We performed a comparison between Cisco UCS Director and VMware Aria Automation based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Cloud Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The product is flexible and compact. It has a lot of features."
"The main feature of this solution is the integration with all the Cisco solutions and other vendors."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the fabric sharing."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"This is a user-friendly solution that is very good and easy to use."
"Feature-wise, the solution helps one to add multiple environments in one place...It is a scalable product."
"UCS director enables us to be more productive and more agile, and also more self-sufficient because we don't have to depend on anybody else."
"The reason we went with Cisco is that it comes at a very negligible cost as part of the BOQ. Compared to the competition's products, which are incredibly expensive, UCS Director is low-cost."
"Scalability is perfect. We haven't had any issues."
"It benefits the speed of our development, and the speed of anything we test and send through to production."
"The most valuable feature that we have is that it's able to deploy several different operating systems, it's able to deploy whatever we want. We can take a template, spin it up, revise it, save it back off, and be able to have that for other departments. We can have one for our Dev team and one for our research team which has some specific requirements. We can keep track of them and deploy things automatically."
"It provides visibility into the VM space."
"The most valuable features are the metrics and reporting aspects. The historical data and extraction enable us to tell where the trends are and where contentions may exist in the future."
"The setup is getting better with each version."
"We needed vRA to easily integrate with our hypervisor, orchestration, security (tenant segmentation, PCI), workflows, custom code, and internal monitoring/management tools. Since we didn’t have time to develop our own web front-end during the development sprints, vRA saved considerable time and resource cycles. Its ability to easily integrate with all of the VMware cloud products as well as public cloud providers, like AWS and Azure, out-of-the-box, makes it an even more powerful tool."
"We have integrated our CICD pipeline into an automatic catalog request through some API calls. It can request and provision new virtual machines behind the NSX load balancer, straight out of the CIDC pipeline and add those nodes to the load balancer, request SSL certs, do SSL termination at the load balancer so that it's not encrypted behind the scenes, all of which has really been helpful."
"The tool should be a lot more intuitive and make it easy for us to understand and migrate."
"There could be an improvement with the integration with the newest solutions from other vendors' technologies."
"Currently, Cisco UCS Director is unable to integrate with another product or with a server from another brand."
"I would like to see more integration with other solutions."
"The product's pricing needs to improve."
"There are a lot of bugs in the solution. This is an area in the solution that can be improved."
"Simplifying the user interface would go a long way to making it more usable."
"It is not easy to add or expand the product."
"Upgrades are always a pain."
"They should make it a little bit more dynamic, a little bit easier to deal with large-scale AD deployments. They need to make it a little more enterprise-ready. That is the one thing that kills us."
"I would also like to see them streamline the install. It's split between Windows and Linux appliances, and it would be easier if it was all appliances. I think they're going that way."
"There is certainly room for improvement with some of the little things I was talking about, like either better managing of the upgrade process, or just making the infrastructure deployment a little bit easier. It feels like all of the pieces have been automated on one level or another, like with the PowerShell scripts, doing all the IS, Windows boxes preparation. They just need to get it to be more end-to-end."
"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."
"The stability is okay, but could be improved. We sometimes receive strange errors, which can only be solved with specialists."
"The upgrade experience is horrible. It's not straightforward, there are a lot of failures, a lot of support interactions. It's not something that we are able to pull off ourselves. I've been with vRA since it was termed vCSA. We've gone through multiple rounds, and it has never been easy."
"They could extend the ability to use vRealize Orchestrator Automation for organizations with multiple tenants. It should be easier to operate and extend different capabilities from vRealize Orchestrator. Currently, it's difficult to build advanced services in Aria Automation because you need to use the vRealize Orchestrator."
Cisco UCS Director is ranked 23rd in Cloud Management with 13 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 133 reviews. Cisco UCS Director is rated 7.2, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cisco UCS Director writes " Enables centralized management, but the tool is complicated and expensive". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Automation writes "Allows for a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment to suit our customers". Cisco UCS Director is most compared with Cisco Intersight, vCenter Orchestrator, VMware Aria Operations, Cisco CloudCenter and vCloud Director, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director, Morpheus and vCenter Orchestrator. See our Cisco UCS Director vs. VMware Aria Automation report.
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