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Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

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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

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 (2nd), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (5th)
Morpheus
Ranking in Cloud Management
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Cloud Management
1st
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) (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 5.6%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Morpheus is 6.9%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 11.1%, down from 12.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Keldric Emery - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves time and costs while reducing performance degradation
It's been a very good solution. The reporting has been very, very valuable as, with a very large environment, it's very hard to get your hands on the environment. Turbonomic does that work for you and really shows you where some of the cost savings can be done. It also helps you with the reporting side. Me being able to see that this machine hasn't been used for a very long time, or seeing that a machine is overused and that it might need more RAM or CPU, et cetera, helps me understand my infrastructure. The cost savings are drastic in the cloud feature in Azure and in AWS. In some of those other areas, I'm able to see what we're using, what we're not using, and how we can change to better fit what we have. It gives us the ability for applications and teams to see the hardware and how it's being used versus how they've been told it's being used. The reporting really helps with that. It shows which application is really using how many resources or the least amount of resources. Some of the gaps between an infrastructure person like myself and an application are filled. It allows us to come to terms by seeing the raw data. This aspect is very important. In the past, it was me saying "I don't think that this application is using that many resources" or "I think this needs more resources." I now have concrete evidence as well as reporting and some different analytics that I can show. It gives me the evidence that I would need to show my application owners proof of what I'm talking about. In terms of the downtime, meantime, and resolution that Turbonomic has been able to show in reports, it has given me an idea of things before things happen. That is important as I would really like to see a machine that needs resources, and get resources to it before we have a problem where we have contention and aspects of that nature. It's been helpful in that regard. Turbonomic has helped us understand where performance risks exist. Turbonomic looks at my environment and at the servers and even at the different hosts and how they're handling traffic and the number of machines that are on them. I can analyze it and it can show me which server or which host needs resources, CPU, or RAM. Even in Azure, in the cloud, I'm able to see which resources are not being used to full capacity and understand where I could scale down some in order to save cost. It is very, very helpful in assessing performance risk by navigating underlying causes and actions. The reason why it's helpful is because if there's a machine that's overrunning the CPU, I can run reports every week to get an idea of machines that would need CPU, RAM, or additional resources. Those resources could be added by Turbonomic - not so much by me - on a scheduled basis. I personally don't have to do it. It actually gives me a little bit of my life back. It helps me to get resources added without me physically having to touch each and every resource myself. Turbonomic has helped to reduce performance degradation in the same way as it's able to see the resources and see what it needs and add them before a problem occurs. It follows the trends. It sees the trends of what's happening and it's able to add or take away those resources. For example, we discuss when we need to do certain disaster recovery tests. Over the years, Turbo will be able to see, for example, around this time of year that certain people ramp up certain resources in an environment, and then it will add the resources as required. Another time of year, it will realize these resources are not being used as much, and it takes those resources away. In this way, it saves money and time while letting us know where we are. We've saved a great deal of time using this product when I consider how I'd have to multiply myself and people like me who would have to add resources to devices or take resources away. We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time. Those saved hours are across months, not years. I would consider the number of resources that Turbonomic is adding and taking away and the placement (if I had to do it all myself) would end up being hundreds of hours monthly that would be added without the help of Turbonomic. It helps us to meet SLAs mainly due to the fact that we're able to keep the servers going and to keep the servers in an environment, to keep them to where (if we need to add resources) we can add them at any given time. It will keep our SLAs where they need to be. If we were to have downtime due to the fact that we had to add resources or take resources away and it was an emergency, then that would prevent us from meeting our SLAs. We also use it to monitor Azure and to monitor our machines in terms of the resources that are out there and the cost involved. In a lot of cases, it does a better job of giving us cost information than Azure itself does. We're able to see the cost per machine. We're able to see the unattached volume and storage that we are paying for. It gives us a great level of insight. Turbonomic gives us the time to be able to focus on innovation and ongoing modernization. Some of the tasks that it does are tasks that I would not necessarily have to do. It's very helpful in that I know that the resources are there where they need to be and it gives me an idea of what changes need to be made or what suggestions it's making. Even if I don't take them, I'm able to get a good idea of some best practices through Turbonomic. One of the ways that Turbonomic does to help bring new resources to market is that we are now able to see the resources (or at least monitor the resources) before they get out to the general public within our environment. We saw immediate value from the product in the test environment. We set it up in a small test environment and we started with just placement and we could tell that the placement was being handled more efficiently than what VMware was doing. There was value for us in placement alone. Then, after we left the placement, we began to look at the resources and there were resources. We immediately began to see a change in the environment. It has made the application and performance better, mainly due to the fact that we are able to give resources and take resources away based on what the need is. Our expenses, definitely, have been in a better place based on the savings that we've been able to make in the cloud and on-prem. Turbonomic has been very helpful in that regard. We've been able to see the savings easily based on the reports in Turbonomic. That, and just seeing the machines that are not being used to capacity allows us to set everything up so it runs a bit more efficiently.
MarkWittling - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamless upgrades, stable, and easy to deploy
We've been facing some challenges with Morpheus due to its design for public cloud usage. Their main focus is on allowing customers to deploy virtual machines to Azure, Google Cloud, AWS (and other private or public clouds they support). They provide features such as guidance and cost optimization. However, we're using Morpheus for on-prem v center clouds, which is probably not the user base norm. We are very pleased with the dashboard and multi-tenancy capabilities, but there are some challenges when deploying and configuring the more complex Telco workloads that have advanced networking. The integration of the NSX-T needs to be refactored. As I have been working on the API, there are some issues with the workflow engine in the automation that need to be addressed. For example, I need to be able to flag a task as fail or continue on fail if something goes wrong in the workflow. Currently, if one of the tasks in a twenty-task workflow fails, the remaining nineteen are not run, which can be a problem if one of those tasks is critical, such as when patching or doing security tasks. Thus, workflow enhancements and improvements are necessary. Morpheus desires the ability to control the full life cycle of a virtual machine from beginning to end. We have many vendors who want to establish virtual machines, but we want users to access them through Morpheus. We want the VMs to be provisioned from an external system and then be managed in Morpheus so users can only perform limited activities without being able to delete or provision them. We are currently working on resolving this issue, which I refer to as reconciliation. I have asked the developers to implement multi-tenancy, where each tenant has their own landing page at a unique URL. However, we are using groups, not tenants, so there are features we can do with tenants that we cannot do with groups. Specifically, I am trying to get the developers to add notifications support so that when a group member logs in to the Morpheus portal, they can be informed of their VMs' maintenance schedule at a specific time. This is a feature I have requested them to add. We are generally pleased with Morpheus, however, due to some restraints and restrictions, we are utilizing it differently than the majority of its users. This creates some difficulty.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"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."
"It has automated a lot of things. We have saved 30 to 35 percent in human resource time and cost, which is pretty substantial. We don't have a big workforce here, so we have to use all the automation we can get."
"The ability to monitor and automate both the right-sizing of VMs as well as to automate the vMotion of VMs across ESXi hosts."
"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."
"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 feature for optimizing VMs is the most valuable because a number of the agencies have workloads or VMs that are not really being used. Turbonomic enables us to say, 'If you combine these, or if you decide to go with a reserve instance, you will save this much.'"
"We have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."
"It supports many features, and it also supports some of the automation that Cloudify supports. So, in addition to just giving you basic platform management—such as the ability to deploy virtual machines and have multitenancy to log in and perform all of your basic platform management tasks—it also supports automation. You can, for example, spin up three virtual machines, and you can have each virtual machine configure each other. You can do service chaining with it. You can run scripts in Dash and Python, or you can use tools like Ansible, Puppet, or Chef. All of this is just built into the tool. It is a very powerful tool."
"The most beneficial features for us were the API integrations with various cloud vendors like Nutanix, VMware, AWS, Azure, and GCP. It saved us the effort of doing that work ourselves."
"Morpheus is an intuitive solution that is very easy to use."
"The multi-cloud integrations and the DevOps and operational integrations are the most valuable. Morpheus platform is a centralized set to manage different clouds and your on-premise platforms. It does a very good job of what it is designed to do. It is very good in terms of features. It is extremely stable and easy to install. It is also very scalable. Their support is also extremely good."
"The user interface of the application is exceptional."
"The most valuable feature for me was cost optimization."
"Morpheus provides a very easy and one-click solution to scaling up and down."
"The most valuable feature of Morpheus is its strong integration with vSphere Cloud."
"I like its capacity, the self-service portal, and operational automation. The most beneficial feature is that it saves time when creating new virtual machines, deploying security measures, and writing infrastructure code, making things easier and faster. We have a standard we follow, reducing the time spent repeatedly rewriting everything."
"The preset policies and templates are useful. I would say that vRA is one of the best solutions we have. The CI/CD features also look helpful even though we aren't using them at the moment. We plan to get more involved and train our customers as much as possible."
"It's also absolutely easy and intuitive. It uses the same basic layout as the rest of the product suite so it's really easy to navigate, find your way around between the tabs and the areas."
"It allows some of the tenants to self-provision their machines, so they don't have to wait for us to create the machine for them."
"I can make a blueprint with an Active Directory deployment. With everything prepared, people can start installing our products."
"The most valuable feature of VMware Aria Automation is the versatile automation and deployments."
"The product saves a lot of time and cost for us. It has valuable features for creating a playbook."
"The blueprint functionality of the product is intuitive and user-friendly. The concept of the blueprints is visual and easy to use."
 

Cons

"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."
"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."
"There is an opportunity for improvement with some of Turbonomic's permissions internally for role-based access control. We would like the ability to come up with some customized permissions or scope permissions a bit differently than the product provides."
"They could add a few more reports. They could also be a bit more granular. While they have reports, sometimes it is hard to figure out what you are looking for just by looking at the date."
"It would be nice for them to have a way to do something with physical machines, but I know that is not their strength Thankfully, the majority of our environment is virtual, but it would be nice to see this type of technology across some other platforms. It would be nice to have capacity planning across physical machines."
"Turbonomic doesn't do storage placement how I would prefer. We use multiple shared storage volumes on VMware, so I don't have one big disk. I have lots of disks that I can place VMs on, and that consumes IOPS from the disk subsystem. We were getting recommendations to provision a new volume."
"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."
"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 product has become overly complex. The biggest problem is that we find a bug, they fix the bug, but then another one pops up. We can never really deliver on the vision we had using Morpheus."
"We've been facing some challenges with Morpheus due to its design for public cloud usage."
"I faced a few problems while deploying."
"We had to put in much effort ourselves since Morpheus's support wasn't always available to help us."
"There is room for enhancement in integrating Morpheus with other solutions."
"The service is limited and somewhat lacking."
"The tool could support virtual network functions better. It is really good at doing enterprise-type of things, but one of the things on which we're working with them is loading very complex virtual machines with it, such as Juniper SRX routers. It needs to support more complex virtualized resources a little bit better. Aside from that, it is a terrific tool. We really like it."
"Morpheus is working hard on creating an integration framework due for release in Q2 2021 which will allow clients to create their own interfaces and integrations into any 3rd party product that has a full-function API. Morpheus is also heavily focussed on enhancing the container management side to compete head-to-head with Openshift and CloudForms in Q3 2021."
"Our current use cases aren't very complex, but as our environment grows, we're seeing a greater need for automation. We're considering expanding our automation efforts, especially since other competitive products are starting to offer similar features."
"They should make it a little bit more dynamic, a little bit easier to deal with large-scale AD deployments. They need to make it a little more enterprise-ready. That is the one thing that kills us."
"I would like them to improve the product training."
"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 setup needs coding. It's not easy. It's not straightforward."
"VMware Aria Automation could improve reporting of the policies. They are difficult to customize. We have many policies but they are not able to be modified to what we want."
"I know you can spin up virtual desktops in vRA, but they're not thin-provisioned. I don't know if that's because the other product, Horizon View, is there, but it would be nice to see more integration."
"vRealize Automation on the back-end is still a little complicated. It has a lot of moving pieces, simplifying that from a pure infrastructure point of view would be a good thing. I would then like to have more out-of-the-box functionality and integrations with VMware components."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Contact the Turbonomic sales team, explain your needs and what you're looking to monitor. They will get a pre-sales SE on the phone and together work up a very accurate quote."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."
"I consider the pricing to be high."
"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."
"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."
"The license is based on the number of virtual machines that Morpheus is managing. So, it is a pay-as-you-grow model."
"Licensing is on an annual basis, and it is upfront for the year. There is no extra cost unless you want additional support or specific deployment packs."
"The solution is cheaper if you have less number of servers, but it becomes very expensive for a large number of servers."
"Morpheus doesn't directly support cost optimization, but its API integration can facilitate resource optimization. It doesn't dynamically optimize resources like an aeronautic system would; it operates step by step."
"Initially, the license may seem like a good deal, but as we grow, it becomes costly."
"VMware Aria Automation is expensive."
"We have seen significant ROI. We used to have physical servers, it took 90 days to get a server, order it, buy it, and get it in. We have it down to 10 minutes, building a server with virtualization, and now that's too slow. So, we let the customer do it at their speed. Therefore, it is pretty much up in a couple of minutes and they have a server."
"The tool is expensive since it is an enterprise product."
"The cost of the solution is reasonable for us. Although it is relatively high, we prioritize stability and integration over cost."
"It made the provisioning of the virtual machines easier and faster. We can react more quickly to customers' demands."
"It is pricey for what you get."
"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."
"There is confusion between licensing levels. There are three different licensed versions of vRealize Automation, and there are different things which can happen in each of them."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
7%
Educational Organization
30%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
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 Morpheus?
The most beneficial features for us were the API integrations with various cloud vendors like Nutanix, VMware, AWS, A...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Morpheus?
We've been a Morpheus customer since the early days. I know what they're trying to sell now, and you'd really need a ...
What needs improvement with Morpheus?
The product has become overly complex. The biggest problem is that we find a bug, they fix the bug, but then another ...
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
Morpheus Cloud Management Platform, Morpheus CMP
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
 

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.
Morpheus CMP, mcdonalds, blackrock, HSBC, astrazeneca, arris, WGU, GBG, pennstate, beyondtrust
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about Morpheus vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,533 professionals have used our research since 2012.