Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

Cisco and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Additionally, 87% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of VMware users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] and VMware Aria Automation based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

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Buyer's Guide

Cloud Management

May 2025

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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

IBM Turbonomic

Featured Reviews

Alex Darby

Director, Infrastructure, Wintel Engineering at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Saves time during workload migration, facilitates sizing of virtual servers, and the support team is helpful

The right-sizing feature is the most captivating one for us. It helped in taking the emotions out of what people think they need, basing it off of real data, and providing them what they actually need. It's not really a special feature, but the support that we received from that team really helped us in our success. There were definitely some customizations that needed to take place to make it successful. This is the most aware of our products, in terms of understanding all of the components from the top down. It is integrated with all of the different modules, all the way down to the core infrastructure. All of it is tied together and there are not many tools that can do that.

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LuisLanca

CTO at Logicalis

A stable solution that needs to improve XDR security

The solution is agile and it has APIs for integration. The tool should improve its security on the XDR part. I have been working with the product for four years. I would rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten. I would rate the product's scalability a nine out of ten. My company…

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Le Quang Long

Cloud Engineer at BIDV - Ngân hàng TMCP Đầu tư & Phát triển Việt Nam

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The biggest value I'm getting out of VMTurbo right now is the complete hands-off management of equalizing the usage in my data center."

"The most valuable features are the cluster utilization reports and the resource capacity planning. We can simulate how much capacity we can add to the current resources. The individual DM reports and VM-facing recommendations report are also helpful."

"We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."

"It also brings up a list of machines and if something is under-provisioned and needs more compute power it will tell you, 'This server needs more compute power, and we suggest you raise it up to this level.' It will even automatically do it for you. In Azure, you don't have to actually go into the cloud provider to resize. You can just say, 'Apply these resizes,' and Turbonomic uses some back-end APIs to make the changes for you."

"We like that Turbonomic shows application metrics and estimates the impact of taking a suggested action. It provides us a map of resource utilization as part of its recommendation. We evaluate and compare that to what we think would be appropriate from a human perspective to that what Turbonomic is doing, then take the best action going forward."

"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."

"The ability to monitor and automate both the right-sizing of VMs as well as to automate the vMotion of VMs across ESXi hosts."

"I only deal with the infrastructure side, so I really couldn't speak to more than load balancing as the most valuable feature for me. It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. It always keeps things in perfect balance."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"The solution is agile and it has APIs for integration."

"The initial setup is fairly straightforward if you have a basic setup."

"The solution includes a lot of features and is useful because you can configure all the way down to ports."

"You can scale it easily."

"The initial setup process is straightforward."

"Upgrades are very simple as well because they've allowed us to get updates directly in the CloudCenter Suite manager. If you need to do an upgrade to your setup afterward, you just push a button and it rolls out the parts and retires the old ones. It's seamless and very simple compared to what we've done before."

"Cisco CloudCenter's scalability is good."

"I can define all components and create a blueprint for consumption across all services."

More Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] pros

"It is probably 90 percent quicker to get something out the door than it was before. For developers, depending on who is building VMs for them, sometimes they request anywhere from 20 to 100. Now, we can deploy them in a matter of an hour, where previously it might have taken me three days to deploy out 100 VMs."

"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."

"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."

"Our time to deliver a fully unified three-tier app, at the right version, is one-twentieth what it was before. There is no manual intervention. No IP management. It just dramatically simplifies all of our processes."

"We use it to deploy databases and testing environments. It spins up quickly and also break down fast."

"I used the technical support during upgrades. They came onsite and are very technical. They are very good"

"It's much more stable than the highest available variant."

"value; It has provided my development team a pure self-service portal. We deploy thousands of machines and reclaim. So, their time to business, and their time to market has been improved exponentially."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

"I would love to see Turbonomic analyze backup data. We have had people in the past put servers into daily full backups with seven-year retention and where the disk size is two terabytes. So, every single day, there is a two terabyte snapshot put into a Blob somewhere. I would love to see Turbonomic say, "Here are all your backups along with the age of them," to help us manage the savings by not having us spend so much on the storage in Azure. That would be huge."

"While the product is fairly intuitive and easy to use once you learn it, it can be quite daunting until you have undergone a bit of training."

"Some features are only available via changes to the deployment YAML, and it would be better to have them in the UI."

"Before IBM bought it, the support was fantastic. After IBM bought it, the support became very disappointing."

"There are a few things that we did notice. It does kind of seem to run away from itself a little bit. It does seem to have a mind of its own sometimes. It goes out there and just kind of goes crazy. There needs to be something that kind of throttles things back a little bit. I have personally seen where we've been working on things, then pulled servers out of the VMware cluster and found that Turbonomic was still trying to ship resources to and from that node. So, there has to be some kind of throttling or ability for it to not be so buggy in that area. Because we've pulled nodes out of a cluster into maintenance mode, then brought it back up, and it tried to put workloads on that outside of a cluster. There may be something that is available for this, but it seems very kludgy to me."

"It can be more agnostic in terms of the solutions that it provides. It can include some other cost-saving methods for the public cloud and SaaS applications as well."

"We don't use Turbonomic for FinOps and part of the reason is its cost reporting. The reporting could be much more robust and, if that were the case, I could pitch it for FinOps."

"Recovering resources when they're not needed is not as optimized as it could be."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"The improvement I would like to see is not one thing particular to CloudCenter. I'd say it's more of a message that the system is still using a lot of the different products and if they would all just fit better together, they all could be faster together."

"The solution needs to be more simple."

"Improvements are needed in UI and multi-tenancy for this solution."

"They can add some of those features to make the platform more usable for different backgrounds and developer skills."

"They should provide an entire cloud offering, from architecture to network security features."

"The tool should improve its security on the XDR part."

"For many clients, the main problem with the solution is the price. Cisco is very expensive. If they could somehow make the pricing more competitive, that would be a big draw."

"You don't get all the solution's benefits if you have older switches."

More Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] cons

"The setup is difficult. You need a technical person to help you set it up."

"My impression of its stability is "middle of the road." We've had some issues where it seems to be a little bit sensitive, where deployments fail and we don't really know a specific reason why. We'll dig through logs and try and figure out what's going on, but it's not always apparent as to why it failed. And you can kick it off again and it'll succeed. So stability could be better."

"I don't find the solution to be intuitive and user- friendly. The GUI is really complicated. Tracking down logs and errors is very hard. Then, it takes a specialized JavaScript person to build. Also, I'm not sure how the upgrades are going now, but they definitely need to evolve the upgrade process. Finally, the logs are very generalized. Giving more of an indicator of what's actually going wrong, rather than just a generic error code, would help."

"It has a learning curve."

"The most important thing that we missed in vRanger was the possibility to mount several images instantaneously and present it so we can run it immediately."

"I'm not wanting any particular feature; but there should be cost reductions. VMware comes at a high cost, and that's why we are in the process of transitioning to a more affordable alternative."

"Upgrades are always a pain."

"I want to see HTML5. I want to get rid of JavaScript... we have a lot of issues with Java crashing when we're using vCenter. I obviously don't want that to happen with the vRealize Automation and Orchestrator side."

More VMware Aria Automation cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."

"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."

"When we have expanded our licensing, it has always been easy to make an ROI-based decision. So, it's reasonably priced. We would like to have it cheaper, but we get more benefit from it than we pay for it. At the end of the day, that's all you can hope for."

"If you're a super-small business, it may be a little bit pricey for you... But in large, enterprise companies where money is, maybe, less of an issue, Turbonomic is not that expensive. I can't imagine why any big company would not buy it, for what it does."

"We felt the pricing was very fair for the product. It is in no way prohibitive for larger deployments, unlike other similar product on the market."

"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."

"It was an annual buy-in. You basically purchase it based on your host type stuff. The buy-in was about 20K, and the annual maintenance is about $3,000 a year."

"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"The solution is extremely expensive and has additional fees for things like monitoring."

"The tool's pricing is expensive."

"The tool's pricing is balanced with the market."

"The cost of the solution is reasonable for us. Although it is relatively high, we prioritize stability and integration over cost."

"We do plan to see ROI with any new implementation of new technologies being implemented within our environment."

"A simplified version for small businesses would be good."

"From the customer perspective, the value was worth it."

"The pricing for this solution is roughly 20% lower than the competitive products in the market."

"It is an open-source product."

"Customers say this solution is costlier compared to its competitors."

"The pricing is very high."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

32%

Financial Services Firm

22%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

10%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?

It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is...

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What needs improvement with Turbonomic?

The implementation could be enhanced.

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What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?

We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...

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What do you like most about Cisco CloudCenter?

The initial setup process is straightforward.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco CloudCenter?

They should provide an entire cloud offering, from architecture to network security features.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Cisco CloudCenter?

We use the product for demonstration, device provisioning, and data management.

See all answers

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...

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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...

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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...

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Comparisons

VMware Aria Operations vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 17% of the time

Azure Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 12% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 8% of the time

Cloudability vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 7% of the time

VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 5% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

No data available

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 16% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 15% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 11% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 10% of the time

Cisco Intersight vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 2% of the time

More VMware Aria Automation Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

May 2025

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco CloudCenter [EOL]

May 2025

Download Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

April 2025

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

CliQr, CliQr CloudCenter

VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack

Interactive Demo

IBM

Demo not available

Cisco

Demo not available

VMware

Overview

IBM Turbonomic offers automation, planning, and right-sizing recommendations to streamline resource management, improve efficiencies, and optimize costs across virtualized environments and cloud platforms.

IBM Turbonomic is valued for its capability to optimize resource allocation and monitor virtual environments efficiently. It facilitates automated decision-making in VM sizing, load balancing, and cost optimization for both on-premises and cloud deployments. Users can leverage insights for workload placement, ensure peak performance assurance, and effectively right-size across VMware and Azure. The ongoing transition to HTML5 aims to improve visual and navigational ease, while expanded reporting features are anticipated. Opportunities for improved training, documentation, and integrations enhance platform usability and functionality.

What Are the Key Features?

Automation: Streamlines resource allocation and VM management.
Planning Tools: Supports capacity management and growth projections.
Right-Sizing: Optimizes VM configurations for efficient resource use.
Customizable Dashboards: Provides quick insights into environment health.
Reporting Capabilities: Offers valuable data for informed decision-making.
Cloud Integration: Ensures cost-effective resource utilization.

What Benefits Should Be Looked For?

Performance Enhancement: Improves application performance efficiency.
Cost Reduction: Minimizes operational expenses through optimizations.
Infrastructure Efficiency: Maximizes use of IT infrastructure resources.

In finance, IBM Turbonomic aids in maintaining platform efficiency during market fluctuations. Healthcare organizations leverage its capability for resource optimization during high-demand periods to enhance patient care support. Retailers use it for planning in peak seasons, ensuring resources align with fluctuating demand to maintain performance continuity.

IBM

Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] is utilized for tenant creation, VM management, hybrid deployment, cloud management, and port configuration.

Primary users include DevOps teams, telecom companies, and service providers. It integrates well with ACI and ASX-T, offering stability, initial setup ease, and extensive documentation. Known for high trust in Latin America, it excels in workflow automation through Action Orchestrator and supports detailed configuration down to ports. However, improvements are required in DevOps alignment, upgrades, automation, and cost management.

What are the most important features of Cisco CloudCenter [EOL]?

Stability: Provides a robust platform with minimal downtime.
Ease of Setup: Simplifies the initial setup process to get users started quickly.
Documentation: Extensive guides and resources available for user support.
Workflow Automation: Action Orchestrator enables cross-infrastructure automation.
Blueprint Pattern: Defines middleware and dependencies effectively.
API Integration: Offers agility and flexibility with API support.

What benefits or ROI should users look for in reviews?

High Trust Level: Recognized reliability, especially in Latin America.
Configuration Support: Capability to configure down to individual ports.
Integration: Seamless integration with ACI and ASX-T.
Agility: Enhanced flexibility and adaptability to changes.

Among its features, Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] serves industries like telecom and service providers needing hybrid deployment and cloud management. DevOps teams utilize it for tenant creation and VM management. Known for stability and initial setup ease, it supports Latin American regions highly. Action Orchestrator aids in workflow automation, benefitting user workflows. Improvements in DevOps alignment, UI, multi-tenancy, YAML abstraction, and cost management are desirable. It requires better security for XDR and comprehensive cloud offerings, including architecture and network security features.

Cisco

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.

VMware

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.

NTT, Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), CollabNet, Pratt & Miller, PZFlex

Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual

Find out what your peers are saying about VMware, Nutanix, IBM and others in Cloud Management. Updated: May 2025.

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