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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
6.9
Number of Reviews
50
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

"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 how easy it makes it to manage the VM."
"It is very stable. I have been using vCenter Orchestrator from version three now to six plus."
"It is the most cost-effective method for moving data between machines."
"The product's initial setup phase was easy."
"If I need to do DR, VMware can enable me to use vMotion, which requires use of vCenter. You cannot do vMotion without vCenter. We do a lot of automation, orchestration, and simplification for that purpose."
"It is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution."
"The tool is very beneficial for automating workflow."
"From an IT department perspective, it does help in reducing the time to troubleshoot issues and in providing cost savings through higher capacity utilization."
"The most valuable feature is the insight into how our infrastructure is actually working and the kind of performance that when users either say there is an issue, it gives some insight into finding out what's going wrong with it. I think its cause we have it mainly based on our production units."
"We receive an overview from the dashboard of what is happening in our environment."
"The most valuable feature would be the capacity planning. I can see where we're at as far as usage on our data stores, our CPU and memory. It lets us know where we need to grow."
"They keep improving and updating their apps over time."
"You take all of vCenter's built-in items and you've got one pane of glass for the policies: DRS policies, SRM policies, all of those things work well with VROps."
"Avoiding problems in the monitoring area is our strength. We use real-time monitoring models and real-time monitoring to do this. We also provide other capabilities, such as seeing changes in the environment."
"The vRO (using Functional Programming of Javascript) is a hand-down of the favorite component of this suite."
 

Cons

"Mainly VMware integrates with other products, but there is no easy way to link with other products from a different vendor. We can integrate with other products from the same vendors fairly well, but if they could make it so integration is easier with other vendors, that would really help."
"The product’s cost needs improvement."
"The cost of the solution is high."
"The response time of vCenter Orchestrator's support could be improved."
"The interface could be improved to bring greater user-friendliness and ease of use."
"Many times, customers' licenses are not used because the client is not aware of the features and the product benefits. When somebody is buying a product, they just do a default configuration."
"Its technical support team takes a long time to escalate the issues."
"The snapshot technology of VMware is not good compared to other solutions in the market, like Nutanix."
"We integrated vROps with vRealize Log Insight, but it was not helpful to me. It was not giving me any good data."
"The solution’s pricing could be improved."
"In terms of what could be improved or added to VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), from my experience, it needs more work in the ITSM space because my company never used it as an IT service management tool."
"We would like the default views on the reports for this solution to be improved; at present we have to customize the view before use."
"It's getting better from what it used to be but it still has a pretty steep learning curve. It's not super-intuitive when you first log into it. To find a lot of the information you need, you have to dig through multiple categories, subcategories, panes, and dashboards and widgets. They've been making it better by presenting some of the most commonly used ones more in the forefront. But some of the more advanced stuff is still pretty difficult to find."
"I would like to see improvements in managing within a single cluster - managing DRS a lot better as far as utilization of each host goes, within a single cluster. That would make it comparable to VMTurbo (Turbonomic). That has that feature where you can also manage it within a single cluster, move workloads around to balance out the hosts."
"One of the most valuable features was the cluster modeling, but they took that away... They keep saying that it's going to be back in the next release and that's what we're looking for. We really want that back."
"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 licensing module is somewhat complex. Calculating the cost is complicated. Many of our clients are unclear about the billing system and the traffic metering."
"Our licensing is on a yearly basis. We pay for the license and then we pay the support every year."
"We renew the solution's license every one or two years."
"We pay a yearly fee, based on our entries."
"We provide the VMware solution to our clients, for which they pay a perpetual license."
"vCenter Orchestrator could be more affordable."
"vCenter Orchestrator is a very expensive solution."
"The solution is a bit expensive."
"Don't overallocate! This means that you don't have to buy many hosts. You can save money that way."
"If one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the product price an eight out of ten."
"Most small users don't adopt VMware Aria Operations until it's necessary. Small businesses are looking for it, too. We need more monitoring and insights, so we're analyzing solutions to help us out here. I rate the solution’s pricing a five out of ten."
"The initial costs are a bit on the higher side but the licensing is flexible."
"The licensing is quite expensive for our company."
"I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."
"The solution is costly."
"I have reduced the time to troubleshoot for my customers."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Camunda, BMC, Temporal Technologies and others in Process Automation. Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.