VMware Aria Automation Reviews

I'm not a decision-maker at my current firm. It is a huge company called Allianz Technology. We have vRealize deployed, and I'm part of the administration team. We manage our infrastructure and compute storage as well as the virtualization part with vRA.

We have a lot of internal customers and entities of Allianz whom we treat as customers. They make use of the internal cloud portal to spin up VMs and manage them.

Our vRA 8.0 is a distributed deployment in Europe, the US, and Australia.

vRA has helped almost every team. For example, it has helped the development team and our training team.

I use it to automate operations such as creating a game and setting up a Panzu Kubernetes cluster. I also use it to automate processes after creating a VM. I place at least the lookout of the VM's CyberApp to manage it. 

Currently, I am integrating it with CyberApp and Email. I use the RedSchool API to integrate other automation with the server app. I use NTP to connect the email to the email server.

It helps me build a big catalog and provide it to my end users. It helps us automate the workflow of creating many VMs and the TensorFlow key method. I do not meet many people to operate it live beforehand. It operates for both of my products, but as a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products.

We are a service integrator. For example, a customer might have a roadmap to migrate to the cloud and want to have a single cloud management platform to manage their virtual machines on both public and private clouds. They need a CMP layer. There are multiple tools that we use for this. For example, we use VMware vSphere for virtualization and automation.

I also use other products, such as IBM, which is a multi-cloud management platform for managing workloads running on public clouds (Azure, AWS, and GCP) and on-premises VMware vSphere virtualized environments. So, I use VMware products, such as vSAN and VMware, for virtualization and software.

VMware as a product, has existed for so many years, more than a decade. Now as we move to the public cloud world, we are seeing the acceptability of VMware on the public cloud as well. 

So we have Azure VMware solution as well as we have VMware running on AWS cloud as well, these days.

Our primary use cases are around deployments supporting DevOps, around service provisioning of IP addresses, DNS; self-service entitlement or enablement. And then, driving some workflow processes from our service marketplace, through automation, to actually have them execute within the infrastructure.

It's performing pretty well.

Speed to market. It helps us to improve the rate at which we deploy and the consistency in which we deploy. It has allowed us to scale up and scale down very quickly.

As we meet our open enrollment periods and then we come off of those enrollment periods and go into a normal operational state, we now have that ability to flex down that environment or flex up the environment quickly.

Another side of the coin is the supporting of DevOps. Now, 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. So we can build workflows around DevOps processes that are more consistent. Our past configuration was that they would spin up whole DevOps environments of full, physical machines and they would run indefinitely. That was "Bob's" Dev environment and then "Joe" would come and say, "I want one." And then we'd have all these environments. Now, I can give him his environment for 48 hours and I can take it away and he can spin up another one. Or I can archive it. It allows us to be a little bit more agile.

It's our private cloud platform.

My engineers were able to pick it up quickly and we provisioned and created a private cloud in roughly three months.

Even with the virtualization, it would take us at least three or four days to create a VM. With vRA we have brought that down to seven minutes. The solution has helped increase infrastructure, agility, speed of provisioning, time to market, application agility. Everything got super fast.

It's also easier for IT to support developers. As soon as the developer wants a box, we can pretty much put it out there in a few minutes, instead of wading through a lot of manual paperwork and forms and email boxes and the like.

I was part of the VMware team, doing a double role at VMware:

1. Leading a sales team for the large financial institutions, the top 50.
2. Defining what the roadmap for vRealize suite should be.

I worked for a consulting company. We helped a lot of customers with many things for vRA from provisioning workflows automation to approvals and policies management.

The solution provides a multi-cloud, self-service, infrastructure-as-a-service cloud consumption and delivery layer. vRA 7 was mostly focused on VMware-based internal clouds with a little bit of external clouds. vRA 8 is multi-cloud, which you can host on-prem too. Everybody is moving away to use the cloud, so it is pretty much a done deal that you need to have it.

If you want to start a VM database as a service, then you start a VM, but your customers don't know what size CPU or memories that they want. So, you can also scale it as needed. They can use vRA integration to monitor and scale up or down using the ESXi Server, then VRa works as an integration point.

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.

When you start integrating vRA with the other VMware products, like vRealize Network Insight (vRNI). That is when it starts giving you the capabilities of extending your templates and networks across multiple hybrids and clouds.

If an organization has the capability of being able to use it in their application deployment lifecycle, then they can use the automated infrastructure deployment, but not many companies do. Not many companies say, "When I am going to deploy, I am also going to create 20 virtual machines and deploy on them." They normally start out by saying that there will be a separate team with managers in infrastructure and a separate team that does this in deployment. I have seen only one place that has done this, out of hundreds.

Our primary use case for the product is self-service IT. VMware builds it as a portal for self-service and infrastructure as a service, which is what we are using it for, as we roll forward automating and orchestrating more tasks and being able to push things out of the hands of sys admins and into the hands of the users and app admins.

Digital transformation is more of a people problem than a technology problem in many cases. It is getting people used to the idea of self-service people and not having to go talk to the sys admin all the time, and empowering people to get things done. That's a real big thing. That's probably the biggest part of the change that this tool has on our organization: empowerment.

We use vRealize Automation for monitoring and for some administration tasks. Anytime we do upgrades or patching, we just read the reports and it makes our lives easier.

Earlier we used to spend a whole day to collect all the information regarding upgrades or patches. When we introduced vRealize, it reduced the time to between 30 minutes and one hour to finish the whole job.

It has also improved provisioning a lot. Today, if I want to provision one VM, it takes me five minutes. Earlier, it would take a minimum of 30 minutes to go and choose everything. Now, I can just click once and it can provision my whole VM. We also integrated with our Alexa, so even through voice functionality I can create a VM. One of the guys at VMware, along with our partner, deployed that in our environment. If I say, "Hey, Alexa, I need a VM with four gigs of RAM," it will go and start creating it.

In addition, it has reduced our CapEx and OpEx, especially the OpEx values. Initially, we had 25 people to manage it. After going with vRealize, 15 people can do all the jobs and they can concentrate on other improvements as well. It's good for our company.