Cisco Intersight vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

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2,318 views|1,880 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
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8,502 views|5,008 comparisons
93% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco Intersight and VMware Aria Automation based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Cloud Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Intersight vs. VMware Aria Automation Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Provides an overall view using a single portal.""The product has good integration.""Scalable portfolio of services for remote device management, with good cloud integration. It's also easy to set up.""Cisco Intersight has valuable features for workflow automation and inventory administration.""We enjoy having an inside view of all the data centers and all the EdgeX nodes within a single portal rather than going into the EdgeX connections one by one.""I like Intersight because of the integration with HashiCorp, Kubernetes, and each cloud because Intersight is the IO module.""Intersight can validate our environment.""What I like most about Cisco Intersight is its manageability."

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"Our users can order VMs using the API.""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.""It has saved us a lot of time and work. It helped us to reorganize some of our service lines, so we could be more efficient. For example, on our open system server team, we had 15 people building servers, now we have two.""I find the system to be intuitive and user-friendly. In general, I'm quite happy with the entire setup. Once you configure the system, navigating the portal is pretty simple. They use a lot of the vSphere UI interface structure so it's intuitive, especially if you have used anything vSphere-related before.""It provides visibility into the VM space.""Scalability is perfect. We haven't had any issues.""Our time to deliver a fully unified three-tier app, at the right version, is one-twentieth what it was before. There is no manual intervention. No IP management. It just dramatically simplifies all of our processes.""vRealize automation stability is pretty good. They are always fixing bugs. The product team is doing a great job of addressing any issues that we might have."

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Cons
"When new features are added, the service becomes full of bugs.""The solution needs some enhancement in order to build the cluster in two nodes.""The unique problem with Cisco Intersight is that it's not supporting some players.""An area for improvement in Cisco Intersight is automation. It needs more automation capabilities. Apart from enhanced automation, I want Cisco Intersight to integrate with third-party monitoring tools in its next release.""The product's setup should be easier.""Cisco Intersight needs some improvement in terms of stability. Hybrid cloud management and proper hyperscaler tie-up are other areas for improvement.""It's a very complex solution.""The product could be easy to use."

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"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.""The stability is 95 percent. There are some situations where it gets a little bit clumsy. When it gets really big, when you're dealing with a very large deployment, it can be a little bit difficult, but it's better than nothing. It does a significant job, given what it's tasked to do.""The stability is why I rated it a seven and not higher. There were several cases where we had to restart some services because it wasn't working correctly anymore. People cannot extend their machine or replay their machine. There is no alert to say that there is a problem and that we should stop the service. The monitoring system is not very good.""It is not super-intuitive. It does require some skills to understand how to use it. I had no problem, but I had spent a lot of time already learning this product ahead of moving it to an operational status. But as we did so, we had a hard time bringing some people from other groups into the fold, to script and work against this environment. So, the ability to build workflows within that automation needs to be streamlined.""It does go down from time to time. We have some issues with the appliances sometimes and we have to do reboots in the middle of the day. That affects the ability for them to deploy.""vCenter and vRA, I believe they share two different databases so sometimes you have to somehow sync them up. I wish there was only one database between the two or, somehow, one database would rule over the other one, so if you have both products, the vCenter might use the vRA database. Otherwise, when you do stuff in vCenter, you have to write a command on vRA to update the databases.""Something as simple as formatting the catalog in a different way would be helpful because there is no option for doing so. A lot of the contents for the virtual machine, blueprints that you can request, are hidden from view and there's no way to change the view.""The initial setup was complex because we have a high availability cluster. Especially when it comes to upgrades, we have a lot of downtimes and problems. The upgrade experience has been painful."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Cisco Intersight is not cheap, but it's not the most expensive product either."
  • "It's just the standard licensing cost. There are no additional fees."
  • "Cisco Intersight has competitive pricing. On a scale of one to five, my rating for its pricing is four."
  • "You can get a free license for monitoring but need to purchase a license if you need extra control."
  • "The product is cost-effective."
  • More Cisco Intersight Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "From the customer perspective, the value was worth it."
  • "I'm very interested in the integration with Puppet. However, my organization doesn't have the funding for something like Puppet right now. If VMware would integrate that feature set (Puppet) into vRA. That would be very awesome."
  • "Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."
  • "We have seen significant ROI. We used to have physical servers, it took 90 days to get a server, order it, buy it, and get it in. We have it down to 10 minutes, building a server with virtualization, and now that's too slow. So, we let the customer do it at their speed. Therefore, it is pretty much up in a couple of minutes and they have a server."
  • "The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to 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."
  • "vRealize automation really should be a front door to the whole VMware suite of products."
  • "As far as value is concerned, it has been essential to our environment. We have been able to deploy VMs quickly and the developers have their own sandbox, so they can spin up and destroy VMs at their own will."
  • More VMware Aria Automation Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Intersight can validate our environment.
    Top Answer:We used the solution's automation capabilities, but it wasn’t easy. It was part of why we took some time to deploy the solution. It didn't give us much value. It wasn't that good. Intersight is a… more »
    Top Answer:We use the solution for server management across various locations.
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Ranking
    13th
    out of 75 in Cloud Management
    Views
    2,318
    Comparisons
    1,880
    Reviews
    7
    Average Words per Review
    468
    Rating
    7.9
    1st
    out of 75 in Cloud Management
    Views
    8,502
    Comparisons
    5,008
    Reviews
    15
    Average Words per Review
    599
    Rating
    7.7
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Intersight
    VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite
    Learn More
    Cisco
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    Overview

    Cisco Intersight is Cisco’s systems management platform that delivers intuitive computing through cloud-powered intelligence. This platform offers a more intelligent level of management that enables IT organizations to analyze, simplify, and automate their environments in ways that were not possible with prior generations of tools. This capability empowers organizations to achieve significant savings in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and to deliver applications faster, so they can support new business initiates. The advantages of the model-based management of the Cisco UCS platform plus Cisco Intersight are extended to Cisco UCS servers and Cisco HyperFlex and Cisco HyperFlex Edge systems. Cisco HyperFlex Edge is optimized for remote sites, branch offices, and edge environments.

    VMware Aria Automation is a cloud management tool that allows companies to simplify their cloud experience through a modern automation platform. The solution is designed to deliver self-service clouds, multi-cloud automation with governance, and DevOps-based security and infrastructure management. It helps organizations improve IT agility, efficiency, and productivity through its various features. 

    VMware Aria Automation has multiple use cases that include the following:

    • Self-service multi-cloud: VMware Aria Automation can be used to deliver consistent self-service consumption. Another use case in this area is for delivering infrastructure across VMware Clouds as well as public clouds.

    • Multi-cloud governance: The solution can be used to manage cost, performance, networking, configuration, and security at scale for multi-cloud environments. VMware Aria Automation offers all this with an everything-as-code approach.

    • DevOps for infrastructure: Through VMware Aria Automation, companies can enable a powerful infrastructure as code platform with support for iterative development and infrastructure pipelining.

    • Kubernetes automation: Users can utilize VMware Aria Automation to automate the management of Kubernetes clusters and namespaces with support for vSphere with Tanzu.

    • Security operations: VMware Aria Automation facilitates event-driven automation to deliver full-service IT system compliance enforcement and vulnerability remediation.

    VMware Aria Automation Features

    VMware Aria Automation has various features that allow users to easily perform operations. Some of the solution's capacities include:

    • VMware Cloud agnostic template: This feature allows organizations to use a single cloud template to deploy with Infrastructure as a Code. Deployment options include VMware Cloud as well as major public cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and more.

    • Extensibility and customization: This VMware Aria Automation feature allows users to get full extensibility and customization. This can be achieved through Aria Automation Orchestrator, Action-Based Extensibility (ABX), and built-in integrations with common third-party tools.

    • Self-service multi-cloud: This feature enables users to request and provision infrastructure resources. It can be done across clouds using a unified and consistent Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consumption layer, idempotent REST API, and self-service catalog.

    • Centralized policies and governance: VMware Aria Automation offers a feature for users to manage multiple clouds with templatized cloud and policy definition, automated remediation, and cloud environment visibility.

    • Configuration management: Through this feature of the product, day 1 and 2 control can be achieved for virtualized and cloud environments. This can be done with intuitive configuration automation, compliance enforcement, and vulnerability remediation.

    • Infrastructure pipelining: Through this feature, organizations can access user-friendly release automation pipelines. They can be specifically tailored for CI/CD in infrastructure use cases.

    VMware Aria Automation Benefits

    VMware Aria Automation offers its users various benefits. Some of the biggest advantages that the solution brings to companies that utilize it include:

    • VMware Aria Automation provides faster time to market for companies through offloading manual tasks with advanced workflows and agile templating.

    • The solution offers high levels of security and control.

    • This product is suitable for beginners, as it offers a self-service consumption experience for users.

    • VMware Aria Automation accelerates innovation through Infrastructure as Code and DevOps principles.

    • The product provides users with flexibility, as it is compatible with the most popular public cloud solutions.

    • The solution offers fast deployment because of all natively integrated functions.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Awais J., CTO/CEO at a tech services company, likes VMware Aria Automation because it saves a lot of time, provides more visibility, and has extensive automation capabilities.

    An IT consultant at a government rates VMware Aria Automation highly because the product gives you flexibility to analyze and consume resources.

    Sample Customers
    EXMAR, RapidScale
    Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company43%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    Healthcare Company5%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Healthcare Company15%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    Government9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Government9%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business30%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise10%
    Large Enterprise76%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise79%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise69%
    Buyer's Guide
    Cisco Intersight vs. VMware Aria Automation
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Intersight vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Cisco Intersight is ranked 13th in Cloud Management with 10 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 133 reviews. Cisco Intersight is rated 7.8, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cisco Intersight writes "Scalable and easy to set up portfolio of services; good for remote device management and other functions". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Automation writes "Allows for a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment to suit our customers". Cisco Intersight is most compared with Cisco UCS Manager, HPE OneView, IBM Turbonomic, Cisco UCS Director and VMware Aria Operations, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director, Morpheus and Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). See our Cisco Intersight vs. VMware Aria Automation report.

    See our list of best Cloud Management vendors.

    We monitor all Cloud Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.