Cisco UCS Director vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

Cisco and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Cisco is ranked #22 with an average rating of 6.4, while VMware is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.5. Cisco holds a 1.1% mindshare in CM, compared to VMware’s 8.9% mindshare. Additionally, 69% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco UCS Director and VMware Aria Operations based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Cloud Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Operations Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Operations

October 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 6.3%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 1.1%, down from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations is 8.9%, down from 9.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

SubashSubbiah

Assistant Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Dec 10, 2022

It can tell us where performance is lagging on the hardware layer, but the reporting on the application layer is lacking

The automation area could be improved, and the generic reports are poor. We want more details in the analysis report from the application layer. The reports from the infrastructure layer are satisfactory, but Turbonomic won't provide much information if we dig down further than the application layer. I would like them to add some apps for physical device load resourcing and physical-to-virtual calculation. It gives excellent recommendations for the virtual layer but doesn't have the capabilities for physical-to-virtual analysis. Automated deployment is something else they could add. Some built-in automation features are helpful, but we aren't effectively using a few. We want a few more automated features, like autoscaling and automatic performance optimization testing would be useful.

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reviewer1855059

Principal, Cybersecurity Services at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

May 2, 2023

A compact and flexible solution with a lot of features

The product is flexible and compact. It has a lot of features. The product's pricing needs to improve. The tool is stable. You need to check upgrades every now and then. The solution is scalable. The tool's setup is understandable once you get an idea of the Cisco product. I would rate…

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Edward Hore

L3 Infrastructure Engineer at Specsavers

Oct 24, 2024

Effortless configuration management with cost concerns and an easy installation

We use Aria Operations for hosting our retail environment at remote locations, and for hosting our internal systems We have an established environment with VMware solutions, which has been very robust and reliable. Ease of use and the ability to do what I need to do is very easy. I know where to…

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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

"We like that Turbonomic shows application metrics and estimates the impact of taking a suggested action. It provides us a map of resource utilization as part of its recommendation. We evaluate and compare that to what we think would be appropriate from a human perspective to that what Turbonomic is doing, then take the best action going forward."

"The biggest value I'm getting out of VMTurbo right now is the complete hands-off management of equalizing the usage in my data center."

"I only deal with the infrastructure side, so I really couldn't speak to more than load balancing as the most valuable feature for me. It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. It always keeps things in perfect balance."

"The recommendation of the family types is a huge help because it has saved us a lot of money. We use it primarily for that. Another thing that Turbonomic provides us with is a single platform that manages the full application stack and that's something I really like."

"Turbonomic helps us right-size virtual machines to utilize the available infrastructure components available and suggest where resources should exist. We also use the predictive tool to forecast what will happen when we add additional compute-demanding virtual machines or something to the environment. It shows us how that would impact existing resources. All of that frees up time that would otherwise be spent on manual calculation."

"We can manage multiple environments using a single pane of glass, which is something that I really like."

"I like Turbonomic's built-in reporting. It provides a ton of information out of the box, so I don't have to build panels for the monthly summaries and other reports I need to present to management. We get better performance and bottleneck reporting from this than we do from our older EMC software."

"In our organization, optimizing application performance is a continuous process that is beyond human scale. We would not be able to do the number of actions that Turbonomic takes on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. It is humanly impossible with the little micro adjustments that it can make. That is a huge differentiator. If you just figure each action could take anywhere very conservatively from five to 10 minutes to act upon, then you multiply that out by thousands of actions every month, it is easily something where you could say, "I am saving a couple of FTEs.""

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"I can manage multiple workloads whether it's on AWS, Azure, or on-premises. They can be managed by using the UCS Director."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the fabric sharing."

"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

"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 product is flexible and compact. It has a lot of features."

"This is a user-friendly solution that is very good and easy to use."

"The main feature of this solution is the integration with all the Cisco solutions and other vendors."

"Feature-wise, the solution helps one to add multiple environments in one place...It is a scalable product."

More Cisco UCS Director pros

"Avoiding problems in the monitoring area is our strength. We use real-time monitoring models and real-time monitoring to do this. We also provide other capabilities, such as seeing changes in the environment."

"The visibility it provides from apps to infrastructure and across multiple clouds is also great because it's a tool that aggregates a lot of data, both on-premises and in the cloud. It aggregates everything in one tool, which helps you to analyze the performance and the capacity of the infrastructure."

"You log in, you see everything that's happening right then. We can also export that, get information, print it out, show it to people. That's a big deal. People want to see that transparency. It's great that way."

"It has helped us to reduce the amount of VM sprawl, VMs that are not necessarily used. We can then reclaim resources such as memory, CPU, and storage."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to get a view of our entire environment in a single pane of glass. We're a very large company, so going from one interface to another to troubleshoot an issue, or even just to get capacity information, is time-consuming and not efficient. Being able to go to one place and get that information is very helpful."

"If you use the vCenter stuff, it's okay... but vROps actually gives you more realistic numbers."

"I like that we can see what amount of the CPU has been used and what's been handed out. We can see how we can bring the virtual machines in line with what actually has been used which has saved us cost."

"I'd like to see the streamlining of more wizards, more tasks that are canned. And it would also be good to see some more features around building the Blueprints, just to make it a little easier."

More VMware Aria Operations pros

Cons

"The implementation could be enhanced."

"It sometimes does get false positives. Sometimes, it'll move something when it really wasn't a performance metric. I've seen it do that, but it's pretty much an automated tool for performance. We've only got about 500 virtual machines, so lots of times, I'm able to manage it physically, but it's definitely a nice tool for a larger enterprise that might be managing 2,000 or 3,000 virtual machines."

"After running this solution in production for a year, we may want a more granular approach to how we utilize the product because we are planning to use some of its metrics to feed into our financial system."

"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."

"In Azure, it's not what you're using. You purchase the whole 8 TB disk and you pay for it. It doesn't matter how much you're using. So something that I've asked for from Turbonomic is recommendations based on disk utilization. In the example of the 8 TB disk where only 200 GBs are being used, based on the history, there should be a recommendation like, "You can safely use a 500 GB disk." That would create a lot of savings."

"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."

"While the product is fairly intuitive and easy to use once you learn it, it can be quite daunting until you have undergone a bit of training."

"We're still evaluating the solution, so I don't know enough about what I don't know. They've done a lot over the years. I used Turbonomics six or seven years ago before IBM bought them. They've matured a lot since then."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"There are a lot of bugs in the solution. This is an area in the solution that can be improved."

"There could be an improvement with the integration with the newest solutions from other vendors' technologies."

"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."

"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's pricing needs to improve."

"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."

"Simplifying the user interface would go a long way to making it more usable."

More Cisco UCS Director cons

"It is user-friendly although there's always room for improvement. In the beginning, it was about figuring out where you can find what, but once you know it, it becomes easier to navigate."

"I sure don't find the solution to be intuitive or user-friendly. It takes a lot of time to get familiar with the interface. You've got to spend a lot of time poking around there, it's not very user-friendly. There have been improvements over the versions but, even still, there is a pretty steep learning curve for the product, in my opinion. In the latest and greatest version, there has been quite a bit of a step up from the last version, as far as the user interface goes. they are making improvements. So that's positive."

"Having the capability to manage the enterprise display would be highly beneficial."

"They should include an integration feature through which we can connect to different vendors by installing a small plugin."

"I don't find this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's a large and difficult product to learn. We need to search for more information."

"At the beginning, the stability was not that good. The latest versions are much better."

"It would break, and you would have to go fix it. Then it would break, and they would have some other guys that knew a bit more about it, and they fixed it."

"They should improve the vROps Federation Management Pack, so each customer can create a single pane of glass for multiple sites of vROps."

More VMware Aria Operations cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When we have expanded our licensing, it has always been easy to make an ROI-based decision. So, it's reasonably priced. We would like to have it cheaper, but we get more benefit from it than we pay for it. At the end of the day, that's all you can hope for."

"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."

"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."

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

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

"You should understand the cost of your physical servers and how much time and money you are spending year over year on expanding your virtual farm."

"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."

"It was an annual buy-in. You basically purchase it based on your host type stuff. The buy-in was about 20K, and the annual maintenance is about $3,000 a year."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

"I would rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten."

"Cisco UCS Director is expensive...I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."

"vROps is a bit expensive and that's a reason that small clients say, 'No, I don't think we need this.' From a pricing perspective, it is quite steep. But 'expensive' is relative, depending on what you need. Others might say, 'It is expensive, but I think we can use it to better our environment.'"

"We have seen good ROI results. It has made our lives easier."

"We have seen ROI in performance. It used to be our company was giving out eight CPUs to all servers. That was bad performance-wise. People were seeing slow compute times for their applications."

"If you compare the prices of VMware and the cloud solutions along with the components that you may use, I feel that it may be costly."

"The predictive analysis of the infrastructure helps our customers to reduce downtime and improve capacity planning. Issues are fixed faster with vROps."

"The licensing is quite expensive for our company."

"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."

"We would like to build custom dashboards in the standard license. Right now, this is available in the enterprise license, not the standard license."

More VMware Aria Operations pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

36%

Financial Services Firm

19%

Healthcare Company

Government

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...

See all answers

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?

I rate Cisco UCS Director's price a three out of ten. Cisco UCS Director is not an affordable product. With Cisco UCS...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Director?

Currently, Cisco UCS Director is unable to integrate with another product or with a server from another brand. If Cis...

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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 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

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 9% of the time

Cisco Intersight vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 9% of the time

Cloudability vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 6% of the time

VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 6% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

Cisco Intersight vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 74% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 26% of the time

More Cisco UCS Director Competitors

VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 18% of the time

VMware vSphere vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 12% of the time

Nutanix Prism vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 10% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 7% of the time

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 7% of the time

More VMware Aria Operations Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

October 2024

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director

November 2024

Download Cisco UCS Director product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations

October 2024

Download VMware Aria Operations product report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

No data available

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

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Cisco

VMware

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IBM

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Cisco

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

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.

Entel, Data#3, Cegal, NESIC, LightEdge

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

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Operations

October 2024

Free Report: Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Operations

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