VMware Aria Automation Reviews

The primary use case for deployment of vRealize Automation was to facilitate a service provider web portal front-end to our Hosted Private Cloud and Business Continuity solution. This is a fully automated virtualized SDDC, using VMware as the base hypervisor. We also incorporate NSX for network automation, vCenter Orchestrator for workflow execution, and additional software packages to support the service as a whole (vROps, Log Insight, Network Insight, NSX Manager, etc.).

Our core networking is made up of a spine/leaf architecture using Cisco ACI/APIC and our storage is virtualized behind a Hitachi (HDS). We use SnapMirror and NetBackup as our DR tools.

We needed vRA to easily integrate with our hypervisor, orchestration, security (tenant segmentation, PCI), workflows, custom code, and internal monitoring/management tools. Since we didn’t have time to develop our own web front-end during the development sprints, vRA saved considerable time and resource cycles. Its ability to easily integrate with all of the VMware cloud products as well as public cloud providers, like AWS and Azure, out-of-the-box, makes it an even more powerful tool.

vRealize Automation is improving the way we host and serve up our fully hosted private cloud solutions as a cloud service provider. It has created efficiencies in how we deploy, manage, monitor, and develop within the service. It provides velocity both from management and customer perspectives, from ingesting new catalog items, developing new workflows for additional features, and/or allowing customer access to multiple guest OS instances at scale in a shorter time frame.

From a service provider perspective, its ability to integrate with vRealize Operations and vRealize business management suites provides a window for being able to execute predictive and reactive analysis that you can use to automate your cloud solution from a resource, management, and/or customer perspective.

vRA provides that single pane of glass for our cloud tenants to deploy, monitor, access, and manage their VMs/guest operating systems. vRA allows a cloud service provider to quickly build out a web portal front-end interface that easily integrates with all of the VMware vRealize products, providing an all-encompassing cloud solution.

Additional features also allowed us, as the service provider, to configure branding options for the site itself, as well as full integration into the orchestration layer, including workflows, security control, reporting, billing for our cloud admins, tenant admins, and end-user (customer).

The most valuable feature is vRA’s ability to integrate whether with additional VMware vRealize suites or other vendors' cloud products.

Also, vRA in combination with vCenter Orchestrator makes it very easy to design, import, and deliver quality workflows and blueprints. These can be used for various functions within the cloud portal, from both a production as well as a business-continuity perspective. Examples include automated failover activities in combination with SRM and SRA Replication, VM deployments based on a catalog, being able to roll out an entire LAMP stack dev environment with the click of a button, or ingest and inject data into back-end CMBDs, etc.

Its fully integrates with network and storage virtualization via NSX and workflow development, and secure APIs are available to customize automation using other vendor tools such as Puppet, Chef and/or PowerShell.

There are many features that I find extremely valuable but vRA’s ability to be a central hub for all of the parts that make up a hosted private or multi-tenant cloud solution is extremely valuable. Ultimately, the outcome of this design is a highly available and agile solution with a wide array of integration that enables you to provide a fully automated, scalable private cloud solution that can meet the market and customer demands now and in the future.

I have listed some additional features below for general reference:

• Easy integration into other VMware-based vRealize cloud products via SSO
• Single pane of glass interface
• Parameterized blueprints to enhance reusability and reduce sprawl
• Policy-based optimization of virtual machine placement
• NSX integration enhancements
• Enhanced control of NSX-provisioned load balancers
• Enhanced NAT port forwarding rules
• NSX security group and tag management
• Automated high-availability for NSX Edge Services
• NSX Edge size selection
• Enhanced vRealize Business for Cloud integration – cloud nanagement platform
• Improvements to high-availability
• Health Service
• Configuration Automation Framework – Puppet Integration
• REST API

Most of the areas for which there was room for improvement are being covered in the latest 7.4 release which will include all new workflows for additional management of a customer’s cloud and infrastructure, directly from the Web portal itself. Some of these features today require the ability to build out your own workflows, which can become complicated if you don’t have the knowledge base.

VMware is aware of this and is making the next version of vRA and vCenter Orchestrator with this in mind. They are going to include additional granular-level controls from within the self-service portal itself. This will allow us, the service provider, to pass these additional features on to our customer base giving them greater control and management of their dedicated cloud.

Some of the new vRA 7.4 release features include:

• New and enhanced curated blueprints and OVF files
• New custom form designer
• Enhanced multi-tenancy capabilities
• vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager now extends to IT content management 
• New IT content lifecycle management

No issues with Stability now working on testing out the new version on NSXt via blueprints which will provide a whole new level of control and management for our SDDC virtualized networking stack.

No issues currently with scalability of the product or its uses cases it was implemented for.

One of the best support and architecture teams we have ever worked with from a vendor perspective. Very knowledgeable and on the cutting edge of virtualization.

The software setup is fairly easy but does require knowledge of the VMware product suite. The complexity comes in whether this a service or a dedicated infrastructure. Normally in service oriented infrastructures which are purpose built for multi-tenancy where you have multiple customers hosting multiple sub-tenant customers which require many layers of micro-segmentation and security to be built in. In a dedicated infrastructure you are building for one business or a single customer even though they have segmented sub-tenants such as account, IT, Operations etc it is all internal to that business. The level of micro-segmentation and security is much less in complexity to provide a final solution.

We implemented a majority of the service internally and only reach out to the vendors developers prior to making changes in the design that could impact rework to correct bottle knocks and development dead ends. 

From experience working with other service provider cloud products, VMware vRealize Automation Center is the best out-of-the-box solution to quickly build out your cloud portal and fully integrate it into your orchestration layers, as well as your compute and storage infrastructures. It can support multiple public clouds as well as hypervisors, providing that single pane of glass for management, operations, and reporting. I would give it a nine out of 10 as there is always room for improvement, since cloud is always evolving.

For us, it's a software-defined data center, automating compute, network security, and storage; all the infrastructure components.

Lifecycle management has improved substantially. We're no longer seeing customers holding on to their resources because they're no longer difficult to create or destroy. We've seen substantial amounts of both builds and retirements. 

It also cleans up a lot of the manual operations that used to take place - or that maybe didn't take place at all and now do. There's a lot less human error and we're seeing a lot of, let's say, "cleanliness" in our infrastructure now.

The solution has helped increase our agility, the speed of provisioning, and time to market. It allows our IT admins to deploy dozens of systems simultaneously, as opposed to operating in serial, building one system at a time. That has been pretty significant as well.

Lifecycle management. It allows my teams to create, manage, and retire all of our infrastructure objects in the data center.

Also, the XaaS Extensibility - Anything as a Service. We're starting to utilize that more and more.

One of the features that's a struggle today is some of the public cloud extensibility. Some of the plugins that are native to vRA and vRO, I'd like to see them come out earlier for vRO. I understand that in vRA, the plugins are a little bit more polished because vRA is the GUI. But we'd like to see them released earlier in vRO, prior to a GUI being released.

Azure, for example, is a public cloud provider but we have some instability issues with the plugin in vRO. It's okay for us if we separate the vRA from vRO plugin releases. So I'd like to see some increased stability in some of those public cloud plugins.

We don't really have a stability issue with it. It's not a product that really goes down for us. Although it's not a product we consider to be in our "five nines" of availability, like our other systems are, it's more a tool. We're able to maintain it after hours and patch as needed. But I can't even remember the last time it went down during business hours.

We haven't had any scalability issues. We're nearly 10,000 virtual machines that are registered to our vRealize Automation deployment. With Orchestrator, we did see some scalability concerns, but we clustered it and added some additional resources and we were able to scale it up. We haven't had an issue since.

Technical support could be improved. I definitely feel that the product is accelerating faster than the support engineers are able to keep up with the knowledge needed to know what's going on. The developers maintaining vRealize Automation are doing a great job improving it, but VMware is not doing a great job of training the people we call to get support for it.

Being that we have been involved since some of the early 5.x days, we compare a newer installation to the previous, and each time it gets better.

In terms of upgrades, we're just starting to use Lifecycle Manager, which assists with upgrades. I haven't been impressed, so far, with the maintenance of an existing complex infrastructure. But LCM has allowed us to deploy new vRA instances very rapidly, which is helpful for some of our LCM Code Stream movement between our Dev stage and Prod. But for maintaining the existing environment, we just use the out-of-box upgrade capability of the tool, which is so much easier now than it used to be.

We no longer have the significant issues we had in the past. Things are just getting better with each version.

My advice would be to heavily invest in training in vRO. vRO is the backbone of what vRA does. I also recommend that you come up with a plan. Don't try to automate everything in the first step. Find the good use case and make sure you offer new value to the customers that you're building it for, prior to just replacing what they have with something new. IT admins commonly don't like to have their interface changed so dramatically.

When looking for an IT vendor that would integrate in the data center, I look for an extensible API. It's very helpful when that vendor gives me the ability to either write a REST plugin, or they've written one themselves, and they're fully familiar with the software-defined lifecycle. It's great when they have a vRO plugin that I can tap into and orchestrate and automate but, if they don't, I need good documentation of their REST API and then we'll write our own vRO plugin. We haven't really seen many vendors integrate directly into vRA, but if they're tapping into vRO then we're in good shape. vRA and vRO, for us, are just brothers.

The solution, overall, used to not be intuitive and user-friendly but they've taken some good feedback in the last two years and made some significant improvements that have really helped us out in managing upgrades. It used to be very difficult to upgrade. It's gotten a lot simpler and that has made our lives quite a bit easier. Also, the stability of the distributed, highly-available infrastructure for vRA.

We use it for the deployment of new environments and multiple stacks, as well as deployment inside of NSX. It is also used for easy application deployment and container management.

We can do scripting and do customization after deployment. With vRA, we can integrate everything with a single-click. Then, there is also track management and change management control.

The repetitive tasks which took provisioning storage, network, and compute two to three weeks, now take five minutes.

I like the automation that it provides to deploy VMs and multiple apps. The integration with NSX and AWS for endpoints, which allows us to manage workloads, such as the comparison that it does between different VMs. It can do this in AWS or Azure.

Any new VM admin simplifies deployment. Instead of only deploying templates, we can deploy blueprints which are easier on day-to-day operations for an organization.

VMware should go the way of vROps, with everything in one machine, the ability to scale out, and a more distributed environment instead of having the usual centralized SQL database. 

Three-tier environments are not scalable.

They need to get away from Windows.

It depends, because you are still dependent on the Windows machine that does all the requests and pulls from other agents. It can scale out if you size it right the first time.

We used technical support with previous versions.

We knew we needed a new solution when we were falling behind and could not deploy what the business units needed.

The product has come a long way. Now, it is more streamlined and GUI-based. 

I have done parallel upgrades, then used my grade settings for it.

We also evaluated CA.

We chose VMware because we are a VM shop and the product allows multiple endpoints. We could also have endpoints for AWS.

While it's user-friendly use, you need to know what you are doing with it.

Get your requirements beforehand. Make sure of the services that you want to provide and have them nailed out. If you are just writing VMs, then you don't need vRA. If you are providing services, you're going to become a broker of services to people, so you have to plan ahead. Also plan the workloads that you're going to be providing because they will consume a lot.

vRA's Orchestrator allows you to connect to a huge ecosystem with a huge number of third-party systems to automate any and every IT process that you can think of. It makes it very flexible. Makes it really adaptable as opposed to some other systems.

It allows people to move into orchestration and automation, and most customers want to get into that but they don't really know how. vRO and vRA gives them a step through the door to allow them to start building upon. It gives you a framework, it gives you a baseline to let you build from there.

They are doing well as far as iterating quickly, iterating by often adding small things. I think there should be even more integrations with third-party systems. You have Infoblox and Puppet which great. Let's add Chef to the mix and just keep them coming.

So far so good.

Everything is much improved, especially with vRA's automation 7 and newer, as they move more things into virtual appliances and out of Windows. That's a win for everybody. It's a win for the customers. It's a win for us deploying it. It's a win for manageability, scalability, everything.

Tech support is usually great. As soon as you get a live person you're good. It just depends on the level of support that the customer is paying for. Sometimes that's nothing that we can control, it's just what they have.

It's much more straightforward now that it was in version 6.x., to the Nth degree. They have made it so that you can do either a proof of concept or fully distributed version of vRA with a wizard-driven GUI, which is amazing. Now, there are still some little quirks with that wizard, but it being there makes it much simpler than going it manually and installing each component and linking them all together after the fact.

For me, being a consultant, vendor selection isn't what matters. I want to use whatever is best for the customer. So whatever fits their business use case best is what I'm going to go with, what I'm going to recommend.

vRA does most things really well. There are still some issues such that, if you are going to go 100% cloud, if you don't want anything on-premise, there are some other solutions that might have a leg up.

Use vRA, but it's more about the process than it is about the product. You have to make sure that the users, who are going to be internal IT most of the time, that their expectations are set appropriately. Make sure that you have buy-in from the higher-ups as far as automating processes. You have to make sure you have by-in at all levels.

The most valuable features are:

• How it takes what we used to do in the same process as manual steps, and automates them, such as creating servers.
• It's self-service for creating your own virtual machine.

It's shortened down our SLA's for VMs. When vendors request an application for various VM's, we used to take a two week process (approximately) from building a VM, QAing, and building it. Now, it can be done in a matter of two days, at max, thus, shortening the process.

Implementation directly with our SRM product, because we know what the other products are out there that VM is offering, such as Site Recovery Manager (SRM). There are ties which you can customize to put them into that, but it would be nice if it came as an out-of-the-box feature.

It's very stable. Just like any other project, it does have its quirks and kinks, but like anything else you work through it. You have to customize it to get it used to your environment. There are growing pains.

We recently went through two or three upgrades, and now we're doing an upgrade for the most recent version. In that regard, it's pretty scalable. The way we can actually manage our virtual machines directly through the interface is somewhat of a gain as well.

They are very knowledgeable of their product. This all goes back to customizing our kind of needs, because everybody's needs are not a one size fits all. You kind of have to customize it to fit to your environment. They have been helpful with this. Also, when we run into any issues, which have not been many, they've been very helpful with resolving them.

We actually have an onsite resident, which helps as well.

Because the way technology was going, such a physical footprint, people are now going virtual. When we realized that, we started getting a lot more virtual questions as opposed to physical, which is a good thing. We realized we needed to start pumping out these VMs at a much faster rate to meet with our demands. That's what steered us toward this product.

It was a pretty straightforward implementation, but it was just mostly customizing it. We house somewhere around 3000+ virtual machines in our environment. It's hard to customize for that large of a footprint. We have a team who handles the automation piece, since we have such a large virtual footprint.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Look at the support they provide, the backing of their product, and so on.
• Have a big company name, like VM, where they have stability.
• Fitting the your needs - nobody wants a product that they are never gonna use.

If you get a lot of virtual machine requests, this is the product to get.

• Web front-ends
• Orchestrator scripting engine

We're automating a lot of OS builds. The front-end gives us a way for users to go and request those services and the orchestrator pirate lets us automate a lot of the functions involved in them.

It's like a streamline deposit made more available.

I want to see them get rid of the IS component and make it a VMware appliance. There are a lot of requirements for Windows servers, which is not good for our environment. This makes configuration and installation tough.

It's cumbersome to set up. It requires a lot of Window servers, which we don't like and the external load balancer configurations, which we also don't like. But overall it does have an HA solution, so that's better than no HA solution.

We got VMware resources to guide us and help us with the deployment.

It has an HA configuration, which is pretty good. It could be better.

You can scale out deployment so that's good as well. You can just tack on more Windows servers. That's good for scale out.

I'd give them a seven out of 10.

We get a lot of run around in terms of technical support. Usually, first tech we get can't help us. We end up going down the pipeline to get someone that can.

We're pretty heavily invested in VMware, so there was no competition.

We built an SDDC environment and we needed a way for customers to consume services out of it.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was a complex product.

vRA requires a lot of development work. It's not something you just set up, then it works. You have to tailor it to your environment and develop stuff to do with it. There is a lot of development effort with the product.

If you are looking at implementing the product, hire a Dev team.

No, we're using vRA and other VMware products.

They're the pioneers of virtualization.

The vSphere stack and all their other products are integrated with our core stack, which is vSphere. That's really the big reason why we like all their other products.

The most valuable features are:

• Setting configurations options dynamically for servers
• Pulling information about all computers

We are able to control updates on servers to streamline the process

There is still development for states and pillars. The software is open-source so it allows for extreme customizability. If there is something that you think could be improved, you can code it. Our company is currently working on a few projects to help improve and support SaltStack. I would like to see more training on how to use the many different options. There is a lot of of information to go over and it’s hard to keep it all straight. Other than that, if you put the time learning SaltStack, it is a pretty easy and very powerful tool.

We used this solution for a year and a half..

We have not had issues with stability.

We have had no scalability issues so far.

I don’t have experience with their support, but I heard they are helpful. There is a IRC chat that you can join to get help from your peers.

I was not a part of the setup, but from what I have read, it is pretty simple.

The software is open source. One has to pay for support.

Read the documentation to learn as much as you can.

• Remote execution.
• SaltStack being so fast makes it very convenient and practical; allows me to get information about my servers in no time.

SaltStack allows me to answer user requests in a very efficient manner.

I guess the only downside of SaltStack is the limited user base, which leads to poorer documentation because of the lower use.

On a features side, maybe some more security around the API would be good, so it can be used as a central automation tool.

I haven't kept up with latest releases for a while, though, so don't quote me on that.

I have used it for two years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

It's open source and the community is very helpful as usual.

I previously used multiple solutions combined; harder to manage. Salt is easy to use and manage.

Initial setup was straightforward; worked out of the box .

It's open source.

Before choosing this product, I evaluated Puppet and Ansible.

Just install it and use it for remote execution at first. You'll see how powerful it is.