We performed a comparison between Cisco UCS Director, VMware Aria Automation, 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."The solution is helpful for centralized management."
"The main feature of this solution is the integration with all the Cisco solutions and other vendors."
"I can manage multiple workloads whether it's on AWS, Azure, or on-premises. They can be managed by using the UCS Director."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the fabric sharing."
"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."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"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."
"A product that really aids in systems management without complexity."
"I personally spend a lot of time in vRealize Orchestrator, so being able to directly tie into the back end on the APIs, I find that to be what really is the most advantageous thing for me."
"Now the customer can manage their own server requirements directly. This is very important because, before that, the process included signing off on forms and sending them to the IT Director. It took at least 10 days to create a VM and send it to the person who needed it. Now, it's no more than a half hour to activate a new VM at the customer's site."
"The feature of automated balancing which implemented between two data centers solely for the purpose of a recovery plan is valuable."
"VMware Aria Automation has made a lot of things easier. It has really helped the operations team to spin up the virtual machines."
"value; It has provided my development team a pure self-service portal. We deploy thousands of machines and reclaim. So, their time to business, and their time to market has been improved exponentially."
"The DevOps for infrastructure capabilities has saved time for our developers by automating processes and reducing provisioning time. Task time has been reduced by 40 percent."
"The self-service capabilities are by far the best that we've seen in terms of features. If the user is being able to log in and make requests himself, from the onboarding process all the way to the end, that's very helpful."
"Upgrades have been extremely simple with their Lifecycle Manager product."
"I've found vROps' predictive actions, monitoring, reporting, and provisioning features to be useful."
"One of the most valuable features is the ability to see "before" and "after". It will show you the current state, and then show you what it looks like after it does the optimization."
"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."
"The scalability options are quite good with VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), and all of the features are useful and relevant to us."
"I like that it's integrated with the other suite of tools. That's a big plus for the tool. It's well-integrated with Log Insight. We use that integration quite a bit."
"The most valuable features of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) are capacity and performance management."
"The value from vROps, from a traditional sense that we had, is the visibility into the back-end, to know when we are having issues with VMs before it actually becomes an end user issue."
"It has allowed us to identify problems sooner and helps us with problems and issues."
"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."
"The product could allow more programmatic opportunities through better development of the API."
"There are a lot of bugs in the solution. This is an area in the solution that can be improved."
"Currently, Cisco UCS Director is unable to integrate with another product or with a server from another brand."
"There could be an improvement with the integration with the newest solutions from other vendors' technologies."
"The tool should be a lot more intuitive and make it easy for us to understand and migrate."
"I would like to see more integration with other solutions."
"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."
"I would like them to improve the product training."
"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."
"We still struggle a little bit with the configuration as far as making sure that we have all the endpoints where they need to be, because that's not as agile as we'd like in the back-end. We're working towards that with our DevOps teams to make sure that we're touching the right endpoints and getting the right data."
"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."
"We had a lot of issues at first. Especially with doing any kind of upgrades, it was a complete tear-down and a complete rebuild of all the Blueprints. The upgrade process was not easy or intuitive at all. But it seems to be getting better."
"They can improve on the dashboard representations and the options for non-technical people. I would like to see the ability to customize that and maybe provide them with helpful guides to what subscriptions they have. Sometimes, I find that I have to do more explanation to people who do approvals. I would really like to customize the display to the terms they use in their particular business unit. So a little bit more of a nod to the customization of the UI for non-technical users would be helpful."
"Normally, on the first call to technical support, you don't get the right person. The log analysis takes a long time. This is something which should be improved."
"It is a bit complex, so you need to spend time with it."
"It would break, and you would have to go fix it. Then it would break, and they would have some other guys that knew a bit more about it, and they fixed it."
"I sure don't find the solution to be intuitive or user-friendly. It takes a lot of time to get familiar with the interface. You've got to spend a lot of time poking around there, it's not very user-friendly. There have been improvements over the versions but, even still, there is a pretty steep learning curve for the product, in my opinion. In the latest and greatest version, there has been quite a bit of a step up from the last version, as far as the user interface goes. they are making improvements. So that's positive."
"Lately, the chargeback site has improved, but it could be simpler. You need to create your own dashboards. It should be simple to get a virtual machine and break down the compute and storage costs."
"There are some metrics that are not included in the canned set, that we've created. They call them super metrics in the tool, where you create your own metric. But the super metrics are not really reliable. It might be because we didn't create them correctly, although we did have help from VMware. They also don't translate into newer versions like a canned metric would. One of them is a vCPU to pCPU ratio. That's one that is missing, which should be very simple for them to collect."
"You can troubleshoot, you can do all kinds of deep-dives into the issue and find out what the root cause is and everything, but in order to get it fixed, whatever it is (doesn't matter what it is), you need to log into another tool in order to fix it."
"There's a lot of stuff we want to do that we can't. I would advise someone considering this solution to take classes and get a lot of information because this solution may look simple but it's a lot harder than it seems."
"There is a learning curve because it's a complex program. There is a lot to consume in terms of the metrics inside of it. That's the biggest hurdle: trying to understand all the places to go look."
