Densify vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

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Densify Logo
735 views|532 comparisons
80% willing to recommend
VMware Logo
8,502 views|5,008 comparisons
93% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Densify 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.
To learn more, read our detailed Cloud Management Report (Updated: April 2024).
767,995 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"I would say that the initial thing is that it provides us with a technological basis to expand capacity management beyond Excel.""The tool will come back and tell us that we can operate with 1,000 minutes as an example, save 90% on the contractual rate and not run into any issues.""Densify's ability to aggregate multiple on-premise vCenters and multiple cloud accounts, gives it a level of visibility not found in many places.""The ability to increase server density inside of my environment, which has helped me drive reduction in costs.""One would be the automatic rebalancing of the environment. That was one feature which helped. With that, we could improve our efficiency of our VMware infrastructure.""The Densify Control Console, and Environment Status.""The Control Console provides a very easy to read dashboard of "too little/just right/too much" resources both for current data and on a historical or predictive basis.""The solution's tech support is excellent."

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"Using the VMware vRealize self-service portal, we can better manage the lifecycle.""The automation of the redundant tasks and the implementation of ServiceNow are huge for us...""We also use it to pre-install the applications that the people selected when they ordered the machine, so they get a fully functional machine.""The whole VMR ecosystem allows us to serve multiple customers, multiple organizations and also multiple units per customer. We can cover every level without using the whole VRA and the rest of the ecosystem. We don't need to use a separate product to provide separate functionalities for the customer. We can cover all the use cases using only one product on our side which is really helpful. T""The solution is intuitive and user-friendly. E.g., you have less number of logins.""compare-to-competition; Citrix was on our short list. But over the last ten years, we have been a big VMware shop. We wanted to continue with VMware because we are confident that VMware can address any kind of problem situation, any challenges. But with Citrix, we didn't find that kind of credibility when we did solution testing, a PoC.""In terms of scalability, vRA has connections to a lot of different systems. It's very flexible and an impressive product.""The initial setup was straightforward. It's easy to deploy."

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Cons
"Some parts of the interface are rather complex and require a bit of time to navigate, but this has never stopped us as a Densify advisor is readily available to help with our "how to" queries.""It seems that the mechanism for integration is, it goes so far but I think there could be some standard integration to normal remedy service now etc. I think that should be out of the box.""Initially we talked about some custom reporting, wherein our customer expected certain reports on a few areas, like how the storage is allocated, how the network performance is doing, and how the network utilization is happening for a virtual machine.""A closer integration to the service management processes.""In terms of integration, the tool has great data. However, it's not always meaningful because the true business attributes of how most Fortune 500 companies operate are not maintaining in one tool, they're in a school of many tools.""Unfortunately the tools and mechanisms which really came to maturity in the cloud, and were not mainstream on-premise, are still not implemented.""Normalization of CPU utilization is required. At present, the data is available based on entitlement level.""The solution's stability is the primary concern for me."

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"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.""The upgrade process 6.x to 7.3 was a significant effort. I'm hoping that 7.3 to the next version is much smoother.""vRealize Automation on the back-end is still a little complicated. It has a lot of moving pieces, simplifying that from a pure infrastructure point of view would be a good thing. I would then like to have more out-of-the-box functionality and integrations with VMware components.""I don't think it's intuitive or user-friendly. I think it's a good tool. Any automation tool, these days, the learning curve is kind of high. You're teaching sysadmins who never developed stuff. Maybe they modified a little bit of code and now you tell them, "Hey, here's the tool, use it." But you have to know a little bit of DevOps. So you have to train them how to do the scripting.""I don't find it to be user-friendly or intuitive because, in my case, when I have to deploy SAP systems, I need to jump between the vRA, the vRO, and the actual vCenter itself. I need to go back and forth to do different things... I wish they could make it just one application, just vRA, that does all that. There might be a way to do it but I haven't figured out how to do it yet.""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.""It would be nice in the next release if they added in tool tips. Whether you're putting it together, adding a blueprint, or you're making a change in the system, highlighting or selecting something and having it tell you what it does or what it will do would be nice. Because it's such a complex system, it's hard to work with unless you've been using it for years to know what everything is doing.""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."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Setup cost is negligible, as it scales fairly well."
  • "Cost is always involved, but then I feel that this solution is better than other products that we have."
  • "Densify has licensing setup so you can collect data without licensing. It gives you the ability to collect on everything, then choose later what you would like to license."
  • "There was some sticker shock, as this is not just another software product to spit out graphs."
  • More Densify Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "From the customer perspective, the value was worth it."
  • "I'm very interested in the integration with Puppet. However, my organization doesn't have the funding for something like Puppet right now. If VMware would integrate that feature set (Puppet) into vRA. That would be very awesome."
  • "Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."
  • "We have seen significant ROI. We used to have physical servers, it took 90 days to get a server, order it, buy it, and get it in. We have it down to 10 minutes, building a server with virtualization, and now that's too slow. So, we let the customer do it at their speed. Therefore, it is pretty much up in a couple of minutes and they have a server."
  • "The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market."
  • "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."
  • "vRealize automation really should be a front door to the whole VMware suite of products."
  • "As far as value is concerned, it has been essential to our environment. We have been able to deploy VMs quickly and the developers have their own sandbox, so they can spin up and destroy VMs at their own will."
  • More VMware Aria Automation Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The solution's tech support is excellent.
    Top Answer:Densify is not a stable tool. Every time the support gets investigated, it takes much time to get refreshed.
    Top Answer:We are using Densify to produce reports and to get recommendations that can contribute to the area of our expertise.
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Ranking
    32nd
    out of 75 in Cloud Management
    Views
    735
    Comparisons
    532
    Reviews
    1
    Average Words per Review
    342
    Rating
    6.0
    1st
    out of 75 in Cloud Management
    Views
    8,502
    Comparisons
    5,008
    Reviews
    15
    Average Words per Review
    599
    Rating
    7.7
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite
    Learn More
    Overview

    Densify is a hybrid cloud and container resource management platform that makes workloads self-aware of their precise resource requirements and automates the resource management and selection process. This solution helps you control your cloud spend and also helps your apps perform and scale better. Densify enables you to match your cloud requirements with the optimal cloud supply. Additionally, Densify is the only technology that leverages patented, predictive machine learning-powered analytics to perform advanced modeling of workload patterns, and provide precise optimization directives. It is ideal for cloud engineers, container platform owners, and IT finance.

    Densify works by:

    • Establishing application demand patterns that are based on business cycles, seasonality, peaks, valleys, and other variables.

    • Building normalized models of cloud supply and ingesting the entire cloud catalog and latest technologies.

    • Considering numerous factors, such as performance benchmarks, cost, technical rules, tags, and policies. The solution uses business and functional tags, operational realities, and granular policy control.

    Densify Features

    Densify has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Integration with management and provisioning systems
    • Machine learning-based analytics
    • Automated resource optimization
    • App owner collaboration
    • Tailored efficiency reports
    • Observability
    • Controllability
    • Capacity optimization
    • Policy driven, automated governance
    • VM placement
    • Predictive analytics

    Densify Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing Densify. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Automated resource management: Densify provides your organization with automated resource management at scale, with elasticity at an affordable low cost.
    • Full stack visibility: The Densify solution offers full stack visibility with improved efficiency by determining container size and node resources.
    • Financial visibility: In addition to full stack visibility, one of Densify’s other advantages is that it offers full financial visibility and cost intelligence for both reporting as well as chargebacks.
    • Resizing and rebalancing: Densify analyzes your private cloud infrastructure, providing resizing and rebalancing recommendations.
    • Helps you choose the right host environment: Densify automatically routes workloads to the best hosting environment based on detailed workload requirements. For workloads not requiring immediate placement, it reserves capacity to ensure it is available when required.
    • A true SaaS implementation: Because Densify is a true SaaS implementation, there is no software to maintain or to learn.
    • Better for IT finance: The solution is good for IT finance because it collects and analyzes your detailed billing data, giving you visibility into your spending, what services you’re buying, and how to better manage your costs. In addition, it can also generate reports that cover your spending and your utilization of reservations and reserved instances and savings plans.
    • Reduce risk and costs: Machine learning-based analytics help your organization optimize consumption to eliminate waste and overprovisioning while ensuring performance.
    • Cost-efficient: The Densify solution is cost-efficient, helping you drastically reduce per-processor software license costs by placing workloads intelligently.

    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.

    Sample Customers
    AIG, Bank of America, Cigna, Citi
    Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Manufacturing Company23%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Retailer9%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Healthcare Company15%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    Government9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Government9%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business9%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise82%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business15%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise72%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise79%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise69%
    Buyer's Guide
    Cloud Management
    April 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about VMware, Nutanix, IBM and others in Cloud Management. Updated: April 2024.
    767,995 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Densify is ranked 32nd in Cloud Management with 9 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 132 reviews. Densify is rated 8.8, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Densify writes " Its most valuable feature is the ability to capture attributes in the console, but it is not a stable solution ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Automation writes "Allows for a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment to suit our customers". Densify is most compared with IBM Turbonomic, Granulate, VMware Aria Operations, Cloudability and VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director, Morpheus and vCenter Orchestrator.

    See our list of best Cloud Management vendors.

    We monitor all Cloud Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.