VMware Aria Automation Reviews

My customers use it to build their private cloud infrastructure.

VMware Aria Automation improves the IT service delivery process. It can automate manual operations, but you need a development team with coding or programming skills to develop blueprints and automation workflows. 

While Aria Automation is a good product for that purpose, we haven't had many customers use it due to its cost and the development skills required. That's a challenge to consider.

Aria Automation can manage some aspects of public clouds, but I have no experience with that. We only use it for private cloud development.

The Blueprints feature is a good one. This feature supports the installation and improvement of automation processes. 

It includes a user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface that assists customers in automating routine tasks without the need for coding. These are simple routines, though.

The self-service functionality allows customers to provision VMs with a single click. They don't need to submit a request to the IT team and wait for them to create the VM. This reduces waiting time for the automation process.

I would like to see better integration capabilities. Maybe if they could develop libraries within Aria Automation for simpler integration with other third-party solutions, instead of just basic integration.

So, integration with backup solutions would be helpful. 

We have been working with this solution for five years. We used to work with the vRealize Automation version, but the name changed earlier.

It was also called VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite.

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten.

We have medium-sized businesses as our clients for this solution. 

The customer service and support are okay because the quality of the support varies from case to case. 

Neutral

The initial setup is difficult. I would rate my experience with the initial setup a six out of ten, with ten being easy. 

It is difficult because of load balancing and we need to prepare information and certificates, and there's a learning curve involved. In the past, this product didn't require any load balancers to deploy or certificates for deployment, but now it does.

For the setup only, we need two or three days. But for configuration to edit a routine or test a routine, it can take anywhere from maybe one to two weeks.

So, two to three days for setup and then one to two weeks for deployment.

I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive. 

I recommend the solution because we've worked with it for many years, but we only have two or three customers because of the price. So, we can't start many projects.

However, I would recommend this solution for the automation function itself, and how to group and publish those groupings is quite easy for customers to learn with Aria.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We have used it for infrastructure management between our hybrid cloud, provisioning and patching, using automation.

The automation functionality has been most valuable. With a click of a button, we are able to automate provisioning, the build of new hardware and apply patches. These are all extremely important and differentiated tasks that can be automated in SaltStack. 

The solution is very easy to code and to set up. It works on a YAML language which is very simple and does not require someone with programming experience to start using it. 

This solution could be integrated with more hardware for an improved offering. 

We have used this solution for five years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This solution is easy to scale.

The support from the customer service team is good. 

The pricing for this solution is roughly 20% lower than the competitive products in the market.

I would advise those considering this solution to ensure they have the necessary in-house talent or access to an external vendor who knows this solution well. It is not a widely used technology so it is important to ensure you can support it. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

I was part of the VMware team, doing a double role at VMware:

1. Leading a sales team for the large financial institutions, the top 50.
2. Defining what the roadmap for vRealize suite should be.

I worked for a consulting company. We helped a lot of customers with many things for vRA from provisioning workflows automation to approvals and policies management.

The solution provides a multi-cloud, self-service, infrastructure-as-a-service cloud consumption and delivery layer. vRA 7 was mostly focused on VMware-based internal clouds with a little bit of external clouds. vRA 8 is multi-cloud, which you can host on-prem too. Everybody is moving away to use the cloud, so it is pretty much a done deal that you need to have it.

If you want to start a VM database as a service, then you start a VM, but your customers don't know what size CPU or memories that they want. So, you can also scale it as needed. They can use vRA integration to monitor and scale up or down using the ESXi Server, then VRa works as an integration point.

A lot of its DevOps for infrastructure capabilities improve reliability. Much effort was put in by some customers, like a large automobile manufacturer, a large telecom, and two large banks, to achieve a certain level of capabilities in this space. These DevOps for infrastructure capabilities have saved time for developers. In one use case for a large marketplace, a typical release cycle took about 80 hours and was brought down to three hours by automating deployment for developers. The quicker that deployments happen, the faster that they can do their product release cycles.

When you start integrating vRA with the other VMware products, like vRealize Network Insight (vRNI). That is when it starts giving you the capabilities of extending your templates and networks across multiple hybrids and clouds.

If an organization has the capability of being able to use it in their application deployment lifecycle, then they can use the automated infrastructure deployment, but not many companies do. Not many companies say, "When I am going to deploy, I am also going to create 20 virtual machines and deploy on them." They normally start out by saying that there will be a separate team with managers in infrastructure and a separate team that does this in deployment. I have seen only one place that has done this, out of hundreds.

Two things help out a lot: 

1. Policy management.
2. Integration with other VMware feeds, like ESXi Server. They have a pretty tight integration with those.

If you are trying to automate your capacity management tasks, moving VMs and resizing them, then you need to integrate down to the policy level by reconfiguring the use of servers. That is where these kinds of integration points help you.

vRA's multi-cloud self-service cloud consumption and delivery layer comes with centralized policy control and governance.

VMware cloud templates: These are predefined templates that work across multiple cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. You can use the same templates across various clouds, even clouds that have AWS, Azure, and Google. So, you can have a blueprint and templates running across all of them.

vRA is most helpful in managing the whole lifecycle, taking out the server, bringing them back in, handling outages, and managing clusters, networks, and the entire infrastructure security out there as well as putting identity management all in one place. It creates a control point with its single pane of glass. You can control all the networks as well as their configuration and installation from one place, which is a strength of vRA.

Interoperability is more of an industry problem. There are multiple cloud provisioning tools out there, and vRA is just one of them. There are a lot of components out there, which all do certain things. There are some hard drives, particular types of servers, particular types of routers, load balancers, and firewalls, where some are stronger in one area and some in another. Interoperability between them would be a good thing.

With the workflow aspect, which has manual intervention, a policy needs to be approved by somebody. There could be better management of that piece with better templates. It is like a workflow engine, but does not have enough example templates to do certain things. A lot of people waste a lot of time trying to figure out the same thing, and everybody is trying to figure out the same thing, e.g., how to make a MySQL cluster in a Windows environment?

I used vRA for seven to eight years, then I moved out of the VMware world last year in January.

vRA 8 onwards is very stable. vRA 7 has some clunkiness, but version 8 is very stable.

Hardware depends upon the volumes. I had small customers who had two to three clusters of eight servers each to an enterprise customer with 80,000 servers.

They have a very big community with a lot of support. 

VMware has its own support, but it depends upon what level of customer you are. Bigger customers obviously get better support than smaller customers. However, bigger customers also try funky things. Smaller customers tend to do things based on the standard, so they normally don't run into problems. The technical support is pretty good.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward. 

From the time that a customer enters into an agreement to using the service, it takes two to three weeks minimum because it takes time to design the whole network.

You need to have a basic cloud infrastructure in place. With an existing cloud infrastructure, the initial setup takes a couple of days. Most of the time, it is a deployment where you are also building the cloud with it, then all kinds of things are required, like the network topology, routers, security, etc. That takes time.

vRA 8 is normally managed by a single guy.

Customers say this solution is costlier compared to its competitors.

The open source solutions are cheaper, but they lack documentation. They also have trouble keeping the documentation, drivers, etc. up-to-date.

For any cloud-related thing, you have to think it through. Things get sticky, like external firewalls. Distribute, network, and plan because you are not going to get it right the first few times.

vRA is an orchestration engine, like a workflow engine. What it comes down to, because it is more of a generic tool, what are you using it for? I have seen in places that it has helped people in ITOps.

VMware's goal is to build a long-standing partnership.

I would rate it as a nine (out of 10).

I use the solution to provision virtual machines. 

We automated many tool deployments with the help of the product, cutting short manual deployments and eliminating the need for human interaction. Its most valuable features include integrating various tools and working with different products using plugins. 

The tool's automation performance is excellent, and I rate it four point five out of ten. 

Maintaining the product requires effort and a good understanding of the environment, including how to set up the codes and other configurations. Pricing needs to be improved to improve the customer penetration. 

I have been using the product for four years. 

The tool is stable, but you will encounter issues when it hits the upper limit. 

VMware Aria Automation is easily scalable. My company has 15-20 users. 

I have used Red Hat before, and VMware Aria Automation is better. It is considered better due to its extensive experience in the field. The tool has acquired an existing product in the domain for several years.

The product's deployment process is much simpler than it used to be, especially with the latest version. While previous versions had multiple components and pillars, the latest version has significantly reduced complexity, improving the deployment process. It took a few weeks to complete. You would need two to four resources to complete the deployment. 

The tool's integration with the existing VMware infrastructure is easy due to product similarity. 

The solution's ROI is good. It can be enhanced with improvement in prices. 

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. 

We use it for monitoring.

The benefits include a smoother migration to cloud services and access to new features, but overall, it doesn’t seem to have a significant impact.

I like its capacity, the self-service portal, and operational automation. The most beneficial feature is that it saves time when creating new virtual machines, deploying security measures, and writing infrastructure code, making things easier and faster. We have a standard we follow, reducing the time spent repeatedly rewriting everything.

The integration is a bit tight. I need the right package to use it properly. The new automation processes for VMware are messy, and support could be better.

We’ve been using VMware Aria Automation for six months.

Overall, it’s stable.

I don’t have complaints about its scalability; it seems fine.

When we call support, responses take a long time, and urgent issues can’t wait days for a reply.This leads to operational troubles.

Negative

We evaluated four different options, including Nutanix for virtualization and Ansible for automation.

The experience was not straightforward; we used the Gradios version before, so it wasn’t a new experience, but it was typical.At first, we received direction from VMware technicians, but after the first month, we had to handle everything ourselves. It took longer than expected because of hardware issues and is not fully complete yet.

I would rate it high because, compared to other solutions, VMware’s pricing is quite expensive. VMware products have become significantly more costly in recent years, leading to higher costs.

If you can afford it, I would recommend it. Its integration with virtualization and high availability features make it valuable. I don’t see a direct integration of AI; it seems more about resource management and efficiency than advanced AI features.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The product's most valuable features are ease of automation.

The product's features for hybrid cloud integration could be better. It should allow us to fetch reports from anywhere. Additionally, there should be better options for integration with mobile security platforms.

We have been using VMware Aria Automation for three years.

I rate the platform's stability a six out of ten. It could be better.

We have 89-90 VMware Aria Automation users in our organization. It is suitable for enterprises. I rate the platform's scalability a five out of ten. There could be automated features included for it.

We contacted the technical support team regarding migrating the workload. It is time-consuming and takes them a week to complete. The team could respond faster.

Neutral

I rate the initial setup process a seven out of ten. It takes ten days to complete. We build the platform according to the specific requirements of customers. Later, we transfer operating systems data on virtual machines.

VMware Aria Automation is expensive. They offer a bundle of products included, which we have to pay unnecessarily without a use case. I rate its pricing a ten out of ten.

I rate VMware Aria Automation a seven out of ten.

Our primary use cases are around deployments supporting DevOps, around service provisioning of IP addresses, DNS; self-service entitlement or enablement. And then, driving some workflow processes from our service marketplace, through automation, to actually have them execute within the infrastructure.

It's performing pretty well.

Speed to market. It helps us to improve the rate at which we deploy and the consistency in which we deploy. It has allowed us to scale up and scale down very quickly.

As we meet our open enrollment periods and then we come off of those enrollment periods and go into a normal operational state, we now have that ability to flex down that environment or flex up the environment quickly.

Another side of the coin is the supporting of DevOps. Now, with the advent of the automation, we've been able to give DevOps the ability to spin up environments, give them lease times, and then have it automatically reclaim the environment. So we can build workflows around DevOps processes that are more consistent. Our past configuration was that they would spin up whole DevOps environments of full, physical machines and they would run indefinitely. That was "Bob's" Dev environment and then "Joe" would come and say, "I want one." And then we'd have all these environments. Now, I can give him his environment for 48 hours and I can take it away and he can spin up another one. Or I can archive it. It allows us to be a little bit more agile.

The most valuable feature is the consistency it delivers, at the end of the day. We know that we have consistent images based off consistent Blueprints, check-pointed or QA'ed in a consistent manner.

It is not super-intuitive. It does require some skills to understand how to use it. I had no problem, but I had spent a lot of time already learning this product ahead of moving it to an operational status. But as we did so, we had a hard time bringing some people from other groups into the fold, to script and work against this environment. So, the ability to build workflows within that automation needs to be streamlined.

In terms of additional features, I would like it to be able to poll my vCenter infrastructure more rapidly and adapt to changes quickly. It should alert me and let me know when there are broken components, as a result of underlying infrastructure changes. It needs to be more stringent.

It is very stable. I've had no downtime from the vRealize Automation appliances or components. I think the biggest challenge is being communicative in the infrastructure as you change the infrastructure underneath the automation. This goes back to the naming conventions and the consistency, but you need to be cognizant, as you change your underlying infrastructure - whether that is new storage arrays you're adding, new DV switches you're creating, or new hosts that you're taking out or putting in - you have to be cognizant of your automation.

It would be nice if this product was a little bit more intuitive regarding what's connected to it.

We could scale horizontally with Automation but we're looking more at containers to scale some of our apps more horizontally. But yes, it does integrate very well with other vSphere products that allow us to scale horizontally as well.

The technical support is very good. I've actually been able to turn over my operations to use technical support. They can actually walk me through the problems within the product. That has been great because I tend to focus more on infrastructure or the underlying components, so for the code components, the support is great.

We were manually spinning up clone templates and building them.

We recently took over and built our IT after 50 years of being under HPE. About five years ago we decided to internalize our IT and take everything back. We built a new IT organization literally, out of this solution; it is one of the tools that made us successful. Once we virtualized our infrastructure, automation is what made us be able to work with it.

Our important criteria when looking at any vendor are support and communication.

I was involved in the initial setup and the PoC. It was very complex on the initial setup because we started with the 6.x version and eventually migrated to 7. The way it was architected, with the Orchestrator being outside of the vRA appliance, was difficult to set up and configure. The next versions made it a much more straightforward configuration.

We did not do an upgrade. We did a parallel build. Several upgrades actually blew up and failed and destroyed the environments, so we gave up attempting to upgrade a 6.x environment and built a brand new 7.x. At the time, we did not have Code Stream so we could not laterally migrate. An important component of this is Code Stream. For the ability to scale and have multiple automation instances, Code Stream is essential to be able to move that back and forth. If you already have an existing automation environment, you should look at Code Stream very heavily, rather than redevelop.

We have seen quite a bit of return on our investment. We've actually been able to really change the way that we're doing build and deployments of virtual machines. We've reorganized around that capability. At one time we had a dedicated build team, separate from Windows and LS teams. Now, we've integrated them together because those teams are actually spinning up and building their own VMs right out of Automation.

We did look at some automation around the Red Hat stack itself. Our environment tends to be larger on the Linux side than it is on the Windows side, the Microsoft side. So we did give some consideration to maybe automating through Ansible and some other processes. But because of the simplicity of development, relative to the other options, we chose vRA. We also chose it because of the integration with our vCenter. We wanted to be under vRealize. We wanted to be one consistent stack, whether it's monitoring, spinning up, security, or containers. We want to try to keep everything under one platform.

I would definitely recommend vRealize Automation.

One thing that we've had to realize about this product is, it's dependent on some back-work that you do inside your vSphere environment to prepare for it: things like tags, things like folders, things like naming conventions. We've discovered that these are very important when you're attempting to roll out this product because you already have an established vCenter environment. For instance, in our case, where we had multiple data centers, we may have had different implementation times and perhaps may not have had the same standards around things like naming conventions, DV switches, or storage. Because they map, you have to very cognizant of that.

That's been an issue, not only on the Automation side but across the whole vRealize Suite. I also manage all of the vROps, the analytics, and the integration between the analytics, the vCenter, and the Automation.

It can be tricky. You need to be detail-oriented on how you configure and set up your vCenter so that you're consistent in all implementations. If you have a multi-vCenter environment, you want to make sure you use the same naming conventions across them.

We already had established standards, but as new people came on board, they may have varied something thinking, "Oh, I can just shorten this," or "I'll hyphenate this VLAN_, no, actually I'll do a VLAN-". When you go to map that, to automate that, and you go to read your available VLANs, suddenly it doesn't recognize them because you're not consistent in your conventions. That's one thing we really discovered in automation.

The second was using naming conventions that are consistent and searchable so that you can understand different applications and environments. That's going to be very important when you're actually building automation and workflows.

It's something that the customer needs to be cognizant of and vigilant about as they move towards automation. Automation is taking the existing infrastructure and attempting to automate it and use it and leverage it in a way that's dependable and consistent. I think that's the greatest thing we get out of Automation. It isn't speed, it's consistency; consistency in deployment, consistency in execution.

I give the solution a nine out of 10, based on my satisfaction with the product. My experience with its growth over time - the last few versions I've looked at, 7.3 to 7.4 - is that it is going to give us some capabilities in integration that we didn't have before.

VMware Aria Automation is mainly used with vRealize Orchestration to orchestrate provisioning. It segregates resource usage among different teams. If there are various tenants utilizing resources, vRA is essential for efficiently managing resource allocation. Whether it's provisioning machines in our data center, supporting customer infrastructure in AWS, Azure, or different vCenters, vRA streamlines the process. 

Instead of navigating through various console endpoints for provisioning workloads, vRA allows automation with a single click. This means we can automate the provisioning of not just a plain VM or OS but also include applications and databases in a single click. 

So, we can initiate the process, go about our tasks, and, within 30 to 40 minutes, depending on integrations, our VMs will be built. It significantly reduces manual efforts, and that's why it's called automation. 

With one click, we can get not just one but as many VMs as needed, with databases installed, all at the click of a button. It's a crucial and necessary product that people have been increasingly adopting.

VMware Aria Automation is important for day-to-day operations. It provides more granular visibility of our resources. 

Another valuable thing is the cost. We can easily get to know our IT gives us a cost of data as well, suppose we're going to provision any VM, if a customer or if a user is going to provision one VM, it depends on, again, it depends on the integration that one has done of config already. 

One of its features is, that once we're deploying a VM, we will get to know how much we'll pay for that. How much will be the GB storage per GB cost, how it will be the RAM cost, memory cost, everything would be there. 

And it gives us in-depth visibility into how many resources we are paying for. And suppose we just were purchasing memory GB and if we want to delete particular VMs, we can delete it and we can get the resources back. 

So for the customers, it's pretty convenient to see where they are putting their money into.

It's not open source as of now. The licensing costs and the operations support costs of the VRAs are higher. It's a VMware-based license. 

If I see the other competitors, they are open-source alternatives to VRA, like OpenStack and others. So I can use it on the flow. But in order to get VLS automation, it's an enterprise license that costs more, and hence, VMware support cost is also more.

I have experience with this solution. 

It is stable. But one of the drawbacks that Aria Automation had whenever there used to be an upgrade was that it never used to be very easy. It takes effort to upgrade from the current version to the new version. There used to be some challenges and changes that had to be done. 

The most recent release is based on the Kubernetes nodes now. So, it is easy now but it is not that easy because, with every new release, VMware comes up with something new. 

And how to adapt to new things and how to configure those things. And what all from the previous version will still get supported in a new version is always a new thing for us as well.

It is scalable. However, you cannot increase the number of VMware nodes on the fly. For instance, if you deployed it to a three-node cluster, you cannot simply expand that cluster. Instead, you have to deploy a new cluster with a new set of nodes.

I work in a product-based company, so we have customers for this solution in a service-based company, where we have a direct understanding of the number of customers we're supporting, whereas, in a product company, we only have access to customer usage data.

We can automate your workloads both on-premises or any software data center where you want that to be in. If we want that to be in the cloud, it's fine. If we want to provision it on-premises, it is fine. The installation is mostly done on devices. But as with AWS, if we want to use Google, if you want to use Azure, we can use those as endpoints to the VLS automation. And from the same console, we can automate workloads to be provisioned either on VMware Center, that is our own premises or onto our public cloud. So, VMware Aria Automation is there to automate your provisioning or any day one and day two operations. We can do it from one pane of glass to any endpoint, let it be cloud, or let it be our own premises.

So it doesn't have to be specific on AWS cloud or Azure cloud.

The setup needs coding. It's not easy. It's not straightforward. With the newest releases that we have ahead, we need someone who is good with the YAML codes. 

Now, there has been improvement. Previously, we should have a person who really knows Java, Python, and other codes that are being used. 

But for the recent release, we want one who should understand codes, one who should know how to, and one who should have knowledge about how to do REST API calls if we want to integrate different components with VRA. 

So, programming knowledge is a must when you're using VRA. The most tedious task will be to configure the VRA. Installation is easy; you can do it. 

However, configuring VRA with the whole of your setup within the data center is not easy. It will take some effort, and it has to be done right.

The deployment process is not fast. It will be time-consuming. A few of the modules are already there, but it is time-consuming. Moreover, it depends on the sort of integrations we want to do. If we want to integrate 15 components, different components with vRA for end-to-end provisioning, it will be consuming.

I strongly recommend gaining a thorough understanding of Aria before diving into it. Aria is not as straightforward as it initially appears. There are numerous aspects to consider, such as integrations, VRA usage, VRO, and so on. 

It's crucial to comprehend how Visualized Orchestration, Sensor Automation, and Sensor Orchestration work together harmoniously when orchestrating workflows. You really need to get proper VRA training before effectively utilizing it. It's not something you can pick up easily just by having coding knowledge. Some level of experience and training is essential for thorough usage.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. VMware Aria Automation has made a lot of things easier. It has really helped the operations team to spin up the virtual machines. Previously, if setting up infrastructure for the customer took weeks, now it can be done in a couple of days. It has reduced the time for the customers to get the infrastructure ready. So, I would definitely rate it nine. This solution has done a fabulous job over time.