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.
"So far, we have had no problems at all, as it has been very stable. It is working well."
"Remote console (ability to control booting and OS installation process)."
"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is its ability to host customers on their own cloud."
"I like the functionality that's available with Orchestrator. The platform stability stuff that I would be involved in worries me from the automation side because you have a lot less hands-on control of things. Price point, it kind of puts us off."
"The deployment is easy."
"The stability is rock solid."
"The product allows us to add or remove features."
"The initial installation and setup are very quick."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the way that it plugs into our monitoring systems, and Infoblox and Puppet."
"Among the valuable features are the ease and speed of creating the VMs. Originally, we provisioned them manually and it would take us two days to do the provisioning... but with the automation, we are able to provision a VM with the click of a button, within seconds. It cut down on the time as well as cut down on the expense and employee cost in provisioning."
"We have it deployed in a highly-available environment and scalability is nice because we just had another ESX host and then we are able to increase the capacity."
"The extensibility of the solution when it comes to writing your own ABX actions is a valuable feature. You can write it in PowerShell, JavaScript, or Python, which is great."
"vRealize automation stability is pretty good. They are always fixing bugs. The product team is doing a great job of addressing any issues that we might have."
"It's extremely convenient to be able to spin something up and be able to work on other things, because it's already done it, making my workload lighter."
"We automated many tool deployments with the help of the product, cutting short manual deployments and eliminating the need for human interaction. Its most valuable features include integrating various tools and working with different products using plugins."
"It would be beneficial if some features were built into the platform rather than requiring integration with multiple products, reducing complexity and licensing concerns."
"In the next release, we would like to see improvements with the pricing. It could be reduced."
"If you use it for a lot of customers, it is too heavy for this solution."
"I would like to see mode accessory recovery and integration with SD-WAN."
"The tool needs to add more features to improve the console."
"We use vCloud Director along with Terraform, and it's difficult to make them work together. It takes a long time to deploy virtual machines with Terraform in vCloud Director. For example, it can take about one or two hours to create 10 machines. It takes up a lot of our DevOps' and engineers' time in comparison to that with other solutions. This is an area that they should work on and improve."
"vCloud Director could use the vCenter database to store information. This way, we don't end up in a situation where we have things going out of sync."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution could include more integrations and supportability around the container space."
"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 stability is why I rated it a seven and not higher. There were several cases where we had to restart some services because it wasn't working correctly anymore. People cannot extend their machine or replay their machine. There is no alert to say that there is a problem and that we should stop the service. The monitoring system is not very good."
"The basic support is not there for Google Cloud and Azure. They are unable to provision nor do cost controls. Google is still left out. It is great that they have done AWS, but we are a retailer which means nothing to us because it is a competitor. Azure is good, but Google is where a lot of our development environments are."
"They can improve on the dashboard representations and the options for non-technical people. I would like to see the ability to customize that and maybe provide them with helpful guides to what subscriptions they have. Sometimes, I find that I have to do more explanation to people who do approvals. I would really like to customize the display to the terms they use in their particular business unit. So a little bit more of a nod to the customization of the UI for non-technical users would be helpful."
"It would be better if VMware would provide API documentation for developers and customers on the Internet."
vCloud Director is ranked 6th in Cloud Management with 62 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 Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, Morpheus, vCenter Orchestrator and Red Hat OpenShift. See our VMware Aria Automation vs. vCloud Director report.
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