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Cisco UCS Director vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

Cisco and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Cisco is ranked #22 with an average rating of 8.0, while VMware is ranked #2 with an average rating of 7.8. Cisco holds a 1.3% mindshare in CM, compared to VMware’s 11.1% mindshare. Additionally, 71% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of VMware users who would recommend it.
Cisco UCS Director
Read 14 Cisco UCS Director reviews
  • 595 Views
  • 559 Comparison Views
71% willing to recommend
VMware Aria Automation
Read 170 VMware Aria Automation reviews
  • 8,852 Views
  • 4,692 Comparison Views
94% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

VMware Aria Automation and Cisco UCS Director compete in the automation and orchestration software category. VMware Aria Automation appears to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive features and flexibility in diverse environments.

Features: VMware Aria Automation offers multi-machine blueprints, automated VM lifecycles, and integration with third-party systems, making it ideal for virtual infrastructures. Cisco UCS Director excels in Cisco hardware management, offering excellent orchestration for Cisco-centric systems.

Room for Improvement: VMware Aria Automation users suggest improvements in documentation, ease of use, and cloud provider integration. Cisco UCS Director could enhance its user interface and integration with non-Cisco products, while broadening its feature set for diverse environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Automation supports on-premises and hybrid deployments with generally favorable tech support, though response times can vary. Cisco UCS Director focuses on on-premises deployment, with good tech support, but customization challenges indicate a need for simplified support processes.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Automation is perceived as expensive but offers significant ROI with enhanced infrastructure agility. Cisco UCS Director's high cost and pricing concerns may limit ROI, especially with significant customization required for non-Cisco systems.

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To learn more, read our detailed Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Automation Report (Updated: July 2025).
Buyer's Guide
Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Automation
July 2025
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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
22nd
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Cloud Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
170
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (17th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 1.3%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 11.1%, down from 11.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Sunny Nair - PeerSpot reviewer
Good multi-cloud management capability, but third-party and legacy integration needs improvement
Normally, UCS Director is used primarily for orchestration, but when we look at a 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. I feel that more development or a more integrated road map should be set up so that it becomes a common platform for any infrastructure. In the next release of this solution, I would like to see changes in the navigation controls of UCS Director. That would be helpful. Modifying the icons that are available for use, as well as virtualization aspects.
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Le Quang Long - PeerSpot reviewer
Significantly streamlined operations with good automation that helps with simplifying workflows
It helps me build a big catalog and provide it to my end users. It helps us automate the workflow of creating many VMs and the TensorFlow key method. I do not meet many people to operate it live beforehand. It operates for both of my products, but as a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products.
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

"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"Feature-wise, the solution helps one to add multiple environments in one place...It is a scalable product."
"A product that really aids in systems management without complexity."
"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."
"The solution is helpful for centralized management."
"I can manage multiple workloads whether it's on AWS, Azure, or on-premises. They can be managed by using the UCS Director."
"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."
More Cisco UCS Director pros
"The setup is getting better with each version."
"The most valuable features are that it's multi-tenant and the ability for scale."
"SaltStack has given us the ability to deal with systems at scale and rectify issues at scale."
"It provides velocity both from management and customer perspectives, from ingesting new catalog items, developing new workflows for additional features, and/or allowing customer access to multiple guest OS instances at scale in a shorter time frame."
"The customer can set up multiple machine blueprints. Therefore, we are able to customize the template of three machines, then the customer can deploy without knowing anything about the IT business."
"vRealize Automation has improved the speed of provisioning just by automating things, making people think about whether a human really needs to do something or can we make the machines do it for us. It is a lot faster to deploy things now."
"For repeated installations and provisioning of VMs, we now have a clear definition of what has been installed, and we can monitor all that stuff."
"It provides visibility into the VM space."
More VMware Aria Automation pros
 

Cons

"There could be an improvement with the integration with the newest solutions from other vendors' technologies."
"There aren’t any areas of improvement that immediately come to mind."
"It is not easy to add or expand the product."
"Normally, UCS Director is used primarily for orchestration, but when we look at a 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."
"The areas where this product can be improved are the integrations and the UI. These features are not as friendly compared to VMware products."
"The product could allow more programmatic opportunities through better development of the API."
"I would like to see more integration with other solutions."
"There are a lot of bugs in the solution. This is an area in the solution that can be improved."
More Cisco UCS Director cons
"It is too broad scale and complicated. It takes too many clicks to do things."
"Something as simple as formatting the catalog in a different way would be helpful because there is no option for doing so. A lot of the contents for the virtual machine, blueprints that you can request, are hidden from view and there's no way to change the view."
"The initial setup is very complex because we have a bunch of customization workflows. They were built-in features that we had to program as code with Orchestration."
"Stability has gotten a lot better. However, the vRO aspect, when you have a multi vRA head, is a little bit finicky still. vRO still needs to stay on one appliance and be one application, because, when you have two, you can't see runs on the other one that are happening when you're not logged into that one."
"It is complex to use for new users. It should have automated tools or drag-and-drop functionality."
"Upgrades are always a pain."
"Web UI."
"They could extend the ability to use vRealize Orchestrator Automation for organizations with multiple tenants. It should be easier to operate and extend different capabilities from vRealize Orchestrator. Currently, it's difficult to build advanced services in Aria Automation because you need to use the vRealize Orchestrator."
More VMware Aria Automation cons
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cisco UCS Director is expensive...I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."
"The budget doesn’t work for the state and local governments."
"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."
"The cost of this solution is significant."
"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."
"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."
"Customers say this solution is costlier compared to its competitors."
"So much can be done with the Open Source side, and especially for smaller shops. I personally think the pricing for Enterprise is hard to justify."
"It is an expensive product. After VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, there was a rise in the price of VMware Aria Automation."
"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 is very high."
"The solution is free of cost."
"A simplified version for small businesses would be good."
More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
26%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco UCS Director?
Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.
See all answers
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.
See all answers
What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Director?
There aren’t any areas of improvement that immediately come to mind.
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 you need from the software interface. It provides complete visibility over applic...
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 free trial I cannot describe in detail the second and third options as my company ...
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 companies were using it most often: Social organizations Financial institutions and ...
See all answers
 

Comparisons

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Cisco Intersight vs Cisco UCS Director
Compared 54% of the time
OpenNebula vs Cisco UCS Director Logo
OpenNebula vs Cisco UCS Director
Compared 16% of the time
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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation Logo
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation
Compared 16% of the time
VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation Logo
VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation
Compared 14% of the time
Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation Logo
Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation
Compared 11% of the time
VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation Logo
VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation
Compared 9% of the time
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation Logo
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation
Compared 7% of the time
More VMware Aria Automation Competitors
 

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
Cisco UCS Director
July 2025
Cisco UCS Director reportDownload Cisco UCS Director product report
Buyer's Guide
VMware Aria Automation
June 2025
VMware Aria Automation reportDownload VMware Aria Automation product report
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

Cisco UCS Director enables automated delivery of physical and virtual data center resources, empowering data centers to move at the speed of business.

Cisco

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.

VMware
 

Sample Customers

Entel, Data#3, Cegal, NESIC, LightEdge
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Buyer's Guide
Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Automation
July 2025
Free Report: Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Automation
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
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