Cisco UCS Director vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

Cisco and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Cisco is ranked #21 with an average rating of 8.0, while Broadcom is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.0. Cisco holds a 1.8% mindshare in CM, compared to Broadcom’s 7.1% mindshare. Additionally, 73% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Cisco UCS Director

Read 15 Cisco UCS Director reviews

820 Views
795 Comparison Views

73% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Automation

Read 171 VMware Aria Automation reviews

7,806 Views
4,293 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Cisco UCS Director

VMware Aria Automation

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

VMware Aria Automation and Cisco UCS Director compete in the automation and orchestration software category. VMware Aria Automation appears to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive features and flexibility in diverse environments.

Features: VMware Aria Automation offers multi-machine blueprints, automated VM lifecycles, and integration with third-party systems, making it ideal for virtual infrastructures. Cisco UCS Director excels in Cisco hardware management, offering excellent orchestration for Cisco-centric systems.

Room for Improvement: VMware Aria Automation users suggest improvements in documentation, ease of use, and cloud provider integration. Cisco UCS Director could enhance its user interface and integration with non-Cisco products, while broadening its feature set for diverse environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Automation supports on-premises and hybrid deployments with generally favorable tech support, though response times can vary. Cisco UCS Director focuses on on-premises deployment, with good tech support, but customization challenges indicate a need for simplified support processes.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Automation is perceived as expensive but offers significant ROI with enhanced infrastructure agility. Cisco UCS Director's high cost and pricing concerns may limit ROI, especially with significant customization required for non-Cisco systems.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Automation Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Automation

December 2025

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Helped 881,082 peers since 2012

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

Cisco UCS Director

Ranking in Cloud Management

21st

Average Rating

7.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware Aria Automation

Ranking in Cloud Management

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

171

Ranking in other categories

Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (6th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (19th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 1.8%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 7.1%, down from 10.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
VMware Aria Automation	7.1%
Cisco UCS Director	1.8%
Other	91.1%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

ErnieRumfield

Senior Telecommunications Engineer at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Managing extensive VoIP services becomes efficient and seamless

We use Cisco UCS Director primarily for managing our VoIP service to maintain seamless service delivery. We operate in an enterprise government environment Cisco UCS Director is straightforward to use, which we greatly appreciate. It helps save time by making it quicker to roll out new call…

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is helpful for centralized management."

"The product is flexible and compact. It has a lot of features."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the fabric sharing."

"A product that really aids in systems management without complexity."

"The reason we went with Cisco is that it comes at a very negligible cost as part of the BOQ. Compared to the competition's products, which are incredibly expensive, UCS Director is low-cost."

"I can manage multiple workloads whether it's on AWS, Azure, or on-premises. They can be managed by using the UCS Director."

"The main feature of this solution is the integration with all the Cisco solutions and other vendors."

"An easy and strong configuration, along with its low cost, are some of the features of the solution."

More Cisco UCS Director pros

"It is very stable, especially for high availability features."

"The automation part is valuable, especially where vRA integrates with vRO, because it reduces the amount of effort we have to make."

"VMware Aria Automation supports integration with ServiceNow, Kubernetes, and other tools. It is cloud-agnostic, making it a stronger platform than Ansible."

"Our QA department is able to spin up a new instance of Windows virtual machine and test whatever use case they have, then turn it back down whenever they are done."

"We can connect between multiple VMs in a matter of seconds."

"vRA provides that single pane of glass for our cloud tenants to deploy, monitor, access, and manage their VMs/guest operating systems."

"VMware Aria Automation is a very scalable solution because it integrates well with a couple of leading products in the industry. For products that are not already integrated, there are plugins or adapters that can be used with customization."

"The product’s most valuable feature is its ability to provide environmental security."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

"We cannot depend on this solution to manage all of the data center's infrastructure."

"It is not easy to add or expand the product."

"Simplifying the user interface would go a long way to making it more usable."

"The areas where this product can be improved are the integrations and the UI. These features are not as friendly compared to VMware products."

"Normally, UCS Director is used primarily for orchestration, but when we look at a non-Cisco data infrastructure components, the UCS Director needs a bit more improvement in terms of integration with third-party systems and with existing older systems."

"Currently, Cisco UCS Director is unable to integrate with another product or with a server from another brand."

"The product could allow more programmatic opportunities through better development of the API."

"The product's pricing needs to improve."

More Cisco UCS Director cons

"We have seen some issues with upgrades or installations. This means we have to raise a call every time with VMware."

"The stability is 95 percent. There are some situations where it gets a little bit clumsy. When it gets really big, when you're dealing with a very large deployment, it can be a little bit difficult, but it's better than nothing. It does a significant job, given what it's tasked to do."

"They could extend the ability to use vRealize Orchestrator Automation for organizations with multiple tenants. It should be easier to operate and extend different capabilities from vRealize Orchestrator. Currently, it's difficult to build advanced services in Aria Automation because you need to use the vRealize Orchestrator."

"The initial setup is complex. There are too many components to integrate, especially when we integrated with different storage types and backup vendors. All the integration made it more complex."

"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."

"It would be better if VMware would provide API documentation for developers and customers on the Internet."

"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."

"I have not found this solution to be user-friendly. It's really complicated. The demo shows that you can automate anything but they only show basic scenarios. If you want to do anything more complicated than that, it becomes very complicated to set up."

More VMware Aria Automation cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten."

"I rate Cisco UCS Director's price a three out of ten. Cisco UCS Director is not an affordable product. With Cisco UCS Director, there is a need to pay an overall price, which consists of the product, software, and support."

"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing around five to six out of ten."

"The cost of this solution is significant."

"Cisco UCS Director is expensive...I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."

"The budget doesn’t work for the state and local governments."

"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."

"It is an expensive product. After VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, there was a rise in the price of VMware Aria Automation."

"VMware Aria Automation is expensive."

"The pricing is very high."

"The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market."

"Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."

"I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

17%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

11%

University

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	11

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	32
Midsize Enterprise	24
Large Enterprise	130

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS Director?

While the pricing might be seen as expensive, it provides value for money due to reliable service and excellent technical support.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Director?

It should be more of a cloud-based architecture for Cisco UCS Director, and it should be affordable to small customers as well because the pricing is a major challenge when we talk about Cisco UCS ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Cisco UCS Director?

Mainly in my region and country, large data center customers are using Cisco UCS Director, not the SMB or mid-market customers. More of the on-premise customers are utilizing Cisco UCS Director. Th...

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 you need from the software interface. It provides complete visibility over applic...

See all answers

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 free trial I cannot describe in detail the second and third options as my company ...

See all answers

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 companies were using it most often: Social organizations Financial institutions and ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Cisco Intersight vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 19% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 9% of the time

OpenNebula vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 8% of the time

Morpheus vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 7% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 7% of the time

More Cisco UCS Director Competitors

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 15% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 9% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 8% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 5% of the time

vCenter Orchestrator vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 2% of the time

More VMware Aria Automation Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director

January 2026

Download Cisco UCS Director product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

January 2026

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

Overview

Cisco UCS Director enables automated delivery of physical and virtual data center resources, empowering data centers to move at the speed of business.

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.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

Entel, Data#3, Cegal, NESIC, LightEdge

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

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Automation

December 2025

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