VMware Aria Automation Reviews

• We use it for our own private hosting. 
• We do services for departments within the State of California. 
• We have a large agency where we design and deploy an automation solution around vRealize Automation.

It's done most of what we needed for our customers. However, custom integration had to be done with certain things which are not exotic.

I would like to see more out-of-the-box blueprints and workflows for the rest of VMware's products and its portfolio.

We would like them to continuously improve the product with upgrades, as they have been.

The product is stable. When we used it early on, the changes were so rapid that we had to be careful with versioning. We probably still have to be pretty careful between versioning. The environment includes NSX, as well as vRA. Therefore, we have to pay attention to making sure everything is compatible.

Scalability hasn't been a problem. For the agency where we have it deployed, there are 4500 to 5000 VMs.

The first version that we deployed was not long after VMware had acquired the product. This was with version 6 or 6.2 for a production deployment. There was a lot of work to do with certificates, etc. However, the setup is getting better with each version. 

If you do a deployment for a proof of concept, it is simple. When you start to do a deployment where you need higher availability and more resiliency, then the complexity goes up drastically.

From the customer perspective, the value was worth it.

Be particular about requirements and what your goals are with the customer. There is a lot more to this product than doing a deployment, so make sure you understand the use cases.

• Automation
• Catalog
• Blueprints

Probably more stability and just ensuring everything works out-of-the-box.

There is still a bit of a gap in terms of product maturity based on all the forums and things that we've seen, so we would like it to be much more mature than what we currently have.

There's some issues that we've encountered while standing it up.

As of now, it seems like it does scale. However, we haven't hit the point where we are deploying in a large scale.

So far, we haven't had too many issues reaching out to tech support.

It's fairly complex. The documentation continuously evolves and the product seems to change every couple months. It's trying to piece together different forums and documentations to figure out how to get a working solution.

Most important criteria for selecting a vendor: Brand recognition, but also VMware being the biggest. We thought that might be the best route in terms of support and community.

Self-service and automation. They reduce the amount of time to build a virtual machine and reduce the operation costs.

The requesters create their own virtual machines now, instead of a series of tickets to get things built.

We're still running version 6. When we upgrade to version 7, a lot of our issues should be addressed already. Things like some of the flexibility, and some of the ease of automation.

It's very stable.

It's extremely scalable.

Since we moved to Business Critical Support, it's been very good. I always reach the right person.

We needed a self-provisioning front end. So, this was the best option.

Complex. We deployed the original version of vCAC and there wasn't a lot of documentation at the time. There are a lot of disparate parts that have to be deployed on multiple machines that involve a bunch of load bouncers. Issues like that.

We purchased PSO resources.

Licensing's expensive.

VM was the only one we really looked at.

The most important criteria when looking at various vendors are reliability, their position within the industry, and the ability to get references from existing customers.

Do a lot of planning upfront because some of the choices you make, when you initially deploy, you'll have to live with in the end. Sizing is the main one.

I would suggest hiring a PSO.

The most valuable features are:

• Seeing how the actual servers are responding
• CPU times
• Memory times.

This allows us more scalability in terms of different applications in using specific servers.

Resource management. That's the biggest thing. We're not scaling solutions too much larger than what they actually should be. We can actually take back a lot of the memory with some of the solutions that we're not necessarily using overall. This kind of management is probably the most beneficial.

There is some performance lag, but that could be on our end.

Great. I haven't noticed anything.

I would say great. For different solutions, it allows us to scale.

I haven't. My company has though. I haven't heard anything negative with it. It's all been positive.

We were not using something else, but internally we were overscaling a lot of different solutions and we were getting criticism from upper-level management.

I was not involved.

Look into it heavily when researching similar products, especially if you're looking in terms of budgetary issues with different servers or how you're gonna scale something. It allows you to have pretty concrete data to show to your management.

I wasn't a part of the decision-making process. I know VMware was one of the top choices.

Make sure, and this solution does this, it touches on everything you want to see in a solution in terms of CPU memory. This is such an all-encompassing solution.

Someone that's willing to be a good partner with us. Someone who's responsive, and who when they set us up, or when we enter a partnership, they don't just disappear afterward.

Probably the extensibility as well as the out-of-the-box features it provides, which allow you to be very creative with things you can add on and customise. The extensibility is the most important part for me.

The extensibility allows you to take custom or proprietary requirements and make them happen. Where there's a lot of products, it will give you a set number of used cases, and if you have something that's outside of those, then it can be difficult to make that happen, but the vRealize Automation product allows you to just extend beyond what we'd initially expect them to be used for and make your own custom scripts that can be executed as well as the things that come out-of-the-box.

Yes, certainly. The ability to manage the product in code; so infrastructure is code. It certainly has improved in the last version, but it still isn't quite at the level that some of its competition is in. It's not infrastructure is called native, overlooks is getting closer to it, so that's probably the biggest single improvement to suggest.

About two years now.

Yeah, there are some issues with stability. I suppose with any product, when new versions come out sometimes there are bugs, and depending how wide-spread that is, it can take a varying length of time to clean a patch from a big crash or fault. I give it a seven out of 10 for stability. There are issues, but it's not dreadful. It is certainly better than it was in previous versions.

No, it's very scalable. It's fairly easy to add the numbers of servers to allow it to scale up. As I've said, we've seen it running hundreds of concurrent deployments with the right design and the right number of devices. Obviously, while supporting the platform, it's very scalable.

It's probably a difficult question to answer. Depending on the type of relationship you have with them, I've looked at a couple of places. One company had business critical support. They were very quite good at certifying specialists, they were almost always able to at least categorise a problem, if not fix it in the first sort of hour or two. If you don't have that level of support, you often go through a couple of levels of help desk first and that can be quite frustrating and quite difficult. So I think the level of support maybe averages out to a six out of 10, but it could be eight or nine if they got the right.

Previously, I worked in a team which tried a proprietary tool that did a very similar job, and the main reason for going a product like vRA, is that the development cost of it is handled by another company, so they'll maintain that, and we develop and maintain their own code base instead of paying for support from a larger organization. The idea is when you reach a certain scale, paying someone whose job it is or specialty it is to do this kind of work, they'll have a small team doing it, then having the rest of the people on that team might move on. I suppose to operate it into a prize scale was one of the main reasons for switching.

The installation has been greatly improved in the latest version. There's now a lesser based installation, which has made it many times easier. It is still something that requires a bit of knowledge and time (if you've never used the product before). It is probably going to take you a week or so to get familiar with the concept and try the installation maybe one or two times before it works for you. Once you've used it a few times, you can probably do an installation in a day or two. So maybe a seven out of 10, for ease of installation.

No, I've never been involved in the selection of this product, but I've actually joined teams that have already chosen to use it. I know some of the competition. Some of the other products have on from being the VMware vCloud Director. Some of the products are heard suggested via other places, like answerable and telethon.

Probably the decision to run a private cloud, such as VMware, versus running things in someplace like the public cloud and it being AWS. The main thing is about the scale, and getting sufficient scale, it can be cost effective to run your own private cloud. Best to find the right algorithms, if not setting up the hardware themselves; but you probably do need to reach that multi-million pound scale to make that the right decision. Smaller players are probably better off thinking about comparing costs without a cloud provider, and maybe a less niche product.

It's a good product. It's very extensible. It is fairly complex to set-up, and its fairly closely tied to VMware's infrastructure, so there's a lack of portability to public clouds and a lack of ability to manage infrastructure is code natively. Although it can be persuaded to do it, it's not always straightforward. Those are probably the biggest downfalls.

Execution modules. It is designed for system administrators rather than for developers. It covers maximum functionality and makes automation easy.

As it provides maximum functionality, it keeps automation short and sweet. This helps writing automation in a modular format. SaltStack helped us in optimizing infrastructure related tasks, such as operations.

There should be some mechanism to push agents to the target device. Also, it should focus on managing networking devices.

In order to manage Salt minions from a Salt master, we have to install the Salt agent. As of now, there is no mechanism by which we can push and install this agent on a target machine.

For example:

• A - Salt Master
• B - Windows machine

From A, we want to control B. For this to happen, B should have a Salt agent running on it. There should be some mechanism in which we are able to push and install a Salt agent from A to B. This is assuming that we have to provide an IP address and the credentials of B.

For now, there is concept of Saltify, in which we can partially achieve the above scenario.

We have been using this solution for close to a year.

We found some intermittent issues with the Windows minion connection.

The installation is straightforward and is pretty much a simple setup.

We have used the open source version. In open source, you will get good enough functionality.

We have evaluated this product against Puppet, Chef, and Ansible.

As a DevOps engineer, this CM tool is truly made for system administrator usability rather than for the developer.

• Distributed shell: Ability to execute remote commands on all targets at once.
• Package Helper: Upgrades all your machines with one command: The package method of SaltStack allows easy host updates. (See https://docs.saltstack.com/en/... .)

We spent far less time to upgrade and configure all of our hosts. A lot of time was saved.

I'm not aware if a UI exists or not. There are a lot of possibilities, like having a kind of dashboard that would recap all of the states and responses to commands.

I’ve used this solution for four years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

It is very scalable!

I have not used technical support.

This is the first solution I have used.

The setup was pretty straightforward, especially compared to "legacy" solutions.

It is non-paid product usage.

I evaluated Ansible.

Read the documentation. There is nothing fancy or special to know before using it.

The two most valuable features to us are beacon related. We can use the beacons to alert that a service is stopped, and restart it almost instantly. Also, we can use the beacons to alert based on whatever monitoring metric we see fit. For example, if a server is running out of usable RAM, for example, we can alert on that, and react to it in whatever way we see fit. We could in fact automate any aspect of scaling – all because of SaltStack. Also, it enables you to have a remote CLI on every server in your infrastructure and issue a command to it. Within seconds, you will have the results of that command in an organized list.

We use it to automatically install software on servers with the minion installed – based on the server name. So we can bring any machine up to spec by simply changing the host name. We have plans to automate it even further; it is just a matter of time.

The online documentation is lackluster at best. It usually only gives one example of how to do something. If you want to see all possibilities, you have to look at the Python code for the SaltStack modules themselves. They are commented extremely well, and what isn't there you can write yourself! Anything is possible when you edit the code on your own. We have modified many modules to suit our specific needs.

I have used it for 10 months.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. It has helped us scale other applications.

We are all self-taught on this product. I have not initiated a call to their support. I will say their online documentation leaves something to be desired; however, that is all made up in the code itself. It is commented really well.

We were previously using SCCM and SCOM. We have brought in SaltStack and it is slowly taking over those two spaces. SaltStack is a great orchestration tool, but not intended to be used for monitoring. We are looking at switching over to Zenoss for our monitoring solution.

The initial setup was complex because we did not think it would be as simple as it was. I can build a new SaltStack infrastructure in a matter of minutes now, but initially it took me longer than I would like to admit. Again, it is hard to make your way through the documentation. I was using YouTube videos for instruction.

We use the free, open-source version. I have no information or experience with their pricing.

We looked at Ansible, Puppet, and SCCM. All were really good at what they do, but SaltStack seemed to be much more feature rich than the competition. I am extremely happy with our decision.

Absolutely, positively, go to YouTube first before looking at the documentation. Documentation gives you a great start of what you need, then you look at the code to see the configurable options.