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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 (10th)
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 0.2%, down 0.5% compared to last year.
VMware Aria Operations, on the other hand, focuses on Virtualization Management Tools, holds 33.2% mindshare, down 34.0% since last year.
Process Automation
Virtualization Management Tools
 

Featured Reviews

David Villota - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides automatic monitoring capabilities that save time for users
In my company's IT environment, we use the tool to deploy production environments for products, including live manufacturing systems. The product improves my company's IT automation processes since we can use fewer resources currently. In my company, we need to spend less time considering that vCenter Orchestrator monitors everything. In general, we don't have to be present in our company to do active monitoring. Automatic monitoring is available for everything with vCenter Orchestrator, so we have proactive alerts in our company. The most valuable feature of the product in streamlining our company's workflow stems from the fact that we need to spend fewer resources and less time in general. Our company can spend time on more effective tasks like working with the plans to improve processes and so on, instead of taking care of the systems. The benefits of the product's integration capabilities were useful for HPE. My company has HPE infrastructure, and we are keen to integrate everything into the host, VMware ESXi. It is really important to have an easy integration method that allows for everything to be installed easily in a matter of minutes. I was not involved in the product's setup process. My colleague took care of the product's setup process. From what I know, I can say that the product's setup phase was straightforward. Some custom setups were to be done manually in the tool, but everything was well documented. I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. One of the benefits of the product is that it is a low-cost and stable solution that offers a lot of resources. I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.
Gaurav Amar - PeerSpot reviewer
Enabled us to cut the cost of resources and manage our infrastructure with a smaller team
There's a feature known as Smart Alerts in vRealize Operations, which I have found to be useful if there's anything going wrong in the infrastructure. What usually happens is that you get so many alerts that you become confused. Smart Alerts give you visibility into your infrastructure and also recommend how to fix the situation. That's a feature which I'm really a fan of. Control, from the compliance perspective, is also helpful because we are a PCI DSS-certified company. It keeps us in compliance so that all of our servers and other things are not breaching any of the baseline protocols and baseline policies which we have laid down for the company. That's another thing which I like about the VMware vROps.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product's initial setup phase was easy."
"I am impressed with the tool's easiness to work with VMware solutions."
"vCenter Orchestrator is easy to use."
"We can scale the solution."
"vCenter Orchestrator is very reliable and stable."
"The stability of the product is very good."
"The hardware abstraction layer, being able to make the VMs portable when moving to a different platform or over a WAN."
"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."
"The valuable features of VMware Aria Operations include the single pane of glass for all my environments, which allows a deep dive into the metrics."
"I have found the reporting tool, capacity planning, and reports for performance monitoring the most valuable features."
"It gives us a lot of details about the environment that we normally wouldn't be able to see without using other tools. We get visibility into our infrastructure, a single interface to see storage performance, VM performance, and to find issues in the environment that we wouldn't normally see."
"The solution has helped us improve quality of service to users, by giving alerts when different performance metrics get outside of their normal ranges. For example, I've had times when there have been memory leaks in applications and this solution has shown me as my memory usage gets outside of normal bounds. I'm able to find that and resolve it before my customers get back to me to tell me that there's a problem."
"The monitoring and verification functionalities were the most useful features."
"The scalability is great. With vRealize Operations Manager, we are able to create remote collection nodes if we feel that it's too intensive for the current deployment. The remote collection nodes allow us to collect more metrics from other sources."
"The initial setup is quite easy and straightforward. The majority of the time, implementing vROps is not time-consuming."
"The automation brings insight into how we will grow. I can look at it, then make my recommendations on what equipment we need to do for the next fiscal year."
 

Cons

"Its technical support team takes a long time to escalate the issues."
"I did not do the initial setup. However, it was complex at the beginning."
"The GUI should be enhanced in the future."
"VMware tools would benefit from more automation. When installing our devices and servers, we often need to install the VMware tools manually. This process should be automated during the VM installation process."
"A feature to review and setup tasks should be added."
"I would like to have an interface that can manage both on-premises and cloud solutions from a single console, where we can easily manage the resources that are being used or at least applications. Whereby clicking here and there from on-premises to cloud, or cloud to on-premises, depending on the requirements. If that can be accomplished, it will be extremely beneficial."
"In the next release, to make it easier to write the workflows, I would l like to see more HTML GUIs."
"Using this solution requires a lot of experience."
"The main concern would be just to make sure that there's some consistency when third-parties are building their various content packs for it. It seems like it's pretty random in terms of what you're going to get. A vendor is are going to provide whatever they provide but it's really hit or miss in terms of how good the quality is."
"The deployment of the solution can be improved by making it less complex."
"One way the solution could be improved, in my opinion: management packs, more native management packs with API."
"For the most part, we have found it to be user-friendly. It has gotten better over time since the first version of vROps that I used. The interface has really improved since then."
"We had some problems with updating it. The two times that we upgraded vRealize Operations Manager, we lost all our data."
"VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) should improve instant monitoring. Currently, the monitoring is on an interval of five to ten minutes, if I want to know what is happening now I cannot."
"I don't find this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's a large and difficult product to learn. We need to search for more information."
"It was just a case of going in, looking around, learning it, and just getting a little bit of initial help for a few days."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My company needs to make yearly payments towards the licensing costs attached to the product."
"The price is reasonable, and one of the reasons that this product was selected."
"We renew the solution's license every one or two years."
"The licensing cost is manageable because they have different versions available, standard, essential, and advanced."
"Our licensing is on a yearly basis. We pay for the license and then we pay the support every year."
"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."
"The product is expensive."
"The solution is a bit expensive."
"The solution requires an annual license which is very expensive."
"It is an affordable solution that doesn't require any additional costs."
"We have seen ROI in performance. It used to be our company was giving out eight CPUs to all servers. That was bad performance-wise. People were seeing slow compute times for their applications."
"When we last did a comparison of solutions, the pricing was equal or similar."
"Pricing is good for us. We're non-profit so we get a break on that."
"The pricing: It's expensive."
"We did an enterprise license agreement with our VMware partner and put this in our bundle. We tried it and loved it, so we use it now."
"So, besides the license overall, you have to pay for the type of support you want. With the license, there is a support cost as well."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Government
12%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
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, Pega and others in Process Automation. Updated: May 2025.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.