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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

vCenter Orchestrator
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (6th)
VMware Aria Operations
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
374
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (3rd), Virtualization Management Tools (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

vCenter Orchestrator and VMware Aria Operations aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. vCenter Orchestrator is designed for Process Automation and holds a mindshare of 0.3%, down 0.4% compared to last year.
VMware Aria Operations, on the other hand, focuses on Virtualization Management Tools, holds 32.1% mindshare, down 34.3% since last year.
Process Automation
Virtualization Management Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Gerhard Gmelch - PeerSpot reviewer
Enhance automation efficiency with cost-effective graphical workflow design
I use vCenter Orchestrator for automation purposes, specifically to run automation workbooks The most valuable features are the graphical UI for designing the workflows and the interfaces that come out of the box. Additionally, it is included in the VMware Vitalization Stack, which means there…
Amar Sorro - PeerSpot reviewer
Manage and monitor crucial banking operations with deep logging and efficient alerting
The most valuable features of VMware Aria Operations include its excellent monitoring capabilities. It allows me to perform deep monitoring and logging of the entire environment, providing a quick alarm and warning system through email. These features help me in efficiently managing virtual machines. The solution also offers easy access to VMware KB articles for problem resolution, ensuring quick access to troubleshooting information.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features are the graphical UI for designing the workflows and the interfaces that come out of the box."
"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."
"The positive impact I have seen from using vCenter Orchestrator includes benefits such as cluster and versioning, frequent updates, and updates on the Dell side."
"It is very stable. I have been using vCenter Orchestrator from version three now to six plus."
"Because of the central management, the scripting engine and workflow engine are integrated with VMware without any burden to integrate different products."
"The most valuable feature is workflow automation."
"The most valuable feature is affinity rules."
"What I like best about vCenter Orchestrator is that it makes life easier through automation. People can request to automate all processes with vCenter Orchestrator, such as adding storage, creating VMs, removing VMs, and extending VMs."
"vRealize has a very nice dashboard. It integrates well with other products such as those from Oracle."
"Most valuable features are the dashboards that we can customize per-user that logs into them. If we need to make a dashboard that's very high-level for our executive to see how our virtual environment's handling things, we can do that. Or, if we need to deep-dive technically, we can do that for our engineers."
"Monitoring is the most valuable feature for us. When our customers have a problem and we can monitor it in real time or evaluate the history of the problem."
"The main point of installing, deploying, and troubleshooting with vRealize Operations is to provide visual dashboards to ensure that the entire workload is functioning properly."
"The stability in vRealize has been great. We've had no outages nor impacts. The upgrade process has been great so far."
"It is easy to drill down directly to the root cause of a problem. It goes from network to storage and having access to all the metrics. When you run 100 percent virtual, then everything is in one tool."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to get a view of our entire environment in a single pane of glass. We're a very large company, so going from one interface to another to troubleshoot an issue, or even just to get capacity information, is time-consuming and not efficient. Being able to go to one place and get that information is very helpful."
"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."
 

Cons

"There can be compatibility issues."
"After the change from perpetual licensing to subscriptions, the cost model changed."
"Enhancing the platform's setup process intuitiveness and offering more flexible pricing options could further improve its accessibility across different company sizes."
"I believe vCenter Orchestrator should be part of VMware vSphere's basic bundle. As a product, vCenter Orchestrator should not be licensed at all because the world has progressed way beyond what it can offer."
"The product’s cost needs improvement."
"vCenter Orchestrator's debugging capacity could be improved."
"The solution needs to integrate with Cloud facilities like AWS and Azure."
"I did not do the initial setup. However, it was complex at the beginning."
"In terms of user-friendliness, there are a lot of areas that take a lot of time to research and figure out what the information is actually telling me, so that I know how to better use the product and troubleshoot issues that I see. It would be nice if they could fine-tune the user-interface a little bit."
"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."
"I would like to see them bring in metrics for other things in the infrastructure, not just the virtual infrastructure: for example, being able to bring in metrics from my arrays themselves or my fiber channel switches or my ethernet switches. Being able to collect that data would help in being able to lay a holistic view on top of how my entire system is functioning, from the hypervisor all the way down to my end-point."
"There is a lot of stuff which is hard to read and understand. I must do a lot of research to understand what is going on with the hardware."
"For the initial setup, there should be some sort of auto discovery of the environment. That should be enabled. It has the ability to discover a main node, but it could still be made easier, to reduce the initial configuration and setup time."
"They should make it easier to find those granular things that you're always looking for. You're always running into a situation where you want to use the tool to figure out a problem, but the amount of effort needed to delve into vROps and find the exact metric you're looking for is always so difficult."
"Monitoring is useful but if the solution can't automate or function without my input, it's a waste of my time. That's where I found out there are some issues with this product, there are elements that are not as intuitive as they could or should be."
"We're on the 6.0 version, so it does lack a little bit of that intuitiveness. You have to have some experience with VMware to get around inside of it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is reasonable, and one of the reasons that this product was selected."
"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."
"We renew the solution's license every one or two years."
"This solution is expensive and the licensing is more attractive for Haveri."
"vCenter Orchestrator is an expensive solution."
"My organization didn't have to pay extra for vCenter Orchestrator. It was already included, so it's basically free. Even VMware regular support is included."
"vCenter Orchestrator could be more affordable."
"The licensing cost is manageable because they have different versions available, standard, essential, and advanced."
"If one is low price and ten is high price, I rate the product price a ten."
"The solution is costly."
"Our manpower costs have been reduced due to the automation in conjunction with the usage of the dashboard."
"If one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the product price an eight out of ten."
"The license is a one time cost, and you pay for support on a yearly basis. It is a bit expensive, but if you consider the product support and its reliability, it's justifiable."
"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."
"We have seen ROI in performance. It used to be our company was giving out eight CPUs to all servers. That was bad performance-wise. People were seeing slow compute times for their applications."
"We did an enterprise license agreement with our VMware partner and put this in our bundle. We tried it and loved it, so we use it now."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
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 costs due to the change from perpetual to subscription licenses.
What needs improvement with vCenter Orchestrator?
After the change from perpetual licensing to subscriptions, the cost model changed. We are considering alternatives since we lost the perpetual aspect, and support is changing.
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...
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 complex to set up and you can rely on the technical support to provide you with assis...
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 introduced the new version of VMware Aria Operations, they also introduced more a...
 

Also Known As

No data available
VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), vCenter Operations Manager (VCOPS)
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Beiersdorf Shared Services
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
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861,390 professionals have used our research since 2012.