We performed a comparison between Cisco CloudCenter, IBM Turbonomic, and VMware Aria Automation based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about VMware, Nutanix, IBM and others in Cloud Management."Cisco has a lot of published information and documentation that helps users understand the product and its offering very well."
"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 initial setup is fairly straightforward if you have a basic setup."
"The solution includes a lot of features and is useful because you can configure all the way down to ports."
"I can define all components and create a blueprint for consumption across all services."
"You can scale it easily."
"The initial setup process is straightforward."
"The solution is agile and it has APIs for integration."
"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."
"The automated memory balancing, where it looks at whether it's being used in the most efficient way and adds or takes away memory, is the best part. If it didn't do that, it would be something that I would have to do. We have too many machines for one person to do that. The automation helps me in that it is done in a really efficient way and a balanced way because of the policies. It really helps."
"It became obvious to us that there was a lot more being offered in the product that we could leverage to ensure our VMware environment was running efficiently."
"The tool provides the ability to look at the consumption utilization over a period of time and determine if we need to change that resource allocation based on the actual workload consumption, as opposed to how IT has configured it. Therefore, we have come to realize that a lot of our workloads are overprovisioned, and we are spending more money in the public cloud than we need to."
"It also brings up a list of machines and if something is under-provisioned and needs more compute power it will tell you, 'This server needs more compute power, and we suggest you raise it up to this level.' It will even automatically do it for you. In Azure, you don't have to actually go into the cloud provider to resize. You can just say, 'Apply these resizes,' and Turbonomic uses some back-end APIs to make the changes for you."
"The ability to monitor and automate both the right-sizing of VMs as well as to automate the vMotion of VMs across ESXi hosts."
"The recommendation of the family types is a huge help because it has saved us a lot of money. We use it primarily for that. Another thing that Turbonomic provides us with is a single platform that manages the full application stack and that's something I really like."
"The primary features we have focused on are reporting and optimization."
"I used the technical support during upgrades. They came onsite and are very technical. They are very good"
"The most valuable features are the Catalog View and the access control business group. Access provisioning is probably the main use case for us, so we can separate access to different Catalog items among the different business groups and have that tied back to our AD LDAP systems."
"It provides velocity both from management and customer perspectives, from ingesting new catalog items, developing new workflows for additional features, and/or allowing customer access to multiple guest OS instances at scale in a shorter time frame."
"vRealize Automation has improved the speed of provisioning just by automating things, making people think about whether a human really needs to do something or can we make the machines do it for us. It is a lot faster to deploy things now."
"It is probably 90 percent quicker to get something out the door than it was before. For developers, depending on who is building VMs for them, sometimes they request anywhere from 20 to 100. Now, we can deploy them in a matter of an hour, where previously it might have taken me three days to deploy out 100 VMs."
"The preset policies and templates are useful. I would say that vRA is one of the best solutions we have. The CI/CD features also look helpful even though we aren't using them at the moment. We plan to get more involved and train our customers as much as possible."
"Instead of deploying a VM from a template and going through the process of configuring that VM, with vRA we're able to click once and it does everything: grabs an IP, joins it to the domain, loads whatever configuration agents are needed. It does all of that without manual intervention."
"The automation part is most valuable. Because it is a VMware product, the automation capabilities that come with vRA are pretty extensive. We can integrate and build a lot of features on top of it, which makes it extremely useful for us."
"For many clients, the main problem with the solution is the price. Cisco is very expensive. If they could somehow make the pricing more competitive, that would be a big draw."
"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."
"The solution needs to be more simple."
"They should provide an entire cloud offering, from architecture to network security features."
"Improvements are needed in UI and multi-tenancy for this solution."
"The tool should improve its security on the XDR part."
"They can add some of those features to make the platform more usable for different backgrounds and developer skills."
"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."
"It can be more agnostic in terms of the solutions that it provides. It can include some other cost-saving methods for the public cloud and SaaS applications as well."
"The automation area could be improved, and the generic reports are poor. We want more details in the analysis report from the application layer. The reports from the infrastructure layer are satisfactory, but Turbonomic won't provide much information if we dig down further than the application layer."
"Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development."
"After running this solution in production for a year, we may want a more granular approach to how we utilize the product because we are planning to use some of its metrics to feed into our financial system."
"The one point is the reporting. We do have reports out of it, but they're not the level of graphical detail I would like."
"Some features are only available via changes to the deployment YAML, and it would be better to have them in the UI."
"Recovering resources when they're not needed is not as optimized as it could be."
"Since the introduction of a HTML 5 based interface, our main - but minor - criticism of a less than intuitive operation managers' GUI would be the area of improvement."
"It has a learning curve."
"We are migrating from vRA version 7 to 8, but the migration is really hectic and time-consuming. There are no straightforward paths to migrate. We are doing an entirely new deployment to go to vRA version 8.0, then somehow get all of the VMs to vRA 8.0. Therefore, it would have been great if VMware had some solutions to upgrade from vRA 7 to 8 seamlessly. This includes the management of all the objects or VMs from the older version. Unfortunately, it is not there."
"vRO can get out of sync with vRA. We've run into every once in a while."
"VMware Aria Automation could improve reporting of the policies. They are difficult to customize. We have many policies but they are not able to be modified to what we want."
"It's not cheap."
"It would be nice if, at the director level, the manager level, there was a pretty graphic. They don't like to see numbers and line items, they want to see graphs and scales and real world pictures. That would support better reporting."
"It's not a smooth upgrade process. For a DTA environment, which is very simple, it is a smooth process, but for our production environment, which is quite enhanced and has a lot of dependencies, it's not easy at all, and it results in a lot of errors... It takes a lot of retries to upgrade which ends up being costly."
"The stability needs a lot of work. The troubleshooting component of vRealize is a pain. The administration and the upgrades are not up to the mark. If they were able to improve on that, that would be the best thing and would make it much easier to run it in the enterprise."
