VMware Aria Automation Reviews

We're moving from our normal IT support platform to be a service provider to our hospital. I am with a medical corporation managing more than 95 percent of the healthcare services in Qatar. There are many big hospitals under our IT Operations, and we're trying to move and be a service provider to them.

All the feedback that I have received so far from our administrators is very positive. The solution is user-friendly and intuitive.

1. Virtualization
2. The replication to our remote R&D data centers.

We would like them to improve the automation part. This is an upcoming area that we would like to focus on. We used to rely on other technologies to help us with VMware monitoring, but now, we're coming back to VMware technology. Hopefully, they will not take us down and provide something good. We have been watching their roadmaps, and it's promising. Therefore, I think it will be fine.

So far, stability has been good.

Scalability has been working fine.

Technical support is supportive. We are one of VMware's major customers in Qatar, so we receive good attention from them.

For the virtualization part, we have previously used Veeam.

We licensed VMware a long time ago. Now, we are moving from our legacy infrastructure to have a proper, private cloud environment.

Our upgrade experience was good.

We are a government service provider, so ROI is not a main KPI. However, we do plan to see ROI with any new implementation of new technologies being implemented within our environment.

We do regular technology refreshment from all our suppliers to be aware of the latest trends in the market and to select the most suitable ones which fit our needs.

We recommend VMware technologies to any of our colleagues or anyone asking to compare to other virtualization technologies in the market.

We have had VMware for more than twenty years. We are very old VMware customers and have a big setup.

Our primary use case for the product is self-service IT. VMware builds it as a portal for self-service and infrastructure as a service, which is what we are using it for, as we roll forward automating and orchestrating more tasks and being able to push things out of the hands of sys admins and into the hands of the users and app admins.

Digital transformation is more of a people problem than a technology problem in many cases. It is getting people used to the idea of self-service people and not having to go talk to the sys admin all the time, and empowering people to get things done. That's a real big thing. That's probably the biggest part of the change that this tool has on our organization: empowerment.

The solution has increased the infrastructure agility from people's perceptions of the infrastructure: Having an actual private cloud or something on-premise, which people can turn to a Window and provision things when they need it. The end result is it appears to be more agile, then the back-end is just the back end. 

• vRealize Automation has improved the speed of provisioning just by automating things, making people think about whether a human really needs to do something or can we make the machines do it for us. It is a lot faster to deploy things now.
• It has improved time to market. Just by improving them, making provisioning increases, time to provision, time to market is a definitely improved. 
• It makes a developer's life easier. They don't have to interact with their sys admins for everything anymore. It's an empowering thing.

We can automate a number of things which weren't automated before, then tie into things like VMware NSX and vRealize Operations Manager. We put things into their hands directly that were never there before, so not only do they feel empowered, but they can get their job done faster.

vRealize Automation on the back-end is still a little complicated. It has a lot of moving pieces, simplifying that from a pure infrastructure point of view would be a good thing. I would then like to have more out-of-the-box functionality and integrations with VMware components.

vRealize Automation stability is pretty good. They are always fixing bugs. The product team is doing a great job of addressing any issues that we might have.

In terms of scalability, vRA has connections to a lot of different systems. It's very flexible and an impressive product. It's almost scarily flexible.

We came to the conclusion that vRealize automation was right for us as part of an effort on our campus to consolidate IT from a real distributed model into a less distributed model, but still retain a lot of local control with departments.

A lot of higher education institutions have similar problems. People want to retain local control, but all the IT is spread out all over campus. This is a real problem. 

As we talked to people, a private cloud was the way we felt we needed to go: To be able to do self-provisioning and self-service for groups who really wanted it. We also wanted to be able to add additional advanced features, workflows, integration points, and approval processes, and vRealize Automation could do all of that. 

We were able to span from our simplest customer to our more complicated customer in the same product. This is why the product appealed to us.

I was involved in the initial setup of our environment.

The vRealize Automation team, when they released version 7 awhile ago, made immense improvements as far as being able to install and deploy the product, which has been super helpful. 

We track vRealize automation versions pretty closely. There are always new features which are of interest to us, bugs which have been fixed, and the upgrade process has been really smooth lately.

There is confusion between licensing levels. There are three different licensed versions of vRealize Automation, and there are different things which can happen in each of them. This is confusing.

vRealize automation really should be a front door to the whole VMware suite of products. The front door to a cloud: Just open it up, and let everyone do whatever they need.

We've been with vRealize Automation for a while now. 

OpenStack was pretty immature at the time that we were evaluating the solution. We also looked at Embotics and their stuff.

There are a lot of good options in this space. There is a lot of competition now. Do your due diligence around it. The VMware solutions stand on their own, but look around. Know what you are after: 

• Are you after infrastructure? 
• Are you after multi-cloud? 

Everything has a different focus.

The solution is getting better. VMware has been paying a lot of attention to it lately, and it's been inheriting a lot of their cloud efforts, user interface improvements, and getting more intuitive. It's a nice thing. To be able to build custom forms and do more things, which directly respond to our customer's needs.

If I had to rate the solution one to ten, I would give it a seven. There is room for improvement, but it looks like they are making those improvements and putting a lot of work into it.

It's our private cloud platform.

My engineers were able to pick it up quickly and we provisioned and created a private cloud in roughly three months.

Even with the virtualization, it would take us at least three or four days to create a VM. With vRA we have brought that down to seven minutes. The solution has helped increase infrastructure, agility, speed of provisioning, time to market, application agility. Everything got super fast.

It's also easier for IT to support developers. As soon as the developer wants a box, we can pretty much put it out there in a few minutes, instead of wading through a lot of manual paperwork and forms and email boxes and the like.

The solution is intuitive and user-friendly. It only took three months to start a private cloud. It was very good. Guys that didn't have a lot of knowledge in scripting picked up on it. Then I hired a VMware solutions architect and it just skyrocketed from there because he knew the ins and outs.

I can't say what new features I'd like right now because we're looking forward to the stuff that's in 7.5. I need some stick-time on 7.5 and then I can tell you what I want to see in 7.6 or 7.7.

It's very stable. We haven't had any issues and we've been using it for roughly two years. We're upgrading to the 7.5 now.

It scales fine. We've been scaling on storage but we actually have two divisions. We just deployed it to another division to help them out. The company I work for grows by acquisition so the new acquisitions are now getting this pointed to them so they can provision faster, with basically the same standards, instead of doing stuff manually.

Regarding technical support, because we have a solution architect on board, we have a lot of problems but his questions are not normal questions. His questions almost have to be escalated to a developer immediately. He doesn't ask anything simple or even just plain hard. His stuff is nearly impossible.

From that perspective, technical support has not done very well. But we have rockstars on the team and there's no way you're going to get great support because these guys are asking questions that even the rockstars of the VM world are scratching their heads about.

I brought VMware into the company in 2004. Before that it was manual, bare metal boxes.

I was involved in the initial setup but not as an engineer. Before I hired Alex, we had a guy put the stuff up. He did it in a couple of days. It was straightforward and it was functional, it worked really well. Then we got this new guy and he had so much insider knowledge. He worked out of Moscow. He was doing all the work for the all the other customers and we hired him in.

We're on 7.4, we're going to upgrade to 7.5 after Labor Day. Since we've gone live, we've done three upgrades and they've all been really good. No issues.

I can't provide numbers off the top of my head but going from three or four days to seven minutes to create a VM - and that seven minutes can go up to 50 servers wide - means it has worked beautifully.

We evaluated Hyper-V, that was a big failure. We looked at KBM, that was pretty good. We're using Acropolis Hypervisor right now. Everything is still primitive, but among the other ones, AHV from Nutanix seems to be the most stable functionally but it is still missing a whole lot of toolsets that you need. So we're not moving in that direction any time soon.

The other competitors are throwing everything at you for free but they don't have any management. You don't have the feature set that you have in vROps. vRA is much more sophisticated. You get what you pay for with VMware. You're getting all the feature set. Where everybody else is trying to give you stuff for free, they're harder to work with and then you spend more man-hours.

Start with VMware vRA. Other solutions haven't been in the game long enough. You're going to have a lot of custom-scripting that VMware already puts in there.

I rate it an eight out of 10 only because I wish we had a way to get through the technical support department faster. We've been with them long enough - and I've already talked to the sales guy about this - that they should almost have an "express lane." You lose two or three days going through the normal process. It goes to level-one and he bounces it to level-two, to level-three, when pretty much, because we've got this long history, they should know that when we call, it needs to be bounced all the way up to the top. That's just the reality.

Our primary use case of this solution is to provide our clients with a virtual private cloud. It has been performing very well. We've had some multi-tenancy issues but VMware has been very supportive. 

For repeated installations and the provisioning of VMs, we now have a clear definition of what has been installed, and we can monitor all that stuff. There are some functions for the ICDs, and we have continuous development and deployment.

It theoretically could help provision new clients faster if you adhere to the limits of the product then it makes provisioning the new client a lot faster. If you have customers like we have that are really demanding and want special solutions it will end up in huge customization.

We like the blueprint designer. We can create topologies with it. 

I have found it to be user-friendly because it's very UI centric. We have a problem that most of our developers would like to have it more on a flat file format. For our end user, it's just perfect.

I would like to see multi-tenancy in NSX and better functionality. 

We have found this solution to be stable as long as we don't test its limits. We have had huge installations where we had some problems with performance and stability. 

If you have a normal use case like a conventional enterprise and use it for yourself then you might never test its limits. In our case, our customers are creating a lot of business groups and this led to a lot of problems later on.

Their technical support is very good and swift. 

We switched because we don't want to focus on the cloud management platform. We want to have this resolved and supported by a vendor because we are system integrators and want to supply the services and the knowledge above that. 

The initial setup was complex because we have a high availability cluster. Especially when it comes to upgrades, we have a lot of downtimes and problems. The upgrade experience has been painful. 

The product as a whole was offered by Dell EMC but we used VMware as an integrator and for the setup. We still have some VMware specialists working within our team.

We have seen ROI. 

We built everything from scratch, it ended up being very costly. 

I would rate this solution a seven because it hasn't perfectly adapted to our use cases with multi-tenancy. 

If you're looking into this solution I would tell you that if you use this solution only within your own company, you'll be fine. If you have a business like ours, it can get complicated. 

Primary use case for us is how do we consolidate, how do we provision machines as fast as possible, provision databases? Also, how do we go from on-prem to cloud?

We like vRA because it helps make systems available on time for our customers, on demand. Previously, if a customer requested machines or servers it would take three or four days to deliver. But now we can give them specific tools, or a portal, where they can shop and select which server they want. We provision servers faster. For example, to get a database machine provisioned it would take a week. Now it's a matter of 30 minutes.

Also, we now have control over the network, the server team, the storage. We only need a single team, customers are only talking to one team.

I don't think it's intuitive or user-friendly. I think it's a good tool. Any automation tool, these days, the learning curve is kind of high. You're teaching sysadmins who never developed stuff. Maybe they modified a little bit of code and now you tell them, "Hey, here's the tool, use it." But you have to know a little bit of DevOps. So you have to train them how to do the scripting.

They could also improve a lot on the interface itself.

We have not had any outages or crashes so far.

Scalability is very agile. You can scale it however you want.

If you have the Premium Support you might get somebody. Other than that...

I was responsible for the upgrade. It was very complex. One the reasons was that we were going version to version. We learned that some of the objects that were supported in previous versions were duplicated across the board. So we had to clean a lot of the databases to get the new versions.

We are still at an early stage so our assessment is probably going to be at the end of the next quarter.

My advice would be to hire Professional Services. Don't do it yourself.

When looking to work with a vendor, the most important factor is skills. They need to have the right skills, especially when you don't have time, your project timeline is very short. Skills are the key: someone who knows the product, who has lot of experience, and who has done it before.

My customer is the largest in Turkey, a university. The university has more than 48 servers in its data center, and they ask for between at least five to ten virtual machines daily.

They were looking for a solution that automates VM creation, especially for SQL sites, because they have a very large SQL Server requirement, especially for project management. They are looking for an HPC solution. We performed a PoC at the customer's site using vRealize Automation. After that, they bought it for all their sockets, approximately 100 sockets.

Now the customer can manage its own server requirements directly. This is very important because, before that, the process included signing off on forms and sending them to the IT Director. It took at least 10 days to create a VM and send it to the person who needed it. Now, it's no more than a half hour to activate a new VM at the customer's site.

The most valuable feature is the automation. They now save time because there is one person who manages all of the virtualization servers and the storage sites at this university. 

Another valuable feature is the flexible user interface. They can manage all of the servers, the full lifecycle of VMs, on one screen.

Turkey does not have a big presence on the automation side. We have only one customer. Maybe some new applications can be added based on the technology. For example, maybe SAP could be added, because the customer is currently only using it for the database site, and the other VMware systems.

It is stable. We haven't had any problems with vRA and it has been working for more than three years. We upgraded to the new version without any problems, and the customer is using it.

In terms of scalability, this customer is looking to expand and they have to plan to buy and multiply their resources. After that, because they like vRA, they want to buy vSAN because they also want to automate the storage scalability and storage for the VM sites.

The setup is very easy. We performed the installation with the customer.

Buy the solution. There is no problem. For the last three years, our customer hasn't had any problem. With vRA, the customer saves time.

The primary use case is going to be managed services. We're a hosting provider and we're looking to provide provisionable resources across multiple cloud platforms and to be able to support Day 2 Operations. We're trying to fully manage the lifecycle process as well as fully integrate with all of our management end-points, whether it would be inventory, ITSM, or backups, etc.

Eliminating the need for our engineers to do any of this manually, and being able to focus their efforts on the deeper level customizations at the OS level - like installing applications and leveraging things that we would not necessarily want to offer in an automated sense just because of the diversification of the implementation - that has been of value to us.

I personally spend a lot of time in vRealize Orchestrator, so being able to directly tie into the back end on the APIs, I find that to be what really is the most advantageous thing for me.

The solution is intuitive, but not necessarily user-friendly. In particular, it's the documentation. It's a lot of going-through-the-weeds types of scenarios. There is just an abundance of information, so it's a matter of understanding how the objects or the relationships exist, and then, obviously, being able to access that information and knowing how to make use of it.

If there were a tighter integration with either AWS or Azure - being able to have a little bit more out-of-the-box, flexibility-wise, and the ability to realize that - it would help. You're getting out-of-the-box workflows that will literally allow you to provision, but there's a large development gap to cover the use cases that we're trying to provide or support.

The stability of the product has been good. However, I feel like the upgrade, doing more of the infrastructure administration, has been more problematic for my organization. But otherwise, it's been a good product.

Scalability is good. We haven't had any real concerns over that because we have a data center footprint. We haven't had any real limitations on acquisitioning new hardware so, at the rate at which we're growing, we're making the right projections and we haven't really exceeded our availability.

VMware tech support is not terrible. At times I feel like it's hard to get to the proper person to speak with, because I deal with vRealize Automation. It's a matter of trying to get straight to the second tier.

We just had vCenter. Ultimately, we were looking to take that to the next level. We wanted to allow our customers to be able to potentially consume the catalog items and to better leverage things, and to give more transparency to what we can provide. At the same time, we wanted them to not have to go through all of the ticket-raising process. We wanted to be able to allow them to get right to it.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. I've done it many times though, so at this point I can almost do it without documentation.

Compared to alternative solutions in this space, the feature set of this solution is unrivaled. I can't really think of anything else that has a better management platform, that would be as mature as this software.

Do your research beforehand, because the architecture itself can get you tripped up if you don't properly align your certificates. You definitely have to have an idea of where you want to end up.

There is certainly room for improvement with some of the little things I was talking about, like either better managing of the upgrade process, or just making the infrastructure deployment a little bit easier. It feels like all of the pieces have been automated on one level or another, like with the PowerShell scripts, doing all the IS, Windows boxes preparation. They just need to get it to be more end-to-end.

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.