SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

SolarWinds and VMware are both solutions in the Virtualization Management Tools category. SolarWinds is ranked #7 with an average rating of 6.0, while VMware is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.6. Additionally, 66% of SolarWinds users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of VMware users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024

VMware Aria Operations and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager compete in the virtualization management space. VMware Aria Operations is favored for its integration and analytics capabilities, while SolarWinds Virtualization Manager stands out for its ease of use and specialized virtualization features.

Features: VMware Aria Operations provides robust performance optimization, automation features, and dynamic threshold monitoring that leverages historical data to set performance baselines. Its integration with multiple cloud platforms offers unified visibility and advanced predictive analytics for capacity management. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager delivers simplicity in virtual machine performance insights, capacity planning tools, and customizable dashboards, making it efficient for targeted virtualization management.

Room for Improvement: VMware Aria Operations could enhance its user interface for easier navigation and reduce deployment complexity, especially for smaller organizations. It also requires improvement in reporting granularity. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager could benefit from deeper integration with third-party tools, more comprehensive analytics, and broader support for heterogeneous virtual environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Operations requires meticulous planning but provides extensive resources and customer support for complex environments. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is quicker to deploy with an emphasis on user-friendliness, offering efficient customer support specifically tailored for virtualization concerns.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Operations, while potentially entailing higher setup costs, offers substantial ROI for businesses requiring broad IT management functionalities. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager presents a cost-effective solution with solid ROI for enterprises primarily focused on virtualization management, valued for its affordability and efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs. VMware Aria Operations Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs. VMware Aria Operations

October 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic

Featured Reviews

SubashSubbiah

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

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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Wapelo Zaphaniah

Information Technology Administrator at Debswana

A tool with an easy initial setup phase and high scalability that needs to improve its pricing and include reporting features

The problem or issue with the product is related to its pricing. The solution can be made free, especially for those who are using Dell products. The monitoring part is taken care of after SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is integrated into Dell IDRAC. If the aforementioned integration is not carried out, then you have to pay money separately to receive or utilize the services from SolarWinds. In the future, the product should have reporting features. The reporting feature would allow users to get whatever information they are looking for rather than having to do it manually.

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Edward Hore

L3 Infrastructure Engineer at Specsavers

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

"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.""

"The solution has a good optimization feature."

"We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."

"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."

"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."

"I like Turbonomic's automation and AI machine learning features. It shows you what it can do, but it can also act on recommendations automatically. Integration with an APM system makes the AI/ML features truly effective. Understanding what the application is doing and the trends of application behavior can help you make real-world decisions and act on that information."

"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."

"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"The most valuable features of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager are the non-Windows servers' monitoring and capacity planning."

"SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is a great tool that is easy to use...It is a stable solution."

"It gives us visibility into the virtual infrastructure, and even the physical infrastructure, and into the workloads running. We have visibility even at the level of the appliance services. We can monitor everything. We can also create dependency reports, so if a service is down, it will not impact things. It gives us those dependencies brilliantly."

"Being able to consolidate everything on similar hardware is really helpful, as opposed to trying to manage a bunch of hosts."

"It's pretty user-friendly. It is very intuitive, the layout is well-built, and the user experience is well-built. You look at the interface and you say, "Oh, I understand what these sections or what these categories of features do." For example, for reporting, there's a tab that says "Reporting." You click on it and there are all your reports. So the user interface is really well-designed to make it intuitive."

"It allows us better visibility into our virtual infrastructure than we could get through vCenter or other tools by providing us a lot of metrics. vROps is good at spotting problems."

"The stability in vRealize has been great. We've had no outages nor impacts. The upgrade process has been great so far."

"Alerts and monitoring were most valuable. It was also pretty user-friendly and interactive. I was able to generate good reports in PDF and HTML formats, which was really helpful."

"The initial setup is quite easy and straightforward. The majority of the time, implementing vROps is not time-consuming."

"It gives us a better look into performance, a better look into right-sizing, a better look at possible issues or, more so, trends."

More VMware Aria Operations pros

Cons

"The way it handles updates needs to be improved."

"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."

"If they would educate their customers to understand the latest updates, that would help customers... Also, there are a lot of features that are not available in Turbonomic. For example, PaaS component optimization and automation are still in the development phase."

"There are a few things that we did notice. It does kind of seem to run away from itself a little bit. It does seem to have a mind of its own sometimes. It goes out there and just kind of goes crazy. There needs to be something that kind of throttles things back a little bit. I have personally seen where we've been working on things, then pulled servers out of the VMware cluster and found that Turbonomic was still trying to ship resources to and from that node. So, there has to be some kind of throttling or ability for it to not be so buggy in that area. Because we've pulled nodes out of a cluster into maintenance mode, then brought it back up, and it tried to put workloads on that outside of a cluster. There may be something that is available for this, but it seems very kludgy to me."

"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."

"Since the introduction of a HTML 5 based interface, our main - but minor - criticism of a less than intuitive operation managers' GUI would be the area of improvement."

"I like the detail I get in the old user interface and will miss some of that in the new interface when we perform our planned upgrade soon."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"The problem or issue with the product is related to its pricing."

"The SolarWinds Virtualization Manager platform in general can have a better response time in the performance."

"Every product has room for improvement, no matter how good it is. For VMware Aria Operations, I think the main area for improvement is its integration with other cloud vendors, like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The integration process is quite complex and often requires VMware personnel's involvement, which isn't always a great experience. So, integration with hyper scalers would be a key improvement."

"Moving forward, I would like to see some tighter integration with the vSphere Web Client, just so that I don't have to open multiple windows and jump back and forth. We've currently running vSphere 6.7 and there is a lot tighter integration between vROps and vSphere, but it can always be better."

"Sometimes it's difficult to find some features like they were in previous versions."

"I'd like to see a little more training, free training on the VMware site; to get some more information within the VMware community. There's quite a bit of stuff out there but getting that access can be daunting sometimes."

"One of the big challenge with vROps is there so much to learn as a user as you're doing it. It is also getting these dashboards in front of the executive committee, so they can actually see the environment."

"I would like to see more integration between vRealize Operations, Log Insight, and Network Insight. It would be nice if they worked a bit better together."

"We use a large installation of this solution with multiple nodes and so the setup was pretty complex."

"There are some delays in response to the solution's technical support, making it an area where improvements are needed."

More VMware Aria Operations cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."

"I don't know the current prices, but I like how the licensing is based on the number of instances instead of sockets, clusters, or cores. We have some VMs that are so heavy I can only fit four on one server. It's not cost-effective if we have to pay more for those. When I move around a VM SQL box with 30 cores and a half-terabyte of RAM, I'm not paying for an entire socket and cores where people assume you have at least 10 or 20 VMs on that socket for that pricing."

"I consider the pricing to be high."

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

"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."

"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."

"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."

"We felt the pricing was very fair for the product. It is in no way prohibitive for larger deployments, unlike other similar product on the market."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"The maintenance and support are a part of the package, meaning it is included in the product's price."

"The is an annual subscription needed to use this solution."

"It is an affordable solution that doesn't require any additional costs."

"I would like to see a free offering. Cost is always a factor in any sort of line. Obviously, the value added is there and it's worth it."

"The license is a one time cost, and you pay for support on a yearly basis. It is a bit expensive, but if you consider the product support and its reliability, it's justifiable."

"The solution is slightly expensive."

"I would give the solution a three out of five, with one being cheap and five being expensive. There are some elements of the pricing that are good, and some areas where I feel like I'm being charged for something the product can't provide yet."

"It was cost effective, because it fixed our problems."

"If the VMs were trimmed, then we wouldn't have to buy as much software/hardware, and this means less licenses. While most of it is VMware licenses, which are relatively cheap, there are SQL licenses for Microsoft, and this is where we could start saving a lot of money."

"Cost is an issue on vROps. The Standard edition, for an organization our size, is just not useful at all. However, I like the price point of vROps Standard. But as a company, the Advanced is the minimum version that we can use, because we need the customization, we need a lot of the features that Advanced brings. But the price is substantially higher than Standard. It's always been a challenge to try to go in to my leadership and say, "Here's what I want." I've always got to go back and super-justify it and it's not an easy win. Whereas, if the pricing were closer to the Standard model, or maybe even a little bit above that, it's an easier conversation with leadership. But because it really feels like more than double the price, I'm not sure the value, double the money, is there, as an easy-sell to my leadership."

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

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

11%

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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 SolarWinds Virtualization Manager?

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is a great tool that is easy to use...It is a stable solution.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Virtualization Manager?

The maintenance and support are a part of the package, meaning it is included in the product's price.

See all answers

What needs improvement with SolarWinds Virtualization Manager?

The problem or issue with the product is related to its pricing. The solution can be made free, especially for those ...

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 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

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Compared 13% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 9% of the time

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Cloudability vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 6% of the time

CloudBolt vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 2% of the time

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Veeam Data Platform vs SolarWinds Virtualization Manager

Compared 22% of the time

VMware vSphere vs SolarWinds Virtualization Manager

Compared 6% of the time

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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 8% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

November 2024

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Buyer's Guide

Virtualization Management Tools

November 2024

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager report

Download SolarWinds Virtualization Manager product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations

November 2024

Download VMware Aria Operations product report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

SolarWinds VMAN

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

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IBM

SolarWinds

VMware

Interactive Demo

IBM

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SolarWinds

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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.

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager reduces downtime by 53% and time spent troubleshooting by 59%. Analyze and remediate VM performance problems by viewing active, critical, and warning issues in your environment.

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.

Elliot Health System

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

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs. VMware Aria Operations

October 2024

Free Report: SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs. VMware Aria Operations

Find out what your peers are saying about SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs. VMware Aria Operations and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.

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