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 7.9, while VMware Cloud Director is ranked #6 with an average rating of 7.8. VMware Aria Automation holds a 11.8% 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.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 12, 2022

We performed a comparison between vCloud Director vs VMware vRealize Automation vRA based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

Ease of Deployment: Users of vCloud Director say that the setup is straightforward. In contrast, VMware vRealize Automation users have mixed opinions, most mentioning that it was complex while a few found it easy.

Features: Users of both solutions are happy with the products’ stability.

vCloud Director users like the solution’s multi-tenancy and multi-site configurations. Users would like to see improved scalability and better integration with hyperscalers.

vRA users like that the solution offers good policy management, flexibility, automation capabilities, and scalability. Users mention that the multi-tenancy management could be improved.

Pricing: Users of both solutions consider the pricing to be expensive.

Service and Support: Users of both solutions find the technical support to be good.

ROI: Users of vCloud Director do not mention ROI. Users of vRA mention a significant ROI.

Comparison Results: VMware vRealize Automation vRA wins in this comparison because scalability is not an issue like it is for vCloud Director, and because users have been very satisfied with the ROI.

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

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation vs. VMware Cloud Director

September 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2024, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 6.1%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 11.8%, up from 11.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 7.7%, up from 5.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Dan Ambrose

Infrastructure Engineer 4 at Hyland

Feb 6, 2024

Helps visibility, bridges the data gap, and frees up time

We use IBM Turbonomic in a hybrid cloud environment. Although it supports multi-cloud capabilities, we currently operate in a single-cloud setting. Turbonomic offers visibility into our environment's performance, spanning across applications, underlying infrastructure, and protection resources. The visibility and analytics help to bridge the data gap between disparate IT teams such as applications and infrastructure. This is important for awareness collaboration, cost saving, and helping to design and improve our application. Enhanced visibility and data analytics have contributed to a significant reduction in our mean time to resolve. Tools like Turbonomic provide crucial visualization and insights, empowering us to make data-driven decisions instead of relying on assumptions as we did before. This newfound transparency translates to a massive improvement, going from complete darkness to having a clear 100 percent view of the situation. Although our applications are not optimized for the cloud we have seen some improvement in response time. IBM Turbonomic empowers us to achieve more with fewer people thanks to automation. Previously, customers frequently contacted us requesting resource increases to resolve issues. Now, we have a tool that allows us to objectively assess their needs, leading to a deeper understanding of our applications. This solution also generates significant cost savings in the cloud and optimizes hardware utilization within our data centers. Its AI algorithm intelligently allocates servers on hosts, maximizing efficiency without compromising performance. By fine-tuning resource allocation without causing performance bottlenecks, Turbonomic extends the lifespan of existing hardware, postponing the need for new purchases. This effectively stretches our capital expenditure budget. We started to see the benefits of IBM Turbonomic within the first 60 days. IBM is a fantastic partner. Their tech support has been outstanding, and the product itself is excellent - a very solid offering. By automating resource management with Turbonomic, our engineers are freed up to focus on more strategic initiatives like innovation and ongoing organizational projects. Previously, manually adding resources was a time-consuming process that interrupted workflows. Now, automation handles scaling efficiently, saving us thousands of man-hours and significant costs. It has illuminated the need for SetOps. It has highlighted areas of overspending, and the actions we've taken have demonstrated significant cost savings. IBM Turbonomic has positively impacted our overall application performance. IBM Turbonomic has helped reduce both CAPEX and OPEX. It has also significantly reduced cloud build times.

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Sukanya Satapanachai

Infrastructure Professional Service Team Lead at G-Able

Mar 18, 2024

Offers self-service functionality allows customers to provision VMs with a single click

My customers use it to build their private cloud infrastructure VMware Aria Automation improves the IT service delivery process. It can automate manual operations, but you need a development team with coding or programming skills to develop blueprints and automation workflows. While Aria…

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PurwandiPurwandi

Senior Cloud Engineer at PT. Sigma Cipta Caraka (Telkomsigma)

Apr 12, 2024

Manage and onboard permission but has high cost

When scanning thoroughly, we integrate automation. It would be easier if VMware improved its capabilities. Then, we can implement autoscaling through the web interface. There is multi-channel support, yet Net Depot is used for security and monitoring. This is crucial if we expose profiles to the Internet for security reasons. We need to enhance security, especially in protecting vCloud Director. If anyone pushes or plugs in something, it could compromise customer access. VMware may be better prepared for security reasons. Two persons are required to maintain the solution. If we only have a small amount of resources, we'll opt for the public vCloud but if we have a large amount of resources like 100s, 1000s then vCloud Director might be a better solution. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

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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

"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."

"The automation and orchestration components are definitely the best part, as you can tell it what it can do and when, and just let it be."

"The most important feature to us is an objective measurement of VM headroom per cluster. In addition, the ability to check for the right-sizing of VMs."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The system automatically sizes and moves resources based on the needs of the applications."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"It's extremely convenient to be able to spin something up and be able to work on other things, because it's already done it, making my workload lighter."

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

"We have also found it to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's something that, because it has the workflows that are very easily graphed out - you can follow what it's doing, it's very picturesque, you can see what it's doing easily - it's something that you can hand over to a user who is not familiar with it and they can wrap their brain around it pretty quickly."

"The most valuable features for us are capacity planning as well as environment life management; putting in specific templates and workflows that we know are secure. That solidifies the environments that we're in or that are being provisioned. We also know that every environment being provisioned has a lifespan. It affects capacity, so it's great for budgeting, from my perspective, and good for my team."

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

"The automation of the redundant tasks and the implementation of ServiceNow are huge for us..."

"Instead of only deploying templates, we can deploy blueprints which are easier on day-to-day operations."

"Today, if I want to provision one VM, it takes me five minutes. Earlier, it would take a minimum of 30 minutes to go and choose everything. Now, I can just do one click and it can provision my whole VM. We also integrated with our Alexa, so even through voice functionality, I can create a VM. One of the guys at VMware, along with our partner, deployed that in our environment. If I say, "Hey, Alexa, I need a VM with four gigs of RAM," it will go and start creating it."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

"I like the functionality that's available with Orchestrator. The platform stability stuff that I would be involved in worries me from the automation side because you have a lot less hands-on control of things. Price point, it kind of puts us off."

"vCloud Director is a scalable solution, and we have 10 customers who use it."

"The most valuable features are the multi-tenancy and multi-site configuration."

"vCloud Director requires less knowledge to get into in the first place. Therefore, when we bring in new members of staff, we can always give them the customer experience straightaway, and they can pick it up quite easily."

"Technical support is great. They help us 24/7."

"Working with VMware has supported us especially in terms of building a very powerful cloud for our customers."

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

"The orchestration and automation are very valuable."

More VMware Cloud Director pros

Cons

"The planning and costing areas could be a little bit more detailed. When you have more than 2,000 machines, the reports don't work properly. They need to fix it so that the reports work when you use that many virtual machines."

"The issue for us with the automation is we are considering starting to do the hot adds, but there are some problems with Windows Server 2019 and hot adds. It is a little buggy. So, if we turn that on with a cluster that has a lot of Windows 2019 Servers, then we would see a blue screen along with a lot of applications as well. Depending on what you are adding, cores or memory, it doesn't necessarily even take advantage of that at that moment. A reboot may be required, and we can't do that until later. So, that decreases the benefit of the real-time. For us, there is a lot of risk with real-time."

"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 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."

"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."

"Enhanced executive reporting standard with the tool beyond the reports that can be created today. Something that can easily be used with upper management on a monthly or quarterly basis to show the impact to our environment."

"The deployment process is a little tricky. It wasn't hard for me because I have pretty in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes, and their software runs on Kubernetes. To deploy it or upgrade it, you have to be able to follow steps and use the Kubernetes command line, or you'll need someone to come in and do it for you."

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"We still struggle a little bit with the configuration as far as making sure that we have all the endpoints where they need to be, because that's not as agile as we'd like in the back-end. We're working towards that with our DevOps teams to make sure that we're touching the right endpoints and getting the right data."

"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."

"The stability on the 6.2 version is very bad. It crashes. VMware tech support knows the IIS component is a bit buggy."

"When it comes to the orchestration workflow, you're on your own. The documentation and resources are very limited, and you have to learn everything on your own."

"Technical support could be improved. I definitely feel that the product is accelerating faster than the support engineers are able to keep up with the knowledge needed to know what's going on. The developers maintaining vRealize Automation are doing a great job improving it, but VMware is not doing a great job of training the people who we call to get support for it."

"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."

"It would be nice if, at the director level, the manager level, there was a pretty graphic. They don't like to see numbers and line items, they want to see graphs and scales and real world pictures. That would support better reporting."

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

More VMware Aria Automation cons

"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."

"Technical support needs to improve its skills and respond to queries faster."

"The initial setup is not straightforward; it can be complicated. The deployment can take one to two weeks."

"vCloud Director should include better billing options for businesses like mine or more options for customers to see their usage and billing situation regarding the usage of vCloud Director."

"The integration between components could be improved."

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

"This solution could improve by adding root cause analysis."

"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."

More VMware Cloud Director cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."

"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."

"If you're a super-small business, it may be a little bit pricey for you... But in large, enterprise companies where money is, maybe, less of an issue, Turbonomic is not that expensive. I can't imagine why any big company would not buy it, for what it does."

"You should understand the cost of your physical servers and how much time and money you are spending year over year on expanding your virtual farm."

"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 know there have been some issues with the billing, when the numbers were first proposed, as to how much we would save. There was a huge miscommunication on our part. Turbonomic was led to believe that we could optimize our AWS footprint, because we didn't know we couldn't. So, we were promised savings of $750,000. Then, when we came to implement Turbonomic, the developers in AWS said, "Absolutely not. You're not putting that in our environment. We can't scale down anything because they coded it." Our AWS environment is a legacy environment. It has all these old applications, where all the developers who have made it are no longer with the company. Those applications generate a ton of money for us. So, if one breaks, we are really in trouble and they didn't want to have to deal with an environment that was changing and couldn't be supported. That number went from $750,000 to about $450,000. However, that wasn't Turbonomic's fault."

"It was an annual buy-in. You basically purchase it based on your host type stuff. The buy-in was about 20K, and the annual maintenance is about $3,000 a year."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is very high."

"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."

"A simplified version for small businesses would be good."

"The pricing for this solution is roughly 20% lower than the competitive products in the market."

"This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us."

"The solution is pretty expensive but provides good workload management."

"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."

"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."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

"This is an expensive solution."

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

"The licensing costs are pretty high, but it might depend on the size of the company."

"vCloud Director is a very expensive solution."

"We are able to provision new clients faster. Every month, we take on more customers."

"The license could be less expensive and we are on a perpetual license."

"It enables us to provision new clients more quickly."

"The licensing cost is high for vCloud Director. It is mostly a perpetual license."

More VMware Cloud Director pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

15%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

22%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Comms Service Provider

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

Cisco Intersight vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 10% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 8% of the time

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 2% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 21% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 13% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 8% of the time

vCenter Orchestrator vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 5% of the time

Red Hat Satellite vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 2% of the time

More VMware Aria Automation Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 25% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 7% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 6% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 6% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 2% of the time

More VMware Cloud Director Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

August 2024

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

August 2024

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Cloud Director

August 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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IBM

VMware

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IBM

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VMware

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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

September 2024

Free Report: VMware Aria Automation vs. VMware Cloud Director

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