VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

VMware Aria Automation and VMware Cloud Director are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. VMware Aria Automation is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.0, while VMware Cloud Director is ranked #6 with an average rating of 7.8. VMware Aria Automation holds a 10.8% mindshare in CM, compared to VMware Cloud Director’s 7.7% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of VMware Aria Automation users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of VMware Cloud Director users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024

VMware Cloud Director and VMware Aria Automation are fierce competitors in cloud management solutions. VMware Aria Automation seems to have an advantage due to its comprehensive feature set that delivers higher long-term value.

Features: VMware Cloud Director provides efficient resource management, multi-tenancy capabilities, and seamless operations suited for cost-effectiveness. VMware Aria Automation, however, offers advanced automation, extensive integration capabilities, and value-added features that are considered superior for complex operations.

Room for Improvement: VMware Cloud Director could improve its scalability, integration with third-party tools, and feature set diversity to better compete. VMware Aria Automation requires enhancements in documentation, user training, and a more intuitive setup process to smooth the learning curve for users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Cloud Director is known for its straightforward deployment and responsive customer support, making it user-friendly. On the other hand, VMware Aria Automation's complex deployment requires significant technical expertise, though it delivers robust functionality post-implementation with similarly supportive service once operational.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Cloud Director offers lower setup costs, making it attractive for budget-conscious businesses seeking quick ROI. VMware Aria Automation, despite higher initial costs, promises better long-term returns due to its advanced capabilities, justifying the higher investment for organizations prioritizing comprehensive features.

To learn more, read our detailed VMware Aria Automation vs. VMware Cloud Director Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation vs. VMware Cloud Director

October 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 6.3%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 10.8%, down from 12.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 7.7%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

SubashSubbiah

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

Dec 10, 2022

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

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

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NiteshKumar1

Principle consultant at Infosys

Sep 27, 2023

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."

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NiteshKumar1

Principle consultant at Infosys

Jun 10, 2024

Provides crystal clear dashboarding and allows you to manage and monitor your infrastructure

The overall dashboarding is very crystal clear. The ability to switch from one infrastructure to another infrastructure and get into detailed information, whether it is compute, storage network, or whatever. That helps you get a holistic view of the overall infrastructure running in your landscape. This also helps the leadership and management be aware of the right potential investment strategy by looking at the potential utilization. vCloud Director also provides ways and means through which you can make a prediction or a forecast of the infrastructure that would be needed in the future, depending on what you are currently running. That does not take away the fact that we have to be completely aware of our pipeline projects in our schedule so that you can plan your infrastructure requirements accordingly. vCloud Director provides multifold features that have been beneficial to the end users.

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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

"Turbonomic can show us if we're not using some of our storage volumes efficiently in AWS. For example, if we've over-provisioned one of our virtual machines to have dedicated IOPs that it doesn't need, Turbonomic will detect that and tell us."

"Turbonomic has helped optimize cloud operations and reduced our cloud costs significantly. Overall, we are at about 40 percent savings, and we spend about three million a year just in Azure. It reduces the size of the VMs, putting them into the right template for usage. People don't realize that you don't have to future-proof a virtual machine in Azure. You just need to build it for today. As the business or service grows, you can scale up or out. About 90 percent of all the costs that we've reduced has been from sizing machines appropriately."

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

"I like the analytics that help us optimize compatibility. Whereas Azure Advisor tells us what we have to do, Turbonomic has automation which actually does those things. That means we don't have to be present to get them done and simplifies our IT engineers' jobs."

"I have the ability to automate things similar to the Orchestrator stuff. I do have the ability to have it do some balancing, and if it sees some different performance metrics that I've set not being met, it'll actually move some of my virtual machines from, let's say, one host to another. It is sort of an automation tool that helps me. Basically, I specify the metric, and if I get a certain host or something being over-utilized, it'll automatically move the virtual machines around for me. It basically has to snap into my vCenter and then it can make adjustments and move my virtual machines around. It also has some very nice reporting tools built around virtual machines. It tells you how much storage, memory, or CPU is being used monthly, and then it gives you a very nice way to be able to send out billing structure to your end users who use servers within your environment."

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

"We have a system where our developers automate machine builds, and that is constantly running out of resources. Turbonomic helps us with that, so I don't have to keep buying hardware. The developers always say, "They don't have enough. They don't have enough. They don't have enough," when they just configured it improperly. Therefore, Turbonomic helps us identify configuration issues on their side so it doesn't cost me money on the other end to buy resources that I don't really need."

"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.'"

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"It is very stable, especially for high availability features."

"The automation function itself and how to group and publish those groupings is quite easy for customers to learn with Aria."

"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."

"It is also intuitive and user-friendly... With vRealize, we can have a Help Desk individual, who might not be that techy, provision the different elements quite easily, with no almost training at all."

"The product saves a lot of time and cost for us. It has valuable features for creating a playbook."

"To manage when VM's aren't being used, we have it set up so that it will auto-destroy them after a certain amount of time, obviously with permission from the user who owns it."

"VMware Aria Automation has made a lot of things easier. It has really helped the operations team to spin up the virtual machines."

"It has definitely increased speed of VM deployment. When a normal server-request would come in, it might take anywhere from three to four days to deploy. Now, within 15 minutes, they can click and have something up and running."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

"We use it to replicate VMs for our customers from one data center to another data center."

"The initial setup was complex. There's a lot of things you have to factor in, like security, backup, disaster recovery, monitoring, and how to maintain the platform. It's something we still struggle with, but it's getting better."

"We were using VMware, also combined with AirWatch and Boxer. We configured corporate emails on mobiles and used them for MDM applications on tablets, like the launcher."

"vCloud Director is a stable solution."

"The compatibility with vSAN and NSX is the greatest feature of vCloud. It also has integration with vROps, which is quite nice."

"vCloud Director works and makes my life easier. Its self-service capabilities allow us to give resources to our customers. They can spin up as many or as few machines as they like, and it works."

"The product allows us to add or remove features."

"So far, we have had no problems at all, as it has been very stable. It is working well."

More VMware Cloud Director pros

Cons

"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."

"Additional interfaces would be helpful."

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

"I would like Turbonomic to add more services, especially in the cloud area. I have already told them this. They can add Azure NetApp Files. They can add Azure Blob storage. They have already added Azure App service, but they can do more."

"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."

"There is room for improvement [with] upgrades. We have deployed the newer version, version 8 of Turbonomic. The problem is that there is no way to upgrade between major Turbonomic versions. You can upgrade minor versions without a problem, but when you go from version 6 to version 7, or version 7 to version 8, you basically have to deploy it new and let it start gathering data again. That is a problem because all of the data, all of the savings calculations that had been done on the old version, are gone. There's no way to keep track of your lifetime savings across versions."

"Recovering resources when they're not needed is not as optimized as it could be."

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

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"The solution could include more integrations and supportability around the container space."

"We upgraded twice. The last upgrade was a bit problematic."

"It needs to be more dynamic with variable customization to make new workloads more reliable. It also needs to be faster. We are exploring vRA version 8 right now and maybe what I'm requesting is available in the new version, but we haven't yet explored it fully."

"I would like to see more integration to do things like DR, from a court perspective. Today, for us, SRM doesn't scale because each of our customers has a local vCenter environment as well as the vCenter in our environment. So we can't get SRM to scale to the point to which we need. From an integration perspective, DR inside of that would be good."

"The deployment mechanisms for the initial deployment of the product line lacks the appropriate documentation to give someone who's never used it before... There might be cases where someone wants to go to the website, go to the doc section, and do a step-by-step on how to deploy it. That's really not as brushed-up as other documents I've seen that they have. That would definitely be an improvement on their end."

"The setup needs coding. It's not easy. It's not straightforward."

"It is not super-intuitive. It does require some skills to understand how to use it. I had no problem, but I had spent a lot of time already learning this product ahead of moving it to an operational status. But as we did so, we had a hard time bringing some people from other groups into the fold, to script and work against this environment. So, the ability to build workflows within that automation needs to be streamlined."

"I don't find the solution to be intuitive and user- friendly. The GUI is really complicated. Tracking down logs and errors is very hard. Then, it takes a specialized JavaScript person to build. Also, I'm not sure how the upgrades are going now, but they definitely need to evolve the upgrade process. Finally, the logs are very generalized. Giving more of an indicator of what's actually going wrong, rather than just a generic error code, would help."

More VMware Aria Automation cons

"vCloud Director should improve by having support with other cloud providers, such as Microsoft Azure and Google cloud."

"Technical support is something that we've had problems with in the past. Across all the VMware solutions we have not always had the best response from support. To be fair a lot of the issues that came up for us have been quite niche but it seems that in terms of release cycles they introduced a lot of bugs and it's a lot of stuff that support generally has to work quite hard on. There have been cases when we've logged critical priority issues and not had responses in time. I think support is something that can be worked on."

"It would be beneficial to have enhanced integration capabilities with third-party solutions within vCloud Director, especially in networking and data security."

"If you have a deployed environment and lose it, you can't easily deploy it back with vCloud Director. Because of this reason, we don't have the data protection, disaster recovery, and container features."

"What could be improved in vCloud Director, particularly from the networking side, is its integration with other network devices. It also needs a more simplified installation because the process is a little bit complicated."

"It would be great if Microsoft and VMware come together and become a common tool."

"The solution's pricing is high, and VMware should consider lowering it."

"In version 6.7, compatibility to migrate VMs from a vCenter to vCloud Director had a problem. However, this has been solved in the newest version."

More VMware Cloud Director cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is very high."

"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."

"It is pricey for what you get."

"From a budget point of view, the pricing is a bit on the higher side."

"We do plan to see ROI with any new implementation of new technologies being implemented within our environment."

"Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."

"vRealize automation really should be a front door to the whole VMware suite of products."

"So much can be done with the Open Source side, and especially for smaller shops. I personally think the pricing for Enterprise is hard to justify."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

"The solution is expensive so pricing is rated a four out of ten."

"vCloud Director is an expensive solution."

"It runs our company in the millions of rand every month."

"This is an expensive solution."

"The solution is costly, efficient, and robust versus alternative solutions."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing eight and a half to nine out of ten."

"vCloud Director is priced higher than other solutions, such as Nutanix."

"If ten is very expensive, I rate the tool's price as a four out of ten."

More VMware Cloud Director pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

21%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?

It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is...

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What needs improvement with Turbonomic?

The implementation could be enhanced.

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What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?

We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...

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What's the difference between VMware vRA (automation) and vROps (operations)?

vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything y...

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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...

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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...

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Would you change anything about VMware vCloud Director if you could?

VMware vCloud Director works very well and there are not many things that I would like to see changed. However, a sin...

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What is the biggest improvement you saw at your company after you started using VMware vCloud Director?

For my company, VMware vCloud Director noticeably increased operational efficiency. When I started working here a few...

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Is vCloud Director convenient for building applications?

When it comes to building applications, vCloud Director offers you various methods to create cloud-ready ones. For e...

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Comparisons

VMware Aria Operations vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 20% of the time

Azure Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 12% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 9% of the time

Cisco Intersight vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 8% of the time

ParkMyCloud vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 4% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 20% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 14% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 8% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 6% of the time

Cisco Intersight vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 2% of the time

More VMware Aria Automation Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 26% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 7% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 7% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 6% of the time

ServiceNow IT Operations Management vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 1% of the time

More VMware Cloud Director Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

November 2024

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

October 2024

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Cloud Director

October 2024

Download VMware Cloud Director product report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack

vCloud Director

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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.

VMware Aria Automation is a cloud management tool that allows companies to simplify their cloud experience through a modern automation platform. The solution is designed to deliver self-service clouds, multi-cloud automation with governance, and DevOps-based security and infrastructure management. It helps organizations improve IT agility, efficiency, and productivity through its various features.

VMware Aria Automation has multiple use cases that include the following:

Self-service multi-cloud: VMware Aria Automation can be used to deliver consistent self-service consumption. Another use case in this area is for delivering infrastructure across VMware Clouds as well as public clouds.
Multi-cloud governance: The solution can be used to manage cost, performance, networking, configuration, and security at scale for multi-cloud environments. VMware Aria Automation offers all this with an everything-as-code approach.
DevOps for infrastructure: Through VMware Aria Automation, companies can enable a powerful infrastructure as code platform with support for iterative development and infrastructure pipelining.
Kubernetes automation: Users can utilize VMware Aria Automation to automate the management of Kubernetes clusters and namespaces with support for vSphere with Tanzu.
Security operations: VMware Aria Automation facilitates event-driven automation to deliver full-service IT system compliance enforcement and vulnerability remediation.

VMware Aria Automation Features

VMware Aria Automation has various features that allow users to easily perform operations. Some of the solution's capacities include:

VMware Cloud agnostic template: This feature allows organizations to use a single cloud template to deploy with Infrastructure as a Code. Deployment options include VMware Cloud as well as major public cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and more.
Extensibility and customization: This VMware Aria Automation feature allows users to get full extensibility and customization. This can be achieved through Aria Automation Orchestrator, Action-Based Extensibility (ABX), and built-in integrations with common third-party tools.
Self-service multi-cloud: This feature enables users to request and provision infrastructure resources. It can be done across clouds using a unified and consistent Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consumption layer, idempotent REST API, and self-service catalog.
Centralized policies and governance: VMware Aria Automation offers a feature for users to manage multiple clouds with templatized cloud and policy definition, automated remediation, and cloud environment visibility.
Configuration management: Through this feature of the product, day 1 and 2 control can be achieved for virtualized and cloud environments. This can be done with intuitive configuration automation, compliance enforcement, and vulnerability remediation.
Infrastructure pipelining: Through this feature, organizations can access user-friendly release automation pipelines. They can be specifically tailored for CI/CD in infrastructure use cases.

VMware Aria Automation Benefits

VMware Aria Automation offers its users various benefits. Some of the biggest advantages that the solution brings to companies that utilize it include:

VMware Aria Automation provides faster time to market for companies through offloading manual tasks with advanced workflows and agile templating.
The solution offers high levels of security and control.
This product is suitable for beginners, as it offers a self-service consumption experience for users.
VMware Aria Automation accelerates innovation through Infrastructure as Code and DevOps principles.
The product provides users with flexibility, as it is compatible with the most popular public cloud solutions.
The solution offers fast deployment because of all natively integrated functions.

Reviews from Real Users

Awais J., CTO/CEO at a tech services company, likes VMware Aria Automation because it saves a lot of time, provides more visibility, and has extensive automation capabilities.

An IT consultant at a government rates VMware Aria Automation highly because the product gives you flexibility to analyze and consume resources.

VMware Cloud Director, also known as vCloud Director, is a cloud management tool that offers secure, flexible, and efficient cloud resources to thousands of enterprises and IT teams across the world. The solution serves as one of the leading cloud service-delivery platforms for businesses that want to manage and operate their services effectively. By deploying this solution, companies can benefit from virtualized networking, computing, security, and storage. These benefits can be received in a timely manner, as the infrastructure of the product is operationally ready within minutes and clients do not need to install and configure physical infrastructure.

One of the biggest advantages of vCloud Director is that it allows users to build cloud-ready applications. In several ways, it facilitates the process for developers, including:

Open to DevOps: The product addresses the needs of DevOps teams by providing Infrastructure as Code services with vCD Terraform Provider. This allows developers to deliver infrastructure directly from code. Additionally, it provides capabilities from Python and vCD API as well as Object Storage API and App Launchpad APIs.
Customization: This solution is very customizable and extensible for cloud providers to deliver their own branding, themes, and services to their clients.
Dev-ready cloud: vCloud Director offers support for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid for vSphere and multicloud with a plugin for container service extension. Through these, native K8s Clusters or Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Clusters can be delivered and managed through a user interface (UI) and application programming interface (API).

vCloud Director Features

This VMware product has various features through which users can virtualize their data and benefit from quality management solutions. Among the popular capabilities of vCloud Director are:

Elastic secure virtual data centers: This vCloud Director feature provides tenants with securely isolated virtual resources, fine-grained control of their public cloud services, and independent role-based authentication.
Multi-site management: This feature allows companies to stretch data centers across sites and geographies as well as connect to existing dedicated vCenters for access and management or on-broad into VMware vCloud Director.
ISV ecosystem: This feature integrates leading cloud service vendors into the product using an open extensibility framework. Some of the partners of vCloud Director include Dell Data Protection, Veeam, Cloudian, AWS S3, and Dell ECS.
DRaaS workload protection: This feature allows users to deliver self-service tiered disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) on-premises to cloud and cloud to cloud.
Cloud migration: Part of this feature is the plugin VMware Cloud Director Availability, which enables simple migration to cloud, offering self-service cold or warm migration to users' vCloud Director clouds.
Operational visibility and insights: The product includes an accessible dashboard and a single pane of glass to provide centralized multi-tenant cloud management views.
Cloud-native applications and development: This feature makes the platform suitable for developers to sandbox or deploy apps as it natively supports Tanzu Basic, native K8s, and PKS.
Automation: Through various tools and deep integration, the solution allows users to automate complex infrastructure-as-code and tile UI-driven workflows. This allows them to deploy X-as-a-Service and maintain full access control and visibility at the same time.
Application Platform as a Service: This feature enables users to deliver their own catalog-based applications or VMware Cloud Marketplace-certified third-party cloud applications through the plugin App Launchpad VMware Cloud Director.
GPU as a Service: Utilizing Nvidia AI Enterprise, this feature provides support for GPU as a Service and delivers multi-tenant GPU services for customers who require high-performance compute for GPU-specific applications.
Secure cloud: The solution supports multiple security-centric features to deliver an enterprise-class cloud service, including NSX-T distributed firewalling, workload encryption, and integrated disaster recovery replication.

vCloud Director Benefits

VMware vCloud Director offers various benefits to its users. Some of these include:

The solution provides a highly efficient self-service model which consists of a virtual data center compute, network, storage, and security.
VMware vCloud Director offers its users multi-tenancy infrastructure with deep automation which facilitates their daily tasks.
The product is cost-efficient, as it is service-ready on its very first day and offers a high revenue from services.
Businesses can deliver services to their clients in a timely manner through this product, benefitting from its natively integrated solutions.
VMware vCloud Director provides users with high flexibility, as it allows businesses to stretch networks across virtual data centers globally.
The solution provides load-balancing capabilities, which facilitate the creation of new hybrid applications and digital transformation initiatives.

Reviews from Real Users

Ajit Y., a cloud architect at a computer software company, likes VMware vCloud Director because it is a stable, truly multitenant software and the go-to tool for infrastructure as a service.

Kashif F., a divisional engineer at National Telecom Corporatio, rates vCloud Director highly because the product can be used for infrastructure provisioning without using a platform service.

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.

Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual

MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation vs. VMware Cloud Director

October 2024

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