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VMware Aria Automation vs vRealize Business for Cloud [EOL] comparison

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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

VMware Aria Automation
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
172
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (2nd), Configuration Management (11th), Network Automation (7th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (29th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (7th)
vRealize Business for Cloud...
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

VasilisGiannitsiotis - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT at ITSolutions
Automation has streamlined complex financial workflows but still needs more intuitive orchestration
Something to improve in VMware Aria Automation would be related to VCF 9, as I do not know what it is trying to bring because they exposed it as the solution of everything. So VCF 9 will bring VCF Automation and VCF Operations, the new product line of VMware. I have not seen what this brings or what else it includes. Maybe in the area of vRealize Orchestrator, this would be beneficial because VRO can do everything. Perhaps a more user-friendly way to use that tool would be helpful because the possibilities there are endless. I am looking for more user-friendly navigation in VMware Aria Automation.
TM
Solutions Architect and project manager at MIB leipzig
Complete solution for automation, orchestration, and end-to-end lifecycle management
The most valuable feature is automation. With the automation, you can easily and quickly implement it by deploying gnashing on virtual environments. It doesn't take long to develop an automation blueprint. You need about half an hour, and then you can install or deploy it on several systems. That was our first great advantage in the project because we urgently needed to deploy across many different systems. So automation helps us to do our work quickly and easily. VMware vRealize has standardized systems for doing work after the deployment. First, you have to set up the language on the system itself. Then there are vRealize's orchestration features. You can implement code in your deployment script to do this configuration automatically. So the orchestrator is a beneficial component. With this, you can implement automatic language selection and automated integration. In other systems, you can implement a multi-blueprint or multi-system environment to deploy the entire database environment and applications on this database with one click. The lifecycle manager is also essential. In version 7.5, you must provide a dir example username and password to access the Citrix server and controller. What's more, you have to include this in your script or your code. But in version 8, you can provide the username and password or store them in the lifecycle manager. So then you can pick it up from there. And that's the only location where you have to change the password. You don't have to change it in every script. That's a massive improvement in version 8.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"To manage when VM's aren't being used, we have it set up so that it will auto-destroy them after a certain amount of time, obviously with permission from the user who owns it."
"The main benefit of vRA is a faster deployment for our customers, because before implementing vRA we were building VMs from scratch, but vRA allows us to create images so we can deploy a VM in just a few minutes."
"The most valuable features are the Catalog View and the access control business group. Access provisioning is probably the main use case for us, so we can separate access to different Catalog items among the different business groups and have that tied back to our AD LDAP systems."
"It helps me build a big catalog and provide it to my end users."
"We have it deployed in a highly-available environment and scalability is nice because we just had another ESX host and then we are able to increase the capacity."
"Today, if I want to provision one VM, it takes me five minutes. Earlier, it would take a minimum of 30 minutes to go and choose everything. Now, I can just do one click and it can provision my whole VM. We also integrated with our Alexa, so even through voice functionality, I can create a VM. One of the guys at VMware, along with our partner, deployed that in our environment. If I say, "Hey, Alexa, I need a VM with four gigs of RAM," it will go and start creating it."
"Being able to provide automation for my customers, essentially having guard rails on what they can deploy and how much it is they're deploying in my environment."
"Aria Automation gives you the flexibility to deploy tenants with customized blueprints for permissions and policies."
"The features I find most valuable about this solution is it helps us to automate all the provisioning activities on the platform."
"The solution's cost management is very good."
"The most valuable feature is that it has a very easy and adaptive look and feel, compared with some other cloud solutions."
"The way the dashboard works with the main orchestrator to combine different types of cloud providers is helpful."
"Overall, this is a good solution and we have not had any problems, but I can't say that it is perfect because of the issues with the documentation and knowledge base."
"The tool helps us to monitor the services provided to customers as a cloud provider. The product is a monitoring solution that helps customers pay for their utilization of services."
"I like the openness of the solution."
"The flexibility of the solution is the most valuable feature."
 

Cons

"It's not cheap. It would be more expensive to get an alternative though because we would have to buy the extras for it."
"Implementation directly with our SRM product, because we know what the other products are out there that VM is offering, such as Site Recovery Manager (SRM). There are ties which you can customize to put them into that, but it would be nice if it came as an out-of-the-box feature."
"The flexibility can hurt sometimes, as there are so many ways to accomplish the same task."
"It is too broad scale and complicated. It takes too many clicks to do things."
"VMware Aria Automation could improve reporting of the policies. They are difficult to customize. We have many policies but they are not able to be modified to what we want."
"VMware needs to make it to where it is not as custom. Right now, you spend a lot of time making the services work. In order to get it up and running initially, that takes time."
"I would like them to improve the product training."
"From my experience, vRA requires a highly skilled team to maintain, version upgrades without downtime are not possible, and overall it doesn’t scale fast."
"The knowledge base is not available for the engineers, which is something that needs to be improved."
"The pricing model is complicated and would be more predictable if it were simplified."
"If you haven't established a vSphere cluster and you only have a single server to integrate, you can't deploy any service."
"At the moment, in the POC, we have a very huge issue because you definitely have to implement a vSphere cluster."
"The product needs some investment in configuration. I would like to see better and more optimized configuration in the tool's future releases."
"Better integration with other VMware toolsets would be beneficial."
"It's not always easy to find the information you need. You must have a lot of technical experience to find the right location for what you're implementing within the program."
"It would be a good idea for VMware to be compatible with the most popular orchestration tools in the market."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"They should provide one license for all the sub-products."
"The solution is pretty expensive but provides good workload management."
"Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."
"As far as value is concerned, it has been essential to our environment. We have been able to deploy VMs quickly and the developers have their own sandbox, so they can spin up and destroy VMs at their own will."
"There is confusion between licensing levels. There are three different licensed versions of vRealize Automation, and there are different things which can happen in each of them."
"The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market."
"I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive."
"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."
"The pricing model is complicated."
"The product is a cost-effective solution."
"It's expensive, which is one of the problems with this solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
19%
Construction Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise131
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

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 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 ...
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 ...
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Also Known As

VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
VMware IT Business Management Suite, VMware ITBM, IT Business Management Suite, Digital Fuel
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Rent-A-Center, SAIC - (Science Applications International Corporation), Tribune Media, iGATE, EMC, Deutsche Telekom, GEFCO, Banca Ifis
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