VMware Aria Automation Reviews

We use this technology including VMware to support our customers' critical information systems.

The feature of automated balancing which implemented between two data centers solely for the purpose of a recovery plan is valuable.

I'm not wanting any particular feature; but there should be cost reductions. VMware comes at a high cost, and that's why we are in the process of transitioning to a more affordable alternative.

I have been using VMware Aria Automation for the last five years. 

I would rate the stability seven out of ten. Ensuring hardware compatibility is crucial in our platform. However, it posed challenges as some of our servers were not compatible, necessitating extensive adjustments to make them function correctly. Regrettably, this incurred a substantial overall cost, which was quite troublesome.

I would rate it nine out of ten. 

It's quite different. I had a rather negative encounter in the past. VMware provides local support, where you can request them to review and validate a global architecture design, which comes at a significant cost. On one occasion, despite having VMware validate the design, we encountered errors and events that had not been considered by VMware.

Neutral

We used to rely on VMware for assistance when setting up and deploying our infrastructure. The initial setup is complex. It is deployed on-premises for us by VMware teams. In the case of customers, it is dependent on the user's requirements. I would rate it four out of ten.

We encountered numerous challenging use cases that made it tough for us to deploy and handle. While the feature itself is intriguing, the administrative aspect has been quite burdensome for us. So, to sum it up, the feature rates a seven in terms of quality. However, when you dive into it and take responsibility for its ongoing maintenance, it turns into a nightmare. So, I would rate seven out of ten. 

We use SaltStack to configure virtual machines, ESXi hosts, or any Windows product.

The product’s most valuable feature is its ability to provide environmental security.

There could be better initial documentation for the product.

We have been using SaltStack for six months now.

It is a stable product. I rate its stability an eight out of ten.

The platform scales well. We can configure multiple systems. I rate its scalability a ten out of ten.

We can contact VMware support. But we find out the solutions ourselves. Although, its online documentation needs a lot of improvement.

Negative

We have deployed SaltStack on a hybrid cloud. It is difficult to set up and requires one executive to operate the deployment. I rate the process a six out of ten.

It is an open-source product.

The product works great for changing configurations. I recommend it for the DevSecOps environment. I rate it a seven out of ten as it is not user-friendly.

We use vRealize Automation for monitoring and for some administration tasks. Anytime we do upgrades or patching, we just read the reports and it makes our lives easier.

Earlier we used to spend a whole day to collect all the information regarding upgrades or patches. When we introduced vRealize, it reduced the time to between 30 minutes and one hour to finish the whole job.

It has also improved provisioning a lot. Today, if I want to provision one VM, it takes me five minutes. Earlier, it would take a minimum of 30 minutes to go and choose everything. Now, I can just click once and it can provision my whole VM. We also integrated with our Alexa, so even through voice functionality I can create a VM. One of the guys at VMware, along with our partner, deployed that in our environment. If I say, "Hey, Alexa, I need a VM with four gigs of RAM," it will go and start creating it.

In addition, it has reduced our CapEx and OpEx, especially the OpEx values. Initially, we had 25 people to manage it. After going with vRealize, 15 people can do all the jobs and they can concentrate on other improvements as well. It's good for our company.

The most valuable feature is that, instead of doing the VMotion manually, we have automated everything with a script, using vRealize. That means I don't need to think about things like compatibility. The system will do everything for me and just give me a report.

It's very user-friendly. It is not hard to go and find things. There is a one-click Help that you can use to find all the documentation you need to manage it.

From a stability perspective, VMware is number one compared to other products that are available in the market. We have never had any major downtime, after going to vSphere 6.5 and afterward. Earlier, yes, there were challenges, but nowadays it's very smooth and very straightforward.

VMware products are meant for scalability. For example, today my environment is 1500 VDS's. We acquired a company with 300 users. To merge them, I didn't need to worry about anything like hardware because it was already there. I was able to do it on the fly in one shot.

What we like about VMware, especially if I compare it with other vendors, is the support. When we call directly, the technical people jump in and start supporting us. Deploying the solution is, maybe. a three-month process. After that, managing it can be painful. So when a vendor is ready to offer that kind of support, a customer is ready to adopt their solutions. That's why we like VMware support.

We are a VMware shop. We also have Citrix and Microsoft hypervisors but, compared to both of them, VMware is the best for us, for our environment.

When selecting a vendor, price is not the only criterion. The product availability and how much better their support is, are also important.

In the initial setup, I took care of the hardware part, but the software layer and other things were taken care of by my engineers. It was straightforward.

Currently, we are upgrading the environment. Compared to the earlier versions, from my experience, the upgrade process is easier; for example, the compatibility checks. I also don't need to go and find out the resources that are required. It tells me in one report what the current environment is like and, if I want to go to the next level, what things I need to take care of. Based on that I can make things happen.

In a year, I used to spend, say, $10 per user. Now it's $5 per user. That is our approximate return on investment, 

Citrix was on our short list. But over the last ten years, we have been a big VMware shop. We wanted to continue with VMware because we are confident that VMware can address any kind of problem situation, any challenges. But with Citrix, we didn't find that kind of credibility when we did solution testing, a PoC.

I rate VMware a nine out of ten. To get to a ten there are a few areas they could improve, especially vSAN. Performance-wise, there are no challenges, but from a product perspective, it is not that flexible. What we have in vSphere today is very flexible, but vSAN is not.

We use SaltStack for configuration management, where we maintain configurations of 150 servers. It also helps with file integrity monitoring. 

We monitor the configurations against CIS standards. We run CIS benchmarks and maintain configurations with higher CIS values for each server. 

SaltStack's features are minimal. 

I have been using the solution for 14-15 years. 

We have had no issues with the tool's scalability. 

We don't have much interaction with the tech support team. 

I rate the tool's initial deployment a five out of ten. I rate adding a new server to an existing system a nine out of ten. It has pretty decent documentation for installation. 

SaltStack is an open-source product. 

I rate the product an eight out of ten. It is a strong and flexible solution. 

Our company uses the solution to have better insights for our on-premises infrastructure. We use some metrics to decide the placement of workloads based on available capacity. We integrate with automation and make dynamic decisions while working on workflows. 

We are moving a lot of our infrastructure to the cloud so are reducing use of the solution. Right now, we have twenty developers who perform automation tasks. 

The operations manager does a fantastic job on the front end because it includes on-premises and cloud use cases that pertain to any infrastructure. The solution has made great progress in integrating all these things together. 

The solution allow us to define our own super metrics. If we cannot an out-of-the-box metric, then we can write and start using our own super metric instead of waiting for the solution to develop something. 

The licensing models are a bit confusing so should be simplified. 

The solution could include more integrations and supportability around the container space. They have already started to do this, but could expand support for Kubernetes platforms and DevOps tools used for Kubernetes clusters or cloud-native development. 

I have been using the solution for seven years. 

The solution is stable so I rate stability a ten out of ten. 

The solution is absolutely scalable. 

We have contacted technical support several times. On average, they do a pretty good job but sometimes drop support requests. There is always some amount of work we do ourselves because we customize beyond the out-of-the-box options. 

Support is rated an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The initial setup is pretty easy and deployment takes about an hour. 

There are a lot of prerequisites to fill before attempting installation. If something is not right, the solution may not work the way it is expected. 

I rate setup an eight out of ten. 

We implemented the solution in-house. 

The solution is pretty expensive. If you can afford it, you should absolutely buy the solution because it provides good workload management. 

If you have oversized or undersized workloads, then the solution catches them and gives you auto-scaling suggestions that save you a ton of money. The solution will even automate some of the work to keep performance and resources at  optimal levels. It saves you from the cost of expanding your infrastructure. 

There are various licensing models that can be a bit confusing. 

The solution is the best fit if you have a VMware infrastructure because it understands the native components. 

We do not see a similar product in the VMware infrastructure that works as good as the solution. 

Often times, when I think of a missing feature I end up seeing that it is planned for an upcoming release. The solution keeps up with development so it is a great option.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We are using SaltStack SecOps for a rather large fleet of VMs that include a mixture of both Linux and Windows, with many different OS versions for each. It is used to view the compliance of the systems within our infrastructure.

This product brings all of the rich data that it collects under once central view. It makes the remediation of compliance or security issues quick and easy to understand. Being able to see this data allows us to be agile and we are able to make changes on a massive scale, thus reducing the manpower needed to implement changes. 

SaltStack has given us the ability to deal with systems at scale and rectify issues at scale. This, along with the fact that SaltStack is a event engine, allows teams to be able to to creatively attack problems and view problems within our infrastructure.

The SecOps product allows us to see where there may be issues, what a current patch level may be at, and what the recommended patch is.

As far as compliance, SecOps is able to reduce the time it takes us to verify our systems are compliant with policy.

The most valuable feature is the ability to see both compliance and vulnerabilities in a dashboard view. Being able to see that data in one place is a real game-changer. This, along with the rich metadata from our systems allows us to be able to drill down to very specific facts about each and every system. With this level of insight, we are able to make changes both at scale as well as at an individual system or application level.

SaltStack SecOps has the ability to react to events and also allows us to start reacting automatically to issues that might be in that infrastructure.

SaltStack is still growing, and so there are still those growing pains.

Sometimes in order to get the functionality you want, you need to update to the latest and greatest of the software.  For companies that traditionally like to wait for bugs to be found, this can be a bit painful.   Most of the downsides are because the product is growing and is becoming more and more useful, so I can't complain too much about that.  It's evident that SaltStack is listening to it's customers and wants to create a fully functional piece of software.

We have been using SaltStack for three months.

This product seems to handle our scale issues so far.

From our experience, there are not very many issues that we've found with the product in of itself. I'm sure that as we need to scale out, there may be some help/guidance that we need to inquire of support/professional services, but I'm confident that those groups within SaltStack will be able to provide the guidance that is needed to be successful.

Prior to this, we used Puppet/SaltStack open-source. The Puppet solution had scale issues, and SaltStack Open Source didn't have the SecOps product

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

SaltStack, when viewed in the light that it is an event engine, is a very powerful tool.

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.

VMware Automation allows you to deploy your blueprint on-prem or on a public cloud, so you have a consistent, unified service catalog.  Users can request revisions to our infrastructure, applications, and resources from one portal on the private or public cloud. We only have one or two people with the knowledge and experience to use vRA and the vRA Orchestrator.

Aria Automation gives you the flexibility to deploy tenants with customized blueprints for permissions and policies. Version 7.8 consisted of multiple products, so you had to deploy a lot of virtual machines on one of the servers.  Starting from 8.6, VMware consolidated all the components into one Linux appliance. This allows the option to use vRA or DevOps capabilities.

They could extend the ability to use vRealize Orchestrator Automation for organizations with multiple tenants. It should be easier to operate and extend different capabilities from vRealize Orchestrator. Currently, it's difficult to build advanced services in Aria Automation because you need to use the vRealize Orchestrator. 

I have been using Aria Automation for about three or four years

Aria Automation is stable.

You can deploy a single node or an enterprise cluster consisting of three nodes. 

I rate VMware support six out of 10. 

Setting up Aria Automation is difficult. The complexity varies depending on the environment size and infrastructure. It has a lot of prerequisites. For example, it has to have a firewall prepared before installation. Aria Automation is deployed through an installer called vRealize that integrates VMware identity manager, Aria Automation, and the vRealize Lifecycle Manager. The deployment takes about three days.

I rate VMware Aria Automation seven out of 10. Aria Automation needs products like vRealize Orchestrator to extend its capabilities and accessibility. If you are using Aria Automation by itself, you won't get the features you want, and the license cost is high. It needs to be cheaper, easier to use, and have more native capabilities. 

Before deploying Aria Automation, you need to know the prerequisites for the nodes. Each appliance consists of multiple components, and each has its own log. You need to understand your use case and what you want to use so you can customize the services you need to provide. For simple services, you can use only Aria Automation. If you need to customize advanced services, you will have to purchase vRealize Orchestrator and also CI/CD DevOps tools.