We performed a comparison between vCloud Director vs VMware vRealize Automation vRA based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: VMware vRealize Automation vRA wins in this comparison because scalability is not an issue like it is for vCloud Director, and because users have been very satisfied with the ROI.
"vCloud Director has improved our organization in so far as it is an easy solution to sell. I believe this is the case due to the fact that it is an easy tool to manage and to configure."
"We consider it intuitive and user-friendly. It offers a variety of functions for the customer to control the networking, virtual workloads, disk snapshots, and all of vSphere's core features."
"The orchestration and automation are very valuable."
"vCloud Director requires less knowledge to get into in the first place. Therefore, when we bring in new members of staff, we can always give them the customer experience straightaway, and they can pick it up quite easily."
"I like the functionality that's available with Orchestrator. The platform stability stuff that I would be involved in worries me from the automation side because you have a lot less hands-on control of things. Price point, it kind of puts us off."
"The most valuable features of the vCloud Director are global management, added services, and automation."
"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is its ability to host customers on their own cloud."
"We use the infrastructure as a service cloud, that is, we use the features as infrastructure for this. We are not using any platform services."
"It's quite user friendly. Everyone can use it, even non-technical people. This is good, since we use it to build a self-service portal which even users with not a lot of technical background can use."
"VMware Aria Automation has made a lot of things easier. It has really helped the operations team to spin up the virtual machines."
"It's also absolutely easy and intuitive. It uses the same basic layout as the rest of the product suite so it's really easy to navigate, find your way around between the tabs and the areas."
"The most valuable feature is the portal where you can assign permissions to specific people to request specific items in the catalog and allow them to provision things for themselves. Or it enables them to request different services that you can create through vRO and vRA."
"We can connect between multiple VMs in a matter of seconds."
"In terms of scalability, vRA has connections to a lot of different systems. It's very flexible and an impressive product."
"The automation part is most valuable. Because it is a VMware product, the automation capabilities that come with vRA are pretty extensive. We can integrate and build a lot of features on top of it, which makes it extremely useful for us."
"quality-of-latest-release; Compared to the earlier versions, from my experience, the upgrade process is easier; for example, the compatibility checks. I also don't need to go and find out the resources that are required. It tells me in one report what the current environment is like and, if I want to go to the next level, what things I need to take care of. Based on that I can make things happen."
"There didn't seem to be any type of integrated path on how to do the initial setup. There seemed to be different bits of paperwork or instructions available from various places. We always had to go looking for what to do next."
"If you use it for a lot of customers, it is too heavy for this solution."
"It would be nice to see some new features in respect of the GUI."
"vCloud Director could use the vCenter database to store information. This way, we don't end up in a situation where we have things going out of sync."
"Technical support is something that we've had problems with in the past. Across all the VMware solutions we have not always had the best response from support. To be fair a lot of the issues that came up for us have been quite niche but it seems that in terms of release cycles they introduced a lot of bugs and it's a lot of stuff that support generally has to work quite hard on. There have been cases when we've logged critical priority issues and not had responses in time. I think support is something that can be worked on."
"This solution could improve by adding root cause analysis."
"It would be beneficial if some features were built into the platform rather than requiring integration with multiple products, reducing complexity and licensing concerns."
"The product installation process could be easier for new users as well."
"Our current use cases aren't very complex, but as our environment grows, we're seeing a greater need for automation. We're considering expanding our automation efforts, especially since other competitive products are starting to offer similar features."
"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."
"in general, it took us a long time to get it off the ground. We had a lot of issues upfront and we determined that we just needed to scrap it. I think we scrapped it two or three times before we actually got it built the way we wanted, and we're still not where we need to be. We have had downtime. There have been some issues, but we're also two iterations behind on version."
"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 to see more out-of-the-box blueprints and workflows for the rest of VMware's products and its portfolio."
"The stability needs a lot of work. The troubleshooting component of vRealize is a pain. The administration and the upgrades are not up to the mark. If they were able to improve on that, that would be the best thing and would make it much easier to run it in the enterprise."
"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."
"The initial setup was complex because we have a high availability cluster. Especially when it comes to upgrades, we have a lot of downtimes and problems. The upgrade experience has been painful."
vCloud Director is ranked 5th in Cloud Management with 61 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 133 reviews. vCloud Director is rated 8.0, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of vCloud Director writes "Offers flexibility of handling workloads and good scalability". 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". vCloud Director is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), Morpheus, VMware Aria Operations, CloudStack and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, Morpheus, vCenter Orchestrator and SaltStack. See our VMware Aria Automation vs. vCloud Director report.
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