VMware Aria Automation Reviews

The most valuable asset is most probably the ability to target the needed hosts, and running commands via modules or a shell on all of them at the same time. This means that mass parallel administration of large server farms is possible.

I am now able to rollout critical updates within seconds on all affected servers, and it doesn't matter if there are five or 500 of them.

So far, everything worked as expected. This means that so far, I heavn't seen anything which needs improvements. The software works as expected and I stumbled across no issues while using it.

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.

• Automation
• The flexibility to actually build different components, in terms of virtual machines.

Our group, we do mostly the virtualization and a creation of systems. Therefore, it's not a cookie cutter build of a template, and that's it, it's more dynamic for our group.

It's increased the efficiency. There's less manual work through vRA. Now, Orchestrator is the one doing most of the work and making everything more automated.

I would like to see this additional features in the next release: The ability to have more dynamic forms. Some of the static forms that vRA provides in the XaaS form, they are good, but they could be a little more efficient. For instance, the calendar selections should have the ability to only go to a certain spot, as opposed to going out to something like 2040, for the requests.

Stability is really good. Once you got everything setup, even in its HA form, it's pretty stable.

Not as good, but there are some components in vRA that you can scale out a lot more quickly than other pieces.

In our group, more of the web solutions and the blog posts helped to grow our ability to use vRA.

They are always reachable by person and knowledgeable.

But because it's such a dynamic solution, at times VMware does have to go gather more resources in order to figure out the solution to things.

We had a previous VMware product called Lab Manager, then we had grown out of that box and decided to go with vRA.

I was involved in the setup. In the original version 5, it was very complex. Version 6 got a little better. Version 7 is much more improved.

In the first deployment, they sent an in-house team.

Microsoft.

Advice for looking at VM solutions:

Definitely research the product and see what's out there.

Look at blog posts of vRA. There's quite a few resources that you can search and find on the web which will basically get you on the ground running for deployment, even simply XaaS forms.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Support
• The cost is always important.
• The ability of their features to match with ours.

The most valuable feature of the product is the automation for services; it’s the basis of my work. It is important because nowadays, in this complex world, services have become the base for everything. Having a large base is needed to better build what you need for your pipelines, as opposed to a few years ago, when the application was king.

We created pipelines for all our products.

The base library is missing some key elements such as networking management (mine is lacking on that front) and some more granularity on the apt part.

I have used it for 12 months.

I have not encountered any stability issues so far.

I have not encountered any scalability issues so far.

Technical support is just about right, in the sense that the product is well documented and information is easy to find.

We previously used Puppet, which was not suited for my current workload. We chose SaltStack because Ruby wasn't the language used by my team and we needed a master-client solution as opposed to a master-less one.

Initial setup was very easy.

Pricing and licensing is perfect the way it is.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated CFEngine.

Read the docs.

For a few years, when we needed a server, it took us three months to deliver one. Now, we can bring one up in approximately 15 minutes.

Our delivery is now very fast.

It's very stable.

We're satisfied with the scalability of the solution.

They are very good. We have an account manager. We use the account manager, if necessary, and have with a relationship with them, so they can respond very quickly.

If you are looking to implement the product, do it together with VMware. It was a good experience for us.

Multi-vendor cloud IT infrastructure personalization, resource provisioning and configuration, and it automates application delivery and container management.

It provide us a common console to manage workloads on our private and public cloud infrastructures.

Better integration with Azure cloud and Google Cloud Platform.

Two years.

vRA 7.2 onwards is quite a stable product.

New versions are quite scalable, but when it comes to managing a Telco environment, it has bottleneck.

A nine out of 10.

We have been using the older version (VMware vRealize Automation Center).

It's a quite straightforward setup in comparison with products in the same domain.

It's worth each penny.

No, we have been using VMware suite for a long time and we are pretty much comfortable with it.

Go for it. It's a perfect product of a heterogeneous environment.

Fast provisioning and integration with public cloud. Our customers want the VMs to be up and running as early as possible. Also, some of our customers need their workloads to be running on the public clouds like AWS to minimize the cost. Using vRA, we can easily integrate AWS and can provision VMs on them.

Fast provisioning.

I don’t see configuration management feasibility. I think there should be a configuration management tool on the user dashboard. It can be used to patch/update the servers provisioned through vRA for an inbuilt facility.

We have seen couple of bugs.

Not really.

Good.

Good.

Yes. Poor vendor support and less stability.

It was straightforward but they still need to improve the IaaS components.

Compared to other vendors in the market the licensing cost is OK.

Yes. HPE.

Go for it.

Multi-tenancy is one of the best features for configuring a single portal for multiple departments/customers. Multi-tenancy allows us to use a single vRA portal to configure multiple tenants with their individual URLs. Also, this feature allows us to use shared infrastructure for multiple tenants.

The front end portal for end users, which communicates with infrastructure endpoints.

The infrastructure part and VM reconfigure need improvement so that the end user can smoothly perform all the tasks which they are directly performing on the endpoints.

Three years.

No.

No.

Excellent.

No.

Straightforward.

This is one of VMware's best products for automation.