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."I can manage multiple workloads whether it's on AWS, Azure, or on-premises. They can be managed by using the UCS Director."
"A product that really aids in systems management without complexity."
"An easy and strong configuration, along with its low cost, are some of the features of the solution."
"This is a user-friendly solution that is very good and easy to use."
"The main feature of this solution is the integration with all the Cisco solutions and other vendors."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"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."
"The solution is helpful for centralized management."
"The product saves a lot of time and cost for us. It has valuable features for creating a playbook."
"It's also absolutely easy and intuitive. It uses the same basic layout as the rest of the product suite so it's really easy to navigate, find your way around between the tabs and the areas."
"One of the most valuable features is lifecycle management. It allows my teams to create, manage, and retire all of our infrastructure objects in the data center."
"Our QA department is able to spin up a new instance of Windows virtual machine and test whatever use case they have, then turn it back down whenever they are done."
"Using the VMware vRealize self-service portal, we can better manage the lifecycle."
"We've seen that typically, the people who are provisioning VDIs and server VMs can now utilize most of their time towards other projects and moving the environment forward, instead of just hammering out virtual machines all day."
"vRealize Automation has improved the speed of provisioning just by automating things, making people think about whether a human really needs to do something or can we make the machines do it for us. It is a lot faster to deploy things now."
"The most valuable features for us are capacity planning as well as environment life management; putting in specific templates and workflows that we know are secure. That solidifies the environments that we're in or that are being provisioned. We also know that every environment being provisioned has a lifespan. It affects capacity, so it's great for budgeting, from my perspective, and good for my team."
"The product's pricing needs to improve."
"It is not easy to add or expand the product."
"Currently, Cisco UCS Director is unable to integrate with another product or with a server from another brand."
"The tool should be a lot more intuitive and make it easy for us to understand and migrate."
"I would like to see more integration with other solutions."
"Simplifying the user interface would go a long way to making it more usable."
"There could be an improvement with the integration with the newest solutions from other vendors' technologies."
"Normally, UCS Director is used primarily for orchestration, but when we look at a non-Cisco data infrastructure components, the UCS Director needs a bit more improvement in terms of integration with third-party systems and with existing older systems."
"Automation or scripting should be simplified so that administrators who are not experts can have a better grasp of automation."
"I would like to see support for Google Cloud and Azure. Because they don't support Google and Azure today, we need something that's cohesive with our entire landscape. There is a gap right now with VMware. If you want support for these environments, you have to go elsewhere right now."
"I don't think it's intuitive or user-friendly. I think it's a good tool. Any automation tool, these days, the learning curve is kind of high. You're teaching sysadmins who never developed stuff. Maybe they modified a little bit of code and now you tell them, "Hey, here's the tool, use it." But you have to know a little bit of DevOps. So you have to train them how to do the scripting."
"We still struggle a little bit with the configuration as far as making sure that we have all the endpoints where they need to be, because that's not as agile as we'd like in the back-end. We're working towards that with our DevOps teams to make sure that we're touching the right endpoints and getting the right data."
"We are migrating from vRA version 7 to 8, but the migration is really hectic and time-consuming. There are no straightforward paths to migrate. We are doing an entirely new deployment to go to vRA version 8.0, then somehow get all of the VMs to vRA 8.0. Therefore, it would have been great if VMware had some solutions to upgrade from vRA 7 to 8 seamlessly. This includes the management of all the objects or VMs from the older version. Unfortunately, it is not there."
"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."
"It is too broad scale and complicated. It takes too many clicks to do things."
"vCenter and vRA, I believe they share two different databases so sometimes you have to somehow sync them up. I wish there was only one database between the two or, somehow, one database would rule over the other one, so if you have both products, the vCenter might use the vRA database. Otherwise, when you do stuff in vCenter, you have to write a command on vRA to update the databases."
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, vCloud Director, VMware Aria Operations and Cisco CloudCenter, 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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