VMware Aria Automation Reviews

It is primarily used for developers to spin up their own VMs and destroy them at will, afterwards my group spins it up in production machines. Probably, its most valuable feature is it takes time off of my schedule to quickly, securely, and conveniently deploy virtual machines, then I can work on other things.

The big benefit is it will spin up VMs quickly so it would take about 13 to 15 minutes to deploy a virtual machine. Whereas, if I were doing it based on an email from users who are requesting VMs, it might take time for me to hear back from them. This could be anywhere from an hour to a day. It's extremely convenient to be able to spin something up and be able to work on other things, because it's already done it, making my workload lighter.

Quantifying can be a little difficult because we recently rolled out. It is probably 90 percent quicker to get something out the door than it was before. For developers, depending on who is building VMs for them, sometimes they request anywhere from 20 to 100. Now, we can deploy them in a matter of an hour, where previously it might have taken me three days to deploy out 100 VMs.

It would be nice in the next release if they added in tool tips. Whether you're putting it together, adding a blueprint, or you're making a change in the system, highlighting or selecting something and having it tell you what it does or what it will do would be nice. Because it's such a complex system, it's hard to work with unless you've been using it for years to know what everything is doing.

So far, stability is great. We haven't had anything crash or be taken down by bugs that we've come across. 

We left room to be able to expand in the future. This was the job of our consulting company.

Previously, it was just me manually building VMs. 

When my workload started increasing and I started getting more tasks, my manager noticed that it took longer to deploy VMs. At which point, our senior admin knew about this product and suggested that we move forward with putting it into the new environment.

The setup process isn't intuitive and user-friendly, but once it's set up everything after that is easy. It can be as hard as you want it to be, or it could be as easy as you want it to be depending on how you're setting it up. 

It is completely upgraded to the newest right now. 

I spent about a month working on the set up. It was pretty complex. 

It takes a smart person well-versed in anything from JavaScript to building out blueprints to somebody who knows vCenter and vSphere. 

To deploy it, we brought in a consulting company because were strapped for user availability to set it up. Therefore, having a consulting company sped up the process of putting it together.

Since it's fairly new, we don't know the ROI yet. 

As far as value is concerned, it has been essential to our environment. We have been able to deploy VMs quickly and the developers have their own sandbox, so they can spin up and destroy VMs at their own will. 

It was always going to be VMware, because that's our primary virtual machine deployment. 

It is a solid 10. It's completely taken a lot of time off my plate so I can concentrate on other things, including learning the product as well as vRO, vRealize Orchestrator. 

If it's too complex for you, get a consulting company, because it makes the process a lot easier. I would definitely speak with other people who have implemented it in their environment. We've actually done that in the past for other products. It's nice to hear what other companies think about the product. It will help accelerate your decision.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. Ease-of-use.
2. Functionality to the point where it's not going to break, and there are no bugs in it. If the product has been long known to contain very harsh setup routines, it's going to take a long time for bugs get fixed, or there are multiple bugs which keep showing up in every version, this is something that I don't want to deal with.

VMware Aria Automation is mainly used with vRealize Orchestration to orchestrate provisioning. It segregates resource usage among different teams. If there are various tenants utilizing resources, vRA is essential for efficiently managing resource allocation. Whether it's provisioning machines in our data center, supporting customer infrastructure in AWS, Azure, or different vCenters, vRA streamlines the process. 

Instead of navigating through various console endpoints for provisioning workloads, vRA allows automation with a single click. This means we can automate the provisioning of not just a plain VM or OS but also include applications and databases in a single click. 

So, we can initiate the process, go about our tasks, and, within 30 to 40 minutes, depending on integrations, our VMs will be built. It significantly reduces manual efforts, and that's why it's called automation. 

With one click, we can get not just one but as many VMs as needed, with databases installed, all at the click of a button. It's a crucial and necessary product that people have been increasingly adopting.

VMware Aria Automation is important for day-to-day operations. It provides more granular visibility of our resources. 

Another valuable thing is the cost. We can easily get to know our IT gives us a cost of data as well, suppose we're going to provision any VM, if a customer or if a user is going to provision one VM, it depends on, again, it depends on the integration that one has done of config already. 

One of its features is, that once we're deploying a VM, we will get to know how much we'll pay for that. How much will be the GB storage per GB cost, how it will be the RAM cost, memory cost, everything would be there. 

And it gives us in-depth visibility into how many resources we are paying for. And suppose we just were purchasing memory GB and if we want to delete particular VMs, we can delete it and we can get the resources back. 

So for the customers, it's pretty convenient to see where they are putting their money into.

It's not open source as of now. The licensing costs and the operations support costs of the VRAs are higher. It's a VMware-based license. 

If I see the other competitors, they are open-source alternatives to VRA, like OpenStack and others. So I can use it on the flow. But in order to get VLS automation, it's an enterprise license that costs more, and hence, VMware support cost is also more.

I have experience with this solution. 

It is stable. But one of the drawbacks that Aria Automation had whenever there used to be an upgrade was that it never used to be very easy. It takes effort to upgrade from the current version to the new version. There used to be some challenges and changes that had to be done. 

The most recent release is based on the Kubernetes nodes now. So, it is easy now but it is not that easy because, with every new release, VMware comes up with something new. 

And how to adapt to new things and how to configure those things. And what all from the previous version will still get supported in a new version is always a new thing for us as well.

It is scalable. However, you cannot increase the number of VMware nodes on the fly. For instance, if you deployed it to a three-node cluster, you cannot simply expand that cluster. Instead, you have to deploy a new cluster with a new set of nodes.

I work in a product-based company, so we have customers for this solution in a service-based company, where we have a direct understanding of the number of customers we're supporting, whereas, in a product company, we only have access to customer usage data.

We can automate your workloads both on-premises or any software data center where you want that to be in. If we want that to be in the cloud, it's fine. If we want to provision it on-premises, it is fine. The installation is mostly done on devices. But as with AWS, if we want to use Google, if you want to use Azure, we can use those as endpoints to the VLS automation. And from the same console, we can automate workloads to be provisioned either on VMware Center, that is our own premises or onto our public cloud. So, VMware Aria Automation is there to automate your provisioning or any day one and day two operations. We can do it from one pane of glass to any endpoint, let it be cloud, or let it be our own premises.

So it doesn't have to be specific on AWS cloud or Azure cloud.

The setup needs coding. It's not easy. It's not straightforward. With the newest releases that we have ahead, we need someone who is good with the YAML codes. 

Now, there has been improvement. Previously, we should have a person who really knows Java, Python, and other codes that are being used. 

But for the recent release, we want one who should understand codes, one who should know how to, and one who should have knowledge about how to do REST API calls if we want to integrate different components with VRA. 

So, programming knowledge is a must when you're using VRA. The most tedious task will be to configure the VRA. Installation is easy; you can do it. 

However, configuring VRA with the whole of your setup within the data center is not easy. It will take some effort, and it has to be done right.

The deployment process is not fast. It will be time-consuming. A few of the modules are already there, but it is time-consuming. Moreover, it depends on the sort of integrations we want to do. If we want to integrate 15 components, different components with vRA for end-to-end provisioning, it will be consuming.

I strongly recommend gaining a thorough understanding of Aria before diving into it. Aria is not as straightforward as it initially appears. There are numerous aspects to consider, such as integrations, VRA usage, VRO, and so on. 

It's crucial to comprehend how Visualized Orchestration, Sensor Automation, and Sensor Orchestration work together harmoniously when orchestrating workflows. You really need to get proper VRA training before effectively utilizing it. It's not something you can pick up easily just by having coding knowledge. Some level of experience and training is essential for thorough usage.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. VMware Aria Automation has made a lot of things easier. It has really helped the operations team to spin up the virtual machines. Previously, if setting up infrastructure for the customer took weeks, now it can be done in a couple of days. It has reduced the time for the customers to get the infrastructure ready. So, I would definitely rate it nine. This solution has done a fabulous job over time. 

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. 

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 is to automate the end-user request for either a VDI or a server virtual machine.

It has taken some time to implement vRA. Over the different versions, we had a lot of problems doing some upgrades, but as of right now, it's working really well.

The benefits are that it reduces the administrators' having to manually make all these VDIs and deploy servers. It's really an optimization tool for administration. It helps by reducing the amount of time that administrators and engineers have to spend to provision and manage specific VDIs and servers. It puts that work on the end-user, and then the automation engine does it.

We have integrated our CICD pipeline into an automatic catalog request through some API calls. It can request and provision new virtual machines behind the NSX load balancer straight out of the CIDC pipeline, add those nodes to the load balancer, request SSL certs, and do SSL termination at the load balancer so that it's not encrypted behind the scenes - all of which has really been helpful. So it has helped to increase infrastructure agility, speed of provisioning, time to market, application agility, and made it easier for IT to support developers.

The most valuable feature is the portal where you can assign permissions to specific people to request specific items in the catalog and allow them to provision things for themselves. Or it enables them to request different services that you can create through vRO and vRA.

We do partner with VMware on their beta testing, so we have already communicated some of the features we'd like to see back to VMware. I don't know that I'm allowed to speak about it because it's on an NDA.

Stability has gotten a lot better. However, the vRO aspect, when you have a multi-vRA head, is a little bit finicky still. vRO still needs to stay on one appliance and be one application, because, when you have two, you can't see runs on the other one that are happening when you're not logged into that one.

Scalability is good. We have extended its reach out into our DR site and out into the hybrid cloud. The extendability is really much better than it was in the early days of vRA.

I haven't personally used tech support. I know that we have used VMware's preventative tickets when we're getting ready to do upgrades so that we have support on-call when something goes wrong, because something usually goes wrong.

We had no automation engine before we started vRA a couple of years ago. It was something that our directors and our management really wanted to get into our environment so we could automate some of these processes that are very redundant.

When selecting a vendor, interoperability - whether it can operate with the other solutions that we've already implemented - is important. Also, how much the vendor is willing to help and work with us to make their solution viable is another factor.

We have had the opportunity to upgrade the solution multiple times. The upgrade to vRA 7.3 was painful. The most recent upgrade we did to 7.4 was very sleek, it was smooth, it went really well.

We have seen value from it. We've seen that typically, the people who are provisioning VDIs and server VMs can now utilize most of their time towards other projects and moving the environment forward, instead of just hammering out virtual machines all day.

We haven't really looked at a lot of competitors. We do use SCCM, which isn't really a competitor, but it's a different type of management. It seems that vRA works a little bit better in the vSphere environment because it can connect to all the other VMware products really easily.

Use it, but be ready to invest a lot of time, man-hours, into building it out in the way that you want to use it. It can do a lot of things, and that's one of the problems - that it can do a lot of things. So you have to know what you want it to do before it'll do what you want it to.

In terms of it being intuitive and user-friendly, from an end-user perspective, I believe it is. From the administration and development side, it's a little bit complex. It takes a little bit of time to understand how everything works behind the scenes of vRA and vRO, but once you start learning it, it's kind of intuitive, once you get your feet wet with it.

I rate vRA about a nine out of 10, because of some of the "gotchas" that aren't really well documented. But it is very valuable for us in how we've implemented it and how we're utilizing it.

Automating the data center.

We have faster delivery times through its automation.

The blueprint functionality of the product is intuitive and user-friendly. The concept of the blueprints is visual and easy to use.

I would like to see support for Google Cloud and Azure. Because they don't support Google and Azure today, we need something that's cohesive with our entire landscape. There is a gap right now with VMware. If you want support for these environments, you have to go elsewhere right now. Hopefully, product management will listen, hear, and change this.

The basic support is not there for Google Cloud and Azure. They are unable to provision nor do cost controls. Google is still left out. It is great that they have done AWS, but we are a retailer which means nothing to us because it is a competitor. Azure is good, but Google is where a lot of our development environments are.

Stability is good.

Its scalability still has room to improve when supporting Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure.

The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market.

We are currently looking at CMPs which give the functionality that support VMware and Google Compute Cloud, as well as Azure.

We moved to the solution because it is pushing the agility of IT.

The upgrade process was fine.

The ability to customize your own portal. We've gotten to the point now where we've used it to create this whole environment for users to be able to self-provision their own machines and get them into networks. We have a very large number of different networks, which means that many options of where they can put those VMs; their own environment.

We used to do everything manually. Up until just a few months ago, we used to have little reviews where, if they wanted a VM, they would come to us, tell us what they wanted, then someone on the team would actually submit the vRA form in an older version of vRA.

Now, the end user can go in and request what they want and do all that themselves, as long as they know enough about their application to get what they need. So, if you're just trying to add a couple of VMs or projects, where you know pretty well what you want, you don't have to spend days getting in line to talk about it, or worse, like back in the old days where you had to spend weeks waiting for someone to get it done.

Since I haven't been able to get as far into version 7, I haven't actually gotten into the guts of it, I don't know if this taking place already. But perhaps more blueprints of common tasks that are already there, so you have more of a place to start from. They may be there in 7, I haven't gotten a chance to look. It would need to have a base of, "Oh, I want to connect and build a VM and have these things," something to start from. Especially for people who don't have the teams that we've had working on it, they could get going quicker.

In the later versions, 6 and 7, it seems very stable. Really, it's nothing within the program itself that ever seems to cause the failures. It's some other component it's reaching out to which tends to have a problem, and that's not vRA at all. It's very good about telling you what's dead. It's usually more that the other application is having a fault and vRA tries to utilize it and gets an error back from the application, which then gets back to vRA.

It's not an even an integration problem. It's the application that it's going out to is not working properly. Then, it lets us know that it's not able to, for instance, connect to a Linux VM to the management product and register it. If it gets a failure there, it tells the folks who are managing the vRA. They tell us, and we go in. We check the management server. "Oh, it's not working. Well, let's go ahead and we need to restart it."

It's the same story on the other side with it connecting to AD. If for whatever reason, there's a problem with it connecting to AD, they'll go look at it. "Oh, this is the main controller having a problem."

It seems to scale up pretty well. If you're talking about how many classes it manages, the older version, the 6.0 series, we actually have it managing all of our clusters across both of our major datacenters; we're talking about being able to build in to dozens of different clusters. So, it's scaled very well.

You can do quite a few at once. Usually, it's more the order of what it's getting back from an independent service. Sometimes, they can step on each other if you put too many off at once, but that has to do with the fact it's trying to request a sequence number; you're trying to get two sequences at once. But that's not really as problem with vRA. It's the way that it was setup to retrieve stuff from these other third parties.

I haven't been the one that's had to call.

Complex. Part of the reason it's complex is that it's like a blank slate. You have to go out there and make your own environments. It doesn't really do anything for you, so if you've got an idea of what you want to do, you have a path forward. But if you don't, if you're just sitting there looking at the blank screen, it could be daunting for some people.

We kind of knew what we wanted and it just took a while to get all those things setup. You have so many different components. Nothing within in our environment was simple, so every management product that we use was probably different than what anyone else would use. So getting all that to work, finding an interface that worked well, that was really why it became complex. It was the complexity of our environment behind it.

So it's not necessarily vRA, it's just that if you don't already have something that's out-of-the-box which says, "Oh, we do all these things..." (I'm harkening back to vCloud Director, because vCloud Director was an all-in-one that did everything).

I think documentation and support are probably the most important things. If you don't care about documentation and support, you can grab a free one and try and build it. If you want someone who is going to be able to answer your questions, someone who's got the documentation already, so when you have a given error, they have it right on their webpage: "This is what this error means. Go do this." VMware's very good about that.

Overall, VMware is very good. It's very stable, very extensible, but it does have a relatively high learning curve. So folks that don't have the resources to dedicate to it may not be able to get very far. I do think it's a very good product, but it's very much a build-your-own product. That's good in other ways.

I would suggest people think about: "How much of this do you want to figure out yourself?" Because even within that process of building your own, you still have that layer of support. If you're looking at which one to pick, pick the one that's going to be able to provide you with advice. We've had professional services working with us on a lot of it at different points in getting it up and running. That's been a very nice driving force towards getting it to completion.

It is similar to a lab system for testing our software versions. We also use it for cloning customer environments for troubleshooting.

It is mostly for our tech support to test new versions, find bugs, and troubleshoot what is happening at customer sites.

It has made it easier for IT to support developers. Our tech support people are happy with it.

I can make a blueprint with an Active Directory deployment. With everything prepared, people can start installing our products.

It is bleeding edge technology, but at times, it is buggy. 

It is too broad scale and complicated. It takes too many clicks to do things.

I would like a simplified version of the interface for small businesses. We started with Lab Manager. For us, Lab Manager was the perfect tool. It was easy and simple. It had all the screens for machines right up. vRA is too many clicks for the normal, simple user.

Stability is okay. However, this is one of the products which I have had support work on the most.

Scalability is endless. What I would like to see in vRealize Automation is an SMB version, a simplified version, but still have the advanced options. For example, we use a lot of fenced deployments. We have five virtual machines deployed to fenced environments, which is our most common scenario. 

We are a small office with only 600 people and about 16 technical support personnel.

Technical support is very good. I recently had a tech support case last week, and I got the answers that I needed.

We switched because VMware canceled the Lab Manager products. So, we were looking for something, then we started with vCloud, but VMware canceled vCloud too. Thus, it has been a very rocky road. My one message to VMware, "Stick with one direction and stop cancelling products all the time."

I have done all the version setups. For one year, we could not get the first version to work. I think this was version 6.0, but the latest version 7 is good.

I had a consultant help me a little bit. I did most of the work myself because I like owning the products.

Before, we had the vCloud suites, then suddenly we split out to NSX and had to pay two licenses extra just fenced because we don't use microsegmentation for firewall rollouts. Therefore, a simplified version for small businesses would be good.

We are embedded with VMware. We also use OpenStack, but it requires a lot more investment from IT.

It is a complicated product, but you can do anything with it.