No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Cisco UCS Director vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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

Cisco UCS Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
24th
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Cloud Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
172
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (8th), Network Automation (6th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (20th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 1.8%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 5.8%, down from 11.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Aria Automation5.8%
Cisco UCS Director1.8%
Other92.4%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

OR
Senior Telecommunications Engineer at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
Managing extensive VoIP services becomes efficient and seamless
We use Cisco UCS Director primarily for managing our VoIP service to maintain seamless service delivery. We operate in an enterprise government environment Cisco UCS Director is straightforward to use, which we greatly appreciate. It helps save time by making it quicker to roll out new call…
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Better visibility and better control are the main benefits people receive from Cisco UCS Director; the automation and the orchestration part, these three to four points are the key factors to decide on Cisco UCS Director."
"Cisco's knowledge base is extensive."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the fabric sharing."
"Cisco UCS Director is straightforward to use, which we greatly appreciate."
"This is a user-friendly solution that is very good and easy to use."
"The reason we went with Cisco is that it comes at a very negligible cost as part of the BOQ. Compared to the competition's products, which are incredibly expensive, UCS Director is low-cost."
"This is a user-friendly solution that is very good and easy to use."
"UCS director enables us to be more productive and more agile, and also more self-sufficient because we don't have to depend on anybody else."
"It's scalable; as the needs of the university grow, it's growing with us."
"From day 1 that it went into production, we started seeing its benefits."
"It's cut our server deployment times down from weeks to an hour."
"Aria Automation gives you the flexibility to deploy tenants with customized blueprints for permissions and policies."
"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."
"Currently, the primary feature we're using in VMware Aria Automation is its ability to execute tasks quickly. However, we haven't explored other features like workload management or the full stack yet. So it's hard to make comparisons or fully utilize its potential until we expand our usage."
"The repetitive tasks which took provisioning storage, network, and compute two to three weeks, now take five 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."
 

Cons

"The user interface could use improvement."
"I would like to see more integration with other solutions."
"There could be an improvement with the integration with the newest solutions from other vendors' technologies."
"Normally, UCS Director is used primarily for orchestration, but when we look at non-Cisco data infrastructure components, the UCS Director needs a bit more improvement in terms of integration with third-party systems and with existing older systems."
"Currently, Cisco UCS Director is unable to integrate with another product or with a server from another brand."
"The tool should be a lot more intuitive and make it easy for us to understand and migrate."
"Simplifying the user interface would go a long way to making it more usable."
"There aren’t any areas of improvement that immediately come to mind."
"The basic support is not there for Google Cloud and Azure. They are unable to provision nor do cost controls. Google is still left out. It is great that they have done AWS, but we are a retailer which means nothing to us because it is a competitor. Azure is good, but Google is where a lot of our development environments are."
"The initial setup is complex. There are too many components to integrate, especially when we integrated with different storage types and backup vendors. All the integration made it more complex."
"It has a learning curve."
"Hands down, the main thing for improvement is Windows orchestration. Repo is very limited and multiple issues occur when installing vendor products."
"VMware needs to make it to where it is not as custom. Right now, you spend a lot of time making the services work."
"The initial setup was complex from beginning to delivery. The current version is a bit more complex than version 7 to deploy."
"The initial setup was not straightforward. It was not simple, and we had a PoC."
"Now, it's pretty stable, as long as you do not touch it. However, upgrades are always a pain."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of this solution is significant."
"Cisco UCS Director is expensive...I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."
"I rate Cisco UCS Director's price a three out of ten. Cisco UCS Director is not an affordable product. With Cisco UCS Director, there is a need to pay an overall price, which consists of the product, software, and support."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing around five to six out of ten."
"I would rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten."
"The budget doesn’t work for the state and local governments."
"It made the provisioning of the virtual machines easier and faster. We can react more quickly to customers' demands."
"vRealize automation really should be a front door to the whole VMware suite of products."
"From a budget point of view, the pricing is a bit on the higher side."
"The pricing is very high."
"The solution is free of cost."
"It is pricey for what you get."
"Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."
"It is an open-source product."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.
895,151 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
18%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise131
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS Director?
While the pricing might be seen as expensive, it provides value for money due to reliable service and excellent technical support.
What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Director?
It should be more of a cloud-based architecture for Cisco UCS Director, and it should be affordable to small customers as well because the pricing is a major challenge when we talk about Cisco UCS ...
What is your primary use case for Cisco UCS Director?
Mainly in my region and country, large data center customers are using Cisco UCS Director, not the SMB or mid-market customers. More of the on-premise customers are utilizing Cisco UCS Director. Th...
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 ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Entel, Data#3, Cegal, NESIC, LightEdge
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
895,151 professionals have used our research since 2012.