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VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Aria Operations vs vCenter Orchestrator comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

Process Automation
Cloud Management
Virtualization Management Tools
 

Featured Reviews

David Villota - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides automatic monitoring capabilities that save time for users
In my company's IT environment, we use the tool to deploy production environments for products, including live manufacturing systems. The product improves my company's IT automation processes since we can use fewer resources currently. In my company, we need to spend less time considering that vCenter Orchestrator monitors everything. In general, we don't have to be present in our company to do active monitoring. Automatic monitoring is available for everything with vCenter Orchestrator, so we have proactive alerts in our company. The most valuable feature of the product in streamlining our company's workflow stems from the fact that we need to spend fewer resources and less time in general. Our company can spend time on more effective tasks like working with the plans to improve processes and so on, instead of taking care of the systems. The benefits of the product's integration capabilities were useful for HPE. My company has HPE infrastructure, and we are keen to integrate everything into the host, VMware ESXi. It is really important to have an easy integration method that allows for everything to be installed easily in a matter of minutes. I was not involved in the product's setup process. My colleague took care of the product's setup process. From what I know, I can say that the product's setup phase was straightforward. Some custom setups were to be done manually in the tool, but everything was well documented. I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. One of the benefits of the product is that it is a low-cost and stable solution that offers a lot of resources. I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.
Le Quang Long - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Gaurav Amar - PeerSpot reviewer
Enabled us to cut the cost of resources and manage our infrastructure with a smaller team
There's a feature known as Smart Alerts in vRealize Operations, which I have found to be useful if there's anything going wrong in the infrastructure. What usually happens is that you get so many alerts that you become confused. Smart Alerts give you visibility into your infrastructure and also recommend how to fix the situation. That's a feature which I'm really a fan of. Control, from the compliance perspective, is also helpful because we are a PCI DSS-certified company. It keeps us in compliance so that all of our servers and other things are not breaching any of the baseline protocols and baseline policies which we have laid down for the company. That's another thing which I like about the VMware vROps.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I am impressed with the tool's easiness to work with VMware solutions."
"The most crucial feature of vCenter is its scalability. We can use it to expand our network, so we don't have to report our client devices. The network configuration features are also helpful because we can migrate entire networks."
"The most valuable features are the graphical UI for designing the workflows and the interfaces that come out of the box."
"I find that managing all my vCenters from one console is the most valuable feature."
"In regards to the workflows, the fact that we can actually have a full dashboard library of all the existing workflows on this is great. We can see all the workflows and what all the actions do and can work with scripts."
"I like the tool's DNS feature."
"The hardware abstraction layer, being able to make the VMs portable when moving to a different platform or over a WAN."
"The solution was easy to install."
"VMware Aria Automation has made a lot of things easier. It has really helped the operations team to spin up the virtual machines."
"The benefits are that it gives you a heads-up display and dashboard of the way everything's running. The ability to automate around those tasks is really where we get the value."
"It is also intuitive and user-friendly... With vRealize, we can have a Help Desk individual, who might not be that techy, provision the different elements quite easily, with no almost training at all."
"The most valuable features are the metrics and reporting aspects. The historical data and extraction enable us to tell where the trends are and where contentions may exist in the future."
"The infrastructure has helped us to greatly increase our agility."
"The self service portal: People don't have to come to us to request something. They can just go fill out a form. Within 30 minutes, they have what they requested."
"We had a lot of config drift before, and this really helps us keep it on track. Speed to provision is probably our biggest, significant gain."
"vRA is user-friendly. It has the same layout and walk-through GUI, similar to other VMware products."
"From an admin and operations perspective, the solution is intuitive and user-friendly."
"Avoiding problems in the monitoring area is our strength. We use real-time monitoring models and real-time monitoring to do this. We also provide other capabilities, such as seeing changes in the environment."
"What I find most valuable is its simplicity, which allows us to seamlessly migrate views from one physical server to another, be it due to resource overloads or transitioning from one set of disks to another."
"When we have problems with applications, we are fast with troubleshooting because we use vROps."
"The most valuable feature is being able to go back and pull resources from people who have over-allocated resources, on their request for service. I also like being able to hand out the link to hit that web GUI. I can give it to my web guys, the security guys, and let them look at what their actual servers are doing."
"It's valuable because it helps us look at our performance statistics for our environment."
"It's intuitive and user-friendly, especially with the new clients. It's really nice. It's really easy to use. The HTML 5 client is light years ahead of the old one. Everything runs faster, it loads a lot quicker, it's a lot cleaner, the UI is easier to navigate."
"The initial setup process is fairly simple, especially if you are only setting up a standalone instance."
 

Cons

"The product lacks GUIs. The tool should have more GUIs available, along with easier product documentation."
"There are some update-related issues with the product."
"I would like to see, from within the Web Console, being able to define the project and custom templates per user; almost like how CloudSpec has approached the solution."
"Using this solution requires a lot of experience."
"This solution needs to have more built-in workflows."
"It could be integrated with third-party hypervisors."
"vCenter Orchestrator's debugging capacity could be improved."
"There are no good manuals or guidelines on integrations. Hence, you need to be asking someone."
"We have seen some issues with upgrades or installations. This means we have to raise a call every time with VMware."
"It would be nice if, at the director level, the manager level, there was a pretty graphic. They don't like to see numbers and line items, they want to see graphs and scales and real world pictures. That would support better reporting."
"I think they could probably do more if they created more actions and more use cases to automate things."
"The stability on the 6.2 version is very bad. It crashes. VMware tech support knows the IIS component is a bit buggy."
"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."
"It is too broad scale and complicated. It takes too many clicks to do things."
"It is complex to use for new users. It should have automated tools or drag-and-drop functionality."
"One of the features that's a struggle today is some of the public cloud extensibility. Some of the plugins that are native to vRA and vRO, I'd like to see them come out earlier for vRO. I understand that in vRA, the plugins are a little bit more polished because the VRA is the GUI. But we'd like to see them released earlier in vRO, prior to a GUI being released. Azure, for example, is a public cloud provider but we have some instability issues with the plugin in vRO. It's okay for us if we separate the vRA from vRO plugin releases. So I'd like to see some increased stability in some of those public cloud plugins."
"Sometimes what a customer sees as a need for improvement could be incorrect sizing or a result of a specific deployment. So usually, the things we want are a more frequent sampling of the various metrics and the like."
"In terms of what could be improved or added to VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), from my experience, it needs more work in the ITSM space because my company never used it as an IT service management tool."
"Every product has room for improvement, no matter how good it is. For VMware Aria Operations, I think the main area for improvement is its integration with other cloud vendors, like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The integration process is quite complex and often requires VMware personnel's involvement, which isn't always a great experience. So, integration with hyper scalers would be a key improvement."
"If you want to automate the resizing of machines, you should be able to schedule it, so it happens at two in the morning instead of right now, because if you do it in the middle of a workday that's a big no-no. Automation should be a bit more intuitive."
"In vROps, I would like to have both automation and monitoring together, not two separate things you have to buy. I want them included in one package, one installation."
"It's a very complex product. It has gotten better over the years, but they still have some work to do. It still requires a lot of time, and some training, to get accustomed to it."
"If this tool can integrate with other products, for example, those that monitor the network devices or any other storage devices, it will be very beneficial."
"We do not find this solution to be user-friendly. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done and a lot of work has to go into getting the graphs right. It's not a "plug and play" type of thing. You really have to put in a lot of work. You always have to be aware of what's going on within the machines. It needs to be improved from end-to-end."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive."
"We pay a yearly fee, based on our entries."
"The price is reasonable, and one of the reasons that this product was selected."
"We renew the solution's license every one or two years."
"vCenter Orchestrator is an expensive solution."
"I rate the product price a seven to eight out of ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."
"The solution is a bit expensive."
"The concept of hyper-convergence is smart. I don't know if it can be applied with less cost to be more affordable for small or medium-sized companies. The cost is a very important factor for it. We are currently depending on SAN storage. However, the hyper-converged solutions are depending on the storage within the hosts, such as vSAN in the VMware. It is a smart solution."
"It is an expensive product. After VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, there was a rise in the price of VMware Aria Automation."
"Customers say this solution is costlier compared to its competitors."
"The pricing for this solution is roughly 20% lower than the competitive products in the market."
"SaltStack is an open-source product."
"The solution is pretty expensive but provides good workload management."
"From a budget point of view, the pricing is a bit on the higher side."
"vRealize automation really should be a front door to the whole VMware suite of products."
"It made the provisioning of the virtual machines easier and faster. We can react more quickly to customers' demands."
"The product is too expensive to implement."
"Bundle it in with your license rather than buying it as a separate product. It saves a lot of money that way."
"There's a smaller category that stands out due to its affordability, especially for recent versions, which I rate as four or five in terms of value. However, if you're looking for a vCenter with older, more advanced features, it comes at a significantly higher cost, and I would rate it around ten. They provide us with a choice between a recent version and one integrated, and I lean towards the former."
"Get the right licensing and increase your licensing as you upgrade and grow. If you get the wrong licensing, it will be expensive, especially if you plan improperly."
"We have seen good ROI results. It has made our lives easier."
"We would like to build custom dashboards in the standard license. Right now, this is available in the enterprise license, not the standard license."
"vROps is a bit expensive and that's a reason that small clients say, 'No, I don't think we need this.' From a pricing perspective, it is quite steep. But 'expensive' is relative, depending on what you need. Others might say, 'It is expensive, but I think we can use it to better our environment.'"
"The licensing is quite expensive for our company."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Government
12%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about vCenter Orchestrator?
The stability of the product is very good.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for vCenter Orchestrator?
We're running a low-profile budget. This is not our main focus on investment technology, so we're trying to reduce co...
What needs improvement with vCenter Orchestrator?
After the change from perpetual licensing to subscriptions, the cost model changed. We are considering alternatives s...
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 y...
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 fre...
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 compa...
Is VMware Aria Operations a user friendly solution?
In terms of user-friendliness, VMware Aria Operations is one of the best solutions out there. It is not overly compl...
What is the most useful new feature of VMware Aria Operations?
For me, the alerts features are the most unique part of this product, no matter the current name it uses. When they i...
Which licensing model do you use for VMware Aria Operations?
My company pays for VMware Suite license because we use many products from this brand and this solution is included ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), vCenter Operations Manager (VCOPS)
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Beiersdorf Shared Services
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Science Applications International Corporation, Tribune Media, Heartland Payment Systems, Telkom Indonesia, Columbia Sportswear, iGATE, CSS Corp, Angel Broking, Adira Finance, Hipskind, Beiersdorf Shared Services, Innovate Mas Indonesia, Adobe, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi , Join Experience S.A, Borusan Holdings, Department of Transport - Abu Dhabi
Find out what your peers are saying about Camunda, BMC, Pega and others in Process Automation. Updated: April 2025.
850,760 professionals have used our research since 2012.