VMware Aria Automation Reviews

• 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.

Anything which operates "as a service". I have worked in the Cloud industry a long time, so I have a lot of experience with Cloud. I see that there is a lot of flexibility in anything that's a service. You can use it at any of the layers of Cloud, like infrastructure or software.

I have worked in client-facing roles and at enterprise level. We have used VMware vRA. The best has been, from the infrastructure side, having storage as a service for customers. On top of that we add functionality for monitoring and alerts.

There are a lot of improvements required with regards to vRealize Automation. There are a couple of areas I would like to pinpoint. There are a couple of workflows missing from the storage side, so we can't easily add to my current blueprint.

Almost eight years.

Yes, in older versions. For example, 5.1. There were a lot of stability issues. Now it seems pretty stable.

Scaling works quite well. I have vRealize Automation and on the Cloud I have IBM Blue Mix. So I have scaling of my environment and I can scale my storage.

There is very little documentation with regards to when your single sign-on password changes annually. Then there are a lot of issues with regards to setting up the database and syncing up the single sign-on passwords. At the end of the entire environment there is a network and rebuilding the entire environment is inevitable sometimes. So there needs to be documentation.

I had used OpenStack but I would not say it is great. There are a lot of pickups of bad information. I would say vRealize Automation is much better.

I would give the latest version of vRealize Automation a 10 out of 10 because it helped minimize the setup time.

It requires very limited time to set up an enterprise environment. There is a lot of inter-configuration required to ensure your environment is built properly.

• 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.

We use it for the automation of VMs. It is performing okay.

We use it to deploy databases and testing environments. It spins up quickly and breaks down fast.

The automation is consistent.

The front-end is user-friendly and intuitive.

It is very difficult to make the automation work well. This is not product specific, but more due to environment and procedures that we have in our company.

The back-end has a steep learning curve.

The stability is good.

I used the technical support during upgrades. They came onsite and are very technical. They are very good

I am not aware of a previous solution. We moved to vRA because the business wanted quick, repetitive deployments.

It was a complex setup. We had to use the consultant from VMware to make the solution work well.

The upgrade was a very difficult task. We had to break everything down and build it up new in a new version.

We used a consultant from VMware for the deployment.

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.

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.

Multi-machine blueprints.

Prior to the deployment and utilization of vRealize environment infrastructure, deployments (VMs, IPs, DNS, firewall rules, load balancers) would take up to three months. After utilizing vRA we have reduced this to less than an hour for a complete, production-ready infrastructure deployment.

There are a lot of usability issues which I have. Overall, the product feels bloated and cumbersome. It feels like you are very locked in to what VMware has decided is the "way to do things" and you have to spend a lot of time developing custom code and logic to get around these artificial limitations.

Specifically, the blueprint design canvas has had a terrible memory leak error for several versions which makes designing blueprints difficult and time consuming.

One year.

Nothing specific to the product. Due to the complexity of the deployment, there can be issues with stability because you need to keep track of many moving parts.

No. The product is very scalable.

Due to the customizability of the product, support can often be very difficult. However, VMware support is often very helpful and capable.

No, we did not.

The initial setup is very complex. You will deploy at least three VMs, a Linux appliance, a Windows IIS server, and a Microsoft SQL server. If you want high availability, you will deploy two of the appliances and IIS servers. The deployment process requires specific versions of .NET and Java, as well as some specific config file edits. After the actual VMs are deployed and ready to go, you will then be required to set up tenants, and all the associated permissions and groups which are required for this. You will need to set up connections to your vCenter servers, and reservations based on these connections. Creating blueprints can be simple or very complex depending on your needs.

I don't know anything about this.

I was not part of the evaluation process.

vRA is very powerful, but you need to know what you're getting into. You really can do almost anything that you want using the product in conjunction with vRealize Orchestrator, but it requires a lot of knowledge and work.