VMware Aria Automation Reviews

We mostly use it for generating VMware instances.

Things are getting to a point now where you need to be able to do more with less. Anything you can automate is always going to help you in the long run. I'm in the government sector. We're in extreme "do-more-with-less," so we're constantly looking for solutions where we can automate things that we're doing on a day-to-day basis. That's especially true when you have repeatable processes. Automation becomes paramount to get your mission completed in a timely fashion.

It has helped us through time savings. We can do more with fewer people. It probably does, ultimately, improve time to market. But there's so much bureaucratic process in everything we do in the government sector, that it's really hard to improve time to market for anything we do.

When I've been on the console, I have found it very intuitive. There is not a lot to it; it's pretty self-explanatory. It leads you in a direction where you know what you're doing.

I would like to see more improvement in the way it integrates with other systems. That certainly wouldn't hurt.

We've been using this product for a while and the stability is fantastic. As long as we keep our hardware maintained, and we're doing everything we can on that front, I don't see any issues with stability.

The scalability is fantastic. It's there.

Personally, I have not had to use technical support. I know we, as an organization, do so frequently. We have our TAM who is onsite, so any time we do have any issues, the TAM is there to help us, assist us in getting to the right person, and in getting where we need to get to.

The initial setup is straightforward. Not for us, again, because of the bureaucracy, but, in and of itself, it is very straightforward. I've done a lot of it in the lab, and hands-on training. It's pretty straightforward and simple.

There has been a return on investment, although it's hard to measure.

In terms of advice, being here at VMworld 2018 is a start. I'm sitting through a lot of these presentations and there's a myriad of information available that is located right here, as opposed to me having to go search for it across the web.

When we consider working with a vendor, for us, government certifications help. From our perspective, ATOs and STIGs and all those types of things being in existence before we start to work with them are important, because having to obtain all those things from us is a difficult portion of it. Also, product support for integration with other systems, that's always a key to us. Those are the two main factors.

We use it for about 1,000 clients at Santander Bank in Brazil and, nowadays, we have about 22,000 machines. It's performing very well.

Before, it took us two days to provision new machines, and today the whole process is done in about two hours. Previously, there were a lot of complaints about how long it took to create a new machine. The process was manual. We had to create the machines and put the data on the CMDB but, nowadays, it's super-fast, magical, too easy. About two years ago, the process was based on 15 people. Nowadays, we use three people to manage things.

The most valuable feature is the process it provides us and the time it takes us to deliver to our clients.

I also find it to be intuitive and user-friendly.

They need to help in managing the change of corporate culture involved in establishing the solution.

It is a stable product.

It scales.

Tech support is very good, responsive. They provide us with support in Portuguese in Brazil.

I was not involved in the initial setup but I have been involved in the upgrade process. It was very easy. The whole process was too easy.

I rate it nine out of ten because of the simplicity of the solution. It's so easy to manage

Initially, we used it for private cloud. Now, we are trying to go with a hybrid model.

In terms of performance, right now we're making revisions to ensure that it is hybrid-compatible. We have multiple engagements with VMware to facilitate it that.

Productivity has definitely increased. We are not relying on engineers to actually build out the infrastructure anymore. That's the main benefit. From an infrastructure perspective, it has definitely increased productivity, ensuring that the engineers' time is well spent on other, more important tasks, rather than the basic provisioning that they were doing earlier. 

The self-service capabilities are by far the best that we've seen in terms of features. If the user is being able to log in and make requests himself, from the onboarding process all the way to the end, that's very helpful.

I'm curious to test out the features that have been announced. We'll see how that goes from a hybrid perspective. I'm looking forward most to the hybrid capabilities.

The stability needs a lot of work. The troubleshooting component of vRealize is a pain. The administration and the upgrades are not up to the mark. If they were able to improve on that, that would be the best thing and would make it much easier to run it in the enterprise.

Since we are looking at public-cloud scalability, as long as that model works, I think we should be good. We're not too focused on the scalability on-prem but we want to see how it scales out to the public cloud.

Our experience with technical support has not been great. There seem to be multiple rounds of escalations surrounding support for vRealize Automation issues that we have encountered.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was complex. The certificates, the distributed install, wasn't straightforward, I'll just leave it at that. We had Professional Services come in for the first round of install. During the second round of install, when we tried to do the update ourselves, there were multiple points of failure. It was not easy. The install, the upgrade features, are not easy at all. The administration part is what is very problematic with vRealize Automation right now.

The upgrade experience is horrible. It's not straightforward, there are a lot of failures, a lot of support interactions. It's not something that we are able to pull off ourselves. I've been with vRA since it was termed vCSA. We've gone through multiple rounds, and it has never been easy.

We were initially thinking about vCloud Director but we're a VMware shop so we wanted something that is native to VMware technologies. We didn't approach a lot of other vendors. One of the things that is important for us when selecting a vendor is whether it fits in with our footprint or not.

I rate it at six out of ten right now. To get to a ten, they definitely need to improve on the administration and the troubleshooting. From an operations perspective, it is a nightmare. From a user perspective, it is pretty good.

We use it for server deployments, typically. It's mostly for managing our own private cloud, for infrastructure-as-a-service deployments. It has performed well. We just recently went through an upgrade that had some hiccups to it, but it's been performing well for us.

It allows us to deploy servers on a much faster basis. Instead of deploying a VM from a template and going through the process of configuring that VM, with vRA we're able to click once and it does everything: grabs an IP, joins it to the domain, loads whatever configuration agents are needed. It does all of that without manual intervention.

It has definitely improved the speed of provisioning over the old-school way of deploying a VM from a template.

Ease of use, the GUI, is probably the best feature, so that really anybody can use it. You don't have to be technical to be able to deploy a VM.

I find it to be intuitive and user-friendly. Regarding some of the files that you feed it, you don't have to do a ton of development. You can feed it pretty standard configuration files. You don't have to be a developer, you don't have to know C# or Java or the like to get it going.

An improvement - and maybe this is already a feature that I don't know about - would be to be able to deploy to public cloud. Deployments to the public cloud would probably be a good feature if it's not already there, to be able to deploy to AWS or Azure, etc.

My impression of its stability is "middle of the road." We've had some issues where it seems to be a little bit sensitive, where deployments fail and we don't really know a specific reason why. We'll dig through logs and try to figure out what's going on, but it's not always apparent why it failed. And you can kick it off again and it'll succeed. So stability could be better.

The scalability is okay. You can't, to my knowledge - and I could be wrong - tell it to deploy like this: "I want 20 VMs all configured this way," and have it go ahead and spin them off. You have to do them one at a time. So, from a scalability standpoint that's not great, but it could also be that we're just not using it correctly. We don't actually have the need to do that very often, but from time to time we'll get a request such as, "We need five SQL Server VMs." It would be nice to be able to do it once and be done with it, rather than repeat that process five times.

To my knowledge, I don't think there was a previous solution.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup but we just went through an upgrade. It was not without its challenges. Some of the challenges were probably on our side, being able to support the newer infrastructure. But I seem to recall there being some issues importing some of the old settings and from vRA 6 into vRA 7 so that you could destroy VMs that were built in 6 from within the 7 UI. There were some challenges in getting that done. It's done, but I believe that there were some speed bumps to that.

I rate vRA at seven out of ten. There's some room for improvement, but it's better than the old way that we used to do things. It's a good product, it could just use some ironing out.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor, to my mind, is support: a support network, whether it be knowledgebase articles online, forums online, or calling into actual, paid support.

The primary use case is to automate systems, and at a faster pace, so we can give them to our end-users faster.

It has cut down the time for building out a machine. A process that used to take three hours is down to 20 to 30 minutes. If the users need a machine fast, we can get it presented to them quicker. So it has absolutely helped with the speed of provisioning.

The most valuable feature is the way that it plugs into our monitoring systems, and Infoblox and Puppet.

I don't find the solution to be intuitive and user- friendly. The GUI is really complicated. Tracking down logs and errors is very hard. Then, it takes a specialized JavaScript person to build.

Also, I'm not sure how the upgrades are going now, but they definitely need to evolve the upgrade process. 

Finally, the logs are very generalized. Giving more of an indicator of what's actually going wrong, rather than just a generic error code, would help.

We had a lot of issues at first. Especially with doing any kind of upgrades, it was a complete tear-down and a complete rebuild of all the Blueprints. The upgrade process was not easy or intuitive at all. But it seems to be getting better.

It's easy to be scalable on it. You're as scalable as the infrastructure you have behind it.

I have used technical support, but more on the infrastructure side, not on the system side. My experience with them has been good. They get back to us quickly. We're a TAM customer, so we get quite a bit resolved pretty quickly.

We didn't have a previous solution. We were doing manual. We still are, but we're within 15 to 20 days of deploying it. We went with this solution because of the partnership with VMware. We have vCenter, we have a bunch of their products, so it just made sense to try to go with a simple approach.

The most important criteria when looking to work with a vendor are the ability to adapt to us and our needs, and that the vendor be quick on responses.

I came in about halfway through the initial setup. It was very complex. We had VMware projects going on, so we had a couple of consultants giving us full-time personnel to help us through it. We had VMware there, and AdvizeX was another one. Then we had the specialty people from VMware that they deployed out to our place.

We still haven't gotten it into production yet. But once we do, our value is going to be the ability to turn around virtual machines a lot faster.

Read as much as possible and then take it slowly and don't try to jump in full force. Make sure you have a good plan going into it. That was one of our mistakes. We were expecting, "Oh, this will be pretty easy," but once we got into it, was a little more complex than we were thinking.

I give the solution about a seven out of 10, given the process we've gone through with it. We've had it now for three years, but we haven't been able to really deploy it in production. I don't know if it's because of the documentation or just the ability to be able to use it and make it functional.

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.

Our primary use case is production IT, VM provisioning workloads. It performs pretty well most of the time.

It's the backbone for VM deployments for our main production data center.

The most valuable features are the Catalog View and the access control business group. Access provisioning is probably the main use case for us, so we can separate access to different Catalog items among the different business groups and have that tied back to our AD LDAP systems.

Early on, we had a lot of troubles. Most of those were short-knit runs. And we do have difficulties trying to upgrade.

I also don't find it to be entirely user-friendly. There are a lot of complicated menus within menus within menus. Things move around from version to version

We're looking forward to some of the Catalog enhancements that I know are coming in the upcoming versions.

Earlier on there were some problems and with upgrades, and there were some other problems as well. But in between, it tends to run pretty well. We leave it alone.

It has met our needs scale-wise, in that environment.

The setup was complex. Even with the Professional Services, it took days and days to try and get it installed and working right.

We have had the opportunity to upgrade and it failed. We're having troubles with that. We're still working on it.

If you have the validated designs or PSO guidance for setup, go with that now. Try to keep it as out-of-the-box as possible, in a supported configuration.

I rate this solution at seven out of ten. By now, it does the job we need it to do most of the time. There are definitely areas where it could use some improvements.

Without it in our data center, we would have to have a different solution. It's what we thought was the best architecture for our company.

What I like about the software are the performance and the optimization, based on the unit pricing.

It's very stable. And due to the software contracts - we have a subscription membership - we get the newer versions. It's going be around and, from what I heard at one of the sessions today at VMworld 2018, it's going to be around for a while.

It's scalable. We're such a large company, we would never even consider using it if we didn't think it had a lot of room to grow, for the capacity that we utilize.

Technical support is okay, VMware is fine. I work with both Dell EMC and VMware and, of the two, VMware has more of a commitment to us and makes sure that the products are working in the way that they intended and sold to us.

In addition to production-level support, we buy mission-critical support. Mission-critical support makes sure that we get responses quickly. They actually know who we are when we call.

I rely on the Technical Account Manager from VMware to give us the solution for our network or data center. I'm not an SE, so we also rely on our internal SEs to provide us the right version and capabilities. It's customized for us.

We've been with VMware for such a long time, in excess of a decade, and because of that, I wasn't working here when they had an earlier solution.

We upgrade it anytime we do a technical refresh. It's just like anything else. We're in a complex environment, so to upgrade it, it's almost like you have to migrate the data that is utilized underneath. It's not simple, but it is done periodically.

You should look at the complexity and size of your environment, and when utilizing that background for your requirements, I personally would recommend VMware. You should look at what your deliverables are in this solution. If you do that, you have something you can measure it by, to determine if it's a good fit for you. But I do suggest that you look at VMware as a potential vendor.

I rate the solution at seven out of ten because I don't believe it's a perfect solution. It fits in our data center and it works for our organization, so it's a good solution for us. Yet, at the same time, technology changes so quickly today that a solution you bought three years ago, even if it's upgraded, isn't the solution that's going to fit. For example, we're all going to the cloud or on-prem/off-prem, and because of that, that solution may be in the cloud tomorrow, so I won't be buying it anymore, I'll be buying the cloud version of it because it's utilized through a different service provider.

My most important criteria when working with a vendor are really easy. I evaluate the vendor based on these things: 

• What is their reliability? 
• What is their pricing model?
• Is it a partnership versus our just being a customer that they want to make large margins from?