"The initial setup is fairly straightforward if you have a basic setup."
"Cisco has a lot of published information and documentation that helps users understand the product and its offering very well."
"The most valuable feature is being able to deploy a virtual machine from a low level. We can automate everything including network configuration, firewall configuration, storage, storage attachment, OS deployment, middleware, and so forth."
"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."
"vRA helps automate deployment for developers. We do a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment so it will suit each of our customers. So, we have different business units who have their own templates."
"We provided the ability to request virtual machines to our end users. Before, this was a very manual process, which took engineers to do. Now, it's an automated process."
"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."
"A lot of its DevOps for infrastructure capabilities improve reliability. Much effort was put in by some customers, like a large automobile manufacturer, a large telecom, and two large banks, to achieve a certain level of capabilities in this space. These DevOps for infrastructure capabilities have saved time for developers. In one use case for a large marketplace, a typical release cycle took about 80 hours and was brought down to three hours by automating deployment for developers. The quicker that deployments happen, the faster that they can do their product release cycles."
"Having an enterprise service catalog and being able to automate various parts of our infrastructure are among the most important components."
"vRA has enabled us to derive value from the cloud faster. It is five to six times faster than traditional solutions."
"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."
"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."
"The solution could be lighter. As an administrator, I would like to simplify the number of services I need to deploy. They took a significant step in that direction by removing all the Windows dependencies that we had in the past, but there are still a lot of services consuming resources."
"They should concentrate on navigation and service improvements."
"With the workflow aspect, which has manual intervention, a policy needs to be approved by somebody. There could be better management of that piece with better templates. It is like a workflow engine, but does not have enough example templates to do certain things. A lot of people waste a lot of time trying to figure out the same thing, and everybody is trying to figure out the same thing, e.g., how to make a MySQL cluster in a Windows environment?"
"The initial setup was complex from beginning to delivery. The current version is a bit more complex than version 7 to deploy."
"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 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."
"Multitenancy management is a little bit difficult to do, so it is an area that can be improved."
"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."
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Cisco CloudCenter is ranked 12th in Cloud Management with 2 reviews while VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) is ranked 2nd in Cloud Management with 9 reviews. Cisco CloudCenter is rated 7.6, while VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco CloudCenter writes "Scales well with good documentation and a very good reputation regionally". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) writes "Allows for a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment to suit our customers". Cisco CloudCenter is most compared with Cisco Intersight, Turbonomic, CloudStack, VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) and Cisco UCS Director, whereas VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) is most compared with vCloud Director, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), vCenter Orchestrator and SaltStack. See our Cisco CloudCenter vs. VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) report.
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