VMware Aria Automation Reviews

Our primary use case is to deploy a private cloud. It has integrated well with an in-house-developed front end. Then we have the vRA's all over the backend and all the deployments in the vSphere. 

The most valuable feature would be the scalability. It's very easy to add more capacity into it once you've already got it set up. It's just cases deploy, and more hypervisors and we're off.

In terms of provisioning, it has definitely helped speed-wise. It simplifies making the environment bigger because it's easier to scale out. We don't have the downtime of having to wait to get more hardware and to add it in.

I have found bits of this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. We've been on a training course for it because it's quite a big product. We don't really use it the way it's intended to be used. We don't use it the standard way, so it takes a bit more poking around.

We haven't had any problems stability-wise with vRA.

We haven't hit any limits yet, scalability is good. 

We have a support contract with VMware but we haven't had to use their technical support. 

The setup was fairly simple. It's a matter of integrating it with all the other systems and then getting all the sorts to match with the certain policies we've got.

We integrated in-house. 

It's not cheap. It would be more expensive to get an alternative though because we'd have to buy the extras for it.

I would rate this solution an eight. There's always room for improvement, nothing's perfect but we haven't had any major problems because of it or with it.

I would advise someone looking into this solution to check out the training before you get it and not afterward because it covers all of the deployment.

It's a SunBox for the people developing apps for the healthcare company. They can submit the project chapter, implement what they want based on the template that we have in the vRealize Automation, check, compare, and then at the end, they can build a project charter with all the needed components.

In the past, we released several steps to implement an application in the company. The first step was the project charter. You explain what you want to do or how you want to do it and what the costs would be for this. This means that before having the project charter, you don't have any budget. The SunBox is free of charge: they think, they deploy, they test. If it's working, they do a project charter, if it's not working they go back and try other stuff.

It has helped with provisioning. I know several projects that were going faster with the up to date cloud. In the past, they would implement and if it wasn't the right step they would have to go back, discuss with us getting a new server with the right sizing, then they would implement, test and go back. With this, they implement, they test it, if it's not the right stuff, they just throw it out and implement the new stuff. It's direct. If they just increase the size then it's less work for everybody and everybody can achieve their work easily and quickly.

It's intuitive and user-friendly for the user, but not intuitive and user-friendly for the implementer because the templates are not easy to set up. For the end user, it's quite easy, but it's a fulltime job for the implementer and we don't have the time for it. This is why we used a service to implement instead of us. We don't have the time to focus on that. 

I would like to see more stability, something that is integrated and that checks that all of the servers are working well. Also, the ability to customize templates. 

I would like to see them implement vRealize into the cloud. It would be very smart for us to have vRealize in the cloud as a service that can be deployed internally. Then we don't have to implement anything anymore. We only need to take care of templates. 

The stability is why I rated it a seven and not higher. There were several cases where we had to restart some services because it wasn't working correctly anymore. People cannot extend their machine or replay their machine. There is no alert to say that there is a problem and that we should stop the service. The monitoring system is not very good.

Scalability is perfect. We haven't had any issues.

We have found their technical support to be good. 

It was a logical and smart decision for us to have this solution in place. It makes sense for my business. We used Orchestrate, the original version. It was the first automated system that could deploy complete solutions. We decided to go with this solution because it was evolving and I just followed the evolution. We switched to vRealize three years ago.

I wouldn't say the initial setup was straightforward but it wasn't complex.  

The upgrade experience went well. It's working well.

We used a service to implement. We did our research and now we have a good guy from VMware services. We plan to keep him. If we always have new people coming into deployment services it can take at least five days to teach them how the system works and to do all of the certifications needed. Our plan is to stick with this guy from VMware services. 

The ROI that we see is that people don't have to work too hard to have something done and therefore they have more time to market. They save time, which is money. We are an American company so if you save time, any implementation that we do is the implementation of a tool that can submit new work to FDA. One day is like one million.

I also have a lot fewer people asking me questions or for help. I don't need to be as involved in the discovery phase. People can now do their own job with something free and automated. They are happy.

We conducted studies on other options. We found other possibilities that were cheaper but so far this is what's working well for us and as of now we don't want to change. 

Mostly, vRA is for automating deployment. We use it with templates to deploy and maintain compliance based on the certifications we have. It's a way to maintain consistency across cloud and data center environments. 

We have about 30 to 40 engineers. They are primarily support engineers what we call platform hybrid teams. They create templates and help customers deploy VMs.

The main benefit of vRA is a faster deployment for our customers. Before implementing vRA, we were building VMs from scratch, but vRA allows us to create images, so we can deploy a VM in just a few minutes.

Obviously, it depends on the hardware installed and everything, but the time has been significantly reduced. Time is money. We want to provide as much flexibility in the private cloud and bring our customers as close to the private cloud as possible.

The preset policies and templates are useful. I would say that vRA is one of the best solutions we have. The CI/CD features also look helpful even though we aren't using them at the moment. We plan to get more involved and train our customers as much as possible.

The solution could be lighter. As an administrator, I would like to simplify the number of services I need to deploy. They took a significant step in that direction by removing all the Windows dependencies that we had in the past, but there are still a lot of services consuming resources. 

I would also like to see a richer API. This is true of all VMware solutions because the REST API is not the best.

I have been using vRA for the last three years. We've gone through different versions of the solution.

We haven't had major issues with vRA so far. Generally speaking, all the VMware infrastructure does work. I wouldn't say it's rock-solid, but we haven't experienced significant stability problems on the platform.

Our most significant deployment is two clusters working with a single instance, and it's running perfectly fine. It comprises two clusters of 15 ESXI servers each, so it's a massive deployment.

We do plan to increase usage and deploy vRA for other customers, but we currently have a small number of customers actively using it. Then we have our internal segment of vRA that we connect to a few small customers. But the idea is to expand it and add as many customers as possible.

I rate VMware support eight out of 10. We have a VMware service agreement, and we've used support a few times. It was helpful, but they needed to research some of our questions because our implementations tend to be a bit complex. That's why I don't give it a perfect 10.  

Positive

We had a home-grown solution before, but we changed to vRA because of it's simplicity and compatibility with all the tools we use.

I rate vRA eight out of 10 for ease of setup. The previous version of vRA was harder to deploy, but they have simplified it considerably. 

After the deployment, daily maintenance doesn't take more than one day a month. There is nothing much to be done once it's set up. The upgrading is sometimes a headache, and it takes longer. For deployment and maintenance, we need at least one network engineer, one platform engineer, and three storage people. That's because our team is split into three different tiers.

I would rate vRA six out of 10 for ROI. It's in the middle. We haven't quite broken it even yet, but we are close.

We pay a license based on volume. I rate VMware vRealize Automation four out of 10. The license is quite expensive. 

The engineering team evaluated a few solutions, but we went with vRA because it is the fastest and easiest.

I rate VMware vRealize Automation seven out of 10. I recommend it for any company that constantly deploys VMs. This tool will help you a lot. 

We use it to monitor our production VMware infrastructure. We use it to watch for things like resource contention and to automate around mostly similar needs.

The benefits are that it gives you a heads-up display and dashboard of the way everything's running. The ability to automate around those tasks is really where we get the value. It helps click the buttons and keep the lights green when nobody's there to do it for you. The automation really is priceless.

Without a doubt, in our infrastructure, we mostly use it to keep the lights green in a day-to-day operational way. But absolutely, in the future, we plan to use it for automation and deploying a more DevOps mentality and products, which should speed up our time to market.

The most valuable feature is the capacity to automate around the issues that come up, the alarms.

It's also absolutely easy and intuitive. It uses the same basic layout as the rest of the product suite so it's really easy to navigate, find your way around between the tabs and the areas.

I always like to see some improvement. I think they could probably do more if they created more actions and more use cases to automate things.

It's very stable. We haven't had any downtime whatsoever.

I haven't run into any scalability issues with it yet.

I can't recall any specific instances where we have had to use technical support.

I've deployed multiple versions of it, but I have not upgraded. It's not the simplest deployment, but the documentation is there and it's easy to follow. Googling helped with the implementation as well.

There are always features that could be added. I've looked at other solutions such as Turbonomic. They check a lot of the same boxes, but I prefer the VMware interface and usability.

My advice is "do it."

Functionality really is the most important criterion when selecting a vendor. If I can purchase a product or a service that is going to check all the boxes, that's more important to me than price, personally. The company signs the checks though, so they might see it differently.

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 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 vRealize Automation for all of our court locations and the customers are able to, on any day of the week, 24/7, provision VMs at will and maintain them.

As opposed to the old days where customers put in a ticket and they waited three or four days to get a server provisioned for them, today they can get servers provisioned in five minutes. So, the time to market for our customers is much better, much improved. It's multi-tenanted, meaning one court customer doesn't see the other court customer. They're very happy about that.

For time to market, it's absolutely incredible that a court customer can come in and, within a few days, have the service provided to them. They can then spin up one or 100 servers. Before, it would take them six months to a year to get there. So, for time to market, there are incredible savings. And there are cost savings from their perspective as well. They don't have to manage HVAC and space and cooling and all of those things that they used to have to do. Today, all they have to do is provision a server and manage their users, which is what they should be focused on.

We don't know what they run, we don't manage them. We just provide the infrastructure and they are saved from having to purchase infrastructure, having to purchase licensing, and having to maintain servers internally. So it's a win-win for the courts and for us. We love the product.

The most valuable features are that it's multi-tenant and the ability for scale.

From a customer perspective, they log in and they have Catalog: what services are available to them. They simply click on that and then there's an option: I can have a Linux server, I can have a Windows server. They select it, configure it, how many CPUs, how much memory, how much storage, and hit the button, submit. It's that easy.

I would like to see more integration to do things like DR, from a court perspective. Today, for us, SRM doesn't scale because each of our customers has a local vCenter environment as well as the vCenter in our environment. So we can't get SRM to scale to the point to which we need. From an integration perspective, DR inside of that would be good.

Also virtual desktops. I know you can spin up virtual desktops in vRA, but they're not thin-provisioned. I don't know if that's because the other product, Horizon View, is there, but it would be nice to see more integration. I know NSX is getting more and more integrated. We talked a little about vROps. I see that integration coming in.

But for vRA, DR would be a service we'd like to be able to offer to the customers, and it should be integrated, in my opinion, in vRA.

We scale, we have 180 plus customers in the environment and we have courts with as few as maybe four servers and as many as 80. So it's a very diverse range of systems and they absolutely love it. It scales great.

vRA is pretty reliable. We use technical support more for upgrades.

In the event that we've had issues, cluster-wise perhaps, within VRA, we've had to use technical support, but very seldom. I can't point to an outage related to vRA. The outage is probably something else related to either NSX or vCenter itself, perhaps the PostgreSQL Database is filling up. But vRA itself has scaled incredibly well for us.

When we've needed it, the support itself is good, very good.

You have architectural design questions that you have to address. We have multiple sites, multiple data centers. One of the fundamental questions is, how do you get HA in vRA? Do you have active-active, active-standby? Today, for vRA, we deploy it out of one site and we use remote execution managers at the other site. We're kind of in an active-standby mode, if you will. We're semi single-point-of-failure, in that respect. We probably should move to get an active-active scenario, but we're not there today.

But the setup was not too bad. It's nothing like a vROps, for example.

vRA is great. If you're looking for a multi-tenanted solution that is very easy, from a customer perspective, to use, and make it seamless for the customer to actually get what they're looking for, i.e. a server, developers love this. For the customer, from the time to market and ease of use perspectives, you can't go wrong with vRA. It's that good.

I would rate it at about nine out of 10. If they would integrate DR, that would bring it to a 10.

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.