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VMware Aria Automation vs vRealize Business for Cloud [EOL] comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Cloud Management (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (2nd), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st)
VMware Aria Automation
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
168
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (1st), Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (15th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)
vRealize Business for Cloud...
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

RM
Jul 15, 2021
Enables us to reduce our ESX cluster size and save money on our maintenance and license renewals
Rightsizing is the most valuable feature because it helps with our capacity management and server density so that we are always optimized. Turbonomic provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. It'll tell us if a server is overpowered or over-provisioned so that we can recover resources. And on the same note, it'll tell us if a server is under-provisioned and we need to add resources to it to help the performance. It also provides us with a single platform that manages the full application stack. This was the secondary reason we went with Turbonomic. The primary reason was for the server optimization. In my organization, optimizing application performance is a continuous process that is beyond the human scale. We're always looking to better optimize the environment. We use Turbonomic's automation mode to continuously assure application performance by having the software manage resources in real-time for sizing-up. Sizing down is a manual process. Turbonomic handles on-prem, virtualization, and storage. Turbonomic understands the resource relationships at each of these layers and the risks to performance for each. As far as we can tell, they are risk-averse. So they put controls in so that you don't cause outages. It makes the operations more secure. We do a piece of automation in real-time, scheduling them for change windows, or manual execution for implementing Turbonomic actions. The vMotions are automation, the rightsize up is done automatically, and the rightsize down is during change windows. We do the automation piece so that it is continuously rightsizing how many VMs are on a host for best performance, same with increasing resources on a VM to make sure application performance is where it should be. And then we do change control for the rightsize down because it requires a reboot. The fact that Turbonomic shows application metrics and estimates the impact of taking a suggested action gives us a window into seeing what will happen if we do make the change. So it provides better visibility. Turbonomic provides a proactive approach to avoiding performance degradation. That's what rightsizing does. It continuously optimizes so there are fewer application performance issues. We have seen a 20% reduction in tickets opened for application issues. Using Turbonomic does it all-in-one versus the approach of using monitoring and threshold to assure application performance. Sometimes your monitoring tool does not do the optimization as well.
SS
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…
TM
Oct 19, 2021
Complete solution for automation, orchestration, and end-to-end lifecycle management
The most valuable feature is automation. With the automation, you can easily and quickly implement it by deploying gnashing on virtual environments. It doesn't take long to develop an automation blueprint. You need about half an hour, and then you can install or deploy it on several systems. That was our first great advantage in the project because we urgently needed to deploy across many different systems. So automation helps us to do our work quickly and easily. VMware vRealize has standardized systems for doing work after the deployment. First, you have to set up the language on the system itself. Then there are vRealize's orchestration features. You can implement code in your deployment script to do this configuration automatically. So the orchestrator is a beneficial component. With this, you can implement automatic language selection and automated integration. In other systems, you can implement a multi-blueprint or multi-system environment to deploy the entire database environment and applications on this database with one click. The lifecycle manager is also essential. In version 7.5, you must provide a dir example username and password to access the Citrix server and controller. What's more, you have to include this in your script or your code. But in version 8, you can provide the username and password or store them in the lifecycle manager. So then you can pick it up from there. And that's the only location where you have to change the password. You don't have to change it in every script. That's a massive improvement in version 8.

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."
"It became obvious to us that there was a lot more being offered in the product that we could leverage to ensure our VMware environment was running efficiently."
"It is a good holistic platform that is easy to use. It works pretty well."
"The recommendation of the family types is a huge help because it has saved us a lot of money. We use it primarily for that. Another thing that Turbonomic provides us with is a single platform that manages the full application stack and that's something I really like."
"The biggest value I'm getting out of VMTurbo right now is the complete hands-off management of equalizing the usage in my data center."
"In our organization, optimizing application performance is a continuous process that is beyond human scale. We would not be able to do the number of actions that Turbonomic takes on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. It is humanly impossible with the little micro adjustments that it can make. That is a huge differentiator. If you just figure each action could take anywhere very conservatively from five to 10 minutes to act upon, then you multiply that out by thousands of actions every month, it is easily something where you could say, "I am saving a couple of FTEs.""
"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."
"We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time."
"It benefits the speed of our development, and the speed of anything we test and send through to production."
"Now the customer can manage their own server requirements directly. This is very important because, before that, the process included signing off on forms and sending them to the IT Director. It took at least 10 days to create a VM and send it to the person who needed it. Now, it's no more than a half hour to activate a new VM at the customer's site."
"VMware Aria Automation has made a lot of things easier. It has really helped the operations team to spin up the virtual machines."
"compare-to-competition; Citrix was on our short list. But over the last ten years, we have been a big VMware shop. We wanted to continue with VMware because we are confident that VMware can address any kind of problem situation, any challenges. But with Citrix, we didn't find that kind of credibility when we did solution testing, a PoC."
"Using the VMware vRealize self-service portal, we can better manage the lifecycle."
"The initial setup was straightforward. It's easy to deploy."
"The whole VMR ecosystem allows us to serve multiple customers, multiple organizations and also multiple units per customer. We can cover every level without using the whole VRA and the rest of the ecosystem. We don't need to use a separate product to provide separate functionalities for the customer. We can cover all the use cases using only one product on our side which is really helpful. T"
"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."
"It doesn't take long to develop an automation blueprint. You need about half an hour, and then you can install or deploy it on several systems. That was our first great advantage in the project because we urgently needed to deploy across many different systems."
"The most valuable feature is that it allows us to compare the billing between the clouds."
"The product provides excellent daily reports."
"The tool helps us to monitor the services provided to customers as a cloud provider. The product is a monitoring solution that helps customers pay for their utilization of services."
"The way the dashboard works with the main orchestrator to combine different types of cloud providers is helpful."
"The flexibility is the product's most valuable feature."
"This solution has made us aware that we are over-provisioning our virtual machines."
"The most valuable feature is the metering capability."
 

Cons

"The one point is the reporting. We do have reports out of it, but they're not the level of graphical detail I would like."
"I would love to see Turbonomic analyze backup data. We have had people in the past put servers into daily full backups with seven-year retention and where the disk size is two terabytes. So, every single day, there is a two terabyte snapshot put into a Blob somewhere. I would love to see Turbonomic say, "Here are all your backups along with the age of them," to help us manage the savings by not having us spend so much on the storage in Azure. That would be huge."
"The GUI and policy creation have room for improvement. There should be a better view of some of the numbers that are provided and easier to access. And policy creation should have it easier to identify groups."
"Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development."
"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."
"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."
"If they would educate their customers to understand the latest updates, that would help customers... Also, there are a lot of features that are not available in Turbonomic. For example, PaaS component optimization and automation are still in the development phase."
"We're still evaluating the solution, so I don't know enough about what I don't know. They've done a lot over the years. I used Turbonomics six or seven years ago before IBM bought them. They've matured a lot since then."
"Something as simple as formatting the catalog in a different way would be helpful because there is no option for doing so. A lot of the contents for the virtual machine, blueprints that you can request, are hidden from view and there's no way to change the view."
"Our primary challenge is upgrading the product to the latest version. This process requires careful communication with the vendor to mitigate risks."
"Its configuration process could be better."
"The most important thing that we missed in vRanger was the possibility to mount several images instantaneously and present it so we can run it immediately."
"Stability has gotten a lot better. However, the vRO aspect, when you have a multi vRA head, is a little bit finicky still. vRO still needs to stay on one appliance and be one application, because, when you have two, you can't see runs on the other one that are happening when you're not logged into that one."
"Automation or scripting should be simplified so that administrators who are not experts can have a better grasp of automation."
"The initial setup was complex because we have a high availability cluster. Especially when it comes to upgrades, we have a lot of downtimes and problems. The upgrade experience has been painful."
"We would like them to improve the automation part. This is an upcoming area that we would like to focus on."
"It would be a good idea for VMware to be compatible with the most popular orchestration tools in the market."
"The pricing model is complicated and would be more predictable if it were simplified."
"If you haven't established a vSphere cluster and you only have a single server to integrate, you can't deploy any service."
"The product needs some investment in configuration. I would like to see better and more optimized configuration in the tool's future releases."
"I would like it if they could provide their customers with more qualified support."
"Better integration with other VMware toolsets would be beneficial."
"The knowledge base is not available for the engineers, which is something that needs to be improved."
"The solution's private cloud is much too expensive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."
"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."
"Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."
"It made the provisioning of the virtual machines easier and faster. We can react more quickly to customers' demands."
"This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us."
"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."
"It is an open-source product."
"We do plan to see ROI with any new implementation of new technologies being implemented within our environment."
"Customers say this solution is costlier compared to its competitors."
"The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market."
"The pricing model is complicated."
"It's expensive, which is one of the problems with this solution."
"The product is a cost-effective solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
17%
Real Estate/Law Firm
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?
It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is...
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
The implementation could be enhanced.
What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?
We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...
What's the difference between VMware vRA (automation) and vROps (operations)?
vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything y...
Is there any way to try VMware Aria Automation for free?
When it comes to VMware Aria Automation, you have three choices for free runs: Hands-on Lab (HOL) Advanced lab A fre...
Which sectors can benefit the most from VMware Aria Automation?
I was looking at VMware Aria Automation case studies recently and I got the impression that three main kinds of compa...
What do you like most about vRealize Business for Cloud?
The tool helps us to monitor the services provided to customers as a cloud provider. The product is a monitoring solu...
What needs improvement with vRealize Business for Cloud?
The product needs some investment in configuration. I would like to see better and more optimized configuration in th...
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
VMware IT Business Management Suite, VMware ITBM, IT Business Management Suite, Digital Fuel
 

Learn More

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Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

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
Rent-A-Center, SAIC - (Science Applications International Corporation), Tribune Media, iGATE, EMC, Deutsche Telekom, GEFCO, Banca Ifis
Find out what your peers are saying about VMware, Nutanix, IBM and others in Cloud Management. Updated: September 2024.
801,394 professionals have used our research since 2012.