We performed a comparison between Cisco UCS Director, CloudStack, 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."The product is flexible and compact. It has a lot of features."
"I can manage multiple workloads whether it's on AWS, Azure, or on-premises. They can be managed by using the UCS Director."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"This is a user-friendly solution that is very good and easy to use."
"UCS director enables us to be more productive and more agile, and also more self-sufficient because we don't have to depend on anybody else."
"The main feature of this solution is the integration with all the Cisco solutions and other vendors."
"A product that really aids in systems management without complexity."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the fabric sharing."
"Killer features for me were: support for many hypervisors, ability to match business logic, "everything in one box," available APIs."
"The structuring of the components and isolated environments helped us when using parts of the framework at different levels of product development."
"The initial implementation process was quite good."
"We like the virtualization capabilities."
"CloudStack is simple to stand up and get off the ground in a hurry. Its centralized design allows for easier troubleshooting when compared to OpenStack. Out of the box, it’s very well suited for white labeling and IaaS."
"It gives us the ability to manage and segregate a guest network with openvSwitch and VLAN IDs."
"You can build your own cloud and make it customizable with APIs."
"When compared to OpenStack, CloudStack is also an open-source platform that is continuously improving its features and capabilities with each new version release. Having worked with CloudStack 4.7, 4.14, and most recently, 4.17, I have noticed significant enhancements in the platform's features and customer experience, such as the introduction of a new user interface in the latest release. Notably, the latest versions have made major improvements to VM live migrations, making them more efficient and effective."
"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 solution is intuitive and user-friendly. E.g., you have less number of logins."
"We've seen that typically, the people who are provisioning VDIs and server VMs can now utilize most of their time towards other projects and moving the environment forward, instead of just hammering out virtual machines all day."
"The setup is getting better with each version."
"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."
"The solution is user-friendly and intuitive."
"Being able to give provisioning of environments over to our developers and the different teams has enabled them to put up environments faster and also freed up time for the IT team. This is really one of our bread and butter solutions for our developers."
"It provides visibility into the VM space."
"Normally, UCS Director is used primarily for orchestration, but when we look at a non-Cisco data infrastructure components, the UCS Director needs a bit more improvement in terms of integration with third-party systems and with existing older systems."
"The product's pricing needs to improve."
"I would like to see more integration with other solutions."
"Simplifying the user interface would go a long way to making it more usable."
"We cannot depend on this solution to manage all of the data center's infrastructure."
"Currently, Cisco UCS Director is unable to integrate with another product or with a server from another brand."
"It is not easy to add or expand the product."
"There could be an improvement with the integration with the newest solutions from other vendors' technologies."
"CS has very descriptive logging, and every time I faced issues and asked for help, I didn’t get any reply from the community. Reason? Its quite obvious. CS runs on specific environments, unique to each case. So, unless it is a functional issue of CS, nobody can help you. All issues were resolved by myself going through logs. This is another reason why you need smart enough people to manage it. Engineers must have knowledge of hypervisors and understand how CS interacts with them."
"I would like to see support for native VLAN, and fault-tolerance."
"VPN P2S is cutting all connections except the CloudStack environment for the user when he is connected. I would like to have VPN like Cisco's AnyConnect."
"It would be great to have a couple of “external” networks for VPC and have the possibility, for each domain, to choose they type of “external” network."
"Accounts, domains, and user accounts are set up with public cloud in mind, not private."
"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."
"It's really hard to delete zones, clusters, datacenters. You need to follow strict rules, which were not properly documented at the time."
"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."
"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 upgrade experience is horrible. It's not straightforward, there are a lot of failures, a lot of support interactions. It's not something that we are able to pull off ourselves. I've been with vRA since it was termed vCSA. We've gone through multiple rounds, and it has never been easy."
"It's not cheap."
"I would also like to see them streamline the install. It's split between Windows and Linux appliances, and it would be easier if it was all appliances. I think they're going that way."
"Deploying and configuring the solution takes a lot of time."
"We would like them to improve the automation part. This is an upcoming area that we would like to focus on."
"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."
"For the administrator, it can be a little challenging. For the administrator, there are a lot of moving parts. It is fine once you figure out where the knobs are you need to twiddle, but it can be a challenge to get it up and running."
