VMware Aria Automation Reviews

We use VMware Aria Automation for autoscaling. We have multiple databases on multiple nodes. We leverage Aria Automation to migrate workloads to other nodes during the downfall. Additionally, it facilitates training VMs for rapid deployment as needed.

We can connect between multiple VMs in a matter of seconds.

The connectivity between VMs is easy, but they can be made more effective if we have a single proof point where we can configure all the biggest data at a single point. It will be very helpful for the deployment team. They could maintain every log from multiple VMs being collected or taken to adequate various VMs in a single cluster at a particular time.

I have been using VMware Aria Automation for two years.

We haven't got any instability in the VMware Automation.

I rate the solution's stability a ten out of ten.

We have to review some aspects while scaling the VMs due to the connectivity issue.

Internally, the solution is being used by around 10-15 people and 10,000-15,000 people across the globe. We use it daily because the application needs to be up and running for the whole day. Users are currently using Aria Automation.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

Technical support is good. If we have any issues, we call the team. They respond in no time.

Positive

We had an open-source Automation on the POC basis. It was in the development phase. We didn't deploy due to the security features.

The initial setup is moderate. There could be some trouble connecting multiple VMs to a single master node, but eventually, after getting some hands-on practice, one can leverage tools easily. During the initial period when the team struggled, they took around two hours to deploy. When everyone understood VMware, it took around 30-40 minutes. It was an in-house setup.

We require around three to four people consolidated into a single and deployment teams. They have multiple aspects of others. One was having all the monitoring logs. One was handling VM files or configuration files that need to be maintained. One was looking after all sorts of needs to maintain for every stage. One was a developer looking after all these team members and managing the deployment completely.

I rate the initial setup an eight out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy.

I rate the product’s pricing a nine out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.

We require only two people to maintain this solution, including one monitoring it and another going through all the software documents to be maintained.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Currently, our usage of VMware Aria Automation is relatively light, mainly focused on automating VMs. However, we aim to broaden our use cases to include more complex scenarios, such as integrating with ServiceNow for end-to-end automation from request to execution. Our goal is to transition towards self-service and comprehensive automation.

The process for customers to automate with VMware Aria Automation is predominantly manual. Requests are made through tickets, which are assigned to Resolver tools. Approvals may come via email, and the execution team logs into Aria Automation to input and execute the requested tasks. Overall, it involves a mix of manual processes, email communication, and ticketing systems.

Currently, the primary feature we're using in VMware Aria Automation is its ability to execute tasks quickly. However, we haven't explored other features like workload management or the full stack yet. So it's hard to make comparisons or fully utilize its potential until we expand our usage.                 

Our current use cases aren't very complex, but as our environment grows, we're seeing a greater need for automation. We're considering expanding our automation efforts, especially since other competitive products are starting to offer similar features.

I have been using VMware Aria Automation for the past one and a half years.

I would rate the stability 8 out of 10. 

I would rate the scalability 6 out of 10. The scalability has improved, making it easier to expand and maintain additional features in VMware Aria Automation.

The response time is usually good, but for more complex cases or requests involving extensive data, the turnaround time may be longer.

The integration works well and there are plenty of out-of-the-box integration options available. While I haven't used all of them extensively, the integration experience is generally smooth and straightforward, typically requiring just one step for standard environments.

Before implementing VMware Aria Automation, users should consider their specific use cases and how the solution aligns with the demands of their working environment. They should also take into account pricing considerations, potential need for ongoing support, and whether the support team is responsive and helpful. Additionally, users should evaluate the availability of features and assess whether the solution meets their requirements effectively.

We utilize the solution for various purposes, including backup solutions with other tools. It automates the backup of servers once they are provisioned, integrates with Cloud Director, and manages SQL databases and storage solutions like NetApp and VMAX.

The platform's most valuable features are its automation capabilities and agility. Eliminating manual backups simplifies the processes and enhances the customer experience. Its integration with other products is also highly beneficial.

Our primary challenge is upgrading the product to the latest version. This process requires careful communication with the vendor to mitigate risks.

I recommend enhancing Red Hat Ansible's integration for better automation and bulk configuration management.

We have been using VMware Aria Automation for approximately five years.

I rate the solution's stability a nine. 

The solution is highly scalable. Approximately 1,500 users are engaged with the product in our organization.

Scaling up is easy, but scaling out requires additional planning and consultation. I rate the scalability a ten. 

We have contacted the technical support team. Their response is generally good, but sometimes cases are transferred between different teams, which can delay resolution.

Positive

The setup is relatively straightforward, though upgrading the system can be complex. Deployment typically takes four to five days, carried out by the vendor's step-by-step plan.

I rate the process an eight. 

The cost of the solution is reasonable for us. Although it is relatively high, we prioritize stability and integration over cost.

I recommend the product due to its effectiveness in automation and integration.

I rate it a ten. 

We were looking to have a single pane of glass (one console) to manage our complete infrastructure. It has helped us integrate having one user interface to manage our infrastructure and application templates.

vRA's multi-cloud strategy is very important to us as a cloud service provider.

The hardware that we use is Dell EMC.

The manual efforts of creating a VM for an individual customer has now been eliminated, e.g., creating a template or blueprint. With Orchestrator, we will take that blueprint and build a form for the customer. All this used to be done manually by an administrator, from a network, storage, and compute point of view. The admin's job is simple now versus the way we were doing it before.

It provides a single pane of glass for management. These types of platforms help us to have a holistic view.

The solution has helped us to automate deployment for developers. Before developers have to build another virtual machine, they can run code with VMware Code Stream integration. They can verify and download code, which really helps our developers be faster.

vRA has enabled us to derive value from the cloud more rapidly. We have seen increased services along with more integrations and catalogs. Now, we can create and update policies faster. 

The solution has freed up our time to concentrate on other things.

• vRealize Orchestrator
• Catalog Service

The policy control is excellent. There are multiple security controls that we can achieve by using this tool. When we were siloed, the policy implementation and control were difficult.

We use the solution’s following DevOps for infrastructure capabilities:

• The cloud templating standard for VMware Cloud infrastructure
• VMware Cloud Templates
• Infrastructure pipelining for continuous delivery
• We partially use iterative development for GitOps use cases, as it is not very good.

These capabilities boosts our administration and management from a technical point of view and help our team maintain the solution. Reliability improved because now the CI/CD and DevOps are integrated and managed under the same team using the same software.

They should concentrate on navigation and service improvements.

We have been using it for more than two years.

From the inception and kick-off meeting, VMware has been very professional from a project management standpoint. They know what their goal is and have all the ground work done. They have a dedicated Project Manager. They know what kind of resources that they need, so it happens in a very timely manner. We don't have any complaints from a VMware product management standpoint, because they are all professionals. 

I would rate the technical support post-deployment as a 10 out of 10.

Prior to using any VMware products, we had Cisco UCS Director. 

Prior to vRealize Automation, we had VMware vCloud Automation Center, or vCAC. It was not a mature product. At that point in time, everything was working in silos and the integration was difficult because the APIs were not mature. After we did the automation upgrade, this embedded everything, so it now has one single URL for accessing all applications. 

The initial setup was straightforward. From a product point of view, it is seamless. The code runs. The software is built into all the appliances, then everything is deployed automatically and integrated with the scripts.

There are commercial implications to start up vRA if a company has no hardware nor knowledge of the product.

Our deployment was one month. Integration and completion of the migration took another two months. Put together, it took us a total of 90 days to implement and start using it. 

For the initial setup, there were four people from my organization involved:

• One SME from compute and storage
• One SME from network
• One SME from application
  
• One technical project manager.

We have seen ROI. The more VMs that we create, the more services that we are creating for our customers. Our delivery times are reduced, so we have more productivity.

The DevOps for infrastructure capabilities has saved time for our developers by automating processes and reducing provisioning time. Task time has been reduced by 40 percent. 

When it comes to IT operations, 40 percent of our time has been reduced because of Code Stream.

From a budget point of view, the pricing is a bit on the higher side.

We did need to purchase some new hardware for the cloud because we wanted to upgrade it.

While we evaluated other options, vRA made it easy and quick for us to go with this solution as an existing VMware customer. With new products, there are training implications. Also, VMware is one of the market leaders.

If you are already a VMware, definitely consider the cost implications of going with vRA versus a competitor.

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is 100 percent mature on the private cloud. We don't have any issues working on it.

We are using other solutions from VMware to extend our network security.

Training is a continuous process. 

I would rate this product a nine out of 10.

We are mainly using it for automation. Our main use case is providing in-house kind of cloud capabilities to the enterprises so they can utilize automated provisioning, backups, etc.

Different customers have different versions. We are probably using versions 6 and 7.

One of our main customers is a big tech company. We have created automated labs for their products. They have these events in which they wanted to do training on the event site, and they wanted to have on-the-go labs. We utilized vRA to do that. Another customer for whom we are using VMware vSphere and vRA is a government entity. They have other customers or end-users that are different departments of the government. They have provided them cookie-cutter and templates to provision the VMs and do the backups. So, they are using vRA along with vSphere and the stack to provide a kind of government cloud.

We use the following DevOps for Infrastructure capabilities: the cloud templating standard for VMware Cloud infrastructure and infrastructure pipelining for continuous delivery. Through these capabilities, we have achieved more control, more monitoring capabilities, and more efficiency in terms of delivering solutions with much more confidence and less number of failures. There is also less strain on our human resources, so everything becomes more easily manageable. These features have saved time for our developers. They have saved 30% to 40% of the time. Using DevOps infrastructure has definitely improved reliability.

vRA has helped to automate deployment for our developers. These automatic deployments have saved time. It has improved the self-service kind of deployments for the development teams. We have our own internal data centers, and we are also doing a lot of customer deployments. In both cases, it has reduced the time that they have to spend communicating internally with other people. They have these cookie-cutter operations that they can utilize. They can provision their own stuff or deploy their infrastructure pretty quickly. So, the dependencies are reduced, and the developers can focus more on their own part rather than calling the infrastructure team to provision or automate something.

We have been using VMware within our organization and for our customers, and vRA has enabled us to leverage existing VMware processes, systems, and training in our organization to support IT Ops.

vRA's automated processes have reduced infrastructure provisioning time. There is about a 60% reduction of time in infrastructure provisioning. 

Our application provisioning time is also reduced by using vRA automated processes. We have Ansible and other stuff with vRA. There is a 60% to 80% reduction in time for application configuration. It has also reduced the time to market for our apps by at least 40%.

The automation part is most valuable. Because it is a VMware product, the automation capabilities that come with vRA are pretty extensive. We can integrate and build a lot of features on top of it, which makes it extremely useful for us.

We have been using it in our own data centers and for our customers for almost five years.

It is pretty stable. This is based on what I have heard or seen for different projects.

I would think that it is scalable. Our clients are usually looking for somebody who can deploy and configure their environments or provide some kind of managed services support. Around 10% to 15% of our customers are on VMware vSphere automation and vRA automation. Internally, there is a 25% utilization. We are planning to expand its usage this year, and we will see how multi-cloud automation can be utilized. We will try to implement things or use cases in a virtual environment, and then we can resell those use cases, provide support for those use cases, or give training to the customers. 

I have not worked with them myself, but our customers have VMware support, and we use their TAC accounts to raise an issue and get support.

Previously, we were mostly using manual processes. The reasons for implementing vRA were more control, visibility, and flexibility. We wanted to move away from manual, human intervention-based processes to automated processes, which would also provide more stability.

Its initial setup is of medium complexity. It is not too straightforward, and it is not extremely complex. It can improve. There are technicalities that are involved.

We have done some deployments that have taken us less than a week. We have also done deployments that have taken us months. On average, it takes three to ten days.

The deployment strategy depends on the requirements. We like to have a repeatable model, but most of the time, customers have different needs. Wherever possible, we utilize a repeatable model. 

In our organization, we have five people who are dealing with VMware infrastructure. Our senior solutions architect has different kinds of certification in VMware solutions. There are two senior engineers and two junior engineers reporting to him. So, we have a team of five people for our internal management and external deployments.

We have received a return on investment. We are a lean team, and we are able to deliver more. We are able to manage more than what we could manage previously, and we don't have to have lots of people. We are also saving a lot of time, and it is also providing us more visibility.

I don't think we evaluated other solutions.

While implementing a solution like vRA, the most important thing is to understand why you're using it for a use case. If you want to implement a solution to do automation, I would suggest seeing what kind of integrations it provides with different endpoints and plan around it. vRA provides pretty extensive integrations. My advice would be to first just understand why you want to use vRA and then have a strategic roadmap implemented. You should start with a basic implementation and then go on top of it.

vRA has enabled us to derive value from the cloud more rapidly, but we have not yet fully realized that value. We are planning to use the multi-cloud features more as we go along. It is in the roadmap that we have for this year. Similarly, vRA has enabled us to manage the cloud easily through its entire life cycle, but we have not exploited it fully. We have not utilized it for multi-cloud environments. We have mostly focused on the on-prem environments and on Azure and AWS to a certain extent. We are working on utilizing vRA along with other automations from our tech cloud. There is an internal roadmap that we have for this year in which we want to monitor multiple multi-cloud environments, not only for our own staff but also for our customers.

We have not used VMware Cloud Templates and iterative development for GitOps much. We have not used the multi-cloud Infrastructure as Code yet. We are planning to use it.

We have also not used vRA much to extend our security footprint into the cloud. We have done it here and there but not fully and not to the extent that I am happy about.

I would rate vRA an eight out of 10.

I use the solution in my company for our day-to-day tasks, like the creation of VMs, policy assignments, and some network mappings to the virtual machines, which are all done through the tool's automated policies in Aria Operations.

The most helpful feature of the product stems from the fact that you can create a lot of virtual machines automatically using the tool's automation features.

The high price of the tool is an area of concern where improvements are required.

I have been using VMware Aria Automation for two years.

The product is stable.

It is a highly scalable solution.

My company has an additional team that consists of people who coordinate directly with the VMware support team.

From the usability point of view, if you have experience working on other platforms, then you will feel familiar working with VMware Aria Automation, and it would mostly be the same experience. Only VMware Aria Automation's interface would feel different compared to the interfaces of the Other products one may have experienced with in the past. Most of the features are the same in VMware Aria Automation and in the other products that are similar to it.

In my company, we work with other tools, but there are dedicated teams who are assigned specifically to use each product.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The solution can be deployed in a month.

It is an expensive product. After VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, there was a rise in the price of VMware Aria Automation. My company's procurement team handles the pricing part.

I did see a significant improvement in our company's IT efficiency, especially when there were a lot of deployments, as it eased up the efforts.

The most beneficial feature of the product for my company's on-premises infrastructure revolves around VMware vSphere and VMware Aria. I can't speak in much depth about other tools as I have not been exposed to other products since some other team in my company handles them.

My company has not integrated VMware Aria Automation with some other tools or platforms.

I rate the tool a seven and a half to eight out of ten.

We use the product for automation purposes for high CPU utilization. We can create a playbook using it.

The product saves a lot of time and cost for us. It has valuable features for creating a playbook.

VMware Aria Automation could be more user-friendly. It is complex to use for new users. It should have automated tools or drag-and-drop functionality.

We have been using VMware Aria Automation for one year.

It is a stable product.

We have three VMware Aria Automation users in our organization. It is a scalable product.

The technical support team takes time to reply to queries. 

Neutral

We have used Dell IDPA before. We switched to VMware Aria Automation for more flexibility. It integrates with many VMware products, including Nutanix and ESXI data centers and hypervisor.

The deployment is easy. It takes a day to complete. It requires two to three executives from the network, data center, reporting, and implementation department to work on it. It can be integrated on-premises and on the cloud. 

The product is easy to maintain. One executive can maintain 500 virtual machines. It needs two more executives to manage more than 500 different cloud accounts.

They should provide one license for all the sub-products. For example, if we purchase VMware Aria Automation, they should also add a license for VMware vRealize Automation. It is tricky to upgrade and manage multiple licenses together. We have to pay additional costs for support services for critical issues.

I rate VMware Aria Automation a seven out of ten. They should provide only one license and free support services until the product’s life cycle ends. Also, its support team should respond faster.

We use vRealize Automation not only to track the utilization of the environment but to deploy new VMs on a regular basis. When DevOps decide they need a whole bunch of VMs spun up for a new version of an application we are already running, we can duplicate everything we've already got, spin them all up, get them running. When they're done with whatever test case they have going on, we can either move them over to staging or we can completely wipe out the entire environment, and that's a lot easier to monitor and manage.

Simplification. It gives us one interface to control multiple environments. It's an easier way to look at how a large chunk of information or data or processors are being used, and what they're being used for.

I would like to see it expanding, growing in all of the cloud-based stuff that they are really pushing towards, and have it be more capable of what it is already doing. But in reality, that's probably our own fault because we're a little bit behind on the version of VMware that we're running. It's probably just that we need to get caught up on our version.

The stability is 95 percent. There are some situations where it gets a little bit clumsy. When it gets really big, when you're dealing with a very large deployment, it can be a little bit difficult, but it's better than nothing. It does a significant job, given what it's tasked to do.

Scalability is probably the best part about it. You can take things that you've already defined, that you've already built once, and build them again multiple times, without significant effort.

I haven't used technical support but my co-worker has, more than once, to deal with issues we were having while we were in the process of setting it up. I was off on other tasks so I never really had to deal with tech support. But, from what he said, it worked out well. They knew what they were talking about, they helped us get it sorted out.

There were other solutions that were used previously, but this one is the main one I have used, personally. Before coming to Bass Pro, where I am working now, it was a lot of VMware on bare metal and dealing with it directly. vRealize wasn't there.

We see our ROI is in terms of the reduced workload, because we can see a lot of things on one place and don't have to spend a lot of time going out looking for them, and in the simplification of deployment. Again, we can go to one place, do what we need to do, go off and work on other projects and come back and it's taken care of it itself.

I give the solution a nine out of ten. Again, that's probably our own being behind. It's entirely possible the newest version is a ten. It's the whole extension, further into more modern technology, but we're not on the newest version at the moment. So it's probably already there and we don't see it yet. We're trying to get everything pulled together between our company and several other companies, to be on the same version. We're in the process of upgrading to the 6.5 and then, hopefully, very soon to 6.7.