We performed a comparison between CloudBolt 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."Turbonomic helps us right-size virtual machines to utilize the available infrastructure components available and suggest where resources should exist. We also use the predictive tool to forecast what will happen when we add additional compute-demanding virtual machines or something to the environment. It shows us how that would impact existing resources. All of that frees up time that would otherwise be spent on manual calculation."
"We like that Turbonomic shows application metrics and estimates the impact of taking a suggested action. It provides us a map of resource utilization as part of its recommendation. We evaluate and compare that to what we think would be appropriate from a human perspective to that what Turbonomic is doing, then take the best action going forward."
"The primary features we have focused on are reporting and optimization."
"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."
"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."
"The system automatically sizes and moves resources based on the needs of the applications."
"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."
"We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."
"I find the self-service features valuable."
"Hybrid cloud platform for VM and app deployment and management, with very good stability. It's customizable, easy to set up, and can be deployed within half an hour."
"The initial deployment was super easy."
"Role-based access control and application blueprinting."
"The solution's biggest advantage is flexibility"
"The feature of automated balancing which implemented between two data centers solely for the purpose of a recovery plan is valuable."
"In terms of scalability, vRA has connections to a lot of different systems. It's very flexible and an impressive product."
"A lot of its DevOps for infrastructure capabilities improve reliability. Much effort was put in by some customers, like a large automobile manufacturer, a large telecom, and two large banks, to achieve a certain level of capabilities in this space. These DevOps for infrastructure capabilities have saved time for developers. In one use case for a large marketplace, a typical release cycle took about 80 hours and was brought down to three hours by automating deployment for developers. The quicker that deployments happen, the faster that they can do their product release cycles."
"It's much more stable than the highest available variant."
"The automation of the redundant tasks and the implementation of ServiceNow are huge for us..."
"For repeated installations and provisioning of VMs, we now have a clear definition of what has been installed, and we can monitor all that stuff."
"Currently, the primary feature we're using in VMware Aria Automation is its ability to execute tasks quickly. However, we haven't explored other features like workload management or the full stack yet. So it's hard to make comparisons or fully utilize its potential until we expand our usage."
"The most valuable feature is the portal where you can assign permissions to specific people to request specific items in the catalog and allow them to provision things for themselves. Or it enables them to request different services that you can create through vRO and vRA."
"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."
"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."
"We don't use Turbonomic for FinOps and part of the reason is its cost reporting. The reporting could be much more robust and, if that were the case, I could pitch it for FinOps."
"Some features are only available via changes to the deployment YAML, and it would be better to have them in the UI."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"There are a few things that we did notice. It does kind of seem to run away from itself a little bit. It does seem to have a mind of its own sometimes. It goes out there and just kind of goes crazy. There needs to be something that kind of throttles things back a little bit. I have personally seen where we've been working on things, then pulled servers out of the VMware cluster and found that Turbonomic was still trying to ship resources to and from that node. So, there has to be some kind of throttling or ability for it to not be so buggy in that area. Because we've pulled nodes out of a cluster into maintenance mode, then brought it back up, and it tried to put workloads on that outside of a cluster. There may be something that is available for this, but it seems very kludgy to me."
"Could increase the number of integrations and add more out-of-the-box work flows."
"The management of SaaS must be improved."
"The solution is not easy to use. It's not intuitive enough to click anywhere in the solution and make it work."
"The scheduling feature of CloudBolt needs improvement because sometimes, it doesn't work."
"The area of integrating on-prem and cloud needs improvement."
"It's not cheap."
"I don't find it to be user-friendly or intuitive because, in my case, when I have to deploy SAP systems, I need to jump between the vRA, the vRO, and the actual vCenter itself. I need to go back and forth to do different things... I wish they could make it just one application, just vRA, that does all that. There might be a way to do it but I haven't figured out how to do it yet."
"It is not intuitive or user-friendly. It's complicated as heck. We actually hired VMware Professional Services to come in. I understand the newer version, which we're not quite on yet, is easier and that the interface is better. But the product is really a profession unto itself. The user interface could be improved on."
"Normally, on the first call to technical support, you don't get the right person. The log analysis takes a long time. This is something which should be improved."
"Maintaining the product requires effort and a good understanding of the environment, including how to set up the codes and other configurations. Pricing needs to be improved to improve the customer penetration."
"VMware should go the way of vROps, with everything in one machine, the ability to scale out, and a more distributed environment instead of having the usual centralized SQL database."
"The initial setup is complex. There are too many components to integrate, especially when we integrated with different storage types and backup vendors. All the integration made it more complex."
"My impression of its stability is "middle of the road." We've had some issues where it seems to be a little bit sensitive, where deployments fail and we don't really know a specific reason why. We'll dig through logs and try and figure out what's going on, but it's not always apparent as to why it failed. And you can kick it off again and it'll succeed. So stability could be better."
CloudBolt is ranked 21st in Cloud Management with 8 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 133 reviews. CloudBolt is rated 8.4, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of CloudBolt writes "Should be made considerably easier to use, though it offers much flexibility". 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". CloudBolt is most compared with Morpheus, VMware Aria Operations, BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management and BMC Helix Cloud Security, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director, Morpheus and Microsoft Configuration Manager. See our CloudBolt vs. VMware Aria Automation report.
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