VMware Aria Automation Reviews

Our primary use case for the product is automating the basic rollout of a VM.

Our experience with it has been very good. It's one of those things where, if you don't have to think about a product, it just does its thing, it's in the background, you don't have to worry about it, that's always handy.

We're not too complex, we're not a dot-com, but it does help us with smoothing out the variability of things. It makes it so that we can deploy things very easily. We don't use a lot of the higher features it has, but the basic things we do, we can just knock them out on a daily basis. It's not a problem to use.

The flexibility it has given us in being able to deploy things very quickly and easily, taking it from having to build up an image, and deploy something manually, which would take several hours or a day, we can do in 20 minutes; just roll out a template very easily. If we want a half-dozen different systems, we don't have to manually build them. We just point a domain to each: bang, bang, bang, done.

The solution has helped us to increase infrastructure agility, mostly because, in addition to it being able to do its thing on its own, it has tie-ins to other parts of our CI/CD pipeline. We use Jenkins for our build process which, of course, vRA has plugins for, to be able to integrate with it. We use Chef and there is the Chef build as part of our image that we standardized to deploy, and that can tie in with our section of the pipeline that it does for applications.

It has made it easier for IT to support developers because we can stand up boxes a lot quicker. We can have a test environment, we can actually just clone off something and make it a lot quicker and easier for them to deploy; quicker deployment, quicker testing, quicker into production.

The most valuable feature is that it's able to deploy several different operating systems, it's able to deploy whatever we want. We can take a template, spin it up, revise it, save it back off, and be able to have that for other departments. We can have one for our Dev team and one for our Research team which has some specific requirements. We can keep track of them and deploy things automatically.

The tool is also usable for Windows and Linux and Mac. We have people who access the tool who have different requirements. For example, I'm in Windows, but we have a Linux group that also uses the tool, and some of the people in the networking department use Macs. So it's very usable across different functional groups.

We have also found it to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's something that, because it has the workflows that are very easily graphed out - you can follow what it's doing, it's very picturesque, you can see what it's doing easily - it's something that you can hand over to a user who is not familiar with it and they can wrap their brain around it pretty quickly. The networking group, which doesn't access the finer features of VMware a lot, we give it to them. When they want to deploy a tool, they can see what it's doing very quickly. It's not something that you have to understand a scripting language for to see what it's doing.

I honestly don't see much room for improvement, but how can I take a new employee and ramp him up so he can be productive quickly? How do we get the training materials standardized so we can get him up and running really quickly?

The stability is good. It's one of those things that we can just stand up and forget. We haven't really had any problems with it. It's just there, and we can rely on it.

Scalability is one of those things we haven't used or needed. But it's there when do. We have confidence that it will meet our needs when we need them.

We haven't had to use tech support for the product. Part of that is that I do my own support. During the initial deployment, I had a few questions. We already had a VMware representative up there. So I asked him my questions. The support was good.

We have gone all the way from version 5.5 to version 8. VMware provided us the steps that we needed to do to go from this version to this version to this version, the progression we needed. From there, it was very straightforward.

I would easily give vRA a nine out of ten. It has done everything that we need. We're not the most complex use case, but it's done everything we need, we can just forget about it in the background.

It's a nine and not a ten because of the training stuff. It would be helpful to have a nice flow of training for a new employee. I'm the "old guy" of the shop and we're bringing on new people or new use cases. For example, the user-services department needs to start using it. How do we bring in new people to use its fleshed-out features, in addition to just our using it, where other departments are using it? How do we bring those people in? That's the only thing we really need.

The primary use is to automate the provisioning of applications that my organization uses as well as sells to customers.

The time for provisioning a VM for one of our clients was cut in half. It's a lot easier, now, for a customer to come and ask for a solution. We can provide that solution to that customer on the same day that the request was made. Previously, it would have taken us days to get it done and, back then, I would find a lot of instances where errors were made, things were forgotten. But with the automation, everything is already in a step-by-step approach, so it makes it easier for us to provision for the customer. And the customer also feels a lot more secure knowing that they've gotten what they've requested, easily.

Among the valuable features are the ease and speed of creating the VMs. Originally, we provisioned them manually and it would take us two days to do the provisioning. We have a lot of internal items that need approvals from lines of business, but with the automation, we are able to provision a VM with the click of a button, within seconds. It cut down on the time as well as cut down on the expense and employee cost in provisioning.

It is also intuitive and user-friendly. Those who use the tool, they are techy, they understand the technology. However, with vRealize we can have a Help Desk individual, who might not be that techy, provision the different elements quite easily, with no almost training at all. That in itself is a plus for us, especially with our having a high turnover of staff. In training, they see how easy it is to use. The time for training to bring them up to speed is very short and they are then able to provision the application.

I would like to see a simpler way of provisioning it. As is, we can automate the provisioning of a VM. However, when it comes to the external IPs, that is outside of VMware. But that has to be automated as well. If there was a way for us to have the virtual machines connect to switches that are external to VMware, that would be great. That way, it would handle the entire workflow from creation and provisioning of a VM to the connectivity to the external IP addresses which allow our customers to have access to the VM. Currently, that IP configuration has to be done manually.

It's stable. To my knowledge, we have not had any downtime. If there was any downtime, it had nothing to do with VMware. It could have been our infrastructure itself. Or what we might have had a misunderstanding regarding how to get certain things done.

We have not had the opportunity to scale - instances where we need to scale up or down - but I believe it's quite scalable.

Technical support is very responsive. It's more of a partnership, as opposed to a customer-client relationship. They're knowledgeable.

We didn't have a previous solution. Regarding this solution, I don't think the cost was a major factor in its selection, based on what it offers. It was more of, "Can it meet our growing needs, as well as what is the experience that is out there?" Based on those issues, I am sure that is why it was selected.

We have another department that is involved in the initial setup. But I understand it's not straightforward and it's not complex. They have gotten the required training and they've been utilizing it for some time now. They, themselves, are quite knowledgeable in the solution. Clearly, they have been trained professionally. They work with VMware to do the initial setup.

VMware is not the only solution that we have. We also have Huawei's version of virtual machines. But VMware is our leading solution.

VMware is great.

We have multiple criteria when selecting a vendor. But in general, we look at

• support
• experience
• cost.

I rate this solution at eight out of 10 because of the high level of functionality that it has. Why not a 10? Because there are some things that we wish we could have in the application, which the solution will have at some point, from what I'm seeing, but at the present, they're not there.

We use it as a self-service customer portal, for all of our present customers. So far, it's going pretty well.

There are a lot less tickets, and we get more people onboard much faster.

Between I think 7.0 and 7.1, when we first had it, the IDM Appliance had a lot of issues with SSL. Upgrade has been a issue, we always have to call in and open up the ticket for assistance. It's just not been that good. I think 7.2 to 7.3, which one of our engineers just did, was actually the only time we've actually been able to do an upgrade well.

Also, there's a couple of UI things that we'd like to see improved, but we'll put in future requests for those.

It's been better, but it did not start off so well. We've been using it since 6.0, and 6.0 had a lot of issues. Early 7.x versions had a lot of issues as well.

We're actually not that big, so we do a simple deployment.

We use them for all our issues, though it took awhile. It seems like we're getting the right people now.

The CIO asked us to set up self-service for visiting. We looked at a couple other things. We actually bought a different product first and it did not work at all. It was a Abatix. We did that for about a year and a half, but it just didn't work like it was supposed to.

Then, we came up with a requirements document for what we're actually trying to achieve for that project. Afterwards, we start evaluating the various metrics.

It was complicated. 7.0 was a lot easier.

We're doing cross-training now, so the guy that actually took over for 7 is cross-training the rest of us, and it's been a lot easier for us.

With 6.0, it's just less Windows machines.

It's a product worth looking at.

When managing vRA and trying to use the keep-it-simple model I found that setting up an access control system where anyone could request access with ease. I really thought that the ability to use AD groups throughout the product made it very easy to set up and grant user access at every level of the product.

The ability to extend vRA with vCO to add custom service designs was helpful in our deployment. It allowed us to eliminate blueprint sprawl.

We were able to reduce the delivery time of requesting a VM from three weeks to under 10 minutes using the vRealize Automation Suite.

The way this product handles logging has a long way to go. VMware addresses this by using agents to gather the logs from various locations and condense them for you.

Managing templates and the way they interact with blueprints needs improvement. If you change a template, you have to go change every blueprint that it was assigned to. There needs to be a template clustering or grouping object.

It lacks the expected seamless integration with vCenter. Objects like templates, storage clusters, or naming changes were not automatically reconciled by vCAC. This often led to full error logs when the only issue was a lack of syncing between vCenter and vCAC.

I began working with vRealize Automation (vCAC) two years ago, in mid-2014. The first six months of this time was spent designing use cases and configuring the out-of-the-box settings such as reservations, blueprints, templates, resource allocation, entitlements, and chargeback. For approximately the next year, we enhanced the out-of-the-box product using vCO/vRO to automate IPAM integration, DNS, monitoring, storage selection, template management, and tagging.

The system was already deployed when I arrived; it had been accomplished by VMware professional services. However, it was not configured, so that was my challenge: Determining the best way to set up business groups, allocate resources, user access and entitlement, create blueprints, manage templates, create the business catalog, and then add features and functions.

The product was stable if no changes were being made. Adding a new endpoint, agent, or fabric often led to some sort of related or sometimes unrelated errors. We were usually able to catch these in our integration environment and avoid them in production.

The system functioned stable with no real issues. The one problem we encountered was around data collection at remote sites.

We grew our deployment upwards of five sites and the system functioned as desired.

Our sales reps have always tried to sell us something such as professional services, then when we finally caved in and said yes, they never delivered the resources. Rating = 6/10.

We often solved the problem ourselves before support could answer our question. It seemed like a trial-and-error game with VMware’s support on this product. Try this, oh that didn’t work, try this, still no, let me ask someone, no reply for days, then the guy is off and a new guy comes in, start over. I spoke to the department manager multiple times. Rating = 7/10.

It was implemented by VMware professional services with an excellent level of expertise.

Prior to my arriving on the team, they compared this product to OpenStack and KVM.

VMware’s vRealize Automation is a good product, made for large enterprises. From my experience, vRA requires a highly skilled team to maintain, version upgrades without downtime are not possible, and overall it doesn’t scale fast. Every change requires weeks of planning and testing to see how the product is going to respond.

With the release of vRealize Automation 7, there is a deployment wizard that reduces the complexity of setup. Make sure you have very knowledgeable technical staff to operate this product on a daily basis. There are 15 roles that come with the product by default; it’s a lot to learn.

The vRealize Suite is a great product for those that want excellent governance and tight controls. Integration with Active Directory groups works flawlessly for both vRA business groups and entitlements.

In order to truly take advantage of the power of vRA/vCAC, you need vRealize Orchestrator. It’s a totally separate entity to maintain, patch, upgrade, connect to vCenter Server and of course manage its code.

The ability to quickly setup the self-provisioning of vSphere VMs was one of the primary drivers for us to use this product over others. Additionally, the product has several plugins and an almost limitless potentional for further automation using vRealize Orchestrator. Lastly, its integration with NSX is superb and very much a critical part of our VM provisioning.

We are using the following vRealize suite products: Log Insight, Operations, Orchestrator, Business for Cloud, and Automation.

We have given internal IT developers the ability to self-provision VMs for development and testing. This has been a hit with our staff. I have talked to several of them involved in the POC and it has drastically increased their efficiency since they do not need to wait on IT Ops. Additionally, the publishing of templates, firewall rules, and software installs in the system has increased the communication and transparency between IT development and IT operations.

As with all recent VMware products, more focus needs to be done on QA. I encountered far too many bugs for an enterprise product. Additionally, more native vRA integration for various parts of the VM lifecycle will take some of the onus off the engineer to learn so much about Orchestrator.

I used version 6.2.0 for five months and version 7.0.1 for 11 months.

We did have stability problems. I encountered several issues with the product after the upgrade from 6.2.0 to 7.0.1. I would highly recommend that anyone looking to move to 7.x from 6.x should do a migration rather than an upgrade. VMware did not do enough QA on the product in order to handle in-place upgrades.

We did not encounter scaling issues because we had a limited release of the product since it was a POC.

Technical support from the frontline technicians is very good, but if your problem has to be routed to “engineering” then be prepared to wait for days (sometimes weeks) for resolution.

We did not have an existing automation product.

We already owned vRealize Automation as part of our suite licensing. We did evaluate the Cisco UCS Director product for one month and found it too complex to setup.

The initial deployment of vRealize Automation was not complex, but it was tedious and error prone. This was the 6.2.0 version and these issues have been fixed in the 7.x versions.

I would advise heavy VMware shops to look into getting suite licensing and leverage the VMware ELA framework if possible. Additionally, I would highly recommend that NSX is purchased in conjunction with vRealize Automation in order to get the most out of the product.

We evaluated Cisco UCS Director.

Do your research ahead of time and try to find others in your area who have already deployed the product. Your VMware rep can usually provide contacts that may be able to provide advice. Additionally, start talking to internal developers at your company and see what pain points they have and how automation can help. This communication will also help when you start publishing catalog items in automation, because a lot of more advanced workflows will require knowledge of Javascript and PowerShell. Lastly, start working with Orchestrator now. It has the steepest learning curve, but it is critical to understand how it works for advanced workflows. Orchestrator is already included with your vCenter licensing.

Primary use case is, generally, a DevOps lab-type environment that we have, spread across multiple locations throughout the United States. It's meant for a DevOps shop, for our developers to spin up, spin down VMs or applications, and do their testing.

Big-time cost savings on administrative overhead without having to constantly manage virtual machines, spin them up, spin them down, manually. We can automate all of that now and most developers will be able to access a page, landing zone, and do that all themselves, rather than having an admin or someone on the team have to do it for them.

As far as increasing the infrastructure agility, that goes back to the cost savings. Being able to tear down entire development enclaves, essentially by pushing a button or invoking a command line, and spin them all back up, is immensely valuable for an Agile development shop.

It does help, to an extent, with speed of provisioning. But to me, I'm also thinking on the back end, the technical end, depending on which environment I'm on, it might have flash or, in some areas, it might have old spinning disk. So the speed is going to be limited to that as well. But as far as the software itself and using the API calls, it's definitely speedy.

It has definitely made it easier for IT to support developers. That is one of the main aspects of the product line. It's for having that in place, to not have to call up Joe Shmo Admin to say, "Hey, can you go manage this for me, spin this up for me?" You can have a portal for a developer, another user login, spin up the resources, shut them down if they need to, request apps, and all without having to bother your admin next door. 

Valuable features include the extensibility of it and the customization of a lot of the Blueprints, that you can customize, and the community as a whole. There's a ton of community-generated Blueprints that might be (helpful) to set up a design for your automation needs, that you can use as a base and go on from there and make changes to it. That would probably be the biggest thing.

Once it's deployed, managing it is pretty intuitive.

The deployment mechanisms for the initial deployment of the product line lack the appropriate documentation to give someone who's never used it before... Obviously, you want people who are knowledgeable in the product line before they deploy it, but there might be cases where someone wants to go to the website, go to the doc section, and do a step-by-step on how to deploy it. That's really not as brushed-up as other documents I've seen that they have. That would definitely be an improvement on their end.

I haven't had any stability issues with it.

Scalability, I have no issues with that as well. As long as I have the compute, storage, and network bandwidth to support it, the underlying infrastructure is there. It's pretty expandable.

Technical support has been fine, adequate. I have not really had any need for it, per se. It's more so self-taught and people going to training and learning how to use it. If we have an issue, it's generally really rare that we'd have to reach out and talk to tech support. So I don't have a lot of experience having to deal with them on it.

The deployment of it is not overly intuitive. It does require some knowledge about putting it out there and deploying it.

I have had the opportunity to upgrade it and that is definitely not the easiest of things to do, generally. As long as you follow the checklist, and which product line you're updating in the specific order, you won't break your system. But if you don't follow the sheet or "the law," you will definitely mess yourself up big-time.

Make sure that you know what you're getting into, first off, what it's for and what you might need it for because I might recommend maybe a less robust product line for your needs as opposed to something that's more of like a higher infrastructure, corporation-level product line, like vRealize.

Every version, they've updated the UI, scalability, added new products to be able to work with different cloud vendors. Overall, that part of it's fine, there have been improvements from version to version.

As far as automation techniques, like Chef or Puppet or Ansible, it's the age-old thing: Mac, Windows, Linux, whatever works for what I need, I'll use. I don't really have a preference, as long as it works for what I need.

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.

I am working on the architectural and design part of the product. We use it for capacity planning, reclamations of reports, infrastructure monitoring, alerts monitoring, and notifications.

There are many features in the solution. We can map all the service profiles. We can do the scripting in third-party applications. The solution provides multi-level approval features to download VMware workloads.

It also provides features like multi-tenancy. The tool seamlessly integrates with private and public clouds. There are a lot of good features in the solution. The product is very user-friendly.

The costing models in the previous version have been moved to vRO. The process is not simplified in vRO. I don't like this change in the new version.

Currently, I am using the latest version of the solution.

Once the product is customized and implemented, it is stable. We need a lot of effort during the initial stages.

It is a scalable tool. We can scale it horizontally and vertically. Our organization has plenty of users, including internal and external customers.

We use break/fix support. We don't get problems very often. Whenever there is an upgrade or customization, we use break/fix.

Setting up the primary components is easy, but sometimes scripting is complex. It is not a simple product. It is vast. Deployment, planning, mapping to the business requirement, and including the stakeholders take a lot of time. Modifying the product according to the business is challenging. Business is very dynamic, and we must tailor the features based on the business needs. We use a private cloud.

A lot of information gathering is required to deploy the product. We need to understand the business requirement, demonstrate various features, integrate many endpoints, customize the tool, integrate backup, and integrate scripting to auto-install various software. Deploying and configuring the solution takes a lot of time. It is a full-time job. It requires a dedicated team of people. There are a lot of components. It is challenging.

We need an experienced team to maintain the solution.

ROI is purely defined by how individuals define their goals to meet their business expectations. ROI can be easily achieved if we do proper planning. If we don't map the technology to the business, ROI cannot be achieved. That is the drawback. If you map the technology clearly to the business requirement, document the process, and approve the proof of concept with all the stakeholders, then deploying the solution makes sense. It would get better results in terms of ROI.

The tool is expensive since it is an enterprise product. The cost and the business requirement must be justified before deploying the solution in the cloud environment.

Before deploying the product, we must have a blueprint of how we want to use it. Then, we can plan it accordingly. We must plan the organizational needs before deployment. It will ensure minimum changes while deploying because it needs a lot of integration. A lot of third-party vendors will be involved during customization. However, having proper planning, knowledge, and technical abilities and integrating multi-skill vendors will make a perfect blend of technology for a better experience. Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.