VMware Aria Automation Reviews

The most valuable feature is Salt Cloud due to its ability to tie into VMware, as well as Salt Orchestration, because it allows us to script the process of setting up an entire infrastructure.

This product has saved us time in standing up new servers, as well as allowed us to automate the deployment of these servers and the applications that run on them.

• Documentation can be hard to find and examples aren't as detailed. In Salt, you can use modules in an SLS file, as well as via command line. A lot of the time, the official documentation only has a command line example and you've got to dig around through third-party sites to find examples of using modules in an SLS file. It can also be difficult to find documentation on Jinja templating through Salt’s website, as well. Basic examples are given but anything more complex is lacking.
• Salt Cloud Windows support isn't that mature.
• Salt Orchestration lacks logging when states are nested.

I have used it for 1.5 years.

Occasionally minions would time out and not return a response, although the Salt state would still run. Increasing the timeout helped, but this is more of a design concern than an overall stability issue.

So far no issues with scalability were encountered.

I haven't utilized technical support. The forums seem to be somewhat helpful in suggesting workarounds to issues caused by lack of features, but more detailed steps on implementing those workarounds would be helpful (e.g., setting a static IP on Windows VMs setup with Salt Cloud).

I've used Puppet at a previous job. Salt is the tool that was in place at my current job.

Salt is open source.

The product was already in use.

Define the scope of what you need a configuration management tool to use and then look at all available options and the potential drawbacks of those options. Nothing can beat hiring a sys admin with experience in different technologies.

VMware Aria Automation is used for automation.

The most valuable feature of VMware Aria Automation is the versatile automation and deployments.

VMware Aria Automation could improve reporting of the policies. They are difficult to customize. We have many policies but they are not able to be modified to what we want.

I have been using VMware Aria Automation for approximately three years.

The solution has been stable and smooth in operation.

We have one customer using the solution. The solution is best suited for enterprise companies.

The solution is scalable.

The support is good.

I rate the support from VMware Aria Automation a nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup of VMware Aria Automation was not difficult.

We did the deployment of the test environment.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate VMware Aria Automation an eight out of ten.

It is similar to a lab system for testing our software versions. We also use it for cloning customer environments for troubleshooting.

It is mostly for our tech support to test new versions, find bugs, and troubleshoot what is happening at customer sites.

It has made it easier for IT to support developers. Our tech support people are happy with it.

I can make a blueprint with an Active Directory deployment. With everything prepared, people can start installing our products.

It is bleeding edge technology, but at times, it is buggy. 

It is too broad scale and complicated. It takes too many clicks to do things.

I would like a simplified version of the interface for small businesses. We started with Lab Manager. For us, Lab Manager was the perfect tool. It was easy and simple. It had all the screens for machines right up. vRA is too many clicks for the normal, simple user.

Stability is okay. However, this is one of the products which I have had support work on the most.

Scalability is endless. What I would like to see in vRealize Automation is an SMB version, a simplified version, but still have the advanced options. For example, we use a lot of fenced deployments. We have five virtual machines deployed to fenced environments, which is our most common scenario. 

We are a small office with only 600 people and about 16 technical support personnel.

Technical support is very good. I recently had a tech support case last week, and I got the answers that I needed.

We switched because VMware canceled the Lab Manager products. So, we were looking for something, then we started with vCloud, but VMware canceled vCloud too. Thus, it has been a very rocky road. My one message to VMware, "Stick with one direction and stop cancelling products all the time."

I have done all the version setups. For one year, we could not get the first version to work. I think this was version 6.0, but the latest version 7 is good.

I had a consultant help me a little bit. I did most of the work myself because I like owning the products.

Before, we had the vCloud suites, then suddenly we split out to NSX and had to pay two licenses extra just fenced because we don't use microsegmentation for firewall rollouts. Therefore, a simplified version for small businesses would be good.

We are embedded with VMware. We also use OpenStack, but it requires a lot more investment from IT.

It is a complicated product, but you can do anything with it.

We are looking at doing automation at the enterprise-class level.

The product is really excellent. VMWare provides a complete ecosystem. And it covers multi-cloud, which is where the market is going. We are able to cover compute, network, storage, etc. We have been able to take it to the next level where VMWare is providing the validated designs, VVD. 

Let's take compute, for example. At compute we have seen, in a session here at VMworld 2018, with AWS or Azure or GCP, you are able to create an abstract layer on top of it and manage it. That's what automation at the cloud level is.

Similarly, when we are talking about hypervisors, whether it is Linux or Windows, we have been able to create hypervisors and to deploy the solutions on the same server. That's the kind of automation which we are bringing in. It's a complete solution.

Looking at the desktop level, desktop virtualization, VDI-related solutions are there.

A lot of automation issues are coming up in the market. Customers are looking at containers, among the new technologies which are coming up. How we can integrate with the multi-cloud? I can see, in the sessions happening here at VMworld 2018, that all these things are getting addressed, but the container-related solutions are something I am looking forward to.

We are thinking about containers. PKS is one of the issues. We would like to do a container service. In addition, the VMware Kubernetes Engine is something which we are focusing on.

From the storage perspective, we will bring in vSAN; NSX-T from the networking perspective. But what is the is the overall solution? How would this compare with what the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is providing? That is something which we have to look at it. 

VMware has something called VVD, VMWare validated design. How far the container solutions are going to be a part of that is also something which we'll be looking at.

It is absolutely stable, at this stage. We are able to meet our customers' expectations. VMware is a company which has already grown up. That's the reason we're opting for these new technologies, even though it's taking some time. Even if it is going to be a little bit slower, it's going to be stable. We trust VMware.

I have not used technical support but I have heard it is good. My engineers say that it's good.

Our customers feel it's very costly. But when VMware is providing so many things, the cost is on par with what they're offering.

It's really about whether you want to buy the full solution today and utilize it, or if you want to bring in a lot of people, integrate, and spend on that. Overall, if you look at five to ten years of time, either you buy the full solution or you will bring in the people and try save some costs, but it is going to be almost the same.

If your requirements are on par with what VMware is providing, we would recommend it.

I would rate VMware solutions, overall, at eight out of ten. Whenever we talk about VMWare, people only think about the hypervisors, virtualization. But it's not only about the virtualization at the compute level, it's also at the storage level, at the network level, at all levels. It's about a complete solution. It creates an abstract layer on top of all these things.

There are a lot of different benefits with this product, because there are a lot of things that we're trying to automate. There's another guy within my group, he's the administrator of vROps. He's been able to implement a lot of things, and help us script things for monitoring, for patching, and a whole lot of things. It's definitely got a value and it saves us a lot of time.

I could see improving by just knowing how to script a little better, but other than that, I think the product itself is fine.

Very stable solution. We've had very good luck with it.

It's scalable. There are a lot of different things you could do with it. Really it's whatever you want to do. Whatever you want to put your mind to, to make it scale, it'll do it.

It's good. It's excellent. We haven't had any trouble. If there is something that we have trouble with, call them, and we're on the phone with engineering. They're good about taking care of us right away.

It's pretty straightforward. You can read some of the white papers on it. It's not difficult.

It's a great product. It saves us a lot of time. It cut down a lot of late nights for us.

• Interoperability between operating systems with the ability to perform mass automation with triggering
• Integration with many vendors

These features are valuable because I need them to complete the work assigned to me.

The GUI is clunky and hard to use. It could be more user friendly.

• The UI can get complicated very quickly when you start using SaltStack for a large number of machines (100+).
• The organization of the buttons / layout can make it difficult to search for the machine you are looking for. Even with the search function, it's difficult to determine the exact state in the correct order
• The UI should be organized in a more tree-like structure, starting from the initial state (root) with corresponding states being added after (node).

I have used it for six months.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I recommend SaltStack because, for SysOps or DevOps users, automation is a key part of getting your product out and allows for faster time to market.

We have used it mostly for our internal IT. We haven't really published it for customers or other groups to be able to use it. But we've actually just hit the surface. We've used it for rebooting servers, adding applications, automating some scripts; general things like that.

It has improved our organization by automating some of our processes. Automating processes saves us time. If we are able to schedule, say, a server reboot, instead of actually having to log in at 8:00 at night, when we wouldn't normally be on our network - scheduling a reboot after, say, a patch or something. It just allows us to not have to work. It does it automatically.

The most valuable feature of vRealize Automation is being able to - as the name says -automate VMware executions, to be able to automatically reboot; servers, power them up; add applications. That's useful to us in IT.

To improve the product, possibly the interface could be more informational. There's a nice tree structure on the left, but being able to know what to do with that tree structure could possibly be improved a little bit with right-click menus or more information. I'm sure the Help menu is fine, but just more intuitive, maybe.

We haven't really had any problems with stability. Usually, for what we use it for, it has been very stable, very dependable. I feel like it's done a good job.

I feel vRA is scalable. Being able to develop it more, and get more installations, more things to use it for, will be able to help us scale it out and use it for more people.

I have not had to use tech support for vRA, so I don't really have any experience with that. But I'm sure it's wonderful.

I personally have not upgraded the program, but the people that actually manage it have not had any issues with it. That being said, it's still a fairly small installation, or a very small group of people that use the product. We haven't expanded it to be able to know, with the installation, how it has gone.

The solution is user-friendly, to a degree. I feel like you still have to know a little bit of the ins and outs of how to get into it, some of the commands to use for what, exactly, you're trying to do. But besides that, it's pretty user-friendly.

In terms of increasing infrastructure agility with it, we have, maybe to a small degree. I don't feel that, with our implementation of vRealize Automation, we have really gotten very far. We've only scratched the surface. Like I said, we only use it for our internal IT, and we're just being able to save a little bit of time by the things that we do. We haven't really dug deep into what it's capable of.

It has made it easier for IT to support developers but I don't feel like we're at that point yet where the developers are involved. We have it as a future (goal) to involve our developers and have them be able to get on a webpage, and be able to do things automatically, without them having to put in a ticket or request us to do something for them; just making it automated. As we get to that point, though, I think it will be very useful.

Automation and operations.

So far we haven't really implemented it on our own organization as far as using it with IT in the workplace internally. But vRA has helped us bring in a lot of customers because they use things like Chef and Puppet, and this works in that same kind of realm. So it has drawn those customers to us. We are, as part of our VMware venture, working on our expertise in that realm.

Where it is implemented, in the little bits that we've labbed it out, internally, it has, obviously, increased our infrastructure agility. Otherwise, we wouldn't be continuing to implement it. Once you get all the pieces together, it improves delivery times for internal labs for our internal teams.

We like the seamless, non-vendor-specific application that we can provide with it. We're a service provider, so we have all kinds of different clients and they have different applications. Automation works with all of them, pretty much across the industries. The ability for it to be compatible across many different products is really what's important to me because that's what's selling: being able to go cross-platform and be hybrid. That's the most important feature.

After that, ease of use would be up there too. We also like the GUI display which ties in the non-devs with the devs and helps them work together.

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.

Also, I expect it's going to come with time, but there is not too much documentation out there because it's fairly new, and not very many people use the little niche product. So more documentation.

So far, VRA seems stable to me. I don't have any complaints.

We haven't had any scalability issues yet, but we are approaching that potential, whenever we get larger customers. The customers that we do have on, if they do use it, they're just testing the waters with it.

They're very helpful. We have Premier Support with them, so we're always working with them. Our TAM is always on top of things. It's good.

Before vRA, we were using a combination of Chef and Ansible. We moved to vRA because I'm on the VMware side of the house, so naturally, that was part of it. Also, we switched because we foresaw the need for hybrid cloud and wanted to be relatable to VMware, so we could have an answer to compete with business units. We wanted to say, "We have vendor-supported vRA that does the same as your third-party or your open-source." We wanted that name brand with it because that's the department I'm in.

Compared to the previous solutions, while I don't have too much experience with them, from what I understand, from what I have heard from the people I work with that helped me on that side, it is a lot quicker. In the small test bed that we have, it is performing better as far as being able to deliver, and being consistent in its delivery.

The setup is straightforward. There are plenty of hands-on labs and guides. It's more the, "What can I do with this?" As a project engineer, I try to translate from the vendor to the customer, according to whatever they're doing at their end.

We haven't really had any bumps in the road deploying it.

My advice would be to go to hands-on labs to see if it's exactly what you're looking for because, as far as the reality versus the expectation goes, it might be a little bit of a shock, especially for the non-technical person. If they're going to say you, "It's going to be great. You're going to know everything," there are some things you might have to take into consideration. They might have to do a little tutorial for you. I would just try to set your expectations.

I rate it at eight out of ten. I believe it's intuitive and user-friendly. Could it improve? Yes. Could it be worse? It could've been a lot worse. So it's okay.

The extra two points are because one of the first issues, on one of the first versions that I took training on, was around the idea that, yes, here's your dashboard so people can deploy resources without having to know too much, but it seemed kind of bare as far as presenting it to those people. That's the only gap that I see and it's just going to be filled in with user experience and people like me saying, "I'd like a little bubble to pop up," or something to hover with information when someone has to give approval. I'd like for them to be able to see why they are approving this, without having to go dig into why we set up that limit. 

It would be nice to have a tooltip that says, "This was agreed upon..." or whatever comment I want to display. For example, if I want to reference a ticket number internally: "Approved, XYZ," or "Related to mass ticket maintenance ABC," so they can say, "Yes, that's right, this is the DFW migration," or the like. They're non-technical and those are the kind of terms they use. I find the UI is missing that part. I have to explain it to them. And then, of course, they're going to forget, or they're going to get a new guy in, and he's going to say, "Why do I keep having to approve these things?" It would be really nice if it just told him right there. This is why you're approving it because of mandate such-and-such, or memo number 123.

From other products that we work with - I came from the troubleshooting operation side of the house before I started working in Product, so I worked with VMware on ESXi and vSAN - they have always been good at taking our opinions. For vRA, I'm starting that process with them, so I'm not expecting them to have a turnaround yet, but I'm expecting them to take our feedback, for sure.