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.
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.
"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."
"I have found the solution scales well."
"We like the basic operations that we can do with the VM such as restarting, rebooting, creating snapshots, and deleting snapshots."
"vCloud Director has improved our organization in so far as it is an easy solution to sell. I believe this is the case due to the fact that it is an easy tool to manage and to configure."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is its ability to host customers on their own cloud."
"The solution has more capabilities than OpenStack and integrates well with NSX and vCenter."
"This is the go-to tool for anyone looking for standard out-of-the-box capabilities in a fully multitenant public cloud software that they can leverage to offer services to their customers."
"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."
"We are able to provide self-service to all of our IT/development teams to expand and decrease their environments at will."
"The most valued feature is the streamlining of the DevOps process, automation and orchestration. It provides the ability for the entire Dev lifecycle to actually be incorporated into a single stream."
"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 most valuable features are that it's multi-tenant and the ability for scale."
"The self-service capabilities are by far the best that we've seen in terms of features. If the user is being able to log in and make requests himself, from the onboarding process all the way to the end, that's very helpful."
"The product saves a lot of time and cost for us. It has valuable features for creating a playbook."
"I personally spend a lot of time in vRealize Orchestrator, so being able to directly tie into the back end on the APIs, I find that to be what really is the most advantageous thing for me."
"It would be great if Microsoft and VMware come together and become a common tool."
"Sometimes, there is a disconnection that happens between vCloud Director and its underlying VMware vCenter, where the actions are supposed to be taking place, making it an area where improvements are required."
"vRealize Orchestrator is an expensive tool."
"The initial setup of the vCloud Director was not complex and not easy, it was in the middle range of difficulty. It could be made easier."
"We are having a bit of a problem with vCloud Availability. We know that vRA has a new product, HCX. We would like to know about it, then migrate to the product."
"There didn't seem to be any type of integrated path on how to do the initial setup. There seemed to be different bits of paperwork or instructions available from various places. We always had to go looking for what to do next."
"This solution could improve by adding root cause analysis."
"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."
"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."
"The connectivity between VMs is easy, but they can be made more effective if we have a single proof point where we can configure all the biggest data at a single point."
"It does go down from time to time. We have some issues with the appliances sometimes and we have to do reboots in the middle of the day. That affects the ability for them to deploy."
"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."
"We had a lot of issues at first. Especially with doing any kind of upgrades, it was a complete tear-down and a complete rebuild of all the Blueprints. The upgrade process was not easy or intuitive at all. But it seems to be getting better."
"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."
"One of the features that's a struggle today is some of the public cloud extensibility. Some of the plugins that are native to vRA and vRO, I'd like to see them come out earlier for vRO. I understand that in vRA, the plugins are a little bit more polished because the VRA is the GUI. But we'd like to see them released earlier in vRO, prior to a GUI being released. Azure, for example, is a public cloud provider but we have some instability issues with the plugin in vRO. It's okay for us if we separate the vRA from vRO plugin releases. So I'd like to see some increased stability in some of those public cloud plugins."
"7.5 is not user-friendly, in fact, it's a nightmare. They changed everything on the graphic user interface, the mode where the user interacts with the product."
vCloud Director is ranked 6th in Cloud Management with 61 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 133 reviews. vCloud Director is rated 8.0, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of vCloud Director writes "Offers flexibility of handling workloads and good scalability". 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". vCloud Director is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), VMware Aria Operations, Morpheus, CloudStack and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, Morpheus, vCenter Orchestrator and SaltStack. See our VMware Aria Automation vs. vCloud Director report.
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