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Densify vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Virtualization Management Tools (3rd), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (5th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (5th)
Densify
Ranking in Cloud Management
33rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (13th), Virtualization Management Tools (9th), Cloud Analytics (2nd), Cloud Cost Management (11th)
VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Cloud Management
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
169
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (17th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 6.3%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Densify is 1.2%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 11.0%, down from 12.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

SubashSubbiah - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Amit Kantia - PeerSpot reviewer
Its most valuable feature is the ability to capture attributes in the console, but it is not a stable solution
I recommend others to use Densify. They can not only use it for reporting but for automation as well. They can implement the policies on the console easily during the build-out procedure. Stability is the primary concern to us as it is causing lots of problems. We can only make significant decisions if Densify allows us, and it takes lots of time. Thus, I rate the tool as a six out of ten.
NiteshKumar1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Good stability, supports a hybrid model and easy to use
There is an area of improvement. For example, you are migrating from a customer's existing data center to a new target data center. To facilitate this transition, you'll initially need to evaluate the customer's aging hardware hosting VMware, which is nearing the end of its operational life. The customer expresses the intention to upgrade to a newer version, necessitating an overhaul of everything in the new data center. As a Systems Integrator (SI), consultant, or architect, your recommendation would be to acquire the latest hardware with a specified configuration and then install VMware on top of it. However, there's a crucial aspect related to the infrastructure requirements for VMware to run seamlessly on that hardware. If there's an opportunity to potentially reduce these infrastructure prerequisites, it would be highly beneficial. This is because a higher number of VMware licenses requires more infrastructure capacity from Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) or Colocation partners. Consequently, when discussing the operation of this virtualized environment from VMware over a contractual period of five years, the overall cost to the customer is influenced by the infrastructure requirements. If there's a feasible way to decrease these prerequisites for the infrastructure supporting the virtualization layer, it would be advantageous in terms of cost for the customer. Any customer in today's world exists or wants to exist in a hybrid model, so in future releases, we would like to see this. So, going forward, if this virtualized environment would exist, it has to be a combination of on-premise plus public cloud Azure/AWS. It should be more seamless when your interface or when you are interacting with workloads running on-premise VMware/AWS VMware. So it is only there in some capacity and space, and I'm aware of it. And Azure and VMware already have a tie-up on the same lines, but at the same time, if it is more seamless, if it is more interchangeable, if you could move your workloads, or if you can access your workloads or your virtual machines irrespective of whatever platform it is running, whether it is on-premises, or cloud or public cloud, it'll be a lot more comfortable for a user than the user to consume that infrastructure. Firstly, it needs to have a combination of deployment and be more seamless for the customers. Secondly, more software-defined features, more in terms of managing the infrastructure pool in a software-defined way. Managing the infrastructure pool in a more optimized fashion is going to be the key in the upcoming times. It's not just on-premise, but at the same time, it should also be the public cloud as well. Probably because when I meet my customers, this is one thing that I always tell them. I have seen people moving from on-premise public cloud only to realize at the end of the month that they end up paying a higher bill compared to what they were paying when they were running their business on-premise. The reason is that they do not understand or do not realize the full potential of the public cloud, and the way it should be consumed, the way it should be used, and the way it should be scheduled to ensure that the billing at the end of the month is very optimal. You pay for what exactly you need, not everything that you have from the cloud. That's not a way to use the cloud, whether it is on-premise or from the cloud. For example, an enterprise has over 100 applications. Out of that 100 applications, only 25 applications are running the production instances, and the remaining 75 are running non-production instances. It can be a development environment, a test environment, a sandbox, etc. In this case, you need to run only the 25 applications on the public cloud 24/7. You do not need to run your remaining 75 applications 24/7. Because, eventually, your developers, testers, quality managers, and whoever will use the non-production environment only when they're in the office and working on those applications. Then why do we need to have those applications, which are non-production in nature, lower environments? So we're running on the public cloud all the time because, for a cloud provider, it is a virtual machine; whether you are consuming it for production work or non-production work, it is going to charge you the same bill. And if you are not optimizing, if you're not scheduling workloads, you are actually wasting money. You're wasting your money, and your bills, which you are going to pay with the public cloud provider provided, are going to be bad. It's going to be crazy. And then customers do not know what to do in this situation. And you cannot fight with the public cloud provider because they would say, "I had given you all the possibilities, all the opportunities to learn about it, the way you should be functioning it, the way you should be utilizing it. If you are not using it the way it should be used, That's not my problem."

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"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."
"With over 2500 ESX VMs, including 1500+ XenDesktop VDI desktops, hosted over two datacentres and 80+ vSphere hosts, firefighting has become something of the past."
"We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."
"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."
"It also brings up a list of machines and if something is under-provisioned and needs more compute power it will tell you, 'This server needs more compute power, and we suggest you raise it up to this level.' It will even automatically do it for you. In Azure, you don't have to actually go into the cloud provider to resize. You can just say, 'Apply these resizes,' and Turbonomic uses some back-end APIs to make the changes for you."
"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."
"The ability to increase server density inside of my environment, which has helped me drive reduction in costs."
"I would say that the initial thing is that it provides us with a technological basis to expand capacity management beyond Excel."
"The solution's tech support is excellent."
"The Densify Control Console, and Environment Status."
"The Control Console is an incredible way to give a quick view of current capacity utilization allowing technical people to drill down quickly and allowing business/management people to get a quick overview of the environment."
"The Control Console provides a very easy to read dashboard of "too little/just right/too much" resources both for current data and on a historical or predictive basis."
"The tool will come back and tell us that we can operate with 1,000 minutes as an example, save 90% on the contractual rate and not run into any issues."
"One would be the automatic rebalancing of the environment. That was one feature which helped. With that, we could improve our efficiency of our VMware infrastructure."
"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."
"vRA is user-friendly. It has the same layout and walk-through GUI, similar to other VMware products."
"Today, if I want to provision one VM, it takes me five minutes. Earlier, it would take a minimum of 30 minutes to go and choose everything. Now, I can just do one click and it can provision my whole VM. We also integrated with our Alexa, so even through voice functionality, I can create a VM. One of the guys at VMware, along with our partner, deployed that in our environment. If I say, "Hey, Alexa, I need a VM with four gigs of RAM," it will go and start creating it."
"It's much more stable than the highest available variant."
"With the advent of the automation, we've been able to give DevOps the ability to spin up environments, give them lease times, and then have it automatically reclaim the environment."
"The automation functionality has been most valuable. With a click of a button, we are able to automate provisioning, the build of new hardware and apply patches. These are all extremely important and differentiated tasks that can be automated in SaltStack."
"Being able to give provisioning of environments over to our developers and the different teams has enabled them to put up environments faster and also freed up time for the IT team. This is really one of our bread and butter solutions for our developers."
"We use it to deploy databases and testing environments. It spins up quickly and also break down fast."
 

Cons

"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 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."
"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'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."
"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."
"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."
"Additional interfaces would be helpful."
"Before IBM bought it, the support was fantastic. After IBM bought it, the support became very disappointing."
"Initially we talked about some custom reporting, wherein our customer expected certain reports on a few areas, like how the storage is allocated, how the network performance is doing, and how the network utilization is happening for a virtual machine."
"It seems that the mechanism for integration is, it goes so far but I think there could be some standard integration to normal remedy service now etc. I think that should be out of the box."
"Unfortunately the tools and mechanisms which really came to maturity in the cloud, and were not mainstream on-premise, are still not implemented."
"The solution's stability is the primary concern for me."
"A closer integration to the service management processes."
"In terms of integration, the tool has great data. However, it's not always meaningful because the true business attributes of how most Fortune 500 companies operate are not maintaining in one tool, they're in a school of many tools."
"Normalization of CPU utilization is required. At present, the data is available based on entitlement level."
"Some parts of the interface are rather complex and require a bit of time to navigate, but this has never stopped us as a Densify advisor is readily available to help with our "how to" queries."
"In terms of usability, It has had its challenges. It requires a lot of custom code to integrate into our environment. It can take a little while to get it to do what we want, takes some code instead of having built-in functionality. Part it is how we use it. It would be a lot easier to use in a greenfield scenario versus brownfield, which is the way we using it."
"The most important thing that we missed in vRanger was the possibility to mount several images instantaneously and present it so we can run it immediately."
"A hardened set of tests would be much appreciated."
"Our primary challenge is upgrading the product to the latest version. This process requires careful communication with the vendor to mitigate risks."
"There is a little bit of pain when it comes to libraries and what is needed to run the product."
"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 solution could include more integrations and supportability around the container space."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
"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."
"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."
"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."
"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."
"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."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"I consider the pricing to be high."
"Cost is always involved, but then I feel that this solution is better than other products that we have."
"Setup cost is negligible, as it scales fairly well."
"Densify has licensing setup so you can collect data without licensing. It gives you the ability to collect on everything, then choose later what you would like to license."
"There was some sticker shock, as this is not just another software product to spit out graphs."
"I'm very interested in the integration with Puppet. However, my organization doesn't have the funding for something like Puppet right now. If VMware would integrate that feature set (Puppet) into vRA. That would be very awesome."
"The pricing for this solution is roughly 20% lower than the competitive products in the market."
"They should provide one license for all the sub-products."
"The solution is pretty expensive but provides good workload management."
"It is pricey for what you get."
"The cost of the solution is reasonable for us. Although it is relatively high, we prioritize stability and integration over cost."
"It is an expensive product. After VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, there was a rise in the price of VMware Aria Automation."
"It is an open-source product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
27%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Retailer
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
 

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...
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
The implementation could be enhanced.
What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?
We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...
What do you like most about Densify?
The solution's tech support is excellent.
What needs improvement with Densify?
Densify is not a stable tool. Every time the support gets investigated, it takes much time to get refreshed.
What is your primary use case for Densify?
We are using Densify to produce reports and to get recommendations that can contribute to the area of our expertise.
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...
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...
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...
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
No data available
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
 

Learn More

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Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
AIG, Bank of America, Cigna, Citi
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about Densify vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
824,067 professionals have used our research since 2012.