VMware Aria Automation Reviews

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.

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.

It has saved us a lot of time and work. It helped us to reorganize some of our service lines, so we could be more efficient. For example, on our open system server team, we had 15 people building servers, now we have two.

Once you've learned the product, it is very easy to use.

The entire automation orchestration of it. It integrates into all of the other products that we have, e.g., ServiceNow. 

We have a self-service portal, and it does that very well.

It has a learning curve.

We have no issues whatsoever with it. It's very stable.

We have no issues whatsoever with it. It's very scalable.

We have a technical account manager, but we also rely heavily on VMware's support team, who is excellent to work with.

Upgrades have been extremely simple with their Lifecycle Manager product.

We actually used a lot of VMware services because we didn't want it sitting in the box too long. We had them come in, then they had it up and running in two days. There was a lot of tweaking to do, but it was up and running in two days.

We have seen significant ROI. We used to have physical servers, it took 90 days to get a server, order it, buy it, and get it in. We have it down to 10 minutes, building a server with virtualization, and now that's too slow. So, we let the customer do it at their speed. Therefore, it is pretty much up in a couple of minutes and they have a server.

We usually look at least three other vendors minimum. 

We chose VMware years ago. We have also had Hyper-V and KVM. So, we've had different products from different vendors. However, now, we are down to just VMware, because it's very stable and reliable.

Talk to a lot of different companies and people that have done it. Find out what not to do and what to do. It will make your journey easier.

We are working on a lot of the digital transformation right now. We are working more on the Pivotal Container Service (PKS) product, and a lot of integrations that they're doing with the performance monitoring, the metrics, and KPIs. This is very important to us.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Transparency: Be very open with us. 
• Be very knowledgeable about their products, so that we don't have to go through three or four different people to get one answer.

As a software development company with a smaller staff, we've got a lot of technical people - the operations team and myself. Being able to give provisioning of environments over to our developers and the different teams has enabled them to put up environments faster and also freed up time for the IT team. This is really one of our bread and butter solutions for our developers.

As a development company, we have different versions that need to be provisioned constantly, and the build-up/tear-down of this, for the IT team, used to take forever. We have a lean staff. We haven't increased in people but we have increased our company size. To be able to do more with less, that's one big piece of it.

Also, having a fixed capacity plan, that's another piece, for budgeting. The organization it provides has been truer to the needs of spending.

We've just shifted to an Agile development as well, so there has absolutely been an improvement in speed to market. We now have consistent release plans because we have these environments as ready as they are.

The most valuable features for us are capacity planning as well as environment life management; putting in specific templates and workflows that we know are secure. That solidifies the environments that we're in or that are being provisioned. We also know that every environment being provisioned has a lifespan. It affects capacity, so it's great for budgeting, from my perspective, and good for my team.

In terms of it being user-friendly, we have a technical group, so understanding what they're provisioning, what subnet they're going to be using, the security profiles we have, with a straight developer that doesn't have all the bells and whistles, that's one part. If it needs to be on a certain VLAN, they can put it there if it's going to be used for a different purpose. It's that ability and flexibility to provide the different choices for our team in a straightforward format so they can do the services themselves.

Regarding that networking piece, more hands-on pieces, that come with that purchase to help you get to that good spot might be an area that would help.

It's very stable. The one little hiccup we had was with some of the networking but I think that was more our physical switch configurations, supports and protocols. When you try to lock things down you have to know it end-to-end. But once it's in place, it's rock solid. I think the stability on the network side is there. It was more on us, to be honest.

Right now, we're also installing a vRealize Automation in India and expanding. The fact that we're moving from the US to India just shows the power of being able to add capacity, CPU to it, as much as we need. If we need to grow that fixed capacity, we can.

It scales horizontally too with users, more systems, it's easy.

We have used technical support in the past. Not through me but through my team. We have a high expectation, we need that fast turnaround. We've had nothing more than a day or two, tops, in terms of turnaround time. They're very knowledgeable.

Before, it was piecemeal. We had templates. We had some VDI pools for some of these things. It was just a constant revision of that and it would sit idle for too long. So, for the whole pool, if one or two people were using it, great; but if 10 were using it, then it was not the most efficient way to operate.

When selecting a vendor the most important criterion is the relationship, to be honest. Pricing, you can beat people up and have negotiations on it. Pricing, obviously, at some point was an issue, that factors into it. And we need to make sure all the technology fits. But having a relationship with the vendor that can be with you through the good times but also the bad, that makes it worthwhile.

I was not involved, my team was. We did not bring in VMware to help. We have some knowledgeable folks. They knew it pretty well, so I think they liked the hands-on approach a little bit more. They got it up. It wasn't quite perfect but with some support, they were able to round it out and make it the great solution it is today.

We've got education credits through VMware, so we are training on this constantly. I think it's a matter of using the resources that are out there and focusing on this.

Rubrik is one we are looking at. And the whole AWS Hybrid Cloud is definitely on my roadmap.

For a specific business, you need to know what you're trying to do. For ours, it's a match that I wish we would have had immediately. It has paid dividends.

I give vRA a nine out of 10. Sure, there's room for improvement. I don't know all of those areas, I'd let my more technical people speak on that. For us, this has been one of those solutions where ownerships loves it, appreciates it, sees the difference.

We are using it for developers to test code. Our Customer Care uses it to troubleshoot customer issues. We also have a training business unit and they deploy classes for customer training.

We've been using it for four years now. It performs well. It does the functions we need. We do have some issues from time to time. I wish there was a little bit of more maturity out of the product, but it is getting better with every release.

It has definitely increased speed of VM deployment. When a normal server-request would come in, it might take anywhere from three to four days to deploy. Now, within 15 minutes, they can click and have something up and running.

The IT support for developers is nice as well because they are able to manage the environment themselves.

Self-service: Letting the end-users deploy their own machines so the administrators are hands-off at that point.

The user-friendliness is seen in the minimal training that is required to get them up and running, to start deploying machines and accessing.

Something as simple as formatting the catalog in a different way would be helpful because there is no option for doing so. A lot of the contents for the virtual machine, blueprints that you can request, are hidden from view and there's no way to change the view.

It does go down from time to time. We have some issues with the appliances sometimes and we have to do reboots in the middle of the day. That affects the ability for them to deploy. Existing stuff that is already deployed, there's no downtime for that, but it does keep them from deploying at that time.

We have it deployed in a highly-available environment and scalability is nice because we just add another ESX host and then we are able to increase the capacity.

Technical support is helpful. Sometimes they can take a little while to get back to us, but for the most part, we end up finding a solution to cases.

We were using Lab Manager before but that was decommissioned so this was the next solution. We chose it because it did everything we needed it to do, it was the logical step from Lab Manager.

The criteria for the selection process included that we needed to have a self-service environment for our developers, that Customer Care be able to deploy machines, destroy machines, complete the entire VM lifecycle - and this does it.

The setup is fairly complex, but we've been using it for a while so I'm pretty knowledgeable about it now. Upgrades are pretty straightforward. We had a lot of problems originally deploying it, with some certificate issues. We had an engagement with VMware so they were able to help us get a proof of concept environment set up as well. So that was helpful.

It's a good solution. The deployment can be complex so I would recommend engaging professional services for setting up a proof of content environment to evaluate it.

I rate vRA at eight out of 10 because of issues with the stability of the appliances. But other than that, it's a pretty solid product. It does exactly what we need it to do and we are happy with it.

Primary use case is for automatic deployment of VMware guests.

It's performing as we want. We're not really asking anything too complex of it, but it does what we ask of it.

Our organization started to move a lot more towards automating all the things that we can. We're catching up to that, but we're definitely heading in that direction. It's one of those things that enables us to tie in with our other pieces, with automating the operating system, etc. VMware is then able to automate the build of our virtual machines.

In terms of infrastructure agility, we're still getting our feet under us in some areas, but it's definitely playing it's part and doing what it does well.

Our speed of provisioning has also improved. We used to build systems manually, which would take four hours or a day. Nowadays we're able to spin something up off a template that we update every so often and it takes about 20 minutes. We can take an existing template, build it back up, add some configuration for it, specific applications, turning things into what the developers need, and then we can have them deploy it off that. It makes it so that we can have customization within a framework.

The most valuable feature is the integration with some of our other automation platforms. We're starting into Jenkins, and it has a plug-in for other automation of operating systems and things. So it works together with our infrastructure. We don't have a very complex environment, we don't have NSX yet or anything really crazy, but all the things we do have, it has been able to interoperate with them.

It is intuitive and user-friendly. It took some growing. We had to figure it out in the beginning, but that was a couple versions ago. We like the improvements that have been made over time, so it's definitely been able to progress with the environment.

We don't have too complex of an environment, we're not doing machine-learning or any of the advanced features all that much. We're a pretty straightforward IT shop. We just provide servers, and then, from there, it's what the customer wants. The next step we would probably like to see is to have a customer portal, so instead of our having to punch the button, the customer could. But I believe that VMware offers enough that setting that up is more on us, rather than waiting for them offer it.

We needto learn more, advance our usage of the product. We're doing what we can with what we have, but we have to learn a bit more. Better training, or training modules, wouldn't hurt. I haven't personally looked through what the portal has, but more training is always good, so we could take a new employee and point him to the training and get him up to speed quickly. I have had 10 years or so experience with VMware, but I'm the old the guy in the department. Everybody else is newer than me on this and not everyone has my experience. So the training would be nice.

I've been impressed with the stability so far. It does what we ask it to. That's always nice. You don't have to think about it. We haven't had any downtime.

We can scale it up or down. We haven't needed to yet, but we can.

We haven't had to use technical support. I do a lot of blog reading, so I look up my answers on my own. But tech support, on other issues, has been where we need it to be.

We weren't using much. This was right at the beginning of when we were starting to automate things. We saw the VMware automation and decided that, since we had VMware, it would be the logical choice. And then we started with Jenkins for a lot of our other operating system features. Jenkins, of course, has plugins that talk to VMware natively, so it was a natural fit.

When selecting a vendor, the biggest thing for us is multi-operating system support. There is the classic divide. I'm on the Windows side. We have a Linux department also. When looking at different tools, something might be better for Linux but we have to have something that will work for both of us. We don't want to have two different tools for two operating systems. Whereas the Linux team wanted to use Puppet instead of Chef, Chef supports Windows and Linux both, better. The nice thing about VMware, aside from it being a lot more OS-agnostic, is that both teams can use the product. One product for both operating systems. That was one of the primary things. We could have a tool that runs great, but it might be a situation where, "Oh yeah, your Windows support is lame." That's the big thing for us, the interoperability between operating systems.

I thought the initial setup was straightforward. The biggest thing, once we had it set up, was to integrate it with the vCenter, but that was pretty straightforward. That was part of the workflow. It is automated within the product as part of the initial deployment, which is really handy.

The upgrade experience was also quite easy.

Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point.

There were not too many on our list. VMware was the natural fit. We saw the automation. We liked it. Chef, technically, will do automation. It has connections into VMware. We preferred having the VMware automation handle it. Chef will do it, but it doesn't have as many things. We would have had to write a lot more tools for it. It's one of those things where, instead of Chef's being the one tool to rule them all, where we do that for everything, we branched out to VMware automation to handle its subset.

Jenkins is a Swiss Army knife. It will do literally everything. The problem is that you have to tell it to do everything. You have to build all of the features into it that you want. There's a language to do it, but it just says, "here's the entire toolbox, do whatever you want." It doesn't have as many pre-packaged things. VMware has the ability to build things, but it has a lot of things preconceived, which is very handy. If I just need the basics, I need to stand up some VMs, it already has those workflows built in. Jenkins doesn't have nearly as many things built in. They can both expand to what we need, but VMware had some pre-provided things that were very handy to get off the ground quickly.

vRA has a very nice toolset for being able to integrate with VMware. It is great for being able to automate things within the VMware environment. We probably need to learn more about it, so we can fully realize its use, what the plugins for other things are. But it's doing everything that we need for now. We've seen that it has room to grow with us.

The primary use case for deployment of vRealize Automation was to facilitate a service provider web portal front-end to our Hosted Private Cloud and Business Continuity solution. This is a fully automated virtualized SDDC, using VMware as the base hypervisor. We also incorporate NSX for network automation, vCenter Orchestrator for workflow execution, and additional software packages to support the service as a whole (vROps, Log Insight, Network Insight, NSX Manager, etc.).

Our core networking is made up of a spine/leaf architecture using Cisco ACI/APIC and our storage is virtualized behind a Hitachi (HDS). We use SnapMirror and NetBackup as our DR tools.

We needed vRA to easily integrate with our hypervisor, orchestration, security (tenant segmentation, PCI), workflows, custom code, and internal monitoring/management tools. Since we didn’t have time to develop our own web front-end during the development sprints, vRA saved considerable time and resource cycles. Its ability to easily integrate with all of the VMware cloud products as well as public cloud providers, like AWS and Azure, out-of-the-box, makes it an even more powerful tool.

vRealize Automation is improving the way we host and serve up our fully hosted private cloud solutions as a cloud service provider. It has created efficiencies in how we deploy, manage, monitor, and develop within the service. It provides velocity both from management and customer perspectives, from ingesting new catalog items, developing new workflows for additional features, and/or allowing customer access to multiple guest OS instances at scale in a shorter time frame.

From a service provider perspective, its ability to integrate with vRealize Operations and vRealize business management suites provides a window for being able to execute predictive and reactive analysis that you can use to automate your cloud solution from a resource, management, and/or customer perspective.

vRA provides that single pane of glass for our cloud tenants to deploy, monitor, access, and manage their VMs/guest operating systems. vRA allows a cloud service provider to quickly build out a web portal front-end interface that easily integrates with all of the VMware vRealize products, providing an all-encompassing cloud solution.

Additional features also allowed us, as the service provider, to configure branding options for the site itself, as well as full integration into the orchestration layer, including workflows, security control, reporting, billing for our cloud admins, tenant admins, and end-user (customer).

The most valuable feature is vRA’s ability to integrate whether with additional VMware vRealize suites or other vendors' cloud products.

Also, vRA in combination with vCenter Orchestrator makes it very easy to design, import, and deliver quality workflows and blueprints. These can be used for various functions within the cloud portal, from both a production as well as a business-continuity perspective. Examples include automated failover activities in combination with SRM and SRA Replication, VM deployments based on a catalog, being able to roll out an entire LAMP stack dev environment with the click of a button, or ingest and inject data into back-end CMBDs, etc.

Its fully integrates with network and storage virtualization via NSX and workflow development, and secure APIs are available to customize automation using other vendor tools such as Puppet, Chef and/or PowerShell.

There are many features that I find extremely valuable but vRA’s ability to be a central hub for all of the parts that make up a hosted private or multi-tenant cloud solution is extremely valuable. Ultimately, the outcome of this design is a highly available and agile solution with a wide array of integration that enables you to provide a fully automated, scalable private cloud solution that can meet the market and customer demands now and in the future.

I have listed some additional features below for general reference:

• Easy integration into other VMware-based vRealize cloud products via SSO
• Single pane of glass interface
• Parameterized blueprints to enhance reusability and reduce sprawl
• Policy-based optimization of virtual machine placement
• NSX integration enhancements
• Enhanced control of NSX-provisioned load balancers
• Enhanced NAT port forwarding rules
• NSX security group and tag management
• Automated high-availability for NSX Edge Services
• NSX Edge size selection
• Enhanced vRealize Business for Cloud integration – cloud nanagement platform
• Improvements to high-availability
• Health Service
• Configuration Automation Framework – Puppet Integration
• REST API

Most of the areas for which there was room for improvement are being covered in the latest 7.4 release which will include all new workflows for additional management of a customer’s cloud and infrastructure, directly from the Web portal itself. Some of these features today require the ability to build out your own workflows, which can become complicated if you don’t have the knowledge base.

VMware is aware of this and is making the next version of vRA and vCenter Orchestrator with this in mind. They are going to include additional granular-level controls from within the self-service portal itself. This will allow us, the service provider, to pass these additional features on to our customer base giving them greater control and management of their dedicated cloud.

Some of the new vRA 7.4 release features include:

• New and enhanced curated blueprints and OVF files
• New custom form designer
• Enhanced multi-tenancy capabilities
• vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager now extends to IT content management 
• New IT content lifecycle management

No issues with Stability now working on testing out the new version on NSXt via blueprints which will provide a whole new level of control and management for our SDDC virtualized networking stack.

No issues currently with scalability of the product or its uses cases it was implemented for.

One of the best support and architecture teams we have ever worked with from a vendor perspective. Very knowledgeable and on the cutting edge of virtualization.

The software setup is fairly easy but does require knowledge of the VMware product suite. The complexity comes in whether this a service or a dedicated infrastructure. Normally in service oriented infrastructures which are purpose built for multi-tenancy where you have multiple customers hosting multiple sub-tenant customers which require many layers of micro-segmentation and security to be built in. In a dedicated infrastructure you are building for one business or a single customer even though they have segmented sub-tenants such as account, IT, Operations etc it is all internal to that business. The level of micro-segmentation and security is much less in complexity to provide a final solution.

We implemented a majority of the service internally and only reach out to the vendors developers prior to making changes in the design that could impact rework to correct bottle knocks and development dead ends. 

From experience working with other service provider cloud products, VMware vRealize Automation Center is the best out-of-the-box solution to quickly build out your cloud portal and fully integrate it into your orchestration layers, as well as your compute and storage infrastructures. It can support multiple public clouds as well as hypervisors, providing that single pane of glass for management, operations, and reporting. I would give it a nine out of 10 as there is always room for improvement, since cloud is always evolving.

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.

The primary use case is to deploy an automated self-service portal for virtual machines for testers and developers to use. It is performing well.

It benefits the speed of our development, and the speed of anything we test and send through to production. It helps us get things to market faster. We're able to get the application out and be more agile with it.

It also raises the caveat for people who like VM sprawl. We have people who don't clean up after themselves.

The self service portal: People don't have to come to us to request something. They can just go fill out a form. Within 30 minutes, they have what they requested.

Once you get in there and start to understand the product, it is more intuitive. However, for somebody coming in from the outside, it takes a while to understand it. There is a lot of terminology. I am the primary admin on it, but I have some guys who tend to support me when I'm gone, and they try to find stuff on it. They don't know the best place to look because some of the terms don't make a lot of sense to them. This is more of a training issue than just getting better familiar with the product. I would like them to improve the product training.

We had a stability issue just this morning. This past weekend was patch day, so it was Monday and patches were done Saturday. The form didn't display properly, so I had to reboot the vRA. Due to the HA, we had to reboot the vRA appliances to get it working again. This might be because the database were ripped out from underneath of it and never reconnected. However, this is not a common occurrence.

Version 7.3 seems to be more scalable than previous versions.

I have talked to some folks out of Denver who do a lot of the vRA support. We also use a partner out in the UK who helps to support us. Both are responsive.

We brought in vRA as part of a new product offering for our customers. It's what we have used from the ground up to provision virtual machines.

I worked with the UK partner to set up the 7.3 version. The upgrade process 6.x to 7.3 was a significant effort. I'm hoping that 7.3 to the next version is much smoother.

I'm very interested in the integration with Puppet. However, my organization doesn't have the funding for something like Puppet right now. If VMware would integrate that feature set (Puppet) into vRA. That would be very awesome.

Find out what the requirements are and what do you want do with it, then see if it fits. If you're looking to deploy virtual machines through a self-service portal, this product works well.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It meets our requirements.