VMware Aria Automation Reviews

I use the solution for configuring the clusters.

The solution's most valuable feature is stability.

They should provide more explanatory reports on error messages. It would be easier for the users to understand. Also, its configuration process could be better.

I have been using the solution for a year now.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

The solution's configuration process needs improvement. They should provide better documentation for easier understanding.

The solution is free of cost.

I rate the solution as an eight out of ten.

When I started working with VMware Aria Automation, I used it mostly to automate the server build process. We completely automated the entire VM-build and post-build processes. I then used the tool at another organization in relation to CICD pipelines.

We now see more hybrid cloud scenarios and enrollment of network automation as well.

VMware Aria Automation reduces the time to market when it comes to deploying new solutions. Usually, it takes three to six weeks to deploy a new solution. Now, with VMware Aria Automation and the automated blueprint, the overall time to market is an hour, depending on approval.

The solutions can be deployed across any cloud, which is a huge advantage when a customer requires machines to be deployed rapidly.

The extensibility of the solution when it comes to writing your own ABX actions is a valuable feature. You can write it in PowerShell, JavaScript, or Python, which is great.

I also like the fact that you can pause a build process, do other tasks, come back to it, and continue with the build process.

The ability to customize the entire user frontend experience with the design canvas is great as well.

When it comes to the orchestration workflow, you're on your own. The documentation and resources are very limited, and you have to learn everything on your own.

Though the product is very powerful by itself, many who work with it struggle to get up to speed. As a result, they view VMware Aria Automation as the icing on the cake and hold on to their PowerShell scripts on the backend.

I would also like to see more integration with third-party solutions. The documentation regarding integration with third-party tools such as ServiceNow needs to be improved.

I've been working with this solution for 10 years. My first deployment was back when it was called vCloud Automation Center or vCAC.

The stability of the vRA platform itself is very good, but because of Workspace ONE, I would rate the overall stability at seven out of ten.

In terms of scalability, I would rate this solution at eight out of ten.

The technical support team in Ireland is excellent, and they resolve issues on the same day. However, if your ticket ends up at another location, it may take a few days to receive a resolution. Overall, I would rate technical support at eight out of ten.

Positive

An experienced person will find the on-premises deployment easy to do. I would rate the initial deployment at nine out of ten for an experienced person. For one who is new to the solution, I would rate it at seven out of ten.

The initial setup may take anywhere between 40 minutes to one hour.

As is the case with any other automation product, VMware Aria Automation also requires a journey. You will need to start slow, build the platform, and make sure you have good out-of-the-gate use cases. You can start with automating basic server requests. If you already have CICD tools in your environment, then you can integrate them and try a few playbooks.

You will definitely need to train your staff so that they can keep moving forward with the tool. It is a complex product, and you will need at least one full-time employee who has experience with scripting and an interest in automation who can be dedicated to this solution.

Overall, VMware Aria Automation is flexible, reliable, and scalable. With VMware Aria Automation as a cloud service, it is even easier to deploy and manage. Therefore, I would give this solution an overall rating of eight out of ten.

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 primarily use it to automate workloads.

The most valuable features are the multimachine blueprint and advanced designer configuration.

Automation or scripting should be simplified so that administrators who are not experts can have a better grasp of automation.

My organization has been working with this solution for about six years.

We have had no issues with stability.

VMware Aria Automation is a very scalable solution because it integrates well with a couple of leading products in the industry. For products that are not already integrated, there are plugins or adapters that can be used with customization. 

Because we are a large organization, we probably have more than 30 people who use the solution.

The basic installation is quite easy. If you have all of the prerequisites ready, then within two to three working days the basic foundation can be created.

Two people could probably deploy and maintain one foundation of the solution.

We deployed the solution ourselves.

We have definitely seen an ROI because automation is directly related to productivity.

Try to use the maximum level of automation possible within VMware Aria Automation. It will help you to achieve the maximum results. This solution has a lot of other features other than provisioning, like tighter integration with third-party products, ISVs, backup software, and open APIs. To fully utilize the product, you would need to get into these areas along with normal provisioning.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate VMware Aria Automation at nine.

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. 

We are using it for infrastructure service, automating things in Active Directory, and deploying Microsoft SQL and Oracle databases. We are also using it to automate some scenarios within our infrastructure.

Having a one-stop-shop for our IT services is one of our goals. Exporting and democratizing the tools helps our end users to do their work efficiently and to be more agile. It helps to minimize the time to market for our product.

Using the solution we are able to automate database refreshment. This process used to consume a number of working days. With vRA fully automating this process, it is now down to five or 10 minutes. As a result, we're able to refresh our testing and development environments frequently. When we go with a new deployment in production, the deployment is based on a fresh copy of production. We're able to have multiple environments so that we can test more product concurrently.

We use VMware Cloud Templates and having a standard template to be deployed gives us a standard across our environment and minimizes the time it takes to provide services. Despite having 20 machines, we just do the configuration once and then we can deploy it across the whole infrastructure for all environments: production, testing, and development. And this reduces the time to market for our services. They improve reliability. They give us consistency. Having things assembled and having everything in one image helps us provide reliable services. And they have saved time for our developers.

Having an enterprise service catalog and being able to automate various parts of our infrastructure are among the most important components.

It needs to be more dynamic with variable customization to make new workloads more reliable. It also needs to be faster. We are exploring vRA version 8 right now and maybe what I'm requesting is available in the new version, but we haven't explored it fully yet.

We have been using VMware vRealize Automation for seven or eight years.

VMware's customer support for vRealize Automation is good. They are knowledgeable about the product and have improved their response time. The support is fine.

We did have a previous solution but I am not able to disclose its name. vRA is an end-to-end solution with all the capabilities.

The pricing is very high.

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).

The goal was to bring the automation process to our customers using virtual machines. We were looking to do the hybrid connection with AWS. 

It can run on Linux and several versions of Windows that we have.

It gives you the flexibility to analyze and consume resources.

vRA provides a multi-cloud, self-service, infrastructure-as-a-service cloud consumption and delivery layer. We have a connection and activation between AWS and Azure. 

There is the possibility to use the central policy, especially using Active Directory. You can put this process into the company so someone can follow it. I can put this control on-prem and outside of our on-prem, using our cloud solution.

You can consume resources into the data center and hybrid with AWS.

I can use the console with the dashboard. I also have access to the portal from Azure.

We use the cloud blueprints for Linux. I can use different templates on-premise and on the cloud via GCP. We can use traditional templates or develop new templates, using them to manage integration with the solution.

In the future, I hope to use a portal from GCP.

I have been using it for approximately five years. During that time, we have used versions 6, 7, and 8.

This solution is used by six sysadmins.

This was our first solution of this type.

The initial setup was complex from beginning to delivery. The current version is a bit more complex than version 7 to deploy.

Our deployment took two days.

Six people from our company were involved in setting up vRA.

vRA has enabled us to derive value from the cloud faster. It is five to six times faster than traditional solutions.

It is easy to deliver IT support when compared to a traditional solution. With vRA, I click it, open it, and then it is available in a few minutes. It saves time because a traditional solution might take two to three hours where vRA takes a few minutes. It's a big difference.

We analyzed the market. We also looked at OpenStack, which is similar in its functionality to vRA. We chose vRA because of its integrations. Integrations were more difficult with OpenStack.

I would recommend doing an integration with hybrid cloud. With vRA, this is excellent.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).