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Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco CloudCenter [EOL]
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Aria Automation
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
172
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (2nd), Configuration Management (11th), Network Automation (7th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (29th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (7th)
 

Featured Reviews

ZT
Director Of Technology at a non-profit with 11-50 employees
Useful features for configuring down to ports but extremely expensive
Our company uses the solution's GUI interface to configure and monitor ports. We look at usage and determine if there are any issues.  Cisco is a very qualified company and has been in business for many, many years.  The solution is useful because you can configure all the way down to ports.  You…
VasilisGiannitsiotis - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT at ITSolutions
Automation has streamlined complex financial workflows but still needs more intuitive orchestration
Something to improve in VMware Aria Automation would be related to VCF 9, as I do not know what it is trying to bring because they exposed it as the solution of everything. So VCF 9 will bring VCF Automation and VCF Operations, the new product line of VMware. I have not seen what this brings or what else it includes. Maybe in the area of vRealize Orchestrator, this would be beneficial because VRO can do everything. Perhaps a more user-friendly way to use that tool would be helpful because the possibilities there are endless. I am looking for more user-friendly navigation in VMware Aria Automation.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Upgrades are very simple as well because they've allowed us to get updates directly in the CloudCenter Suite manager. If you need to do an upgrade to your setup afterward, you just push a button and it rolls out the parts and retires the old ones. It's seamless and very simple compared to what we've done before."
"The solution includes a lot of features and is useful because you can configure all the way down to ports."
"The solution has a blueprint pattern where you can club multiple machines, define middleware components, define dependencies of components, and create an application pattern for a Java stack that can be consumed across all services using the same TOSCA patterns for CloudCenter, vRealize Automation, and ServiceNow."
"There are workflows, automated workflows, of different tasks between different infrastructure divisions, like your VMware, your firewall, and your network."
"The solution is very, very stable, it doesn't crash or freeze, and it's very reliable."
"You can scale it easily."
"The initial setup is fairly straightforward if you have a basic setup."
"The solution is agile and it has APIs for integration."
"Our speed of provisioning has also improved; we used to build systems manually, which would take four hours or a day, but nowadays we're able to spin something up off a template that we update every so often and it takes about 20 minutes."
"We also use it to pre-install the applications that the people selected when they ordered the machine, so they get a fully functional machine."
"It helps me build a big catalog and provide it to my end users."
"The most valuable feature is the portal where you can assign permissions to specific people to request specific items in the catalog and allow them to provision things for themselves. Or it enables them to request different services that you can create through vRO and vRA."
"We can take a template, spin it up, revise it, save it back off, and be able to have that for other departments, so we can deploy things very quickly and easily instead of manually building systems that would take several hours or a day."
"The self service portal: People don't have to come to us to request something. They can just go fill out a form. Within 30 minutes, they have what they requested."
"It is very stable, works well, is easy to use once it's deployed, and is also easy to deploy."
"Overall, VMware is very good, it's very stable, very extensible, but it does have a relatively high learning curve."
 

Cons

"The improvement I would like to see is not one thing particular to CloudCenter. I'd say it's more of a message that the system is still using a lot of the different products and if they would all just fit better together, they all could be faster together."
"Improvements are needed in UI and multi-tenancy for this solution."
"Cisco can improve their product by being agnostic, not just specific to Cisco components but also supportive of other vendors."
"I'm not a big fan of CloudCenter. I don't have anything against it, however, the on-premise version has been so hard to upgrade and maintain."
"They can add some of those features to make the platform more usable for different backgrounds and developer skills."
"They should provide an entire cloud offering, from architecture to network security features."
"We're moving away from it due to the fact that they discontinued the product and introduced something new that does not fit our purpose."
"The solution needs to be more simple."
"I would like to see a simpler way of provisioning it. As is, we can automate the provisioning of a VM, however, when it comes to the external IPs, that is outside of VMware. But that has to be automated as well. If there was a way for us to have the virtual machines connect to switches that are external to VMware, that would be great. That way, it would handle the entire workflow from creation and provisioning of a VM to the connectivity to the external IP addresses which allow our customers to have access to the VM. Currently, that IP configuration has to be done manually."
"There is a little bit of pain when it comes to libraries and what is needed to run the product."
"A hardened set of tests would be much appreciated."
"Ability to mimic more VCD functionality. Ability to share blueprints among tenants, or have a master blueprint repository, so you don't have to move the stuff between tenants."
"Sometimes, salt-minions do start consuming very high memory, but I've generally seen this to last just a few moments or at most a minute."
"Each new version seems to bring a new set of bugs to the table and upgrading is risky, especially for a tool at the core of the operations and infrastructure."
"It needs to be more dynamic with variable customization to make new workloads more reliable. It also needs to be faster. We are exploring vRA version 8 right now and maybe what I'm requesting is available in the new version, but we haven't yet explored it fully."
"We would like them to improve the automation part. This is an upcoming area that we would like to focus on."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing is expensive."
"The solution is extremely expensive and has additional fees for things like monitoring."
"The tool's pricing is balanced with the market."
"There is confusion between licensing levels. There are three different licensed versions of vRealize Automation, and there are different things which can happen in each of them."
"Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."
"It is an expensive product. After VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, there was a rise in the price of VMware Aria Automation."
"This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us."
"So much can be done with the Open Source side, and especially for smaller shops. I personally think the pricing for Enterprise is hard to justify."
"SaltStack is an open-source product."
"It is pricey for what you get."
"vRealize automation really should be a front door to the whole VMware suite of products."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Media Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise131
 

Questions from the Community

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What's the difference between VMware vRA (automation) and vROps (operations)?
vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything you need from the software interface. It provides complete visibility over applic...
Is there any way to try VMware Aria Automation for free?
When it comes to VMware Aria Automation, you have three choices for free runs: Hands-on Lab (HOL) Advanced lab A free trial I cannot describe in detail the second and third options as my company ...
Which sectors can benefit the most from VMware Aria Automation?
I was looking at VMware Aria Automation case studies recently and I got the impression that three main kinds of companies were using it most often: Social organizations Financial institutions and ...
 

Also Known As

CliQr, CliQr CloudCenter
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NTT, Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), CollabNet, Pratt & Miller, PZFlex
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix, Broadcom, IBM and others in Cloud Management. Updated: October 2026.
921,148 professionals have used our research since 2012.