VMware Aria Automation Reviews

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.

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.

The most valuable feature is the governance system around deployment of solutions.

It cuts out a lot of waste, unutilized hardware, and improves performance.

Automation: We want to be able to have a lot more preconfigured solutions. Where a user can go into the marketplace, pick out the preconfigured solution, and deploy that straight out without having a highly-skilled employee specifically for this role.

It is fairly stable. We've so far not had any major outages with it. If we have any misconfiguration issues, it's pretty quick to use the automated system to find the problem, diagnose it, and fix it, then you back it up.

It is very scalable, at least for our environment. We have thousands of ESXi infrastructure, and for that, it works well.

Have not really used it.

We wanted to scale, and these days, everything is being automated. Therefore, we needed a solution that did not require us to reinvent the wheel or create new automation scripts here and there, but used something already built into the system, which we could use to automate our web flows.

It was straightforward, but it needed technical expertise in this particular area. For those competent in the field that could help us, we utilized them to set it up.

An in-house team.

We looked at VMware. We looked at AWS automation capabilities, but at the end of the day we decided to go with VMware, because VMware was an all-in-one platform that we could use.

Go for the product, but make sure you have experienced folks on the platform that can help your admins to ramp up and go to market quickly.

When selecting a vendor, make sure:

• They have continuous support.
• The performance of their platform will scale, even if you load up the system to a point.
• The system actually will be able to dynamically detect flaws and prompt the admin to go fix the flaw.

Agentless application deployment is the main reason for faster setup and easy deployments.

• It doesn't have a GUI to manage VMs.
• Some Python modules had issues which I think will be fixed in newer versions.
• Other configuration management tools, like Chef and Puppet, have a web interface to perform certain tasks on instances where an application is deployed.
• We can scale and schedule based on traffic. If you want to recreate/add a new instance, you can immediately do it from web interface. This was missing on earlier versions we tried.

We have been using this solution for three months as part of a PoC.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We used open source community support.

The installation was straightforward, especially the master and minion configuration. This configuration was time saving and led to a faster, automated application deployment.

We didn't go for pricing model, as we chose to do a PoC using an open source version.

We evaluated Ansible.

This product is in good shape now and the community support is vibrant. I learned a lot from them while implementing it.

We primarily use it for restoration services.

The most important thing that we missed in vRanger was the possibility to mount several images instantaneously and present it so that we can run it immediately.

Stability is fine. 

The scalability is not good. It is slow to scale to our needs. 

The installation was complex and time consuming.

I would not recommend this product. I think that there are better products to meet your needs that are competitors on the market. 

We use it mainly for cloud automation with private cloud solutions. It works fine with the exception of integration with public clouds and multi-tenant data centers.

It has been pretty successful for many of my customers so far.

vRA is user-friendly. It has the same layout and walk-through GUI, similar to other VMware products.

• Orchestration
• Out-of-the-box integration with Database-as-a-Service
• Storage-as-a-service
• Backup-as-a-service

More integration and out-of-the-box use cases would be nice.

It is very stable, especially for high availability features.

It has some limitations for scalability, especially for remote data center management. For some components, everything need to be centralized.

We only used tech support during the PoC and design phases, but they were good.

The initial setup is complex. There are too many components to integrate, especially when we integrated with different storage types and backup vendors. All the integration made it more complex.

We haven't upgraded yet.

If the use case matches, it is the perfect product for you.

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.