Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is a cloud management tool that drives consistent governance across private and public clouds for its users. The solution brings simplicity and ease of use to managing and building cloud deployments by providing a unified multicloud management that addresses common cloud adoption challenges.

Nutanix Cloud Manager offers four key value drivers:

• Intelligent operations: They include monitoring, insights, and automated remediation.
  
  
• Self-service and orchestration: This capacity category of the product includes tools for managing application and infrastructure workloads across multicloud environments.
  
  
• Cost governance: NCM offers cost governance through accurate visibility into public and private cloud metering, cost optimization, and chargeback.
  
  
• Security central: The solution facilitates users' security operations through alert automations with intelligent analysis and compliance controls.

Nutanix Cloud Manager provides coverage for Nutanix private clouds as well as for VMware's. The solution also supports several popular public cloud providers, including Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). NCM provides additional flexibility for users, as it is also available as a fully managed Software as a Service (SaaS). This product allows companies to benefit from all of Nutanix multicloud self-services, application automation, security compliance, and governance, without depending on Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Features

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) has features in the four key categories already mentioned. Some of the main capacities of the solution include:

• Codeless task automation: This Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) feature allows IT teams to build automation and improve productivity with zero coding required.
  
  
• Automated optimization: This feature detects the performance of VM deviates and raises an anomaly alert automatically without the need for configuration.
  
  
• Capacity usage and scenario analysis: This feature’s runways enable pay-as-you-grow scaling and improves capacity usage with optimizations.
  
  
• Self-service provisioning: This feature allows users to publish blueprints directly to end users through Nutanix Marketplace.
  
  
• Application lifecycle management: Through this NCM feature, users can provision, configure, scale, upgrade, and delete applications across cloud environments as well as provide access to multiple teams at a time.
  
  
• Hybrid multicloud orchestration: This Nutanix Cloud Manager feature allows users to automate the provisioning of hybrid cloud architectures from a single control plane.
  
  
• Showback, chargeback, and budgeting: Nutanix Cloud Manager uses this feature to allow users to automatically create cloud consumption reports, define chargeback policies, and set up budget alerts.
  
  
• Automated right-sizing and intelligent purchases: Through leveraging machine learning (ML) algorithms, users can benefit from the automatic detection of anomalous spending patterns.
  
  
• Security monitoring and remediation: This feature of Nutanix Cloud Manager allows users to utilize over 250 audits for public clouds and over 500 for Nutanix on-premises.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Benefits

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) provides its users with several benefits. These include:

• Nutanix Cloud Manager offers intelligent operations through the automation of operational tasks.
  
  
• NCM gives users self-service opportunities and centralized role-based IT governance, which allows them the freedom to control their processes better.
  
  
• Companies can benefit from cost and security governance with intelligent analysis and regulatory compliance.
  
  
• The product has been made available across all regions in 2022, allowing worldwide access to its services without limitations.
  
  
• NCM is suitable for beginners, as it offers low to no code actions.
  
  
• Nutanix Cloud Manager provides real-time security, ensuring the cloud data of companies is protected at all times.

Reviews from Real Users

An IT Operations at an energy/utilities company likes Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) because the product provides visibility, simplifies operations, and saves time and cost.

Drew P., a network systems administrator at Moda Health, rates NCM highly because the product saves man-hours with excellent speed on outcomes and provides a continuous validation process.

VMware Aria Operations is a high-ranking virtualization management and cloud management tool that automates and simplifies IT management to the applications it supports. It achieves this through full-stack visibility from physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure. The product allows users to enable self-driving IT operations management across private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. This is conducted with the unified operations platform that delivers continuous performance, capacity and cost optimization, and integrated compliance through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and predictive analytics.

VMware Aria Operations Use Cases

VMware Aria Operations has several use cases, some of which include:

• Continuous performance optimization: VMware Aria Operations allows users to assure application performance at a minimal cost, facilitated by real-time predictive analytics and artificial intelligence. The product can be used to automatically balance workloads, improve consolidation rations, optimize and rightsize workloads, and avoid contention.
  
  
• Capacity and cost management: VMware Aria Operations can be utilized to reduce cost and improve efficiency with real-time ML-based capacity and cost analytics. The solution uses these tools to visualize cost savings opportunities and accelerate decision-making.
  
  
• Intelligent remediation: This product can also be used to predict, prevent, and troubleshoot issues with actionable insights. Through other VMware integrations, users can streamline and centralize IT operations.
  
  
• Integrated compliance: The solution can be utilized to reduce risk and enforce IT regulatory standards for VMware Cloud through integrated compliance and automated drift remediation.

VMware Aria Operations Features

The product has various features which users can utilize. Several of the features that the 2022 version of VMware Aria Operations introduced include:

• Management pack builder: This feature is a no-code solution that allows users to expand their operations visibility to anywhere they wish. The builder allows users to connect to a data source using an HTTP or Amazon AWS data source, as well as to make API calls, create objects, and build out relationships with other objects in the product.
  
  
• Public cloud basic actions: This is a set of features that allows VMware Aria Operations users to initiate actions automatically via the product's UI for AWS, Microsoft Azure, or GCP CE instances.
  
  
• Rule-based application discovery: Through this new feature of the product, users can easily discover multiple applications running in all or specific areas of infrastructure and view associated resources. This can be achieved through simple user-defined rules, including discovering applications based on tags, object names, and properties.
  
  
• Aria Operations capacity management: This feature allows organizations to view the results of what-if analysis based on their allocation model and specify business hours for capacity calculations.
  
  
• Alerts: This is a set of features that include components called Conditions and Symptoms, which are used to alert different types of issues on the platform.
  
  
• User access management: Through this feature, users can benefit from improved ways to configure in VMware Aria Operations with the introduction of scopes.
  
  
• Support for raw device mapping storage: This feature allows users to get configuration details about their raw device mapping (RDM), such as disk sharing, compatibility mode, and SCSI Bus Sharing.

VMware Aria Operations Benefits

VMware Aria Operations brings various benefits to the organizations using it. Among them are the following: 

• The product helps organizations reduce unplanned downtime and maximize return on investment (ROI) in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
  
  
• VMware Aria Operations simplifies management for hybrid clouds from migration assessments.
  
  
• Users can benefit from an accelerated journey to VMware Cloud on AWS through this solution.
  
  
• The product can be delivered on premises or as a service, providing flexibility for its users.
  
  
• VMware Aria Operations can increase operational efficiency through monitoring and management features.
  
  
• The solution accelerates decision-making through detailed cost analytics, which is visualized for users' convenience.
  
  
• VMware Aria Operations allows users to both utilize standard compliance templates and create their own custom ones.

Reviews from Real Users

Mohamed N., a tech lead VMware support engineer at a tech services company, appreciates VMware Aria Operations because it is easy to use, stable, and support is always available.

Mojtaba K., a senior system administrator at a comms service provider, values VMware Aria Operations due to the fact that its dashboards give you a glimpse of what is really going on in your virtualized environment.