VMware Aria Automation Reviews

The primary use case is the automation of the cyber functionalities. Right now, it is performing well.

For the cyber functionalities, we used to set up the functionalities manually using templates. Now, using the VMware vRealize self-service portal, the user can request a server, and we can better manage the lifecycle.

• Manageability of the blueprints.
• Integration with the rest of VMware solutions.
• Availability of the Orchestrator.
• It is intuitive and user-friendly.

Stability is fine. Though, we have seen some issues with upgrades or installations. This means we have to raise a call every time with VMware.

Scalability is good. It has been fine. We have been using it for quite some time and haven't seen any issues.

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 were not using anything previously. We have been using VMware for quite some time.

We are trying to set up this new 7.4 in a distributed environment. Every time it was failing with different errors. Finally, we were able to finish it with notes that we had taken, and the help of VMware. However, later on in the product cycle, when applying the same procedure into our production environment, we followed all the guidelines and it still failed. This used to be a one day job, and it has been a one week job.

I would recommend use the solution.

We're using it to automate the lifecycle of all the VMs that we are managing.

It is possible to completely automatize the creation and removal of a virtual machine. Not just technically, it also automates the monitoring and asset management. It can automate the entire technical and business processes related to it.

The portal is the most valuable feature. The Orchestrator with automation is also valuable. We try to leverage the automation and self-service portal. We trust these two feature allow us to increase time to market, agility, etc.

For the customer, it is intuitive and user-friendly.

The product was bought by VMware and they are trying to add features, which could be improved. For example, there is a Windows component and appliances with two different databases that have to be maintained in sync. This is a pretty nightmare to maintain.

I would like to have infrastructure simplification, such as one box and one appliance which does everything. Having to have a Windows machine with dedicated DBs is sort of crappy.

Now, it's pretty stable, as long as you do not touch it. However, upgrades are always a pain.

We do not need to scale it. One instance is sufficient.

Technical support has improved. Usually it takes some time for an engineer to respond. We try not to open basic tickets. Our tickets are usually linked to the box and can take several weeks to get a solution.

We used the Orchestrator that was free, but started to build some automation on top of it, then we needed to evaluate different tools in the market.

We have something that is very simple to set up: a single instance with minimal infrastructure. However, we have quite some customization.

Always something breaks when we do upgrade them. We tried to install the latest artifacts two weeks ago, then we had to rollback. We sent the log to support, and we're still waiting for a response.

We did the integration directly through VMware.

We assessed the market. We looked at VMware, Cisco, and a third vendor. VMware came out on top because of the integration. The service that we were providing the most is a virtual machine. So, it made more sense to use a VMware product to provide a VM machine.

I recommend going directly to the cloud which already has the self-service portal and other fancy features.

It is primarily used for developers to spin up their own VMs and destroy them at will, afterwards my group spins it up in production machines. Probably, its most valuable feature is it takes time off of my schedule to quickly, securely, and conveniently deploy virtual machines, then I can work on other things.

The big benefit is it will spin up VMs quickly so it would take about 13 to 15 minutes to deploy a virtual machine. Whereas, if I were doing it based on an email from users who are requesting VMs, it might take time for me to hear back from them. This could be anywhere from an hour to a day. 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.

Quantifying can be a little difficult because we recently rolled out. It is probably 90 percent quicker to get something out the door than it was before. For developers, depending on who is building VMs for them, sometimes they request anywhere from 20 to 100. Now, we can deploy them in a matter of an hour, where previously it might have taken me three days to deploy out 100 VMs.

It would be nice in the next release if they added in tool tips. Whether you're putting it together, adding a blueprint, or you're making a change in the system, highlighting or selecting something and having it tell you what it does or what it will do would be nice. Because it's such a complex system, it's hard to work with unless you've been using it for years to know what everything is doing.

So far, stability is great. We haven't had anything crash or be taken down by bugs that we've come across. 

We left room to be able to expand in the future. This was the job of our consulting company.

Previously, it was just me manually building VMs. 

When my workload started increasing and I started getting more tasks, my manager noticed that it took longer to deploy VMs. At which point, our senior admin knew about this product and suggested that we move forward with putting it into the new environment.

The setup process isn't intuitive and user-friendly, but once it's set up everything after that is easy. It can be as hard as you want it to be, or it could be as easy as you want it to be depending on how you're setting it up. 

It is completely upgraded to the newest right now. 

I spent about a month working on the set up. It was pretty complex. 

It takes a smart person well-versed in anything from JavaScript to building out blueprints to somebody who knows vCenter and vSphere. 

To deploy it, we brought in a consulting company because were strapped for user availability to set it up. Therefore, having a consulting company sped up the process of putting it together.

Since it's fairly new, we don't know the ROI yet. 

As far as value is concerned, it has been essential to our environment. We have been able to deploy VMs quickly and the developers have their own sandbox, so they can spin up and destroy VMs at their own will. 

It was always going to be VMware, because that's our primary virtual machine deployment. 

It is a solid 10. It's completely taken a lot of time off my plate so I can concentrate on other things, including learning the product as well as vRO, vRealize Orchestrator. 

If it's too complex for you, get a consulting company, because it makes the process a lot easier. I would definitely speak with other people who have implemented it in their environment. We've actually done that in the past for other products. It's nice to hear what other companies think about the product. It will help accelerate your decision.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. Ease-of-use.
2. Functionality to the point where it's not going to break, and there are no bugs in it. If the product has been long known to contain very harsh setup routines, it's going to take a long time for bugs get fixed, or there are multiple bugs which keep showing up in every version, this is something that I don't want to deal with.

Our primary use case for the product is automating the basic rollout of a VM.

Our experience with it has been very good. It's one of those things where, if you don't have to think about a product, it just does its thing, it's in the background, you don't have to worry about it, that's always handy.

We're not too complex, we're not a dot-com, but it does help us with smoothing out the variability of things. It makes it so that we can deploy things very easily. We don't use a lot of the higher features it has, but the basic things we do, we can just knock them out on a daily basis. It's not a problem to use.

The flexibility it has given us in being able to deploy things very quickly and easily, taking it from having to build up an image, and deploy something manually, which would take several hours or a day, we can do in 20 minutes; just roll out a template very easily. If we want a half-dozen different systems, we don't have to manually build them. We just point a domain to each: bang, bang, bang, done.

The solution has helped us to increase infrastructure agility, mostly because, in addition to it being able to do its thing on its own, it has tie-ins to other parts of our CI/CD pipeline. We use Jenkins for our build process which, of course, vRA has plugins for, to be able to integrate with it. We use Chef and there is the Chef build as part of our image that we standardized to deploy, and that can tie in with our section of the pipeline that it does for applications.

It has made it easier for IT to support developers because we can stand up boxes a lot quicker. We can have a test environment, we can actually just clone off something and make it a lot quicker and easier for them to deploy; quicker deployment, quicker testing, quicker into production.

The most valuable feature is that it's able to deploy several different operating systems, it's able to deploy whatever we want. We can take a template, spin it up, revise it, save it back off, and be able to have that for other departments. We can have one for our Dev team and one for our Research team which has some specific requirements. We can keep track of them and deploy things automatically.

The tool is also usable for Windows and Linux and Mac. We have people who access the tool who have different requirements. For example, I'm in Windows, but we have a Linux group that also uses the tool, and some of the people in the networking department use Macs. So it's very usable across different functional groups.

We have also found it to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's something that, because it has the workflows that are very easily graphed out - you can follow what it's doing, it's very picturesque, you can see what it's doing easily - it's something that you can hand over to a user who is not familiar with it and they can wrap their brain around it pretty quickly. The networking group, which doesn't access the finer features of VMware a lot, we give it to them. When they want to deploy a tool, they can see what it's doing very quickly. It's not something that you have to understand a scripting language for to see what it's doing.

I honestly don't see much room for improvement, but how can I take a new employee and ramp him up so he can be productive quickly? How do we get the training materials standardized so we can get him up and running really quickly?

The stability is good. It's one of those things that we can just stand up and forget. We haven't really had any problems with it. It's just there, and we can rely on it.

Scalability is one of those things we haven't used or needed. But it's there when do. We have confidence that it will meet our needs when we need them.

We haven't had to use tech support for the product. Part of that is that I do my own support. During the initial deployment, I had a few questions. We already had a VMware representative up there. So I asked him my questions. The support was good.

We have gone all the way from version 5.5 to version 8. VMware provided us the steps that we needed to do to go from this version to this version to this version, the progression we needed. From there, it was very straightforward.

I would easily give vRA a nine out of ten. It has done everything that we need. We're not the most complex use case, but it's done everything we need, we can just forget about it in the background.

It's a nine and not a ten because of the training stuff. It would be helpful to have a nice flow of training for a new employee. I'm the "old guy" of the shop and we're bringing on new people or new use cases. For example, the user-services department needs to start using it. How do we bring in new people to use its fleshed-out features, in addition to just our using it, where other departments are using it? How do we bring those people in? That's the only thing we really need.

Initially, we used it for private cloud. Now, we are trying to go with a hybrid model.

In terms of performance, right now we're making revisions to ensure that it is hybrid-compatible. We have multiple engagements with VMware to facilitate it that.

Productivity has definitely increased. We are not relying on engineers to actually build out the infrastructure anymore. That's the main benefit. From an infrastructure perspective, it has definitely increased productivity, ensuring that the engineers' time is well spent on other, more important tasks, rather than the basic provisioning that they were doing earlier. 

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.

I'm curious to test out the features that have been announced. We'll see how that goes from a hybrid perspective. I'm looking forward most to the hybrid capabilities.

The stability needs a lot of work. The troubleshooting component of vRealize is a pain. The administration and the upgrades are not up to the mark. If they were able to improve on that, that would be the best thing and would make it much easier to run it in the enterprise.

Since we are looking at public-cloud scalability, as long as that model works, I think we should be good. We're not too focused on the scalability on-prem but we want to see how it scales out to the public cloud.

Our experience with technical support has not been great. There seem to be multiple rounds of escalations surrounding support for vRealize Automation issues that we have encountered.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was complex. The certificates, the distributed install, wasn't straightforward, I'll just leave it at that. We had Professional Services come in for the first round of install. During the second round of install, when we tried to do the update ourselves, there were multiple points of failure. It was not easy. The install, the upgrade features, are not easy at all. The administration part is what is very problematic with vRealize Automation right now.

The upgrade experience is horrible. It's not straightforward, there are a lot of failures, a lot of support interactions. It's not something that we are able to pull off ourselves. I've been with vRA since it was termed vCSA. We've gone through multiple rounds, and it has never been easy.

We were initially thinking about vCloud Director but we're a VMware shop so we wanted something that is native to VMware technologies. We didn't approach a lot of other vendors. One of the things that is important for us when selecting a vendor is whether it fits in with our footprint or not.

I rate it at six out of ten right now. To get to a ten, they definitely need to improve on the administration and the troubleshooting. From an operations perspective, it is a nightmare. From a user perspective, it is pretty good.

We use it to deploy virtual machines in our traditional VMware environment. We don't use it as a front-end for our customers but it works fine for us, on the back-end.

We can use some of its functionality to avoid having to write custom code for the placement of virtual machines. That is the main way we get use out of it. Also, the deployment time is less than it was before. It's all automated, it's quicker than when it was done by hand.

The most valuable feature is the automation of the deployment of the whole machine.

We also use it to pre-install the applications that the people selected when they ordered the machine, so they get a fully functional machine.

In terms of usability, It has had its challenges. It requires a lot of custom code to integrate into our environment. It can take a little while to get it to do what we want, takes some code instead of having built-in functionality. Part it is how we use it. It would be a lot easier to use in a greenfield scenario versus brownfield, which is the way we are using it.

I would also like to see them streamline the install. It's split between Windows and Linux appliances, and it would be easier if it was all appliances. I think they're going that way.

The stability is pretty good now; previous versions, not so much, but it has improved. In earlier versions, we had issues with crashes, but the latest version has been much better.

We have not had any problems with scalability. We're not pushing the boundaries on the number of deployments with it, but no issues.

Technical support has been good. We have MCS, the mission-critical support, and they've been good. The occasions when it is taking a while to get back to us is when the technical support person needs to contact engineering. That handoff between engineering and support takes some time, at times.

We had a little homegrown thing but that doesn't really count.

When selecting a vendor, if we already have an established relationship with the vendor, it's easier than going to a new vendor and establishing a new relationship.

Setup in the previous version was not so straightforward. They have made big improvements in the later versions. The first one was a pain but the new one is fine. A couple of versions back, they added an automated install that did not exist in the earlier versions that we deployed.

Upgrading took a little while because we did a side-by-side upgrade. There was a code migration, all our custom code needed to be migrated, so it took a little bit of work. But, overall, it was fine.

Time savings are our ROI, the time to deploy machines. I haven't done any studies on the exact ROI, but saving time is always good.

Right now, it works for what we use it for. We're not using all its features, but the pieces that we use work fine.

Primary use case is for automatic deployment of VMware guests.

It's performing as we want. We're not really asking anything too complex of it, but it does what we ask of it.

Our organization started to move a lot more towards automating all the things that we can. We're catching up to that, but we're definitely heading in that direction. It's one of those things that enables us to tie in with our other pieces, with automating the operating system, etc. VMware is then able to automate the build of our virtual machines.

In terms of infrastructure agility, we're still getting our feet under us in some areas, but it's definitely playing it's part and doing what it does well.

Our speed of provisioning has also improved. We used to build systems manually, which would take four hours or a day. Nowadays we're able to spin something up off a template that we update every so often and it takes about 20 minutes. We can take an existing template, build it back up, add some configuration for it, specific applications, turning things into what the developers need, and then we can have them deploy it off that. It makes it so that we can have customization within a framework.

The most valuable feature is the integration with some of our other automation platforms. We're starting into Jenkins, and it has a plug-in for other automation of operating systems and things. So it works together with our infrastructure. We don't have a very complex environment, we don't have NSX yet or anything really crazy, but all the things we do have, it has been able to interoperate with them.

It is intuitive and user-friendly. It took some growing. We had to figure it out in the beginning, but that was a couple versions ago. We like the improvements that have been made over time, so it's definitely been able to progress with the environment.

We don't have too complex of an environment, we're not doing machine-learning or any of the advanced features all that much. We're a pretty straightforward IT shop. We just provide servers, and then, from there, it's what the customer wants. The next step we would probably like to see is to have a customer portal, so instead of our having to punch the button, the customer could. But I believe that VMware offers enough that setting that up is more on us, rather than waiting for them offer it.

We needto learn more, advance our usage of the product. We're doing what we can with what we have, but we have to learn a bit more. Better training, or training modules, wouldn't hurt. I haven't personally looked through what the portal has, but more training is always good, so we could take a new employee and point him to the training and get him up to speed quickly. I have had 10 years or so experience with VMware, but I'm the old the guy in the department. Everybody else is newer than me on this and not everyone has my experience. So the training would be nice.

I've been impressed with the stability so far. It does what we ask it to. That's always nice. You don't have to think about it. We haven't had any downtime.

We can scale it up or down. We haven't needed to yet, but we can.

We haven't had to use technical support. I do a lot of blog reading, so I look up my answers on my own. But tech support, on other issues, has been where we need it to be.

We weren't using much. This was right at the beginning of when we were starting to automate things. We saw the VMware automation and decided that, since we had VMware, it would be the logical choice. And then we started with Jenkins for a lot of our other operating system features. Jenkins, of course, has plugins that talk to VMware natively, so it was a natural fit.

When selecting a vendor, the biggest thing for us is multi-operating system support. There is the classic divide. I'm on the Windows side. We have a Linux department also. When looking at different tools, something might be better for Linux but we have to have something that will work for both of us. We don't want to have two different tools for two operating systems. Whereas the Linux team wanted to use Puppet instead of Chef, Chef supports Windows and Linux both, better. The nice thing about VMware, aside from it being a lot more OS-agnostic, is that both teams can use the product. One product for both operating systems. That was one of the primary things. We could have a tool that runs great, but it might be a situation where, "Oh yeah, your Windows support is lame." That's the big thing for us, the interoperability between operating systems.

I thought the initial setup was straightforward. The biggest thing, once we had it set up, was to integrate it with the vCenter, but that was pretty straightforward. That was part of the workflow. It is automated within the product as part of the initial deployment, which is really handy.

The upgrade experience was also quite easy.

Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point.

There were not too many on our list. VMware was the natural fit. We saw the automation. We liked it. Chef, technically, will do automation. It has connections into VMware. We preferred having the VMware automation handle it. Chef will do it, but it doesn't have as many things. We would have had to write a lot more tools for it. It's one of those things where, instead of Chef's being the one tool to rule them all, where we do that for everything, we branched out to VMware automation to handle its subset.

Jenkins is a Swiss Army knife. It will do literally everything. The problem is that you have to tell it to do everything. You have to build all of the features into it that you want. There's a language to do it, but it just says, "here's the entire toolbox, do whatever you want." It doesn't have as many pre-packaged things. VMware has the ability to build things, but it has a lot of things preconceived, which is very handy. If I just need the basics, I need to stand up some VMs, it already has those workflows built in. Jenkins doesn't have nearly as many things built in. They can both expand to what we need, but VMware had some pre-provided things that were very handy to get off the ground quickly.

vRA has a very nice toolset for being able to integrate with VMware. It is great for being able to automate things within the VMware environment. We probably need to learn more about it, so we can fully realize its use, what the plugins for other things are. But it's doing everything that we need for now. We've seen that it has room to grow with us.

• The agility that it offers.
• The flexibility that it offers.
• The scalability that it offers for us to serve our end customers.

That's really helpful.

At this point in time, it's support for multiple platforms. It already supports certain platforms, so extending that to the multiple cloud platforms and services, that's where we are looking to go.

We have been using it for the last couple of years, and it has pretty much worked for us without any issues.

It is very scalable. We are currently using some 20,000 workloads across multiple customers.

VMware support has been very helpful throughout the journey of using all of the VMware products. I rate them five out of five.

The basic setup is pretty easy, but then into the next phases it all really depends on what services you want your end customers to subscribe to. Depending on that, the complexity will vary.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor include:

• What is it really offering, for us as a customer, and for our end customers?
• How much flexible they have in understanding our needs and accommodating those needs.
• Support: How much support are they ready to offer, what are their capabilities in terms of getting us live, through the product lifecycle, and then helping us manage that product as we move along?

I think vRA stands at the top of the list of the products that we rate, because of the problems that it has helped us to solve, in terms of providing the services to our end customers. I think it has helped us a lot.