Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] vs VMware Aria Operations 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.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] and VMware Aria Operations 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: August 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Management

August 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic

Featured Reviews

it_user234747

Practice Manager - Cloud, Automation & DevOps at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Jan 20, 2017

You can deploy the OVA/QCOW2 file to multiple hypervisor platforms or use a RHEL distribution.

The most valuable features are the planning tool, the policy engine, workload charts, and the extensive library of dashboards We use Turbonomic to fully optimize the use of our infrastructure. We also use it for health checks and assessments we perform for our customers. The current UI (Adobe…

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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…

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it_user509163

Capacity & Performance Senior Specialist at a wellness & fitness company with 10,001+ employees

Sep 8, 2016

A key feature is the ability to integrate data from other sources.

You can always improve the type of data you can merge in, but there's nothing that we're missing at the moment from it. I'm sure as we dig deeper into it, we'll start finding room for improvement. The reporting can always be improved. The problem is that no one does reporting well, because no one can know what your company needs out of the tool. I'm sure refinements with the reporting would be great. I'm sure they'll be refining it with every version, but it's not something that's inherent to them; it's an inherent problem with any tool that's trying to report data. I've found no tools that report data the way you need it to be reported.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

"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."

"The notifications saying, "This is a corrective action," even though some of them can be automated, are always welcome to see. They summarize your entire infrastructure and how you can better utilize it. That is the biggest feature."

"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."

"The proactive monitoring of all our open enrollment applications has improved our organization. We have used it to size applications that we are moving to the cloud. Therefore, when we move them out there, we have them appropriately sized. We use it for reporting to current application owners, showing them where they are wasting money. There are easy things to find for an application, e.g., they decommissioned the server, but they never took care of the storage. Without a tool like this, that storage would just sit there forever, with us getting billed for it."

"Using this product helps us to reduce performance risk because it shows us where resources are needed but not yet allocated."

"It became obvious to us that there was a lot more being offered in the product that we could leverage to ensure our VMware environment was running efficiently."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

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

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

"The initial setup process is straightforward."

"You can scale it easily."

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

"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."

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

"Cisco CloudCenter's scalability is good."

More Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] pros

"vRealize has a very nice dashboard. It integrates well with other products such as those from Oracle."

"Right now I'm working with a lot of other products. We're in the process of flushing out our old HPE system and moving everything over. A lot of the automation that we do, and emailing, sending out customer notices, we've been able to take that over from the HPE Operations Orchestration, and the old stack, and automate it into vRO very quickly."

"The scalability options are quite good with VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), and all of the features are useful and relevant to us."

"It is easy to drill down directly to the root cause of a problem. It goes from network to storage and having access to all the metrics. When you run 100 percent virtual, then everything is in one tool."

"The most valuable features are the Heat Maps, and the various graphs and reporting features it has."

"The most valuable feature would be the ability to plug into the data feeds that we have and pull information from physical hardware as well as the virtual layer. The best feature is the visualization of what's going on, so we can take a very quick look and see if there are any issues that stand out."

"It has helped us with troubleshooting key points of our environment. If there are issues that come up, we can dig down to a virtual machine and see if it's having issues and where those issues lie: if it needs more memory, CPU, or if there is a storage issue."

"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."

More VMware Aria Operations pros

Cons

"I like the detail I get in the old user interface and will miss some of that in the new interface when we perform our planned upgrade soon."

"There are a few things that we did notice. It does kind of seem to run away from itself a little bit. It does seem to have a mind of its own sometimes. It goes out there and just kind of goes crazy. There needs to be something that kind of throttles things back a little bit. I have personally seen where we've been working on things, then pulled servers out of the VMware cluster and found that Turbonomic was still trying to ship resources to and from that node. So, there has to be some kind of throttling or ability for it to not be so buggy in that area. Because we've pulled nodes out of a cluster into maintenance mode, then brought it back up, and it tried to put workloads on that outside of a cluster. There may be something that is available for this, but it seems very kludgy to me."

"It can be more agnostic in terms of the solutions that it provides. It can include some other cost-saving methods for the public cloud and SaaS applications as well."

"The implementation could be enhanced."

"The reporting needs to be improved. It's important for us to know and be able to look back on what happened and why certain decisions were made, and we want to use a custom report for this."

"I do not like Turbonomic's new licensing model. The previous model was pretty straightforward, whereas the new model incorporates what most of the vendors are doing now with cores and utilization. Our pricing under the new model will go up quite a bit. Before, it was pretty straightforward, easy to understand, and reasonable."

"It would be good for Turbonomic, on their side, to integrate with other companies like AppDynamics or SolarWinds or other monitoring softwares. I feel that the actual monitoring of applications, mixed in with their abilities, would help. That would be the case wherever Turbonomic lacks the ability to monitor an application or in cases where applications are so customized that it's not going to be able to handle them. There is monitoring that you can do with scripting that you may not be able to do with Turbonomic."

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"They can add some of those features to make the platform more usable for different backgrounds and developer skills."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

More Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] cons

"It's a little bit scattered. I have to go through a lot of steps to get everything in one place. I would like it that if you click on one cluster, you get all the information from the host, VMs, whatever is there. Sometimes I have to go to different places to get the information."

"The solution’s pricing could be improved."

"There is room for improvement when it comes to the integration with Active Directory. Sometimes I need to log in to the application using my Active Directory account, instead of using the regular admin for vRealize Operations. If I want to deploy this tool to more users, I need that."

"From a personal perspective, I would like it made clearer what options are available in the suite that the customer is not using."

"We would like easier customer reporting, because to do customer reports, we have to do a lot of programming."

"VMware could improve the way VROps forwards critical alerts to Microsoft Teams."

"It needs dashboards that we can present at the executive level. The GUI, overall, could be better."

"In vROps, I would like to have both automation and monitoring together, not two separate things you have to buy. I want them included in one package, one installation."

More VMware Aria Operations cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I know there have been some issues with the billing, when the numbers were first proposed, as to how much we would save. There was a huge miscommunication on our part. Turbonomic was led to believe that we could optimize our AWS footprint, because we didn't know we couldn't. So, we were promised savings of $750,000. Then, when we came to implement Turbonomic, the developers in AWS said, "Absolutely not. You're not putting that in our environment. We can't scale down anything because they coded it." Our AWS environment is a legacy environment. It has all these old applications, where all the developers who have made it are no longer with the company. Those applications generate a ton of money for us. So, if one breaks, we are really in trouble and they didn't want to have to deal with an environment that was changing and couldn't be supported. That number went from $750,000 to about $450,000. However, that wasn't Turbonomic's fault."

"I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company before IBM's purchase, it was compatible with other tools."

"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."

"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."

"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."

"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."

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

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

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

"The tool's pricing is expensive."

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

"I would like to see a free offering. Cost is always a factor in any sort of line. Obviously, the value added is there and it's worth it."

"This is an enterprise-level product and everything is included in the VMware Suite license."

"There's a smaller category that stands out due to its affordability, especially for recent versions, which I rate as four or five in terms of value. However, if you're looking for a vCenter with older, more advanced features, it comes at a significantly higher cost, and I would rate it around ten. They provide us with a choice between a recent version and one integrated, and I lean towards the former."

"I would give the solution a three out of five, with one being cheap and five being expensive. There are some elements of the pricing that are good, and some areas where I feel like I'm being charged for something the product can't provide yet."

"Bundle it in with your license rather than buying it as a separate product. It saves a lot of money that way."

"The value that we get from vROps is okay. It could be cheaper."

"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."

"If the VMs were trimmed, then we wouldn't have to buy as much software/hardware, and this means less licenses. While most of it is VMware licenses, which are relatively cheap, there are SQL licenses for Microsoft, and this is where we could start saving a lot of money."

More VMware Aria Operations pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

38%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Healthcare Company

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

16%

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...

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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...

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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...

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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 compl...

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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 i...

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Comparisons

Azure Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 12% of the time

Cisco Intersight vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 10% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 8% of the time

VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 6% of the time

Cloudability vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 6% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

Cisco Intersight vs Cisco CloudCenter [EOL]

Compared 100% of the time

More Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] Competitors

VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 16% of the time

VMware vSphere vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 13% of the time

Nutanix Prism vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 10% of the time

Veeam ONE vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 7% of the time

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 6% of the time

More VMware Aria Operations Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

August 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 Operations

August 2024

Download VMware Aria Operations product report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

CliQr, CliQr CloudCenter

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), vCenter Operations Manager, VCOPS, vRealize Operations

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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.

The Cisco CloudCenter solution is an application-centric hybrid cloud management platform that securely provisions infrastructure resources and deploys applications to data center, private cloud, and public cloud environments.

With Cisco CloudCenter breakthrough application-centric technology, users
can:

Model: Quickly and easily build a cloud-independent application profile that defines the deployment and management requirements of an entire application stack.

Deploy: Use one click to deploy the application profile and related components and data to any data center or cloud environment.

Manage: Apply a wide range of application lifecycle actions to set policies to enable in-place scaling, support cross-environment bursting or high availability and disaster recovery, and stop the deployment.

VMware Aria Operations is a high-ranking virtualization management and cloud management tool that automates and simplifies IT management to the applications it supports. It achieves this through full-stack visibility from physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure. The product allows users to enable self-driving IT operations management across private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. This is conducted with the unified operations platform that delivers continuous performance, capacity and cost optimization, and integrated compliance through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and predictive analytics.

VMware Aria Operations Use Cases

VMware Aria Operations has several use cases, some of which include:

Continuous performance optimization: VMware Aria Operations allows users to assure application performance at a minimal cost, facilitated by real-time predictive analytics and artificial intelligence. The product can be used to automatically balance workloads, improve consolidation rations, optimize and rightsize workloads, and avoid contention.
Capacity and cost management: VMware Aria Operations can be utilized to reduce cost and improve efficiency with real-time ML-based capacity and cost analytics. The solution uses these tools to visualize cost savings opportunities and accelerate decision-making.
Intelligent remediation: This product can also be used to predict, prevent, and troubleshoot issues with actionable insights. Through other VMware integrations, users can streamline and centralize IT operations.
Integrated compliance: The solution can be utilized to reduce risk and enforce IT regulatory standards for VMware Cloud through integrated compliance and automated drift remediation.

VMware Aria Operations Features

The product has various features which users can utilize. Several of the features that the 2022 version of VMware Aria Operations introduced include:

Management pack builder: This feature is a no-code solution that allows users to expand their operations visibility to anywhere they wish. The builder allows users to connect to a data source using an HTTP or Amazon AWS data source, as well as to make API calls, create objects, and build out relationships with other objects in the product.
Public cloud basic actions: This is a set of features that allows VMware Aria Operations users to initiate actions automatically via the product's UI for AWS, Microsoft Azure, or GCP CE instances.
Rule-based application discovery: Through this new feature of the product, users can easily discover multiple applications running in all or specific areas of infrastructure and view associated resources. This can be achieved through simple user-defined rules, including discovering applications based on tags, object names, and properties.
Aria Operations capacity management: This feature allows organizations to view the results of what-if analysis based on their allocation model and specify business hours for capacity calculations.
Alerts: This is a set of features that include components called Conditions and Symptoms, which are used to alert different types of issues on the platform.
User access management: Through this feature, users can benefit from improved ways to configure in VMware Aria Operations with the introduction of scopes.
Support for raw device mapping storage: This feature allows users to get configuration details about their raw device mapping (RDM), such as disk sharing, compatibility mode, and SCSI Bus Sharing.

VMware Aria Operations Benefits

VMware Aria Operations brings various benefits to the organizations using it. Among them are the following:

The product helps organizations reduce unplanned downtime and maximize return on investment (ROI) in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
VMware Aria Operations simplifies management for hybrid clouds from migration assessments.
Users can benefit from an accelerated journey to VMware Cloud on AWS through this solution.
The product can be delivered on premises or as a service, providing flexibility for its users.
VMware Aria Operations can increase operational efficiency through monitoring and management features.
The solution accelerates decision-making through detailed cost analytics, which is visualized for users' convenience.
VMware Aria Operations allows users to both utilize standard compliance templates and create their own custom ones.

Reviews from Real Users

Mohamed N., a tech lead VMware support engineer at a tech services company, appreciates VMware Aria Operations because it is easy to use, stable, and support is always available.

Mojtaba K., a senior system administrator at a comms service provider, values VMware Aria Operations due to the fact that its dashboards give you a glimpse of what is really going on in your virtualized environment.

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

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 VMware, Nutanix, IBM and others in Cloud Management. Updated: August 2024.

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