Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

Cisco and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Additionally, 87% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] and VMware Aria Automation based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about VMware, Nutanix, IBM and others in Cloud Management.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloud Management Report (Updated: September 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Management

September 2024

Download the complete report

Helped 801,634 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic

Featured Reviews

reviewer1112556

Senior Director of Middleware Hosting Technology at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Aug 17, 2023

It shows you what you should do, but it can also act on recommendations automatically

Our organization uses cloud-based infrastructure, so everything is metered. You're wasting money if you have a system running but you're not using it. Turbonomic can take that system offline or suspend it. It can also adjust resources so that they're optimal for a particular workload. It gives you visibility and also takes action automatically. Turbonomic offers a single platform for optimizing complex, mixed environments. With APM integration, it can tell you how each application is performing and rationalize the resources to ensure the optimal configuration for performance, so there's no waste. It will make those adjustments for you based on application trends. It covers the complete stack all the way up from your UI down to your core host machine if you're running on a VM or the physical machine if you're running on a device. It tries to ensure consistency and hasn't caused any additional overhead on my applications. The automation features are helpful because engineers no longer need to focus on fixing issues. They can spend their time on innovation and more important things. Right now, a lot of the work is still being done manually. When I get alerts, I send a staff member to make adjustments, but I can't do that in real time. It might take days or weeks to address a ticket. The meter is constantly running while we're waiting to fix that so that money is going down the drain. It's hard to quantify how much time we save using Turbonomic, but it's around 20 percent. I only do analysis and remediation on maybe Tuesday and Thursday. It's not about the time that I waste; it's about the time and cost we can recover. I no longer need to wait until Tuesday. If something happens on the weekend, the tool can fix it on Sunday. It does save time, but the bigger aspect is cost savings. The core expense of our setup is cloud costs, so cloud management is a huge piece of our financial operations. We're constantly looking at cloud spending and ways to make that more efficient.

Read full review

reviewer2095668

Director Of Technology at a religious institution with 11-50 employees

Feb 23, 2023

Useful features for configuring down to ports but extremely expensive

Our company uses the solution's GUI interface to configure and monitor ports. We look at usage and determine if there are any issues. Cisco is a very qualified company and has been in business for many, many years. The solution is useful because you can configure all the way down to ports. You…

Read full review

PardhaNallan

Solution Architect at Presidio Networked Solutions

Mar 20, 2023

Helps to customize the entire user frontend experience and is flexible, reliable, and scalable

As is the case with any other automation product, VMware Aria Automation also requires a journey. You will need to start slow, build the platform, and make sure you have good out-of-the-gate use cases. You can start with automating basic server requests. If you already have CICD tools in your environment, then you can integrate them and try a few playbooks. You will definitely need to train your staff so that they can keep moving forward with the tool. It is a complex product, and you will need at least one full-time employee who has experience with scripting and an interest in automation who can be dedicated to this solution. Overall, VMware Aria Automation is flexible, reliable, and scalable. With VMware Aria Automation as a cloud service, it is even easier to deploy and manage. Therefore, I would give this solution an overall rating of eight out of ten.

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 most valuable features are the cluster utilization reports and the resource capacity planning. We can simulate how much capacity we can add to the current resources. The individual DM reports and VM-facing recommendations report are also helpful."

"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."

"We have a system where our developers automate machine builds, and that is constantly running out of resources. Turbonomic helps us with that, so I don't have to keep buying hardware. The developers always say, "They don't have enough. They don't have enough. They don't have enough," when they just configured it improperly. Therefore, Turbonomic helps us identify configuration issues on their side so it doesn't cost me money on the other end to buy resources that I don't really need."

"It is a good holistic platform that is easy to use. It works pretty well."

"I like Turbonomic's automation and AI machine learning features. It shows you what it can do, but it can also act on recommendations automatically. Integration with an APM system makes the AI/ML features truly effective. Understanding what the application is doing and the trends of application behavior can help you make real-world decisions and act on that information."

"The tool provides the ability to look at the consumption utilization over a period of time and determine if we need to change that resource allocation based on the actual workload consumption, as opposed to how IT has configured it. Therefore, we have come to realize that a lot of our workloads are overprovisioned, and we are spending more money in the public cloud than we need to."

"The automated memory balancing, where it looks at whether it's being used in the most efficient way and adds or takes away memory, is the best part. If it didn't do that, it would be something that I would have to do. We have too many machines for one person to do that. The automation helps me in that it is done in a really efficient way and a balanced way because of the policies. It really helps."

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"The solution is agile and it has APIs for integration."

"Cisco CloudCenter's scalability is good."

"The initial setup is fairly straightforward if you have a basic setup."

"Cisco has a lot of published information and documentation that helps users understand the product and its offering very well."

"I can define all components and create a blueprint for consumption across all services."

"The solution includes a lot of features and is useful because you can configure all the way down to ports."

"The initial setup process is straightforward."

"Upgrades are very simple as well because they've allowed us to get updates directly in the CloudCenter Suite manager. If you need to do an upgrade to your setup afterward, you just push a button and it rolls out the parts and retires the old ones. It's seamless and very simple compared to what we've done before."

More Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] pros

"The product is very user-friendly."

"The big benefit is it will spin up VMs quickly so it would take about 13 to 15 minutes to deploy a virtual machine. Whereas, if I were doing it based on an email from users who are requesting VMs, it might take time for me to hear back from them. This could be anywhere from an hour to a day."

"It is mostly for our tech support to test new versions, find bugs, and troubleshoot what is happening at customer sites."

"Even with the virtualization, it would take us at least three or four days to create a VM. With vRA we have brought that down to seven minutes. The solution has helped increase infrastructure, agility, speed of provisioning, time to market, application agility. Everything got super fast."

"value; It has provided my development team a pure self-service portal. We deploy thousands of machines and reclaim. So, their time to business, and their time to market has been improved exponentially."

"The most valuable feature that we have is that it's able to deploy several different operating systems, it's able to deploy whatever we want. We can take a template, spin it up, revise it, save it back off, and be able to have that for other departments. We can have one for our Dev team and one for our research team which has some specific requirements. We can keep track of them and deploy things automatically."

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

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

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

"I would love to see Turbonomic analyze backup data. We have had people in the past put servers into daily full backups with seven-year retention and where the disk size is two terabytes. So, every single day, there is a two terabyte snapshot put into a Blob somewhere. I would love to see Turbonomic say, "Here are all your backups along with the age of them," to help us manage the savings by not having us spend so much on the storage in Azure. That would be huge."

"The issue for us with the automation is we are considering starting to do the hot adds, but there are some problems with Windows Server 2019 and hot adds. It is a little buggy. So, if we turn that on with a cluster that has a lot of Windows 2019 Servers, then we would see a blue screen along with a lot of applications as well. Depending on what you are adding, cores or memory, it doesn't necessarily even take advantage of that at that moment. A reboot may be required, and we can't do that until later. So, that decreases the benefit of the real-time. For us, there is a lot of risk with real-time."

"We don't use Turbonomic for FinOps and part of the reason is its cost reporting. The reporting could be much more robust and, if that were the case, I could pitch it for FinOps."

"The one point is the reporting. We do have reports out of it, but they're not the level of graphical detail I would like."

"They could add a few more reports. They could also be a bit more granular. While they have reports, sometimes it is hard to figure out what you are looking for just by looking at the date."

"The GUI and policy creation have room for improvement. There should be a better view of some of the numbers that are provided and easier to access. And policy creation should have it easier to identify groups."

"They have a long road map when we ask for certain things that will make the product better. It takes time, but that's understandable because there are other things that are higher on the priority list."

"The management interface seems to be designed for high-resolution screens. Somebody with a smaller-resolution screen might not like the web interface. I run a 4K monitor on it, so everything fits on the screen. With a lower resolution like 1080, you need to scroll a lot. Everything is in smaller windows. It doesn't seem to be designed for smaller screens."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"The solution needs to be more simple."

"For many clients, the main problem with the solution is the price. Cisco is very expensive. If they could somehow make the pricing more competitive, that would be a big draw."

"Improvements are needed in UI and multi-tenancy for this solution."

"They should provide an entire cloud offering, from architecture to network security features."

"The tool should improve its security on the XDR part."

"You don't get all the solution's benefits if you have older switches."

"The improvement I would like to see is not one thing particular to CloudCenter. I'd say it's more of a message that the system is still using a lot of the different products and if they would all just fit better together, they all could be faster together."

"I'm not a big fan of CloudCenter. I don't have anything against it, however, the on-premise version has been so hard to upgrade and maintain."

More Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] cons

"I would like to see more integration to do things like DR, from a court perspective. Today, for us, SRM doesn't scale because each of our customers has a local vCenter environment as well as the vCenter in our environment. So we can't get SRM to scale to the point to which we need. From an integration perspective, DR inside of that would be good."

"VMware should go the way of vROps, with everything in one machine, the ability to scale out, and a more distributed environment instead of having the usual centralized SQL database."

"We are migrating from vRA version 7 to 8, but the migration is really hectic and time-consuming. There are no straightforward paths to migrate. We are doing an entirely new deployment to go to vRA version 8.0, then somehow get all of the VMs to vRA 8.0. Therefore, it would have been great if VMware had some solutions to upgrade from vRA 7 to 8 seamlessly. This includes the management of all the objects or VMs from the older version. Unfortunately, it is not there."

"They can improve on the dashboard representations and the options for non-technical people. I would like to see the ability to customize that and maybe provide them with helpful guides to what subscriptions they have. Sometimes, I find that I have to do more explanation to people who do approvals. I would really like to customize the display to the terms they use in their particular business unit. So a little bit more of a nod to the customization of the UI for non-technical users would be helpful."

"The setup needs coding. It's not easy. It's not straightforward."

"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."

"It would be nice if, at the director level, the manager level, there was a pretty graphic. They don't like to see numbers and line items, they want to see graphs and scales and real world pictures. That would support better reporting."

"Deploying and configuring the solution takes a lot of time."

More VMware Aria Automation cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"I consider the pricing to be high."

"Contact the Turbonomic sales team, explain your needs and what you're looking to monitor. They will get a pre-sales SE on the phone and together work up a very accurate quote."

"The product is fairly priced right now. Given its capabilities, it is excellently priced. We think that the product will become self-funding because we will be able to maximize our resources, which will help us from a capacity perspective. That should save us money in the long run."

"The pricing and licensing are fair. We purchase based on benchmark pricing, which we have been able to get. There are no surprise charges nor hidden fees."

"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."

"We see ROI in extended support agreements (ESA) for old software. Migration activities seem to be where Turbonomic has really benefited us the most. It's one click and done. We have new machines ready to go with Turbonomic, which are properly sized instead of somebody sitting there with a spreadsheet and guessing. So, my return on investment would certainly be on currency, from a software and hardware perspective."

"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"The tool's pricing is balanced with the market."

"The solution is extremely expensive and has additional fees for things like monitoring."

"The tool's pricing is expensive."

"vRealize automation really should be a front door to the whole VMware suite of products."

"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."

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

"The tool is expensive since it is an enterprise product."

"A simplified version for small businesses would be good."

"They should provide one license for all the sub-products."

"We do plan to see ROI with any new implementation of new technologies being implemented within our environment."

"The pricing is very high."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

801,634 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

39%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Comms Service Provider

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Government

Manufacturing Company

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Turbonomic?

The implementation could be enhanced.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?

We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cisco CloudCenter?

The initial setup process is straightforward.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco CloudCenter?

They should provide an entire cloud offering, from architecture to network security features.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Cisco CloudCenter?

We use the product for demonstration, device provisioning, and data management.

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 y...

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 fre...

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 compa...

See all answers

Comparisons

VMware Aria Operations vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 20% of the time

Azure Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 11% of the time

Cisco Intersight vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 9% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 8% of the time

Densify vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 4% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

Cisco Intersight vs Cisco CloudCenter [EOL]

Compared 69% of the time

CloudStack vs Cisco CloudCenter [EOL]

Compared 31% of the time

More Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] Competitors

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 21% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 13% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 11% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat Satellite vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 2% of the time

More VMware Aria Automation Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

September 2024

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco CloudCenter [EOL]

September 2024

Download Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

August 2024

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

CliQr, CliQr CloudCenter

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

Learn More

Video not available

IBM

Cisco

VMware

Interactive Demo

IBM

Demo not available

Cisco

Demo not available

VMware

Overview

IBM Turbonomic is a performance and cost optimization platform for public, private, and hybrid clouds used by companies to assure application performance while eliminating inefficiencies by dynamically resourcing applications through automated actions.

IBM Turbonomic leverages AI to continuously analyze application resource consumption, deliver insights and dashboards, and make real-time adjustments. Common use cases include cloud cost optimization, cloud migration planning, data center modernization, FinOps acceleration, Kubernetes optimization, sustainable IT, and application resource management. By integrating with various cloud platforms, on-premise infrastructures, and containers, IBM Turbonomic provides a holistic view of the environment, ensuring that resources are allocated efficiently.

The solution is designed to support complex IT environments, offering actionable insights and automated actions that help IT teams proactively manage application performance and infrastructure resources. Turbonomic customers report an average 33% reduction in cloud and infrastructure waste without impacting application performance, and return-on-investment of 471% over three years.

IBM Turbonomic manages resources across hybrid and on-premises data centers to ensure efficiency and financial impact awareness. It automates resource allocation, balances memory dynamically, and provides robust performance metrics. Users benefit from its ability to prevent resource starvation and offer cost-saving recommendations through continuous management. Executive Dashboards provide insights for cost justification and resource management, making IT operations simpler with AI-driven automation and actionable recommendations.

What are the most important features of IBM Turbonomic?

Automated Resource Allocation: Dynamically allocates resources for optimal performance.
Dynamic Memory Balancing: Adjusts memory allocation to prevent resource shortages.
Right-Sizing: Sizes VMs accurately for Azure and on-prem environments.
Single Platform Management: Manages resources across hybrid and on-premises data centers.
Proactive Performance Optimization: Continuously optimizes performance to prevent issues.
Kubernetes Support: Enhances container management with robust support.
Cost-Saving Recommendations: Provides actionable tips for reducing expenses.

What benefits should users look for in IBM Turbonomic reviews?

Cost Reduction: Helps minimize expenses through efficient resource management.
Performance Improvement: Enhances application performance by preventing resource starvation.
Detailed Insights: Offers comprehensive analytics to justify costs and resource utilization.
Simplified IT Processes: Uses AI automation to streamline operations.

IBM Turbonomic is implemented across multiple industries, including finance for optimizing peak payroll processing, IT for enhanced virtual server management, and healthcare for reliable performance monitoring. Organizations benefit from its robust automation, ensuring maximum efficiency and cost savings.

Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] is utilized for tenant creation, VM management, hybrid deployment, cloud management, and port configuration.

Primary users include DevOps teams, telecom companies, and service providers. It integrates well with ACI and ASX-T, offering stability, initial setup ease, and extensive documentation. Known for high trust in Latin America, it excels in workflow automation through Action Orchestrator and supports detailed configuration down to ports. However, improvements are required in DevOps alignment, upgrades, automation, and cost management.

What are the most important features of Cisco CloudCenter [EOL]?

Stability: Provides a robust platform with minimal downtime.
Ease of Setup: Simplifies the initial setup process to get users started quickly.
Documentation: Extensive guides and resources available for user support.
Workflow Automation: Action Orchestrator enables cross-infrastructure automation.
Blueprint Pattern: Defines middleware and dependencies effectively.
API Integration: Offers agility and flexibility with API support.

What benefits or ROI should users look for in reviews?

High Trust Level: Recognized reliability, especially in Latin America.
Configuration Support: Capability to configure down to individual ports.
Integration: Seamless integration with ACI and ASX-T.
Agility: Enhanced flexibility and adaptability to changes.

Among its features, Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] serves industries like telecom and service providers needing hybrid deployment and cloud management. DevOps teams utilize it for tenant creation and VM management. Known for stability and initial setup ease, it supports Latin American regions highly. Action Orchestrator aids in workflow automation, benefitting user workflows. Improvements in DevOps alignment, UI, multi-tenancy, YAML abstraction, and cost management are desirable. It requires better security for XDR and comprehensive cloud offerings, including architecture and network security features.

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.

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.

NTT, Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), CollabNet, Pratt & Miller, PZFlex

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

Find out what your peers are saying about VMware, Nutanix, IBM and others in Cloud Management. Updated: September 2024.

DOWNLOAD NOW

801,634 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our list of best Cloud Management vendors.

We monitor all Cloud Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.