Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Cisco Piston Enterprise OS [EOL] vs CloudBolt vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

 

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:
 

Featured Reviews

Enterprise677 - PeerSpot reviewer
BS Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
A simple interface and helpful support for a solution that grows with us
It's a flexible enough tool to submit the changes that you want. It gives you the ability to cancel any loop. You can connect new orchestrations together. It offers enough support so that you don't need to have the need to get another device. The user interface is simple and easy to use.
AbhishekGupta2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr PreSales Cloud Architect at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
Centralized self-service has unified hybrid clouds and has improved governance and cost control
The best features CloudBolt offers include governance and policy control, allowing security teams to set up their specific guardrails with governance at scale. Multi or hybrid cloud abstraction provides a single pane of glass for different types of environments, and self-service catalogs enable technical or business users to request services without multiple tickets. CloudBolt also offers strong integration capabilities that work well with existing tools without disrupting the current environment. From an integration standpoint, CloudBolt works well with various public and private cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, GCP, VMware, and Nutanix, as well as different virtualization software, infrastructure as code templates such as Ansible and Terraform, ITSM tools such as ServiceNow, and CMDB platforms. CloudBolt has positively impacted my organization by managing multiple cloud environments for thousands of users with a complex enterprise workflow that has helped reduce man-hours required for provisioning resources. We have achieved faster delivery through standardized operating procedures and reduced reworks due to automation. The chargeback and showback mechanisms allow us to charge different business units according to their consumption, providing better governance, lower risk, and lower cost, resulting in a good return on investment. Since using CloudBolt, I have seen a 25 to 30 percent reduction in service delivery time and an improvement in efficiency of almost 20 to 25 percent within a timeframe of approximately 8 to 10 months.
reviewer2597814 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Infrastructure Manager at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees
Compliance is maintained effectively and automation boosts productivity but further improvements in full-time reduction are desired
I am still using VMware tools. In fact, I have to migrate to a new alternative. I do not deal with vCenter or vSphere as or other VMware products yet. I do not deal with vSphere either. I do not use the Horizon Cloud yet or Horizon Desktop. We use VMware Workstation and vRealize. I use vRealize. VMware Aria Automation is compliant. It is not difficult for them. The regulations request us to perform or to have some security managed ways, and the regulations are clear about that, including authentication and everything related to security. Based on my experience, I rate VMware Aria Automation an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It offers enough support so that you don't need to have the need to get another device."
"Since using CloudBolt, I have seen a 25 to 30 percent reduction in service delivery time and an improvement in efficiency of almost 20 to 25 percent within a timeframe of approximately 8 to 10 months."
"Hybrid cloud platform for VM and app deployment and management, with very good stability. It's customizable, easy to set up, and can be deployed within half an hour."
"I find the self-service features valuable."
"Role-based access control and application blueprinting."
"The initial deployment was super easy."
"The solution's biggest advantage is flexibility"
"Our customers don't have to manage HVAC and space and cooling and all of those things that they used to have to do. Today, all they have to do is provision a server and manage their users."
"The most valued feature is the streamlining of the DevOps process, automation and orchestration. It provides the ability for the entire Dev lifecycle to actually be incorporated into a single stream."
"To manage when VM's aren't being used, we have it set up so that it will auto-destroy them after a certain amount of time, obviously with permission from the user who owns it."
"The initial setup was straightforward. It's easy to deploy."
"It benefits the speed of our development, and the speed of anything we test and send through to production."
"We have integrated our CICD pipeline into an automatic catalog request through some API calls. It can request and provision new virtual machines behind the NSX load balancer, straight out of the CIDC pipeline and add those nodes to the load balancer, request SSL certs, do SSL termination at the load balancer so that it's not encrypted behind the scenes, all of which has really been helpful."
"It has integration with the rest of VMware solutions."
"We haven't hit any limits yet, scalability is good."
 

Cons

"The solution is just too expensive, so maybe the pricing could be better."
"Could increase the number of integrations and add more out-of-the-box work flows."
"The management of SaaS must be improved."
"The area of integrating on-prem and cloud needs improvement."
"The scheduling feature of CloudBolt needs improvement because sometimes, it doesn't work."
"The solution is not easy to use. It's not intuitive enough to click anywhere in the solution and make it work."
"To improve CloudBolt, I believe the user experience needs enhancement as some users find it somewhat dated compared to newer cloud management platforms."
"They should concentrate on navigation and service improvements."
"My impression of its stability is "middle of the road." We've had some issues where it seems to be a little bit sensitive, where deployments fail and we don't really know a specific reason why. We'll dig through logs and try and figure out what's going on, but it's not always apparent as to why it failed. And you can kick it off again and it'll succeed. So stability could be better."
"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."
"The product's features for hybrid cloud integration could be better."
"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."
"The setup is difficult. You need a technical person to help you set it up."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"I rate the pricing an eight out of ten because the solution is expensive."
"The solution is reasonably priced."
"The system is cheaper if a customer has fewer servers since you pay by the node."
"They should provide one license for all the sub-products."
"SaltStack is an open-source product."
"The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market."
"The tool is expensive since it is an enterprise product."
"Customers say this solution is costlier compared to its competitors."
"vRealize automation really should be a front door to the whole VMware suite of products."
"It is pricey for what you get."
"From a budget point of view, the pricing is a bit on the higher side."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.
881,757 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Outsourcing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise130
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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 y...
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 fre...
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 compa...
 

Also Known As

Piston Enterprise OS
No data available
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Kuwait Petroleum Italia, Ministry of Foreign Affairs
WM, CyWest, Panic, Camden, University of Maryland, Xerox, Neustar, Medidata, Continu, Aruba Networks, Neuberger Berman, Peak6, EverBank, Ascensus, Hosting Edge
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: January 2026.
881,757 professionals have used our research since 2012.