We performed a comparison between VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) and VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: vROps is the winner in this comparison. It is simple to set up, efficient, easy to manage, and provides its users with valuable and accurate information.
"It has integration with the rest of VMware solutions."
"The big benefit is it will spin up VMs quickly so it would take about 13 to 15 minutes to deploy a virtual machine. Whereas, if I were doing it based on an email from users who are requesting VMs, it might take time for me to hear back from them. This could be anywhere from an hour to a day."
"Our QA department is able to spin up a new instance of Windows virtual machine and test whatever use case they have, then turn it back down whenever they are done."
"The solution is intuitive and user-friendly. E.g., you have less number of logins."
"It allows some of the tenants to self-provision their machines, so they don't have to wait for us to create the machine for them."
"It is possible to completely automatize the creation and removal of a virtual machine."
"VMware Aria Automation is a very scalable solution because it integrates well with a couple of leading products in the industry. For products that are not already integrated, there are plugins or adapters that can be used with customization."
"Another valuable feature is the flexible user interface. They can manage all of the servers, the full lifecycle of VMs, on one screen."
"Instead of having a lot of people spend time doing manual tasks, it allows us to have dashboards and instantly show us any issues that we have, rather than trolling through log files."
"It's valuable because it helps us look at our performance statistics for our environment."
"vRealize has a very nice dashboard. It integrates well with other products such as those from Oracle."
"Our business is built around testing, measurement, and performance measurement and vROps is the primary tool. We use it in a VMware environment and we do tests in other environments. But in the VMware environment, vROps and the associated products, Log Insight and Network Insight are the primary tools that we use. It's a basic tool. It's very important for our organization."
"The most valuable feature is the seamless integration with the vSphere Client and being able to go quickly back and forth between an incident within the vSphere interface and the actual drilling into it within vROps, to identify problems."
"The solution has helped us improve quality of service to users, by giving alerts when different performance metrics get outside of their normal ranges. For example, I've had times when there have been memory leaks in applications and this solution has shown me as my memory usage gets outside of normal bounds. I'm able to find that and resolve it before my customers get back to me to tell me that there's a problem."
"The dashboards are really good. They give you a glimpse of what is really going on in your virtualized environment. The ability to create customized dashboards based on your needs is also great."
"All our capacity management and capacity planning processes are based on vROps. Without this tool, we are unable to predict what we need, at what time we need to purchase new hardware, whether we should upgrade, etc."
"I want to see HTML5. I want to get rid of JavaScript... we have a lot of issues with Java crashing when we're using vCenter. I obviously don't want that to happen with the vRealize Automation and Orchestrator side."
"I think they could probably do more if they created more actions and more use cases to automate things."
"We still struggle a little bit with the configuration as far as making sure that we have all the endpoints where they need to be, because that's not as agile as we'd like in the back-end. We're working towards that with our DevOps teams to make sure that we're touching the right endpoints and getting the right data."
"They could extend the ability to use vRealize Orchestrator Automation for organizations with multiple tenants. It should be easier to operate and extend different capabilities from vRealize Orchestrator. Currently, it's difficult to build advanced services in Aria Automation because you need to use the vRealize Orchestrator."
"The basic support is not there for Google Cloud and Azure. They are unable to provision nor do cost controls. Google is still left out. It is great that they have done AWS, but we are a retailer which means nothing to us because it is a competitor. Azure is good, but Google is where a lot of our development environments are."
"VMware needs to make it to where it is not as custom. Right now, you spend a lot of time making the services work. In order to get it up and running initially, that takes time."
"The solution is intuitive, but not necessarily user-friendly. In particular, it's the documentation. It's a lot of going-through-the-weeds types of scenarios. There is just an abundance of information, so it's a matter of understanding how the objects or the relationships exist, and then, obviously, being able to access that information and knowing how to make use of it."
"Deploying and configuring the solution takes a lot of time."
"Administration and growth can be improved."
"Technical support is normally good but there is sometimes a delay in their response."
"The what-if analysis section is not very advanced and there is a lot of room for improvement."
"Sometimes it's difficult to find some features like they were in previous versions."
"It would break, and you would have to go fix it. Then it would break, and they would have some other guys that knew a bit more about it, and they fixed it."
"While the initial setup was somewhat straightforward, there is some complexity. Going forward, I would like there to be more clarity in the process. Because to complete the setup process, our team had to open up a case with the technical support, and they had to guide us through the process."
"From a personal perspective, I would like it made clearer what options are available in the suite that the customer is not using."
"There is a learning curve because it's a complex program. There is a lot to consume in terms of the metrics inside of it. That's the biggest hurdle: trying to understand all the places to go look."
VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 133 reviews while VMware Aria Operations is ranked 2nd in Cloud Management with 360 reviews. VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0, while VMware Aria Operations is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of VMware Aria Automation writes "Allows for a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment to suit our customers". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Operations writes "It has good stability, but the report-generating feature needs improvement". VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, vCloud Director, Morpheus, vCenter Orchestrator and SaltStack, whereas VMware Aria Operations is most compared with VMware vSphere, IBM Turbonomic, Nutanix Prism, Veeam ONE and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager. See our VMware Aria Automation vs. VMware Aria Operations report.
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