VMware Aria Automation Reviews

vRA is a great tool. It gives a lot of flexibility. It gives the customer an experience to automate their processes, their provisioning process. So, we widely adopt that into our environment to automate a lot of provisioning processes to automate the VM provisioning. Thus, it's a great tool, which actually gives a lot of flexibility in terms of provisioning and orchestration.

I would say maybe a better interface. It looks very plain. So, a more user-friendly interface, so the vRealize Automation tool could be improved.

It is a very stable solution. It's a state-of-art kind of solution. It gives a lot of flexibility. It's customizable. You can tailor it according to how you want vRA to work for your organization. So it's a very stable tool. It's a very cool tool.

• It's scalable. You can scale it to whatever you want to do.
• It's customizable. You can tweak it to how you want to use the tool.

The tech support is pretty awesome. Whenever you have issues, you engage them. They are on top of the issues, and they get a resolution for you. It's a top-notch type of support from VM tech support whenever you face issues with vRA.

It is straightforward. It's not very complicated. Most of the tools that VMware develops are pretty straightforward. You just click off buttons. It's easily understandable, and it's easy to implement and use it.

It's one of the cool tools in the industry. Go get VMware.

The ability to programmatically describe the desired state of a single, or an entire fleet of servers, on-premises, and in a cloud environment.

SaltStack gave us very useful automation tools that allowed us to standardize our environment, move at a much faster pace through repeatable deployments, and self-documentation of our infrastructure.

It allows us to describe the desired state of our entire fleet of servers through simple to understand syntax and templates all available at a single place.

This is great for things like documenting what a single machine or a group of machine does and how they are configured. It is also good in the event that one of them is lost and a new one needs to be provisioned quickly.

Instead of setting it up by hand, we end up telling it "you are this type of machine" and SaltStack will take care of ensuring that the machine becomes what is expected.

It also means that any machine of "this type" will be setup in a consistent manner thus avoiding unexpected surprises that could potentially become the cause of outages.

Each new version seems to bring a new set of bugs to the table and upgrading is risky, especially for a tool at the core of the operations and infrastructure.

A hardened set of tests would be much appreciated.

We have encountered many bugs during upgrades in the past and it seemed to me like those could have been caught by the developers at a much earlier stage then after doing a widespread release.

We have used this solution three years in production

We have encountered several issues when we upgraded to 2015.8. Some of those were eventually fixed by the community and through fixes we submitted to the project.

We have managed a fleet of hundreds of servers without any scalability issues on the horizon.

We have not requested technical support.

We evaluated Chef, CF Engine, and Puppet and we ultimately decided on SaltStack because:

• It is written in Python: Introspecting the code base, committing fixes and improving on the tools were easy for us to do.
• The amount of tools already baked in the product and the extensive list of formulas made available by the community.

The initial setup was simple enough to get started and see the benefits that the solution brings. There are many tutorials available to get someone started.

Unfortunately, our experience is limited to the open-source (community) version. We have no information in regards to the enterprise offering.

We evaluated CF Engine, Chef, Puppet, Capistrano, and Fabric.

Take some time to learn the types of problems it can solve and you will easily see the benefits that it can bring.

Our use case is infrastructure automation, like self-service.

We utilize all the blades that we had available in the computes, mostly going into VMware vCenter.

When I have been using it, it has been mostly for private compute.

We provided the ability to request virtual machines to our end users. Before, this was a very manual process, which took engineers to do. Now, it's an automated process.

vRA has enabled us to leverage existing VMware processes, systems, and training in our organization to support IT ops. 

Most valuable thing is that it's flexible. You can do anything with coding.

VMware needs to make it to where it is not as custom. Right now, you spend a lot of time making the services work. In order to get it up and running initially, that takes time. I would like it if they didn't require custom code and we could get it running out-of-the-box.

I have been using vRA for about five years.

Stability is pretty important. For example, if the platform goes down and people can't provision anymore, people are relying on the automation versus old manual processes.

Our developers and IT consumers use it as well as other infrastructure teams.

vRA is the means for 90 percent of our infrastructure requests. There are use cases where things, like big data or bare-metal, don't necessarily provision this type of stuff.

The service of VMware during our deployment was average; I wouldn't say VMware support is exceptional.

Post-deployment, it takes time to get to the right people in order to get proper support.

We did use a previous product, but integrating it with VMware was very custom.

There is complexity to the setup. You have to custom write code for any integrations. It took six months to make it end user ready.

There were about 10 of us involved in the setup. We have just a cloud team.

We have seen ROI from replacing manual processes with automation.

vRA has helped to automate deployment for developers. The solution increases developers’ responsibilities and productivity because now they can provision their own VMs and focus on the code.

The solution’s automated processes have reduced infrastructure provisioning time. Automation takes the time down to about an hour. Whereas, it could take days if it was done manually. This time reduction also applies to vRA's automated processes, which have reduced application provisioning time.

The solution has reduced time to market for our apps. It takes the burden off of our internal processes, which can now provision VMs in an automatic fashion.

It is pricey for what you get. Nutanix is cheaper.

We did not evaluate other options.

Make sure you give yourself enough time to implement or replace all your use cases as a business.

The solution requires specific expertise with it to be able to use it effectively.

I would rate this product as a seven (out of 10). 

It is our service catalog for our hybrid cloud which is the most valuable feature.

It allows us to be more agile and provide services to our company more rapidly.

There is room for improvement for mostly stuff around containers and controlling containers.

This solution is very stable.

This solution is very scalable.

I have used technical support. They are excellent. We used their professional services to help us install it.

I just knew where the industry was going. I just knew that it has been moving for a long time in that direction and I was looking for something that we already owned. Also, the team was knowledgeable so that we could use them for orchestration.

The setup was complex. It's a lot of independent components that are put together that make up a software-defined data center. So, it's really complex. They sent an in-house team.

Support, cost, and functionality are the factors that we look for while selecting a vendor.

VMware was the only one that we actually looked at because the other option was OpenStack; we weren't going with OpenStack.

Do it and do it quickly.

It depends on what your app stack is and whether your cloud-native or not. However, if you have a monolithic stack like Oracle and the traditional data center apps, it's the way to go. But, if you are cloud centric and use a lot of web services, then it's probably not the right solution.

You should form a team, be committed to it and expect to put in a lot of work/effort/time into it.

Jinja/Python + wide range of embed functions for various platforms and purposes.

Jinja is based on Python, which is a fairly handy and comfortable programming language. They make it simple to create Python-based templates and, when necessary, create functions for actions that are not covered by the Jinja engine.

Centralized administration and orchestration of severs and services.

Support: It's not bad or poor, but there are some issues. On the one hand, it's about development and progress; on the other, there were some issues that took too long to get fixed by the SaltStack team and forced users to invent workarounds.

Documentation: I'd say it's a little bit complicated for beginners, some topics are not clear and so on. So, one will have to massively use search engines when it comes to complex setups and solutions.

I have used it for ~7 months.

I have encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is good (4 of 5).

I did not previously use a different solution.

The initial setup was neither straightforward nor complex; it required some effort.

It's OSS.

Before choosing this product, I evaluated Ansible and Puppet.

Be patient and you'll get a great solution.

Our primary use case of this solution is to automate with our various partners. It performs quite poorly, has a quite steep learning curve, and you have to invest an extraordinary amount of time to be able to do anything.

We did a POC with one of our customers. Their engineers do a lot of daily provisioning so let's say out of eight to ten working hours per day they'd spend around six or seven hours a day provisioning various kinds of stuff. We did the POC and we managed to cut those six or seven hours to around half an hour a day or so. It has helped increase the speed of provisioning. It cut out a lot of provisioning time on new virtual machines and new resources.

We like the various kinds of tools to automate stuff but not a lot of them have a self-service portal. If you were to compare it to different kinds of automation tools a self-service portal is unique.

I have not found this solution to be user-friendly. It's very complicated. The demo shows that you can automate anything but they only show basic scenarios. If you want to do anything more complicated than that, it becomes very complicated to set up. 

I would like to see support for multiple hypervisors. At the moment that support is only on paper, it doesn't actually work.

The stability is good enough. 

Our experience with technical support hasn't been so great. It can take a long time for them to respond to our questions and often the answer will be "we don't know."

We also looked at Cisco. 

The setup was straightforward. We upgraded to a newer version seamlessly. It worked really well. 

This solution is easier to set up than the alternative we looked at. The other one wasn't as powerful. If I were an automation ninja I could do much more with vRealize than the other solution I evaluated. 

I would rate this solution a neutral five. It has a lot of potential but it's very hard to use. It has a steep learning curve and you need to invest an obscene amount of time to be able to do anything. 

I would advise someone looking into this solution to be prepared to invest some serious time. 

We mostly use it for generating VMware instances.

Things are getting to a point now where you need to be able to do more with less. Anything you can automate is always going to help you in the long run. I'm in the government sector. We're in extreme "do-more-with-less," so we're constantly looking for solutions where we can automate things that we're doing on a day-to-day basis. That's especially true when you have repeatable processes. Automation becomes paramount to get your mission completed in a timely fashion.

It has helped us through time savings. We can do more with fewer people. It probably does, ultimately, improve time to market. But there's so much bureaucratic process in everything we do in the government sector, that it's really hard to improve time to market for anything we do.

When I've been on the console, I have found it very intuitive. There is not a lot to it; it's pretty self-explanatory. It leads you in a direction where you know what you're doing.

I would like to see more improvement in the way it integrates with other systems. That certainly wouldn't hurt.

We've been using this product for a while and the stability is fantastic. As long as we keep our hardware maintained, and we're doing everything we can on that front, I don't see any issues with stability.

The scalability is fantastic. It's there.

Personally, I have not had to use technical support. I know we, as an organization, do so frequently. We have our TAM who is onsite, so any time we do have any issues, the TAM is there to help us, assist us in getting to the right person, and in getting where we need to get to.

The initial setup is straightforward. Not for us, again, because of the bureaucracy, but, in and of itself, it is very straightforward. I've done a lot of it in the lab, and hands-on training. It's pretty straightforward and simple.

There has been a return on investment, although it's hard to measure.

In terms of advice, being here at VMworld 2018 is a start. I'm sitting through a lot of these presentations and there's a myriad of information available that is located right here, as opposed to me having to go search for it across the web.

When we consider working with a vendor, for us, government certifications help. From our perspective, ATOs and STIGs and all those types of things being in existence before we start to work with them are important, because having to obtain all those things from us is a difficult portion of it. Also, product support for integration with other systems, that's always a key to us. Those are the two main factors.

• Automation
• Ability to deploy heavy workloads quickly
• Ease of use and the flexibility

• Ability to mimic more VCD functionality.
• Ability to share blueprints among tenants, or have a master blueprint repository, so you don't have to move the stuff between tenants. That's probably the number one feature.
• Improve functionality that we're looking for longterm.

It is very stable. It works well. It is easy to use once it's deployed, and is also easy to deploy.

We're starting small, but we see the ability to scale quickly and easily.

It's very good. I noticed with vRA, they are starting to ramp up more support. It started off slow, but it seems to be getting better.

Early on with version 6, it was very complex. When 7 was released, it was easier. Now, with 7.3 and cloud foundations (and everything), it's a lot easier.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

1. Reputation.
2. Support, reliability, and longevity of the company.