VMware Aria Automation Reviews

My primary use case for this solution is to automate the development of the infrastructure. I deployed the VM for the development team.

I like that it is easy to deploy the infrastructure.

I have found 7.4 to be user-friendly but 7.5 is not, in fact, it's a nightmare. They changed everything on the graphic user interface, the mode where the user interacts with the product. 

7.4 is okay but we have had some issues with 7.5. We have issues with the approval process of the request. The link for the approval doesn't work. I opened a ticket with VMware and I still haven't gotten an answer. I don't like the infrastructure.  

I have found the scalability to be good. We share infrastructure with multiple machines and infrastructure servers. 

Technical support isn't great. I opened a ticket with them two weeks ago and have yet to receive an answer. 

We knew that we needed to switch to this solution because our customers asked for it. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It's easy to deploy. 

The upgrade experience was a nightmare. I upgraded from 7.4 to 7.5 and it's been terrible. 

I am the integrator. I do the deployment for our customers. 

Our customers have seen ROI but I don't know the exact numbers. 

I would rate this solution a nine and would advise someone looking into this or a similar solution to invest in VMware Orchestrator. It's behind vRealize Automation for almost everything. You should know vRealize Orchestrator first and then try to deploy, install, and configure vRealize Automation. 

The primary use case is to automate systems, and at a faster pace, so we can give them to our end-users faster.

It has cut down the time for building out a machine. A process that used to take three hours is down to 20 to 30 minutes. If the users need a machine fast, we can get it presented to them quicker. So it has absolutely helped with the speed of provisioning.

The most valuable feature is the way that it plugs into our monitoring systems, and Infoblox and Puppet.

I don't find the solution to be intuitive and user- friendly. The GUI is really complicated. Tracking down logs and errors is very hard. Then, it takes a specialized JavaScript person to build.

Also, I'm not sure how the upgrades are going now, but they definitely need to evolve the upgrade process. 

Finally, the logs are very generalized. Giving more of an indicator of what's actually going wrong, rather than just a generic error code, would help.

We had a lot of issues at first. Especially with doing any kind of upgrades, it was a complete tear-down and a complete rebuild of all the Blueprints. The upgrade process was not easy or intuitive at all. But it seems to be getting better.

It's easy to be scalable on it. You're as scalable as the infrastructure you have behind it.

I have used technical support, but more on the infrastructure side, not on the system side. My experience with them has been good. They get back to us quickly. We're a TAM customer, so we get quite a bit resolved pretty quickly.

We didn't have a previous solution. We were doing manual. We still are, but we're within 15 to 20 days of deploying it. We went with this solution because of the partnership with VMware. We have vCenter, we have a bunch of their products, so it just made sense to try to go with a simple approach.

The most important criteria when looking to work with a vendor are the ability to adapt to us and our needs, and that the vendor be quick on responses.

I came in about halfway through the initial setup. It was very complex. We had VMware projects going on, so we had a couple of consultants giving us full-time personnel to help us through it. We had VMware there, and AdvizeX was another one. Then we had the specialty people from VMware that they deployed out to our place.

We still haven't gotten it into production yet. But once we do, our value is going to be the ability to turn around virtual machines a lot faster.

Read as much as possible and then take it slowly and don't try to jump in full force. Make sure you have a good plan going into it. That was one of our mistakes. We were expecting, "Oh, this will be pretty easy," but once we got into it, was a little more complex than we were thinking.

I give the solution about a seven out of 10, given the process we've gone through with it. We've had it now for three years, but we haven't been able to really deploy it in production. I don't know if it's because of the documentation or just the ability to be able to use it and make it functional.

Our primary use case is production IT, VM provisioning workloads. It performs pretty well most of the time.

It's the backbone for VM deployments for our main production data center.

The most valuable features are the Catalog View and the access control business group. Access provisioning is probably the main use case for us, so we can separate access to different Catalog items among the different business groups and have that tied back to our AD LDAP systems.

Early on, we had a lot of troubles. Most of those were short-knit runs. And we do have difficulties trying to upgrade.

I also don't find it to be entirely user-friendly. There are a lot of complicated menus within menus within menus. Things move around from version to version

We're looking forward to some of the Catalog enhancements that I know are coming in the upcoming versions.

Earlier on there were some problems and with upgrades, and there were some other problems as well. But in between, it tends to run pretty well. We leave it alone.

It has met our needs scale-wise, in that environment.

The setup was complex. Even with the Professional Services, it took days and days to try and get it installed and working right.

We have had the opportunity to upgrade and it failed. We're having troubles with that. We're still working on it.

If you have the validated designs or PSO guidance for setup, go with that now. Try to keep it as out-of-the-box as possible, in a supported configuration.

I rate this solution at seven out of ten. By now, it does the job we need it to do most of the time. There are definitely areas where it could use some improvements.

We mainly use it for deploying SAP machines, SAP-type systems.

It allows some of the tenants to self-provision their machines, so they don't have to wait for us to create the machine for them. They can just do it themselves. It has helped improve our infrastructure agility.

All you do is just press a button, it cranks it out and everything is consistent, so that's one nice thing about it. The speed is also a valuable feature.

I don't find it to be user-friendly or intuitive because, in my case, when I have to deploy SAP systems, I need to jump between the vRA, the vRO, and the actual vCenter itself. I need to go back and forth to do different things. For example, with the vRA I'll deploy the base machine. With vRO, that's where I may have to get an IP address. If somebody's SAP machine has a secondary, virtual name, I need to get the next available IP address from vRO. And then, inside the vCenter, I need to do some firewall stuff, NXS. So it's not that user-friendly.

I wish they could make it just one application, just vRA, that does all that. There might be a way to do it but I haven't figured out how to do it yet.

Also, vCenter and vRA, I believe they share two different databases so sometimes you have to somehow sync them up. I wish there was only one database between the two or, somehow, one database would rule over the other one, so if you have both products, the vCenter might use the vRA database. Otherwise, when you do stuff in vCenter, you have to write a command on vRA to update the databases.

It's pretty stable. Once in a while we'll have a problem, but it will be something that's inside the vRA database that got corrupted somehow and they have to clear something out. For example, sometimes, when I deploy a machine, it'll be in the request queue and it'll stay there for a while. Then someone will have to go in there and do something to clear that queue.

It's scalable, in terms of adding Blueprints.

When looking for a vendor I look for a quick response to problems, and reliability. When there is a problem, VMware will help you chase it down. They'll follow up. I like their response times to our issues. They will also escalate.

My advice is: Get training.

I give vRA a seven out of ten, for now. In addition to the database issue I mentioned, it's not quite clear how to do certain things. I have not been given training on it. The learning curve is steep. For me, a lot of it is on-the-job training. There might be a better way to do things, a quicker way, but I don't know what it is right now. For now, I don't find it that intuitive to use.

As a VMware partner, we use it to help us automate the deployment of VMs.

It has helped IT to support development. For example, one of our customers has a development team and, before this solution, it would take ten days to develop and test their solution. Now, it is down to one day.

The user interface is not that intuitive. If it is for technical people like me, it is intuitive, but not for the common man. It's intuitive for me because I know what the technology is behind it. For me, because I use it repeatedly, the same type of use case, it's okay, but for our customers, it would be very difficult.

I would also like to see a test environment, testing before implementing, to see how it will relate to existing things. That would make it feature-rich.

If you don't make any technical changes, it works. You need a test scenario before implementing changes.

It's scalable. It's very good in scaling.

Technical support is good.

The implementation for vRealize is straightforward. The upgrade experience is pretty good, satisfactory.

I would say our clients see an ROI of 30 percent.

I recommend this solution, though it is not that great. It is okay for what it is for. When it works it's great. For me, personally, I don't want a call from a customer that it failed. Most of the time it works. If it doesn't, then we do troubleshooting.

I rate it a seven out of ten because it needs improvement in stability, performance, and quality.

We use it to automate redundant tasks. We're limited to two guys, so automation is beneficial and we'll probably implement it with ServiceNow, down the road.

In terms of benefits, we haven't gotten there yet, but increasing our infrastructure agility, speed of provisioning, time to market, application agility, and making it easier for IT to support developers, are all reasons we have it and are looking to get it working. We have had it set up for six months or so.

The automation of the redundant tasks and the implementation of ServiceNow are huge for us, as we are a cloud provider to the campus. It will allow us to automate a lot of tasks that constituents need done, which is very important to us.

In terms of it being user-friendly and intuitive, from what I've used, the little bit I've done in hands-on labs, it's been pretty easy.

That ServiceNow implementation is a little rough, but those guys in Ohio are doing a great job on it. Seeing things like that, things that integrate would be great. Anything that has REST APIs should have a plugin, that's really what makes it powerful.

So far, so good, in terms of the stability.

The scalability is very good. That's one of the reasons we like it. Is scales great.

Understand your business processes before working with it. That's what we're doing right now: getting a better grasp of our business processes and how the lifecycle of these VMs work, so we can better utilize vRealize Automation.

I rate it at eight out of ten because of its intuitiveness, its ease of use, and the features that it will bring to us - a two-man team - will be like having a couple of extra guys on hand. And that's really great. I know PowerCLI is there and we can always script it out. But automation is really a powerful tool that we're looking forward to using, that will make it a lot easier. It covers a lot more. So we're happy about that.

The primary use case is that it fronts VirtualCenter for our entire development environment. The current version performs well.

It provides us with rapid deployment and reclamation of servers. It has also increased the infrastructure agility, application agility, improved time to market, and made it easier for IT to support developers.

• Self-service for the servers
• Reclamation
• Self-service for all of our IT or development teams to expand and decrease their environments at will

Other than the features that are supposed to already be in place with the new version - meaning the tight integration with vROps, which they said was there but wasn't - the ability to migrate between clusters is a big deal right now. If you try to migrate a current client, create a research pool for a client, and they have multiple ESX clusters, you can't get it. It's so painful to do. The new version that we will be going to is supposed to do that automatically. And I will believe it until it doesn't work.

Its first iteration had some hiccups. It wasn't as streamlined. It crashed a lot more. This version has been way more solid.

Scalability has been excellent. It scales well horizontally. Vertically, you'd have to do a lot to make that happen. It will scale both ways. One way is easier. Horizontally is way easier to scale. It's just the nature of the way the product is built.

On the current version, support is much better. I have a TAM and I have mission-critical support, so I usually get to somebody.

We were previously using a product from CA that CA no longer supports. They got out of the business.

The initial setup was not straightforward. It was not simple, and we had a PoC. We had VMware help us deploy it, and it took them an exorbitant amount of time.

Upgrading hasn't been without its pain. We've had our issues, we've lost some data. There have been some hiccups along the way. We're confident that this next upgrade will be smoother, since it has been getting more stable over time.

The solution is intuitive to the end-user, absolutely. I've created a web portal, through vRA, in which users' specific requirements are built-in. Now, to develop that was not overly fun, but, overall, it is good.

I give it an eight out of ten because it has provided my development team a pure self-service portal. We deploy thousands of machines and reclaim. So, their time to business and their time to market has been improved exponentially.

We are using it for developers to test code. Our Customer Care uses it to troubleshoot customer issues. We also have a training business unit and they deploy classes for customer training.

We've been using it for four years now. It performs well. It does the functions we need. We do have some issues from time to time. I wish there was a little bit of more maturity out of the product, but it is getting better with every release.

It has definitely increased speed of VM deployment. When a normal server-request would come in, it might take anywhere from three to four days to deploy. Now, within 15 minutes, they can click and have something up and running.

The IT support for developers is nice as well because they are able to manage the environment themselves.

Self-service: Letting the end-users deploy their own machines so the administrators are hands-off at that point.

The user-friendliness is seen in the minimal training that is required to get them up and running, to start deploying machines and accessing.

Something as simple as formatting the catalog in a different way would be helpful because there is no option for doing so. A lot of the contents for the virtual machine, blueprints that you can request, are hidden from view and there's no way to change the view.

It does go down from time to time. We have some issues with the appliances sometimes and we have to do reboots in the middle of the day. That affects the ability for them to deploy. Existing stuff that is already deployed, there's no downtime for that, but it does keep them from deploying at that time.

We have it deployed in a highly-available environment and scalability is nice because we just add another ESX host and then we are able to increase the capacity.

Technical support is helpful. Sometimes they can take a little while to get back to us, but for the most part, we end up finding a solution to cases.

We were using Lab Manager before but that was decommissioned so this was the next solution. We chose it because it did everything we needed it to do, it was the logical step from Lab Manager.

The criteria for the selection process included that we needed to have a self-service environment for our developers, that Customer Care be able to deploy machines, destroy machines, complete the entire VM lifecycle - and this does it.

The setup is fairly complex, but we've been using it for a while so I'm pretty knowledgeable about it now. Upgrades are pretty straightforward. We had a lot of problems originally deploying it, with some certificate issues. We had an engagement with VMware so they were able to help us get a proof of concept environment set up as well. So that was helpful.

It's a good solution. The deployment can be complex so I would recommend engaging professional services for setting up a proof of content environment to evaluate it.

I rate vRA at eight out of 10 because of issues with the stability of the appliances. But other than that, it's a pretty solid product. It does exactly what we need it to do and we are happy with it.