VMware Aria Automation Reviews

When I started working with VMware Aria Automation, I used it mostly to automate the server build process. We completely automated the entire VM-build and post-build processes. I then used the tool at another organization in relation to CICD pipelines.

We now see more hybrid cloud scenarios and enrollment of network automation as well.

VMware Aria Automation reduces the time to market when it comes to deploying new solutions. Usually, it takes three to six weeks to deploy a new solution. Now, with VMware Aria Automation and the automated blueprint, the overall time to market is an hour, depending on approval.

The solutions can be deployed across any cloud, which is a huge advantage when a customer requires machines to be deployed rapidly.

The extensibility of the solution when it comes to writing your own ABX actions is a valuable feature. You can write it in PowerShell, JavaScript, or Python, which is great.

I also like the fact that you can pause a build process, do other tasks, come back to it, and continue with the build process.

The ability to customize the entire user frontend experience with the design canvas is great as well.

When it comes to the orchestration workflow, you're on your own. The documentation and resources are very limited, and you have to learn everything on your own.

Though the product is very powerful by itself, many who work with it struggle to get up to speed. As a result, they view VMware Aria Automation as the icing on the cake and hold on to their PowerShell scripts on the backend.

I would also like to see more integration with third-party solutions. The documentation regarding integration with third-party tools such as ServiceNow needs to be improved.

I've been working with this solution for 10 years. My first deployment was back when it was called vCloud Automation Center or vCAC.

The stability of the vRA platform itself is very good, but because of Workspace ONE, I would rate the overall stability at seven out of ten.

In terms of scalability, I would rate this solution at eight out of ten.

The technical support team in Ireland is excellent, and they resolve issues on the same day. However, if your ticket ends up at another location, it may take a few days to receive a resolution. Overall, I would rate technical support at eight out of ten.

Positive

An experienced person will find the on-premises deployment easy to do. I would rate the initial deployment at nine out of ten for an experienced person. For one who is new to the solution, I would rate it at seven out of ten.

The initial setup may take anywhere between 40 minutes to one hour.

As is the case with any other automation product, VMware Aria Automation also requires a journey. You will need to start slow, build the platform, and make sure you have good out-of-the-gate use cases. You can start with automating basic server requests. If you already have CICD tools in your environment, then you can integrate them and try a few playbooks.

You will definitely need to train your staff so that they can keep moving forward with the tool. It is a complex product, and you will need at least one full-time employee who has experience with scripting and an interest in automation who can be dedicated to this solution.

Overall, VMware Aria Automation is flexible, reliable, and scalable. With VMware Aria Automation as a cloud service, it is even easier to deploy and manage. Therefore, I would give this solution an overall rating of eight out of ten.

We primarily use it to automate workloads.

The most valuable features are the multimachine blueprint and advanced designer configuration.

Automation or scripting should be simplified so that administrators who are not experts can have a better grasp of automation.

My organization has been working with this solution for about six years.

We have had no issues with stability.

VMware Aria Automation is a very scalable solution because it integrates well with a couple of leading products in the industry. For products that are not already integrated, there are plugins or adapters that can be used with customization. 

Because we are a large organization, we probably have more than 30 people who use the solution.

The basic installation is quite easy. If you have all of the prerequisites ready, then within two to three working days the basic foundation can be created.

Two people could probably deploy and maintain one foundation of the solution.

We deployed the solution ourselves.

We have definitely seen an ROI because automation is directly related to productivity.

Try to use the maximum level of automation possible within VMware Aria Automation. It will help you to achieve the maximum results. This solution has a lot of other features other than provisioning, like tighter integration with third-party products, ISVs, backup software, and open APIs. To fully utilize the product, you would need to get into these areas along with normal provisioning.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate VMware Aria Automation at nine.

We are using it for infrastructure service, automating things in Active Directory, and deploying Microsoft SQL and Oracle databases. We are also using it to automate some scenarios within our infrastructure.

Having a one-stop-shop for our IT services is one of our goals. Exporting and democratizing the tools helps our end users to do their work efficiently and to be more agile. It helps to minimize the time to market for our product.

Using the solution we are able to automate database refreshment. This process used to consume a number of working days. With vRA fully automating this process, it is now down to five or 10 minutes. As a result, we're able to refresh our testing and development environments frequently. When we go with a new deployment in production, the deployment is based on a fresh copy of production. We're able to have multiple environments so that we can test more product concurrently.

We use VMware Cloud Templates and having a standard template to be deployed gives us a standard across our environment and minimizes the time it takes to provide services. Despite having 20 machines, we just do the configuration once and then we can deploy it across the whole infrastructure for all environments: production, testing, and development. And this reduces the time to market for our services. They improve reliability. They give us consistency. Having things assembled and having everything in one image helps us provide reliable services. And they have saved time for our developers.

Having an enterprise service catalog and being able to automate various parts of our infrastructure are among the most important components.

It needs to be more dynamic with variable customization to make new workloads more reliable. It also needs to be faster. We are exploring vRA version 8 right now and maybe what I'm requesting is available in the new version, but we haven't explored it fully yet.

We have been using VMware vRealize Automation for seven or eight years.

VMware's customer support for vRealize Automation is good. They are knowledgeable about the product and have improved their response time. The support is fine.

We did have a previous solution but I am not able to disclose its name. vRA is an end-to-end solution with all the capabilities.

The pricing is very high.

We use vRA to deliver automation on top of the solutions we provide which are desktops, servers, and multiple other products. These products require more actions to implement than what the vendor offers. Our primary use case is integrating customer's environments and performing data operations.

The whole VMware ecosystem allows us to serve multiple customers, multiple organizations and also multiple units per customer. We can cover every level without using the whole VRA and the rest of the ecosystem. We don't need to use a separate product to provide separate functionalities for the customer. We can cover all the use cases using only one product on our side which is really helpful. The operators are able to provide daily maintenance of the systems and they don't have to take care of multiple deployments. They can just use one setup to serve everyone.

The integration with the whole VRA ecosystem and in the enterprise environments are the features I have found to be the most valuable.

This solution is intuitive and user-friendly, although it is missing different ways it can be automated. I would like to use it not only to form the user interface but in a more programmatic way like APIs. 

I would like to see more automation, more ways to automate automation tasks. We are already working on the first evaluations of the next version of vRealize 8 and have found it to be promising.

There are some issues with stability. We discovered some bugs and we constantly have to work with VMware to figure out a way to fix them. There is no ideal product, it doesn't exist, which is why we are okay with this product. We don't have critical problems that are causing our production problems. 

We don't have any problems with scale. We are running VRA at a very big scale with multiple deployments and don't have any issues with scalability. 

We constantly use technical support and we've found it to be okay. At times I would like it to work faster. Of course, I would prefer to have engineers available all the time and to always have direct access to all the engineers that are directly implementing the solution, but I'm aware it's not possible. The relationship we have now requires building trust on both sides.

The setup that we have implemented in our enterprise is complex. It's not the exact set up that VMware recommends by default to their customers. We get a lot of help from their consultants to help us with our non-standard design. The entire setup took more effort but it's understandable because it's non-standard.

Sometimes we need to get help from VMware consultants. They help us to upgrade the infrastructure and fix issues that we can't fix on our own. They are very helpful and we've had a very good experience with the VMware consultants. We don't use them all the time because we have our onsite engineers who integrate the product. For the mission critical stuff, we use consultants from VMware. Our interactions with VMware consultants is one of the best experiences with this solution. This is something I benefit the most from.

We constantly do upgrades, once they are released, and we have found them to be very straightforward, I cannot complain at all. From our side, it's more difficult because we have customers who are our clients so we need to schedule all the maintenance windows with them. We also need to ensure after the upgrade that everything is properly tested. But these are mostly problems that come from serving big enterprises which have their own policies. But upgrading the product itself is very straightforward and we never get any serious problems.

We evaluated other solutions, VMware was one of many that were looked at. The main reason we chose VMware and VRA was because it's a vendor that provides the whole stack, the whole ecosystem of solutions. We didn't want different products from different vendors, we wanted a full stack. 

I rated this solution a seven because I wouldn't give a ten to any product since there is no such thing as an ideal product. Developers complain about some minor stuff so it's still not always the perfect product for us. I wouldn't give it a lower score because at the end it does what it's supposed to do. We are using it, customers are happy, it brings customers which makes money. It does the job.

I would advise someone who is looking into VRA or a similar solution to try to network with other companies, to learn from the mistakes they've made, from the stuff they've discovered. Also, I would advise using VMware to help you design the architecture you are trying to implement, don't do everything yourselves.

We use it to deploy virtual machines and for self-managed firewalls within NSX. It's a self-service portal to speed up things.

It has helped our company by speeding things up. For example, a year ago it took a long time for a potential VM owner to request a VM and we ultimately wouldn't be able to use it. Now, we can request it for ourselves with our self-service portal. We're using NSX firewalls and it's easy to protect ourselves. We had a Hadoop cluster and the data must be protected within the that cluster. The owner created a fence around his own VM's by using the self-service portal and creating a firewall.

The most valuable feature for us is the fact that it is self-service. 

We have found this solution to be user-friendly but there is room for improvement. The interface is not very modern, although version 7.5 is a lot better.

I would like to see a richer GUI or Visual Studio. If you create a GUI with Visual Studio, it would be much richer than what we have now with the array. 

Most of the time the upgrade experience has been good but sometimes things break after upgrading. For example, some API codes stopped working.

The Orchestrator also has a lot of room for improvement. It's a bit slow.

I would rate this solution a seven and not a ten because there's still room for improvement. 

I'm setting it up as a simple solution. It's much more stable than the highest available variant. We have a lot of intel machines providing a solution.

Scalability is good enough as it is.

We've had to use their technical support and I would say that it's pretty good. We're mostly happy with the service except when a service engineer needs to go to engineering it can take a lot of time. It would be very nice if they would improve that. 

The initial setup was complex. There were a lot of steps. I would suggest for them to cut back on the number of steps to make it easier. Although with every version, the steps are becoming easier. For example, the certificates in the previous versions were a lot more complicated. It has improved. 

We implemented in-house. 

We already had VMware, it was a logical step to choose this solution.

If you're looking into vRA, I would advise that you to choose it but don't customize it.

Primary use case is building a self-service portal for students at our university. It has performed quite well up until now.

We are able to provision VMs much faster than before. Therefore, students can click VMs, submit their form, and VMs will be provisioned automatically.

It's quite user friendly. Everyone can use it, even non-technical people. This is good, since we use it to build a self-service portal which even users with not a lot of technical background can use.

We upgraded twice. The last upgrade was a bit problematic. 

Up until now, it has been quite stable. However, we have not pushed it to its boundaries.

Its scalability looks good, but we have not experienced it yet. 

So far, technical support has been quite good. I have reached quite competent employees of VMware who have helped me a lot.

We did not use another product previously.

We had to invest in a new solution because we had to react faster to customer demands. Previously, it took a long time from requesting a new virtual machine to provisioning it. Now, it is much quicker for the customer. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

We deployed it ourselves.

It made the provisioning of the virtual machines easier and faster. We can react more quickly to customers' demands.

We did not evaluate anything else. We have so many VMware products that it was a logical conclusion for us to chose this one.

We are overall satisfied with the product.

Give it a try. Try it out in the labs from VMware. Evaluate it quite deeply, and see if it fits for your purpose or company.

Our primary use case is to automate deployments of virtual machines and data actions. We have automated everything using vRA.

We have several customer teams that serve external customers. Previously, each team, when it received a change request to deploy a single virtual machine, had to create a ticket in our ticketing system. Then it had to go through a couple of departments. The time to get that all done was quite long, on the order of days. vRA has helped reduce the amount of time it takes to create a ticket in our ticketing system. We have been able to reduce the process to around 30 minutes. Obviously, it has reduced the cost and amount of work.

The automation part is valuable, especially where vRA integrates with vRO, because it reduces the amount of effort we have to make.

This solution is intuitive for the end user. For the guys who need to manage it, it is a bit more complex. It is quite hard to maintain, especially since a lot of work has to be custom-built, which takes a lot of effort.

Stability is not great, although, the latest release has been better.

Scalability is good.

I would rate their technical support as a six out of ten, but that's not completely their fault. A lot of our tickets have to be transferred to engineering. GSS has not been able to solve a lot of our issues.

We work a lot with VMware and were using vCloud Director previously. VMware architects came to our office and, after much discussion, vRA popped up as the best solution that fit our needs.

The setup, the installation, is straightforward, but only with the latest releases.

Upgrades are one of the points where incidents are happening. Every time we want to upgrade, a ticket needs to be created and moved to engineering because GSS is not able to help us. We are able to upgrade, but it takes quite a number of retries, which are very costly.

It's not a smooth upgrade process. For a DTA environment, which is very simple, it is a smooth process, but for our production environment, which is quite enhanced and has a lot of dependencies, it's not easy at all, and it results in a lot of errors.

We did it on our own.

We did not evaluate other vendors.

vRA 8, from what I have seen of it, in a session here at VMworld 2018 Europe, fulfills every need we have. The Service Broker is better. vRA simply speaks with all my other endpoints and I see a lot of benefits in that.

I would rate this solution as an eight because the way we set it up reduces the effort which would normally have been needed to deploy a virtual machine or perform data actions. I'm not giving it a higher score simply because of the difficulties we have run into in the past with it as well as the difficulties we continuously face during upgrades.

We are currently discussing if we should stay on vRA or move back to vCloud Director. For now, I would recommend vRA, having seen the roadmap of vRA 8, which, in my opinion, is really good.

For us, it's a software-defined data center, automating compute, network security, and storage; all the infrastructure components.

Lifecycle management has improved substantially. We're no longer seeing customers holding on to their resources because they're no longer difficult to create or destroy. We've seen substantial amounts of both builds and retirements. 

It also cleans up a lot of the manual operations that used to take place - or that maybe didn't take place at all and now do. There's a lot less human error and we're seeing a lot of, let's say, "cleanliness" in our infrastructure now.

The solution has helped increase our agility, the speed of provisioning, and time to market. It allows our IT admins to deploy dozens of systems simultaneously, as opposed to operating in serial, building one system at a time. That has been pretty significant as well.

Lifecycle management. It allows my teams to create, manage, and retire all of our infrastructure objects in the data center.

Also, the XaaS Extensibility - Anything as a Service. We're starting to utilize that more and more.

One of the features that's a struggle today is some of the public cloud extensibility. Some of the plugins that are native to vRA and vRO, I'd like to see them come out earlier for vRO. I understand that in vRA, the plugins are a little bit more polished because vRA is the GUI. But we'd like to see them released earlier in vRO, prior to a GUI being released.

Azure, for example, is a public cloud provider but we have some instability issues with the plugin in vRO. It's okay for us if we separate the vRA from vRO plugin releases. So I'd like to see some increased stability in some of those public cloud plugins.

We don't really have a stability issue with it. It's not a product that really goes down for us. Although it's not a product we consider to be in our "five nines" of availability, like our other systems are, it's more a tool. We're able to maintain it after hours and patch as needed. But I can't even remember the last time it went down during business hours.

We haven't had any scalability issues. We're nearly 10,000 virtual machines that are registered to our vRealize Automation deployment. With Orchestrator, we did see some scalability concerns, but we clustered it and added some additional resources and we were able to scale it up. We haven't had an issue since.

Technical support could be improved. I definitely feel that the product is accelerating faster than the support engineers are able to keep up with the knowledge needed to know what's going on. The developers maintaining vRealize Automation are doing a great job improving it, but VMware is not doing a great job of training the people we call to get support for it.

Being that we have been involved since some of the early 5.x days, we compare a newer installation to the previous, and each time it gets better.

In terms of upgrades, we're just starting to use Lifecycle Manager, which assists with upgrades. I haven't been impressed, so far, with the maintenance of an existing complex infrastructure. But LCM has allowed us to deploy new vRA instances very rapidly, which is helpful for some of our LCM Code Stream movement between our Dev stage and Prod. But for maintaining the existing environment, we just use the out-of-box upgrade capability of the tool, which is so much easier now than it used to be.

We no longer have the significant issues we had in the past. Things are just getting better with each version.

My advice would be to heavily invest in training in vRO. vRO is the backbone of what vRA does. I also recommend that you come up with a plan. Don't try to automate everything in the first step. Find the good use case and make sure you offer new value to the customers that you're building it for, prior to just replacing what they have with something new. IT admins commonly don't like to have their interface changed so dramatically.

When looking for an IT vendor that would integrate in the data center, I look for an extensible API. It's very helpful when that vendor gives me the ability to either write a REST plugin, or they've written one themselves, and they're fully familiar with the software-defined lifecycle. It's great when they have a vRO plugin that I can tap into and orchestrate and automate but, if they don't, I need good documentation of their REST API and then we'll write our own vRO plugin. We haven't really seen many vendors integrate directly into vRA, but if they're tapping into vRO then we're in good shape. vRA and vRO, for us, are just brothers.

The solution, overall, used to not be intuitive and user-friendly but they've taken some good feedback in the last two years and made some significant improvements that have really helped us out in managing upgrades. It used to be very difficult to upgrade. It's gotten a lot simpler and that has made our lives quite a bit easier. Also, the stability of the distributed, highly-available infrastructure for vRA.