VMware Aria Automation Reviews

• 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.

We use it for automating the deployment of multiple virtual machines.

Our purchase unit had a lot fears in upgrading their environment into production, so we customized it for them. What we did was virtualized the production environment and set it up to the Lab Manager. Then, they could test on Lab Manager on the application, including upgrades, updates, etc.

The customer can set up multiple machine blueprints. Therefore, we are able to customize the template of three machines, then the customer can deploy without knowing anything about the IT business. 

It is not intuitive nor easy to use. Lab Manager was very intuitive, and it was built with VMware functions. However, VMware vRealize Automation bought it, and we have not been happy with it. We would like them to go back to the Lab Manager that we used to use.

The stability on the 6.2 version is very bad. It crashes. VMware tech support knows the IIS component is a bit buggy.

We have 30 virtual machines.

The technical support is okay.

The initial setup is very complex because we have a bunch of customization workflows. They were built-in features that we had to program as code with Orchestration. 

We haven't upgraded because we had to set up the entire environment with the vRealize Orchestration scripts. We have to do it again from the scratch.

We used a reseller for the deployment who was great.

I think we will be leaving the platform. 

For our business case, it was the wrong product, but there was nothing else on the market at the time. When we deployed our virtual machines, we had a very big template with 30 to 40 machines. It was difficult to configure all the virtual machines and blueprints. It was locked when it was deployed with vShield, and now, there is NSX and vShield is no longer supported.

It is used to deploy and manage unified configs in an engineering environment. It has performed pretty well.

It has improved things, absolutely. We had a lot of config drift before, and this really helps us keep it on track.

Speed to provision is probably our biggest, significant gain.

• Integration with Infoblox, for IP management
• Three-tier app deployment as one unified Blueprint

I haven't had any issues with the stability.

We've only used it within our lab engineering environment, which is up to 1,000 VMs at any point, so it's been pretty solid.

I was a VMware consultant for years and I saw successes with it in other people's environments.

The initial setup was very easy. The upgrade was also pretty easy. It was not quite as easy when I piloted it through Lifecycle Manager, but that was in its infancy. It has probably gotten better.

The solution itself has a learning curve to get used to building the Blueprints, but once you've done it, it gets much quicker.

Our time to deliver a fully unified, three-tier app, at the right version, is one-twentieth what it was before. There is no manual intervention. No IP management. It just dramatically simplifies all of our processes.

I haven't had the opportunity to use many comparable products.

My advice would be, use it with NSX and with Infoblox.

I give it an eight out of ten, mostly due to the learning curve to catch up to where you need to be. Some third-party integration, that would still be nice to see.

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.

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.

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.

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.