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Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (5th)
Morpheus
Ranking in Cloud Management
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Cloud Management
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
170
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (17th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 5.7%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Morpheus is 7.4%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 11.4%, down from 11.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Keldric Emery - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves time and costs while reducing performance degradation
It's been a very good solution. The reporting has been very, very valuable as, with a very large environment, it's very hard to get your hands on the environment. Turbonomic does that work for you and really shows you where some of the cost savings can be done. It also helps you with the reporting side. Me being able to see that this machine hasn't been used for a very long time, or seeing that a machine is overused and that it might need more RAM or CPU, et cetera, helps me understand my infrastructure. The cost savings are drastic in the cloud feature in Azure and in AWS. In some of those other areas, I'm able to see what we're using, what we're not using, and how we can change to better fit what we have. It gives us the ability for applications and teams to see the hardware and how it's being used versus how they've been told it's being used. The reporting really helps with that. It shows which application is really using how many resources or the least amount of resources. Some of the gaps between an infrastructure person like myself and an application are filled. It allows us to come to terms by seeing the raw data. This aspect is very important. In the past, it was me saying "I don't think that this application is using that many resources" or "I think this needs more resources." I now have concrete evidence as well as reporting and some different analytics that I can show. It gives me the evidence that I would need to show my application owners proof of what I'm talking about. In terms of the downtime, meantime, and resolution that Turbonomic has been able to show in reports, it has given me an idea of things before things happen. That is important as I would really like to see a machine that needs resources, and get resources to it before we have a problem where we have contention and aspects of that nature. It's been helpful in that regard. Turbonomic has helped us understand where performance risks exist. Turbonomic looks at my environment and at the servers and even at the different hosts and how they're handling traffic and the number of machines that are on them. I can analyze it and it can show me which server or which host needs resources, CPU, or RAM. Even in Azure, in the cloud, I'm able to see which resources are not being used to full capacity and understand where I could scale down some in order to save cost. It is very, very helpful in assessing performance risk by navigating underlying causes and actions. The reason why it's helpful is because if there's a machine that's overrunning the CPU, I can run reports every week to get an idea of machines that would need CPU, RAM, or additional resources. Those resources could be added by Turbonomic - not so much by me - on a scheduled basis. I personally don't have to do it. It actually gives me a little bit of my life back. It helps me to get resources added without me physically having to touch each and every resource myself. Turbonomic has helped to reduce performance degradation in the same way as it's able to see the resources and see what it needs and add them before a problem occurs. It follows the trends. It sees the trends of what's happening and it's able to add or take away those resources. For example, we discuss when we need to do certain disaster recovery tests. Over the years, Turbo will be able to see, for example, around this time of year that certain people ramp up certain resources in an environment, and then it will add the resources as required. Another time of year, it will realize these resources are not being used as much, and it takes those resources away. In this way, it saves money and time while letting us know where we are. We've saved a great deal of time using this product when I consider how I'd have to multiply myself and people like me who would have to add resources to devices or take resources away. We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time. Those saved hours are across months, not years. I would consider the number of resources that Turbonomic is adding and taking away and the placement (if I had to do it all myself) would end up being hundreds of hours monthly that would be added without the help of Turbonomic. It helps us to meet SLAs mainly due to the fact that we're able to keep the servers going and to keep the servers in an environment, to keep them to where (if we need to add resources) we can add them at any given time. It will keep our SLAs where they need to be. If we were to have downtime due to the fact that we had to add resources or take resources away and it was an emergency, then that would prevent us from meeting our SLAs. We also use it to monitor Azure and to monitor our machines in terms of the resources that are out there and the cost involved. In a lot of cases, it does a better job of giving us cost information than Azure itself does. We're able to see the cost per machine. We're able to see the unattached volume and storage that we are paying for. It gives us a great level of insight. Turbonomic gives us the time to be able to focus on innovation and ongoing modernization. Some of the tasks that it does are tasks that I would not necessarily have to do. It's very helpful in that I know that the resources are there where they need to be and it gives me an idea of what changes need to be made or what suggestions it's making. Even if I don't take them, I'm able to get a good idea of some best practices through Turbonomic. One of the ways that Turbonomic does to help bring new resources to market is that we are now able to see the resources (or at least monitor the resources) before they get out to the general public within our environment. We saw immediate value from the product in the test environment. We set it up in a small test environment and we started with just placement and we could tell that the placement was being handled more efficiently than what VMware was doing. There was value for us in placement alone. Then, after we left the placement, we began to look at the resources and there were resources. We immediately began to see a change in the environment. It has made the application and performance better, mainly due to the fact that we are able to give resources and take resources away based on what the need is. Our expenses, definitely, have been in a better place based on the savings that we've been able to make in the cloud and on-prem. Turbonomic has been very helpful in that regard. We've been able to see the savings easily based on the reports in Turbonomic. That, and just seeing the machines that are not being used to capacity allows us to set everything up so it runs a bit more efficiently.
Mark Wittling - PeerSpot reviewer
Astonishing automation capabilities, a lot of third-party integrations, and extremely simple upgrades
It supports many features, and it also supports some of the automation that Cloudify supports. So, in addition to just giving you basic platform management—such as the ability to deploy virtual machines and have multitenancy to log in and perform all of your basic platform management tasks—it also supports automation. You can, for example, spin up three virtual machines, and you can have each virtual machine configure each other. You can do service chaining with it. You can run scripts in Dash and Python, or you can use tools like Ansible, Puppet, or Chef. All of this is just built into the tool. It is a very powerful tool. The automation capabilities in Morpheus are just astonishing, and it also supports a lot of third-party integrations out of the box. So, you don't need to write code. If you have a backup solution, such as Avamar, instead of you having to write all of the scripting and coding to make that work, they have plugins. You just install the plugin, and it snaps right into their GUI and works out of the box. It is very easy to set up, and it is extremely simple to do an upgrade. It is one of the best upgradable solutions I've come across.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has automated a lot of things. We have saved 30 to 35 percent in human resource time and cost, which is pretty substantial. We don't have a big workforce here, so we have to use all the automation we can get."
"We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."
"I have the ability to automate things similar to the Orchestrator stuff. I do have the ability to have it do some balancing, and if it sees some different performance metrics that I've set not being met, it'll actually move some of my virtual machines from, let's say, one host to another. It is sort of an automation tool that helps me. Basically, I specify the metric, and if I get a certain host or something being over-utilized, it'll automatically move the virtual machines around for me. It basically has to snap into my vCenter and then it can make adjustments and move my virtual machines around. It also has some very nice reporting tools built around virtual machines. It tells you how much storage, memory, or CPU is being used monthly, and then it gives you a very nice way to be able to send out billing structure to your end users who use servers within your environment."
"The feature for optimizing VMs is the most valuable because a number of the agencies have workloads or VMs that are not really being used. Turbonomic enables us to say, 'If you combine these, or if you decide to go with a reserve instance, you will save this much.'"
"We have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."
"The recommendation of the family types is a huge help because it has saved us a lot of money. We use it primarily for that. Another thing that Turbonomic provides us with is a single platform that manages the full application stack and that's something I really like."
"The system automatically sizes and moves resources based on the needs of the applications."
"The ability to monitor and automate both the right-sizing of VMs as well as to automate the vMotion of VMs across ESXi hosts."
"The multi-cloud integrations and the DevOps and operational integrations are the most valuable. Morpheus platform is a centralized set to manage different clouds and your on-premise platforms. It does a very good job of what it is designed to do. It is very good in terms of features. It is extremely stable and easy to install. It is also very scalable. Their support is also extremely good."
"The user interface of the application is exceptional."
"It supports many features, and it also supports some of the automation that Cloudify supports. So, in addition to just giving you basic platform management—such as the ability to deploy virtual machines and have multitenancy to log in and perform all of your basic platform management tasks—it also supports automation. You can, for example, spin up three virtual machines, and you can have each virtual machine configure each other. You can do service chaining with it. You can run scripts in Dash and Python, or you can use tools like Ansible, Puppet, or Chef. All of this is just built into the tool. It is a very powerful tool."
"The most beneficial features for us were the API integrations with various cloud vendors like Nutanix, VMware, AWS, Azure, and GCP. It saved us the effort of doing that work ourselves."
"Morpheus is an intuitive solution that is very easy to use."
"The most valuable feature of Morpheus is its strong integration with vSphere Cloud."
"Provides a good automation platform."
"Morpheus provides a very easy and one-click solution to scaling up and down."
"It provides velocity both from management and customer perspectives, from ingesting new catalog items, developing new workflows for additional features, and/or allowing customer access to multiple guest OS instances at scale in a shorter time frame."
"It benefits the speed of our development, and the speed of anything we test and send through to production."
"The whole VMR ecosystem allows us to serve multiple customers, multiple organizations and also multiple units per customer. We can cover every level without using the whole VRA and the rest of the ecosystem. We don't need to use a separate product to provide separate functionalities for the customer. We can cover all the use cases using only one product on our side which is really helpful. T"
"The automation of the redundant tasks and the implementation of ServiceNow are huge for us..."
"It has definitely increased speed of VM deployment. When a normal server-request would come in, it might take anywhere from three to four days to deploy. Now, within 15 minutes, they can click and have something up and running."
"usability; It's very user-friendly. It is not hard to go and find things. There is a one-click Help that you can use to find all the documentation you need to manage it."
"Having an enterprise service catalog and being able to automate various parts of our infrastructure are among the most important components."
"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."
 

Cons

"In Azure, it's not what you're using. You purchase the whole 8 TB disk and you pay for it. It doesn't matter how much you're using. So something that I've asked for from Turbonomic is recommendations based on disk utilization. In the example of the 8 TB disk where only 200 GBs are being used, based on the history, there should be a recommendation like, "You can safely use a 500 GB disk." That would create a lot of savings."
"Before IBM bought it, the support was fantastic. After IBM bought it, the support became very disappointing."
"It sometimes does get false positives. Sometimes, it'll move something when it really wasn't a performance metric. I've seen it do that, but it's pretty much an automated tool for performance. We've only got about 500 virtual machines, so lots of times, I'm able to manage it physically, but it's definitely a nice tool for a larger enterprise that might be managing 2,000 or 3,000 virtual machines."
"Turbonomic doesn't do storage placement how I would prefer. We use multiple shared storage volumes on VMware, so I don't have one big disk. I have lots of disks that I can place VMs on, and that consumes IOPS from the disk subsystem. We were getting recommendations to provision a new volume."
"If they would educate their customers to understand the latest updates, that would help customers... Also, there are a lot of features that are not available in Turbonomic. For example, PaaS component optimization and automation are still in the development phase."
"It would be nice for them to have a way to do something with physical machines, but I know that is not their strength Thankfully, the majority of our environment is virtual, but it would be nice to see this type of technology across some other platforms. It would be nice to have capacity planning across physical machines."
"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."
"There is room for improvement [with] upgrades. We have deployed the newer version, version 8 of Turbonomic. The problem is that there is no way to upgrade between major Turbonomic versions. You can upgrade minor versions without a problem, but when you go from version 6 to version 7, or version 7 to version 8, you basically have to deploy it new and let it start gathering data again. That is a problem because all of the data, all of the savings calculations that had been done on the old version, are gone. There's no way to keep track of your lifetime savings across versions."
"We had to put in much effort ourselves since Morpheus's support wasn't always available to help us."
"We've been facing some challenges with Morpheus due to its design for public cloud usage."
"The tool could support virtual network functions better. It is really good at doing enterprise-type of things, but one of the things on which we're working with them is loading very complex virtual machines with it, such as Juniper SRX routers. It needs to support more complex virtualized resources a little bit better. Aside from that, it is a terrific tool. We really like it."
"The product has become overly complex. The biggest problem is that we find a bug, they fix the bug, but then another one pops up. We can never really deliver on the vision we had using Morpheus."
"Morpheus is working hard on creating an integration framework due for release in Q2 2021 which will allow clients to create their own interfaces and integrations into any 3rd party product that has a full-function API. Morpheus is also heavily focussed on enhancing the container management side to compete head-to-head with Openshift and CloudForms in Q3 2021."
"There is room for enhancement in integrating Morpheus with other solutions."
"The solution's pricing and customization need to improve."
"I faced a few problems while deploying."
"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."
"In terms of additional features, I would like it to be able to poll my vCenter infrastructure more rapidly and adapt to changes quickly. It should alert me and let me know when there are broken components, as a result of underlying infrastructure changes. It needs to be more stringent."
"They should concentrate on navigation and service improvements."
"When you start to do a deployment where you need higher availability and more resiliency, then the complexity goes up drastically."
"I don't find it to be entirely user-friendly. There are a lot of complicated menus within menus within menus. Things move around from version to version."
"Its configuration process could be better."
"For the administrator, it can be a little challenging. For the administrator, there are a lot of moving parts. It is fine once you figure out where the knobs are you need to twiddle, but it can be a challenge to get it up and running."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"You should understand the cost of your physical servers and how much time and money you are spending year over year on expanding your virtual farm."
"I don't know the current prices, but I like how the licensing is based on the number of instances instead of sockets, clusters, or cores. We have some VMs that are so heavy I can only fit four on one server. It's not cost-effective if we have to pay more for those. When I move around a VM SQL box with 30 cores and a half-terabyte of RAM, I'm not paying for an entire socket and cores where people assume you have at least 10 or 20 VMs on that socket for that pricing."
"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."
"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."
"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."
"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."
"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
"The license is based on the number of virtual machines that Morpheus is managing. So, it is a pay-as-you-grow model."
"The solution is cheaper if you have less number of servers, but it becomes very expensive for a large number of servers."
"Initially, the license may seem like a good deal, but as we grow, it becomes costly."
"Morpheus doesn't directly support cost optimization, but its API integration can facilitate resource optimization. It doesn't dynamically optimize resources like an aeronautic system would; it operates step by step."
"Licensing is on an annual basis, and it is upfront for the year. There is no extra cost unless you want additional support or specific deployment packs."
"The solution is free of cost."
"Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."
"This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us."
"From the customer perspective, the value was worth it."
"The solution is pretty expensive but provides good workload management."
"We have seen significant ROI. We used to have physical servers, it took 90 days to get a server, order it, buy it, and get it in. We have it down to 10 minutes, building a server with virtualization, and now that's too slow. So, we let the customer do it at their speed. Therefore, it is pretty much up in a couple of minutes and they have a server."
"They should provide one license for all the sub-products."
"I would rate it high because, compared to other solutions, VMware’s pricing is quite expensive. VMware products have become significantly more costly in recent years, leading to higher costs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
7%
Educational Organization
26%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
9%
 

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...
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
The implementation could be enhanced.
What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?
We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...
What do you like most about Morpheus?
The most beneficial features for us were the API integrations with various cloud vendors like Nutanix, VMware, AWS, A...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Morpheus?
We've been a Morpheus customer since the early days. I know what they're trying to sell now, and you'd really need a ...
What needs improvement with Morpheus?
The product has become overly complex. The biggest problem is that we find a bug, they fix the bug, but then another ...
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...
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
Morpheus Cloud Management Platform, Morpheus CMP
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Morpheus CMP, mcdonalds, blackrock, HSBC, astrazeneca, arris, WGU, GBG, pennstate, beyondtrust
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about Morpheus vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.