"One of the most valuable features of this solution is the versatility of the prebuilt jobs."
"Since we are no longer waiting for an operator to see that a job is finished, we have changed our daily cycle from running in eight hours down to about five. We had a third shift-operator retire and that position was never refilled."
"ActiveBatch can automate predictable, repeatable processes very well. There is no real trick to what ActiveBatch does. ActiveBatch does exactly what you would expect a scheduling piece of software to do. It does it in a timely manner and does it with very little outside interference and fanfare. It runs when it is supposed to, and I don't have to jump through a bunch of hoops to double check it."
"The most valuable feature is its stability. We've only had very minor issues and generally they have happened because someone has applied a patch on a Windows operating system and it has caused some grief. We've actually been able to resolve those issues quite quickly with ActiveBatch. In all the time that I've had use of ActiveBatch, it hasn't failed completely once. Uptime is almost 100 percent."
"From a scheduling point of view, it is pretty good."
"We leverage the solution's native integrations regularly. We have to get files from a remote server outside the organization, and even send things outside the organization. We use a lot of its file manipulation and SFTP functionality for contacting remote servers."
"ActiveBatch's Self-Service Portal allows our business units to run and monitor their own workloads. They can simply run and review the logs, but they can't modify them. It increases their productivity because they are able to take care of things on their own. It saves us time from having to rerun the scripts, because the business units can just go ahead and log in and and rerun it themselves."
"The most valuable feature is how easy it makes it to manage the VM."
"The product's integration is good, it works well with other programs and solutions."
"The open, flexible architecture has brought in the agile computing environment along with better Dr capabilities. Automation management and operational tasks across VMware and third-party applications, like our HMIS and other business productivity applications, have delivered peace of mind."
"If I need to do DR, VMware can enable me to use vMotion, which requires use of vCenter. You cannot do vMotion without vCenter. We do a lot of automation, orchestration, and simplification for that purpose."
"The solution is pretty stable and reliable."
"We have excellent technical support. They have always been helpful when we have needed them."
"vCenter Orchestrator is very reliable and stable."
"The backup and recovery times are very quick."
"Any product is going to have some room for improvement, no matter what. I see the company has already ventured into AWS and they're constantly trying to improve the managed file transfer which they have recently improvised. I think they bought a software called JSCAPE and they're trying to improve it, which is good. I am not sure if JSCAPE would be part of the base product but currently, you have to buy a separate license for it, which doesn't make sense. If it was Microsoft, ServiceNow, or integrating with other software vendors, I would understand but JSCAPE is now in-house and I'm not sure if they can justify having a separate license for JSCAPE. I would probably expect them to be packaging JSCAPE into the base product. They did switch over from a perpetual license model to a subscription model, which hurt the company a little bit. Nobody is offering the perpetual model anymore. As long as the transition is fair for both the companies, I think it should be fine and not burn us out."
"They have some crucial design flaws within the console that still need to be worked out because it is not working exactly how we hoped to see it, e.g., just some minor things where when you hit the save button, then all of a sudden all your job's library items collapse. Then, in order to continue on with your testing, you have to open those back up. I have taken that to them, and they are like, "Yep. We know about it. We know we have some enhancements that need to be taken care of. We have more developers now." They are working towards taking the minor things that annoy us, resolving them, and getting them fixed."
"Between version 10 and version 12 there was a change. In version 10, they had each object in its own folder. But on the back end, they saw it at the root level. So when we moved over to version 12, everything was in the same area mixed together. It was incredibly difficult and we actually had to create our own folders and move those objects—like schedules, jobs, user accounts—and manually put those into folders, whereas the previous version already had it."
"There are some issues with this version and finding the jobs that it ran. If you're looking at 1,000 different jobs, it shows based on the execution time, not necessarily the run time. So, if there was a constraint waiting, you may be looking for it in the wrong time frame. Plus, with thousands of jobs showing up and the way it pages output jobs, sometimes you end up with multiple pages on the screen, then you have to go through to find the specific job you're looking for. On the opposite side, you can limit the daily activity screen to show only jobs that failed or jobs currently running, which will shrink that back down. However, we have operators who are looking at the whole nightly cycle to make sure everything is there and make sure nothing got blocked or was waiting. Sometimes, they have a hard time finding every item within the list."
"A nice thing to have would be the ability to comfortably pass variables from one job to another. That was one of the things that I found difficult."
"The interface is not that user-friendly and is a little tough to navigate."
"The reporting needs improvement. There is a real need for the ability to generate audit reports on the fly. It needs to be a lot easier than what I can do right now. This is a major item for me."
"There can be compatibility issues."
"I would like to see better performance."
"The GUI should be enhanced in the future."
"I did not do the initial setup. However, it was complex at the beginning."
"I would like to have an interface that can manage both on-premises and cloud solutions from a single console, where we can easily manage the resources that are being used or at least applications. Whereby clicking here and there from on-premises to cloud, or cloud to on-premises, depending on the requirements. If that can be accomplished, it will be extremely beneficial."
"When the SSO certificate needs to be renewed, the upgrading and testing are quite complicated."
"It is practically difficult at this stage to really comment on the improvisations of V central. But more tech events and PoC cases would help the EA to design better solutions and utilization."
"The price of this product is high and could be improved."
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ActiveBatch Workload Automation is ranked 7th in Process Automation with 7 reviews while vCenter Orchestrator is ranked 8th in Process Automation with 9 reviews. ActiveBatch Workload Automation is rated 8.8, while vCenter Orchestrator is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of ActiveBatch Workload Automation writes "Everything runs automatically from start to finish; we don't have to worry about somebody clicking the wrong button". On the other hand, the top reviewer of vCenter Orchestrator writes "Enables us to do administration on a centralized layer when using multiple VMware ESX servers". ActiveBatch Workload Automation is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal Automation, Automic Workload Automation and VisualCron, whereas vCenter Orchestrator is most compared with VMware vRealize Automation (vRA), VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), vCloud Director, ServiceNow Orchestration and Microsoft System Center Orchestrator. See our ActiveBatch Workload Automation vs. vCenter Orchestrator report.
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