We performed a comparison between Cisco Piston Enterprise OS, CloudStack, and VMware Aria Operations based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about VMware, Nutanix, IBM and others in Cloud Management."It offers enough support so that you don't need to have the need to get another device."
"The back-end database design is simple and straight forward. The user interface is designed with external users in mind. Billing is relatively straightforward with this product. Not being restricted to just one hypervisor was nice."
"CloudStack, by default, gives us a zone-based setup which makes it easier to manage datacenters located in different geographical areas."
"It was easy to deploy, both for PoC and production (with HA)."
"It has become easy to deploy new devices with no or minimal hardware changes. Now, a user can be ready to use a firewall within a few minutes, as compared to the traditional physical model which involved purchase, shipping, hardware configuration, cabling, power, etc."
"CloudStack helped us showcase our features through process visualization and functional solutions."
"Killer features for me were: support for many hypervisors, ability to match business logic, "everything in one box," available APIs."
"The product gives us the ability to orchestrate large virtual environments and is flexible enough to allow us to configure it for what we need. We value the flexibility of the networking feature set as well as the ability to build virtual private clouds."
"My company could implement a lot of customizations and integration with load balancers and DNS. When we started using CloudStack, we didn't have that integration, so we developed that. We could fix anything missing in the solution."
"The most valuable feature would be the ability to plug into the data feeds that we have and pull information from physical hardware as well as the virtual layer. The best feature is the visualization of what's going on, so we can take a very quick look and see if there are any issues that stand out."
"Being able to consolidate everything on similar hardware is really helpful, as opposed to trying to manage a bunch of hosts."
"Because of the recommendations in the product for configuration changes, bad legacy setups become visible using the tool, which is great."
"The scalability options are quite good with VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), and all of the features are useful and relevant to us."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to right-size a workload, based on historical data for that workload. It also allows us to "sanity-check" the entire infrastructure by getting monthly reports on how everything is performing and where we can make improvements. That's all done automatically, without any administrator involvement."
"Valuable features include the PowerCLI module and the ability to do scripting, to pull information out, to simplify reporting and troubleshooting. Being able to gather metrics, or to gather information to alert on it, or to be able to present it in a report, is crucial because, even if the interface is fast, we want to be able to do everything faster through automation. The fact that that's being developed more and more is very important."
"It gives me metrics that I can share with the rest of my team. I can say, "Look, this server is performing poorly." Even down into the Windows Servers, which are my primary bread and butter, it gives me visibility into situations such as when they're running out of storage and I need to expand the drives. It gives that top-level visibility to get in and fix a lot of problems."
"It's valuable because it helps us look at our performance statistics for our environment."
"The solution is just too expensive, so maybe the pricing could be better."
"We did encounter issues with stability, and the main issue was secondary storage. When it is not available, XenServers and hypervisors are affected. And CS doesn’t do anything to reboot, or fix. Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn’t, considering their approach – CS just orchestrates everything else on the hypervisor and storage level."
"Companies need to be knowledgeable about cloud technology. It's not for novice users."
"From time to time there is a bug in calculating limits of resources for customer domain/account. Maybe it’s a problem with 4.9.2."
"The area of improvement could be the regionalization aspect. For example, managing multiple regions or HubStack deployments together was not thought out thoroughly in the versions I used. We faced issues around managing the global infrastructure and had to develop around it."
"It is not widely used so Google does not help very much when you are troubleshooting, and the CloudStack forum is not very active."
"The absence of the feature, deploy an instance from a snapshot, is the weak point of the platform. It is a feature that everyone needs nowadays."
"I would like to see support for native VLAN, and fault-tolerance."
"The main reason why we started looking for another solution: backups, replication, HA, and dependency on secondary storage. CS is quite sensitive for infrastructure, and any kind of network disruption between CS and secondary storage leads to VM hanging."
"In a previous version, you could click on a cluster to see a lot of information about efficiency, e.g., when you will run out of memory, CPU usage, and RAM in percentages. In newer versions, you see this information in megahertz and kilobytes, not percentage. I don't like this change so much. If you need to present information to your boss or Director of IT, the information would be better with a percentage. Now, you have only a big number and don't know the percentage of use that you are getting from the VMs. I don't know why they changed it, but I liked the percentage version more than getting the numbers for megahertz of memory. Also, kilobytes of memory is a very large number. For a simple view, gigabytes or terabytes is better."
"VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) can improve the Layer 3 hypervisor VM infrastructure because we do not manage other applications. We need a package, which is too expensive. We would like to manage native VMware applications, VMware native components, hypervisor, and storage, such as vSAN."
"For the initial setup, there should be some sort of auto discovery of the environment. That should be enabled. It has the ability to discover a main node, but it could still be made easier, to reduce the initial configuration and setup time."
"Technical support is normally good but there is sometimes a delay in their response."
"Certificate Management should be simplified for non-technical staff members."
"It was just a case of going in, looking around, learning it, and just getting a little bit of initial help for a few days."
"With our environment right now, stability is the one sticking point. There hasn't been a great deal of handholding in between the different versions, so we've run into problems with there being what I would call "more than just the average change between versions" and it's caused a loss of data for us in the past."
"Where the product could improve would be the UI."
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