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VMware Aria Operations vs vCenter Orchestrator comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

vCenter Orchestrator
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (10th)
VMware Aria Operations
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
373
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (3rd), Virtualization Management Tools (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

vCenter Orchestrator and VMware Aria Operations aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. vCenter Orchestrator is designed for Process Automation and holds a mindshare of 0.2%, down 0.5% compared to last year.
VMware Aria Operations, on the other hand, focuses on Virtualization Management Tools, holds 33.6% mindshare, down 34.2% since last year.
Process Automation
Virtualization Management Tools
 

Featured Reviews

David Villota - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides automatic monitoring capabilities that save time for users
In my company's IT environment, we use the tool to deploy production environments for products, including live manufacturing systems. The product improves my company's IT automation processes since we can use fewer resources currently. In my company, we need to spend less time considering that vCenter Orchestrator monitors everything. In general, we don't have to be present in our company to do active monitoring. Automatic monitoring is available for everything with vCenter Orchestrator, so we have proactive alerts in our company. The most valuable feature of the product in streamlining our company's workflow stems from the fact that we need to spend fewer resources and less time in general. Our company can spend time on more effective tasks like working with the plans to improve processes and so on, instead of taking care of the systems. The benefits of the product's integration capabilities were useful for HPE. My company has HPE infrastructure, and we are keen to integrate everything into the host, VMware ESXi. It is really important to have an easy integration method that allows for everything to be installed easily in a matter of minutes. I was not involved in the product's setup process. My colleague took care of the product's setup process. From what I know, I can say that the product's setup phase was straightforward. Some custom setups were to be done manually in the tool, but everything was well documented. I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. One of the benefits of the product is that it is a low-cost and stable solution that offers a lot of resources. I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.
Gaurav Amar - PeerSpot reviewer
Enabled us to cut the cost of resources and manage our infrastructure with a smaller team
There's a feature known as Smart Alerts in vRealize Operations, which I have found to be useful if there's anything going wrong in the infrastructure. What usually happens is that you get so many alerts that you become confused. Smart Alerts give you visibility into your infrastructure and also recommend how to fix the situation. That's a feature which I'm really a fan of. Control, from the compliance perspective, is also helpful because we are a PCI DSS-certified company. It keeps us in compliance so that all of our servers and other things are not breaching any of the baseline protocols and baseline policies which we have laid down for the company. That's another thing which I like about the VMware vROps.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"vCenter Orchestrator is easy to use."
"It has the best workflow feature."
"We can scale the solution."
"It is very stable. I have been using vCenter Orchestrator from version three now to six plus."
"The most valuable feature is workflow automation."
"The hardware abstraction layer, being able to make the VMs portable when moving to a different platform or over a WAN."
"The implementation phase for vCenter Orchestrator was easy."
"The product's initial setup phase was easy."
"I have integrated vROps with vRealize Log Insight and vRealize automation. After integrating vRealize, we tried to split and combine the logs from the login sites for more alerts and information to organize the whole infrastructure and have automation. We used many different types of scripts trying to orchestrate them all together into one solution, replacing, for example, Elasticsearch and some other scripts."
"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."
"It helps us by our using the Troubleshooting Dashboard to see if there is contention on the VM that's causing performance issues or if it's a problem with the resources it has or if it doesn't have enough. It helps lower the troubleshooting time on virtual machines."
"One of the most valuable features is the ability to see "before" and "after". It will show you the current state, and then show you what it looks like after it does the optimization."
"One of the best features is the monitoring. It gives you proactive recommendations, based on the information that you have. It recommends changes. For example, if an ESX service is heavily loaded, it will tell you to make some changes, such as storage optimizations. Every tool does monitoring, but this one gives you more proactive monitoring, with the recommendations and actions that are needed."
"The most valuable features are the Heat Maps, and the various graphs and reporting features it has."
"It has improved our organization with respect to allowing us to size our environments correctly. We get metrics about what our stuff is actually using, how we can scope for future projects, where can we save some resources."
"It has great charts and graphs which provide a high level overview of our environment. Being able to click through those to deep dive, we can easily get to the information that we are looking for."
 

Cons

"The snapshot technology of VMware is not good compared to other solutions in the market, like Nutanix."
"The solution needs to integrate with Cloud facilities like AWS and Azure."
"I liked the previous client better than the current web client of vCenter Orchestrator, though my colleagues like the client now. The technical support for vCenter Orchestrator needs improvement."
"I believe a transparent view and better terms of condition between Oracle and vCenter Orchestrator would be helpful."
"After the change from perpetual licensing to subscriptions, the cost model changed."
"This solution needs to have more built-in workflows."
"The cost of the solution is high."
"A feature to review and setup tasks should be added."
"With our environment right now, stability is the one sticking point. There hasn't been a great deal of handholding in between the different versions, so we've run into problems with there being what I would call "more than just the average change between versions" and it's caused a loss of data for us in the past."
"It would be nice if it could tell me more about my hardware, if there were any updates on the network that should be deployed, if some firmware needs to be deployed on the server, etc."
"The tool itself is not as scalable as we'd like it to be. We have seven or more data centers and we have collectors deployed throughout the whole environment, but we have capacity and performance issues with the tool. We'd like to expand the product so that we would have more capacity, but it has limitations."
"In this vCenter, my wish is to establish a backup system that doesn't require VIN. It involves creating a backup ticket directly from the vCenter for the virtual machines and performing the backup task for each server, ensuring redundancy without the need for additional software. This would be a preferable solution if all of this could be accomplished within vCenter itself."
"The tool should have an easy workflow with some guided steps to make it simpler from the customer's perspective."
"User-friendly? It could probably use a little work there. It is something of a beast. There's a lot that it can do and getting in there and getting everything working the way you want it to can be challenging."
"It can be user-friendly once you get the dashboard set up but it can be complicated to get the information you want, the way you want it. Finally, if there were an easier way to share dashboards, that would be a big one."
"I would like to see more functionality. I would also like to see better support, because the pack that we use, the Horizon, it's an additional pack. It's not currently actually built by VMware, it's built by a separate company. When they merge the two, there will be better support in the future."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We provide the VMware solution to our clients, for which they pay a perpetual license."
"We renew the solution's license every one or two years."
"My company needs to make yearly payments towards the licensing costs attached to the product."
"vCenter Orchestrator could be more affordable."
"The price is reasonable, and one of the reasons that this product was selected."
"vCenter Orchestrator is an expensive solution."
"My organization didn't have to pay extra for vCenter Orchestrator. It was already included, so it's basically free. Even VMware regular support is included."
"This solution is expensive and the licensing is more attractive for Haveri."
"Our manpower costs have been reduced due to the automation in conjunction with the usage of the dashboard."
"There has been a bit of cost savings in that we could decide to move workloads around a bit better."
"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 solution is slightly expensive."
"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."
"We have seen huge ROI. It has certainly reduced troubleshooting."
"We would like to build custom dashboards in the standard license. Right now, this is available in the enterprise license, not the standard license."
"The optimization is a huge return on investment alone."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
24%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about vCenter Orchestrator?
The stability of the product is very good.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for vCenter Orchestrator?
We're running a low-profile budget. This is not our main focus on investment technology, so we're trying to reduce costs due to the change from perpetual to subscription licenses.
What needs improvement with vCenter Orchestrator?
After the change from perpetual licensing to subscriptions, the cost model changed. We are considering alternatives since we lost the perpetual aspect, and support is changing.
What's the difference between VMware vRA (automation) and vROps (operations)?
vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything you need from the software interface. It provides complete visibility over applic...
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 complex to set up and you can rely on the technical support to provide you with assis...
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 introduced the new version of VMware Aria Operations, they also introduced more a...
 

Also Known As

No data available
VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), vCenter Operations Manager (VCOPS)
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Beiersdorf Shared Services
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
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