We compared VMware Aria Operations and VMware vSphere based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Ease of Deployment: Users of both solutions find them easy to deploy.
Features: Users of both products feel that they are fairly stable and scalable.
Users of VMware Aria Operations find its dashboards and interfaces to be intuitive to use. However, they are divided over how effectively it integrates with other products.
Reviewers of VMware vSphere find its integration capabilities to be highly effective. However, they feel that its storage management capabilities could be improved.
Pricing: Users of both solutions find them to be expensive.
Service and Support: For the most part, users of both products find their technical support to be effective.
Comparison of Results: Based on the parameters we compared, VMware vSphere seems to be the superior solution. Our reviewers feel that the question concerning the effectiveness of VMware Aria Operations’ integration capabilities makes VMware vSphere a better investment.
"From a troubleshooting standpoint, beforehand it took us a lot of time to actually go into esxtop, pull the actual raw data that was actually happening from a storage level, a network level, a CPU/VCPU and memory level. But having all of these resources at our fingertips, from a graphical user interface, we can pinpoint the pitfall very easily"
"I like that we can see what amount of the CPU has been used and what's been handed out. We can see how we can bring the virtual machines in line with what actually has been used which has saved us cost."
"For me, it's the dashboard."
"The most valuable feature is it's pre-warning. We get to know ahead of time when systems are starting to have problems. We can pay attention to the alerts and know right away that there's an issue developing at some point. We also use it to monitor poorly configured VMs: over-configured, under-configured."
"I have found the reporting tool, capacity planning, and reports for performance monitoring the most valuable features."
"The dashboards are great. You can quickly see things at a glance without having to dig through a lot of data."
"The initial setup is very straightforward. The platform and add-on solutions are straightforward."
"It has reduced the time it takes to troubleshoot issues. We have customers trying to pinpoint and isolate issues using vROps. The information it provides helps them to pinpoint the issue a lot faster and resolve anything a lot quicker as well. They have a lot less downtime."
"We are able to create virtual machines and move them from one host to another, controlling the resources."
"The speed of the solution is excellent."
"Once you have everything configured, it is relatively straightforward."
"I like the standard features."
"I use customization to prevent any network and DNS collisions to the router."
"VMware Tanzu (container) is the most valuable addition because you get an efficient solution to manage the VM and container in a single pane of glass."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the overall virtualization technology and the new features that allow you to move servers from one system to another."
"The solution is very straightforward to implement."
"I would like to find a tool that is a single pane of glass for everything. The endpoint operations agent doesn't really do much when you install it on an endpoint - for example, on a Windows Server or a Linux server. You don't really get any beneficial information at the OS level from VMware tools."
"I'd like to see more of the advanced reporting without having to go to the advanced product and paying the extra price. Canned reports are great, but you shouldn't have to pay for custom reports."
"The database services in the tool as backup services are friendly and can be deployed in the release to production. However, in the new features, I would like to include more online documentation that can help service generate early alerts."
"I sure don't find the solution to be intuitive or user-friendly. It takes a lot of time to get familiar with the interface. You've got to spend a lot of time poking around there, it's not very user-friendly. There have been improvements over the versions but, even still, there is a pretty steep learning curve for the product, in my opinion. In the latest and greatest version, there has been quite a bit of a step up from the last version, as far as the user interface goes. they are making improvements. So that's positive."
"I rated this solution a nine because I haven't had any issues with it and it has been intuitive and easy to use. I don't know it well enough to give it a ten."
"The automation piece could be done simpler."
"compare-to-competition; We had a lot of homegrown solutions and different products. We have Splunk, we're using Tableau, different reporting services that were based on gathering our own data, power CLI scripts, going out and individually running things against vCenters, pulling them back in, and then dumping them into something centrally that we could view for capacity. But it really was point-in-time, it wasn't real-time, it wasn't something that could even be predictive for us. We would look at it and say, "Well, that looked different last month so let me go look and see why," and then it was a lot more time-consuming to go about that method. It was more of a manual method. vROps is a tool that gathers that data every five minutes, or whatever the time duration is that you have set for collections. We're more up to the minute, more quick to respond. I think it's a smarter product than homegrown stuff. That's why we moved away from the homegrown stuff."
"There is a lot of stuff which is hard to read and understand. I must do a lot of research to understand what is going on with the hardware."
"This solution should have a better backup policy. Furthermore, there should be an ability to expose the universal machine. In the current version, you need to shutdown and use an offline virtual machine to backup."
"Lacks a simplified integration with services automation."
"I would like to see improvements in simplifying automation, cloud native deployment, administration, and fault resolution."
"The ability to run ARM based VMs on an x86 platform for testing purposes. With the growing use of SBCs running on ARM architectures for IoT devices, it would be very useful if developers could build and deploy VMs running operating systems like Raspbian used on Raspberry Pi devices on their existing x86 ESXi environments. Even if this is not possible through some form of emulation, the ability to add ARM hypervisors to vSphere environments would be very useful. This will enable more rapid development cycles for customers just getting started with IoT but already existing vSphere users."
"An area for improvement is that when comparing VMware to Nutanix, Nutanix has higher availability, like clustering for virtual machines. That is a good idea and VMware could profit from something like that for higher availability installations."
"In the last couple of years, the breaking apart of specific added benefits and charging license upcharges for them. That would be the only negative thing that I have to say: As a large consumer of the Hypervisor, we have a hard time justifying the cost of utilizing the extra products, especially when it's a couple of grand here and there, a couple of hundred dollars here and there. It's hard for an IT administrator or an architect to sell to upper management. When they're seeing so much ROI from the Hypervisor, it's hard to show them that there is extra value in the additional products that can be tied on top."
"They need to stop pushing code out so fast."
"The challenge that we have is keeping the system up to date, as well as having the internal resources to maintain that platform. We're not an IT company, so it's challenging for us to keep the IT resources in-house."
VMware Aria Operations is ranked 1st in Virtualization Management Tools with 360 reviews while VMware vSphere is ranked 2nd in Server Virtualization Software with 446 reviews. VMware Aria Operations is rated 8.2, while VMware vSphere is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of VMware Aria Operations writes "It has good stability, but the report-generating feature needs improvement". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSphere writes "Offers good performance and is useful for banking systems". VMware Aria Operations is most compared with VMware Aria Automation, IBM Turbonomic, Nutanix Prism, Veeam ONE and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager, whereas VMware vSphere is most compared with Hyper-V, Proxmox VE, Oracle VM, VMware Workstation and IBM Turbonomic.
We monitor all Virtualization Management Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
