VMware Aria Automation Reviews

Our company uses the solution to have better insights for our on-premises infrastructure. We use some metrics to decide the placement of workloads based on available capacity. We integrate with automation and make dynamic decisions while working on workflows. 

We are moving a lot of our infrastructure to the cloud so are reducing use of the solution. Right now, we have twenty developers who perform automation tasks. 

The operations manager does a fantastic job on the front end because it includes on-premises and cloud use cases that pertain to any infrastructure. The solution has made great progress in integrating all these things together. 

The solution allow us to define our own super metrics. If we cannot an out-of-the-box metric, then we can write and start using our own super metric instead of waiting for the solution to develop something. 

The licensing models are a bit confusing so should be simplified. 

The solution could include more integrations and supportability around the container space. They have already started to do this, but could expand support for Kubernetes platforms and DevOps tools used for Kubernetes clusters or cloud-native development. 

I have been using the solution for seven years. 

The solution is stable so I rate stability a ten out of ten. 

The solution is absolutely scalable. 

We have contacted technical support several times. On average, they do a pretty good job but sometimes drop support requests. There is always some amount of work we do ourselves because we customize beyond the out-of-the-box options. 

Support is rated an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The initial setup is pretty easy and deployment takes about an hour. 

There are a lot of prerequisites to fill before attempting installation. If something is not right, the solution may not work the way it is expected. 

I rate setup an eight out of ten. 

We implemented the solution in-house. 

The solution is pretty expensive. If you can afford it, you should absolutely buy the solution because it provides good workload management. 

If you have oversized or undersized workloads, then the solution catches them and gives you auto-scaling suggestions that save you a ton of money. The solution will even automate some of the work to keep performance and resources at  optimal levels. It saves you from the cost of expanding your infrastructure. 

There are various licensing models that can be a bit confusing. 

The solution is the best fit if you have a VMware infrastructure because it understands the native components. 

We do not see a similar product in the VMware infrastructure that works as good as the solution. 

Often times, when I think of a missing feature I end up seeing that it is planned for an upcoming release. The solution keeps up with development so it is a great option.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

We are using it to offer self-service capabilities to our customers, a self-service portal.

One of the huge benefits, of course, is that it gives direct control to the customer. They have a direct knowledge of what they're using. They know the resources that they're taking advantage of and how much it's actually costing them to take stuff. 

It's helping our operations actually get closer to our applications team because they're now starting to build automation around the information they get from the operations teams; when they build blueprints, for instance. So they're able to build these bigger application stacks and there's a better understanding, from both sides, of what's required.

I would like to see easier custom components for it - that would be the best way I could word it. It's more like custom items for it.

Also, the authentication piece could always use some work. They should make it a little bit more dynamic, a little bit easier to deal with large-scale AD deployments. They need to make it a little more enterprise-ready. That is the one thing that kills us. I hate harping on the authentication issue, but it is huge.

We have run into some issues with stability. Primarily, some of the components seem to go out of whack with each other sometimes but, for the most part, it's been stable. It's just that when it fails, to be honest, it seems to fail spectacularly. It has to do heavily with the authentication portion of it. That is one of our biggest issues with it.

Beyond that, vRO can get out of sync with vRA. We've run into that every once in a while. But it's very rare, compared to the authentication problem.

It seems to scale well. We haven't really had too many problems. There have been a couple of issues, but they have mainly been with our external systems, not the solution itself. It has been able to handle the churn workload.

Technical support has been really good. There have been a couple of issues, but they've been fixed, mostly in an update or a hotfix. And they've been willing to jump on calls almost immediately with us.

The solution we were using, technically, was ServiceNow but it wasn't as good for our environment. It was very good at creating small cookie-cutter, but not for large-scale.

When looking for a vendor the most important thing is support. Absolutely. If I don't understand the product, I need to make sure I can get an answer as quickly as possible.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. Everything was connected. There were little "gotchas" here and there, but either they were easy to resolve with tech support or the documentation usually had some comments about them.

We have already seen the return on it. We've been able to cut down the cost, the time dealing with the back and forth between customers. We can say, “I've got your server, now you can do this,” or, “Here's your server, it's already been provisioned and ready to go for your app."

Make sure you think out the entirety of your deployment because it's hard to change components after the fact. Make sure that the initial deployment is good. We got that from VMware. They were very good at understanding the size of the environment and they tried to scale it for that environment.

I would rate this solution at about eight out of 10. It has been good but, as I said, there are some faults. Overall, it has performed phenomenally and the support behind it has made it absolutely useful.

We use vRealize Automation for our customers. We are an internal service company and use vRA for a SAFE Self Service portal for our customers to provide VMs.

We started five years ago with normal virtualization. Then, the platform grew and our customers requested additional services.

It provides faster SAFE services.

• It has the possibility to combine different clouds. 
• We can provide internal VMs and also VMs from AVS for our customers.
• Our users can order VMs using the API.

The API support could be better, because if your customers are developers, the first thing they do is Google, "How will this API function?" If you have vRA in the API, Google returns nothing. Therefore, my colleagues programmed an internal wrapper so the customers can talk with the API. We have to create our own documentation. 

It would be better if VMware would provide API documentation for developers and customers on the Internet.

It is stable.

The scalable is okay.

We have business-critical support, so this is the best support level available from VMware.

The setup process is good.

My team did the upgrade, but I did not hear anything bad about the experience.

The new version is user-friendly and intuitive. We have upgraded to 7.5, and this has been a good step for the product's usability.

Today, I would start with the vRA device. In the beginning, we did a lot of stuff with vRealize Orchestrator, so we had to develop our workflows on our own, which is a bit more complicated. So, vRA is good idea if you want to start and get quick results.