Cisco UCS Director vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

Cisco and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Cisco is ranked #21 with an average rating of 7.7, while VMware is ranked #2 with an average rating of 7.9. Cisco holds a 1.3% mindshare in CM, compared to VMware’s 9.8% mindshare. Additionally, 73% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Cisco UCS Director

Read 15 Cisco UCS Director reviews

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583 Comparison Views

73% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Automation

Read 171 VMware Aria Automation reviews

8,035 Views
4,339 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Cisco UCS Director

VMware Aria Automation

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

VMware Aria Automation and Cisco UCS Director compete in the automation and orchestration software category. VMware Aria Automation appears to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive features and flexibility in diverse environments.

Features: VMware Aria Automation offers multi-machine blueprints, automated VM lifecycles, and integration with third-party systems, making it ideal for virtual infrastructures. Cisco UCS Director excels in Cisco hardware management, offering excellent orchestration for Cisco-centric systems.

Room for Improvement: VMware Aria Automation users suggest improvements in documentation, ease of use, and cloud provider integration. Cisco UCS Director could enhance its user interface and integration with non-Cisco products, while broadening its feature set for diverse environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Automation supports on-premises and hybrid deployments with generally favorable tech support, though response times can vary. Cisco UCS Director focuses on on-premises deployment, with good tech support, but customization challenges indicate a need for simplified support processes.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Automation is perceived as expensive but offers significant ROI with enhanced infrastructure agility. Cisco UCS Director's high cost and pricing concerns may limit ROI, especially with significant customization required for non-Cisco systems.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Automation Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Automation

September 2025

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Helped 867,349 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Cisco UCS Director

Ranking in Cloud Management

21st

Average Rating

7.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware Aria Automation

Ranking in Cloud Management

2nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

171

Ranking in other categories

Configuration Management (6th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (16th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 1.3%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 9.8%, down from 11.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
VMware Aria Automation	9.8%
Cisco UCS Director	1.3%
Other	88.9%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Sunny Nair

Solution Architect and Senior Consultant at Keysight Technologies

Good multi-cloud management capability, but third-party and legacy integration needs improvement

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. I feel that more development or a more integrated road map should be set up so that it becomes a common platform for any infrastructure. In the next release of this solution, I would like to see changes in the navigation controls of UCS Director. That would be helpful. Modifying the icons that are available for use, as well as virtualization aspects.

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Le Quang Long

Cloud Engineer at BIDV - Ngân hàng TMCP Đầu tư & Phát triển Việt Nam

Significantly streamlined operations with good automation that helps with simplifying workflows

It helps me build a big catalog and provide it to my end users. It helps us automate the workflow of creating many VMs and the TensorFlow key method. I do not meet many people to operate it live beforehand. It operates for both of my products, but as a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The reason we went with Cisco is that it comes at a very negligible cost as part of the BOQ. Compared to the competition's products, which are incredibly expensive, UCS Director is low-cost."

"Feature-wise, the solution helps one to add multiple environments in one place...It is a scalable product."

"The solution is helpful for centralized management."

"I can manage multiple workloads whether it's on AWS, Azure, or on-premises. They can be managed by using the UCS Director."

"An easy and strong configuration, along with its low cost, are some of the features of the solution."

"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

"A product that really aids in systems management without complexity."

"Cisco UCS Director is straightforward to use, which we greatly appreciate."

More Cisco UCS Director pros

"Upgrades have been extremely simple with their Lifecycle Manager product."

"vRA has enabled us to derive value from the cloud faster. It is five to six times faster than traditional solutions."

"I used the technical support during upgrades. They came onsite and are very technical. They are very good"

"It provides velocity both from management and customer perspectives, from ingesting new catalog items, developing new workflows for additional features, and/or allowing customer access to multiple guest OS instances at scale in a shorter time frame."

"Scalability is probably the best part about it. You can take things that you've already defined, that you've already built once, and build them again multiple times, without significant effort."

"Before it would take months to deploy a VM, now, with this solution, we can deploy many VMs in one hour. We can do a stack of them with Mediaware."

"It is very stable, especially for high availability features."

"Valuable features include integration with Infoblox, for IP management; and three-tier app deployment as one unified Blueprint."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

"The tool should be a lot more intuitive and make it easy for us to understand and migrate."

"There could be an improvement with the integration with the newest solutions from other vendors' technologies."

"There aren’t any areas of improvement that immediately come to mind."

"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."

"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."

"I would like to see more integration with other solutions."

"There are a lot of bugs in the solution. This is an area in the solution that can be improved."

More Cisco UCS Director cons

"I would like to see support for Google Cloud and Azure. Because they don't support Google and Azure today, we need something that's cohesive with our entire landscape. There is a gap right now with VMware. If you want support for these environments, you have to go elsewhere right now."

"In terms of usability, It has had its challenges. It requires a lot of custom code to integrate into our environment. It can take a little while to get it to do what we want, takes some code instead of having built-in functionality. Part it is how we use it. It would be a lot easier to use in a greenfield scenario versus brownfield, which is the way we using it."

"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."

"There is certainly room for improvement with some of the little things I was talking about, like either better managing of the upgrade process, or just making the infrastructure deployment a little bit easier. It feels like all of the pieces have been automated on one level or another, like with the PowerShell scripts, doing all the IS, Windows boxes preparation. They just need to get it to be more end-to-end."

"When it comes to the orchestration workflow, you're on your own. The documentation and resources are very limited, and you have to learn everything on your own."

"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."

"The initial setup was complex from beginning to delivery. The current version is a bit more complex than version 7 to deploy."

"I want to see HTML5. I want to get rid of JavaScript... we have a lot of issues with Java crashing when we're using vCenter. I obviously don't want that to happen with the vRealize Automation and Orchestrator side."

More VMware Aria Automation cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing around five to six out of ten."

"The cost of this solution is significant."

"I rate Cisco UCS Director's price a three out of ten. Cisco UCS Director is not an affordable product. With Cisco UCS Director, there is a need to pay an overall price, which consists of the product, software, and support."

"I would rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten."

"Cisco UCS Director is expensive...I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."

"The budget doesn’t work for the state and local governments."

"The pricing is very high."

"I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive."

"This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us."

"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."

"A simplified version for small businesses would be good."

"Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."

"The solution is pretty expensive but provides good workload management."

"The pricing for this solution is roughly 20% lower than the competitive products in the market."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Government

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	11

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	32
Midsize Enterprise	24
Large Enterprise	130

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco UCS Director?

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS Director?

While the pricing might be seen as expensive, it provides value for money due to reliable service and excellent technical support.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Director?

It should be more of a cloud-based architecture for Cisco UCS Director, and it should be affordable to small customers as well because the pricing is a major challenge when we talk about Cisco UCS ...

See all answers

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 you need from the software interface. It provides complete visibility over applic...

See all answers

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 free trial I cannot describe in detail the second and third options as my company ...

See all answers

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 companies were using it most often: Social organizations Financial institutions and ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Cisco Intersight vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 36% of the time

Morpheus vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 13% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 12% of the time

OpenNebula vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 12% of the time

More Cisco UCS Director Competitors

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 17% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 14% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 10% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 8% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 6% of the time

More VMware Aria Automation Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director

September 2025

Download Cisco UCS Director product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

August 2025

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

Also Known As

No data available

VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack

Overview

Cisco UCS Director enables automated delivery of physical and virtual data center resources, empowering data centers to move at the speed of business.

Cisco

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.

VMware

Sample Customers

Entel, Data#3, Cegal, NESIC, LightEdge

Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Automation

September 2025

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