VMware Aria Automation Reviews

Our primary use cases are around deployments supporting DevOps, around service provisioning of IP addresses, DNS; self-service entitlement or enablement. And then, driving some workflow processes from our service marketplace, through automation, to actually have them execute within the infrastructure.

It's performing pretty well.

Speed to market. It helps us to improve the rate at which we deploy and the consistency in which we deploy. It has allowed us to scale up and scale down very quickly.

As we meet our open enrollment periods and then we come off of those enrollment periods and go into a normal operational state, we now have that ability to flex down that environment or flex up the environment quickly.

Another side of the coin is the supporting of DevOps. Now, with the advent of the automation, we've been able to give DevOps the ability to spin up environments, give them lease times, and then have it automatically reclaim the environment. So we can build workflows around DevOps processes that are more consistent. Our past configuration was that they would spin up whole DevOps environments of full, physical machines and they would run indefinitely. That was "Bob's" Dev environment and then "Joe" would come and say, "I want one." And then we'd have all these environments. Now, I can give him his environment for 48 hours and I can take it away and he can spin up another one. Or I can archive it. It allows us to be a little bit more agile.

The most valuable feature is the consistency it delivers, at the end of the day. We know that we have consistent images based off consistent Blueprints, check-pointed or QA'ed in a consistent manner.

It is not super-intuitive. It does require some skills to understand how to use it. I had no problem, but I had spent a lot of time already learning this product ahead of moving it to an operational status. But as we did so, we had a hard time bringing some people from other groups into the fold, to script and work against this environment. So, the ability to build workflows within that automation needs to be streamlined.

In terms of additional features, I would like it to be able to poll my vCenter infrastructure more rapidly and adapt to changes quickly. It should alert me and let me know when there are broken components, as a result of underlying infrastructure changes. It needs to be more stringent.

It is very stable. I've had no downtime from the vRealize Automation appliances or components. I think the biggest challenge is being communicative in the infrastructure as you change the infrastructure underneath the automation. This goes back to the naming conventions and the consistency, but you need to be cognizant, as you change your underlying infrastructure - whether that is new storage arrays you're adding, new DV switches you're creating, or new hosts that you're taking out or putting in - you have to be cognizant of your automation.

It would be nice if this product was a little bit more intuitive regarding what's connected to it.

We could scale horizontally with Automation but we're looking more at containers to scale some of our apps more horizontally. But yes, it does integrate very well with other vSphere products that allow us to scale horizontally as well.

The technical support is very good. I've actually been able to turn over my operations to use technical support. They can actually walk me through the problems within the product. That has been great because I tend to focus more on infrastructure or the underlying components, so for the code components, the support is great.

We were manually spinning up clone templates and building them.

We recently took over and built our IT after 50 years of being under HPE. About five years ago we decided to internalize our IT and take everything back. We built a new IT organization literally, out of this solution; it is one of the tools that made us successful. Once we virtualized our infrastructure, automation is what made us be able to work with it.

Our important criteria when looking at any vendor are support and communication.

I was involved in the initial setup and the PoC. It was very complex on the initial setup because we started with the 6.x version and eventually migrated to 7. The way it was architected, with the Orchestrator being outside of the vRA appliance, was difficult to set up and configure. The next versions made it a much more straightforward configuration.

We did not do an upgrade. We did a parallel build. Several upgrades actually blew up and failed and destroyed the environments, so we gave up attempting to upgrade a 6.x environment and built a brand new 7.x. At the time, we did not have Code Stream so we could not laterally migrate. An important component of this is Code Stream. For the ability to scale and have multiple automation instances, Code Stream is essential to be able to move that back and forth. If you already have an existing automation environment, you should look at Code Stream very heavily, rather than redevelop.

We have seen quite a bit of return on our investment. We've actually been able to really change the way that we're doing build and deployments of virtual machines. We've reorganized around that capability. At one time we had a dedicated build team, separate from Windows and LS teams. Now, we've integrated them together because those teams are actually spinning up and building their own VMs right out of Automation.

We did look at some automation around the Red Hat stack itself. Our environment tends to be larger on the Linux side than it is on the Windows side, the Microsoft side. So we did give some consideration to maybe automating through Ansible and some other processes. But because of the simplicity of development, relative to the other options, we chose vRA. We also chose it because of the integration with our vCenter. We wanted to be under vRealize. We wanted to be one consistent stack, whether it's monitoring, spinning up, security, or containers. We want to try to keep everything under one platform.

I would definitely recommend vRealize Automation.

One thing that we've had to realize about this product is, it's dependent on some back-work that you do inside your vSphere environment to prepare for it: things like tags, things like folders, things like naming conventions. We've discovered that these are very important when you're attempting to roll out this product because you already have an established vCenter environment. For instance, in our case, where we had multiple data centers, we may have had different implementation times and perhaps may not have had the same standards around things like naming conventions, DV switches, or storage. Because they map, you have to very cognizant of that.

That's been an issue, not only on the Automation side but across the whole vRealize Suite. I also manage all of the vROps, the analytics, and the integration between the analytics, the vCenter, and the Automation.

It can be tricky. You need to be detail-oriented on how you configure and set up your vCenter so that you're consistent in all implementations. If you have a multi-vCenter environment, you want to make sure you use the same naming conventions across them.

We already had established standards, but as new people came on board, they may have varied something thinking, "Oh, I can just shorten this," or "I'll hyphenate this VLAN_, no, actually I'll do a VLAN-". When you go to map that, to automate that, and you go to read your available VLANs, suddenly it doesn't recognize them because you're not consistent in your conventions. That's one thing we really discovered in automation.

The second was using naming conventions that are consistent and searchable so that you can understand different applications and environments. That's going to be very important when you're actually building automation and workflows.

It's something that the customer needs to be cognizant of and vigilant about as they move towards automation. Automation is taking the existing infrastructure and attempting to automate it and use it and leverage it in a way that's dependable and consistent. I think that's the greatest thing we get out of Automation. It isn't speed, it's consistency; consistency in deployment, consistency in execution.

I give the solution a nine out of 10, based on my satisfaction with the product. My experience with its growth over time - the last few versions I've looked at, 7.3 to 7.4 - is that it is going to give us some capabilities in integration that we didn't have before.

The primary use case is that it fronts VirtualCenter for our entire development environment. The current version performs well.

It provides us with rapid deployment and reclamation of servers. It has also increased the infrastructure agility, application agility, improved time to market, and made it easier for IT to support developers.

• Self-service for the servers
• Reclamation
• Self-service for all of our IT or development teams to expand and decrease their environments at will

Other than the features that are supposed to already be in place with the new version - meaning the tight integration with vROps, which they said was there but wasn't - the ability to migrate between clusters is a big deal right now. If you try to migrate a current client, create a research pool for a client, and they have multiple ESX clusters, you can't get it. It's so painful to do. The new version that we will be going to is supposed to do that automatically. And I will believe it until it doesn't work.

Its first iteration had some hiccups. It wasn't as streamlined. It crashed a lot more. This version has been way more solid.

Scalability has been excellent. It scales well horizontally. Vertically, you'd have to do a lot to make that happen. It will scale both ways. One way is easier. Horizontally is way easier to scale. It's just the nature of the way the product is built.

On the current version, support is much better. I have a TAM and I have mission-critical support, so I usually get to somebody.

We were previously using a product from CA that CA no longer supports. They got out of the business.

The initial setup was not straightforward. It was not simple, and we had a PoC. We had VMware help us deploy it, and it took them an exorbitant amount of time.

Upgrading hasn't been without its pain. We've had our issues, we've lost some data. There have been some hiccups along the way. We're confident that this next upgrade will be smoother, since it has been getting more stable over time.

The solution is intuitive to the end-user, absolutely. I've created a web portal, through vRA, in which users' specific requirements are built-in. Now, to develop that was not overly fun, but, overall, it is good.

I give it an eight out of ten because it has provided my development team a pure self-service portal. We deploy thousands of machines and reclaim. So, their time to business and their time to market has been improved exponentially.

We use it for deploying, data recovery, and DR.

In terms of recovery, it takes only a tenth of the time that's required compared to a human element. It gives us time savings, which equals cost savings, which equals personnel savings.

Having the visibility of the infrastructure at that level helps greatly with infrastructure agility, application agility, and speed of provisioning.

The most valuable features are the metrics and reporting aspects. The historical data and extraction enable us to tell where the trends are and where contentions may exist in the future.

I also like that it reduces the human interaction and requirement.

It would be nice if, at the director level, the manager level, there was a pretty graphic. They don't like to see numbers and line items, they want to see graphs and scales and real-world pictures. That would support better reporting.

Thankfully, where we're at, we don't have the need for the criticality, we don't need a quick reaction to stability issues. But having the right resources available will help the stability.

We have scaled up. For me and my team, it's very easy.

On a scale of one to five, I would rate technical support a four. It's not always associated with the correct team on the first go-round, but eventually, we get the right people to get the right solution taken care of.

There is a war on wasted initiative and on waste of time, more than a concern about environmental resources, unfortunately. The war has been identified on multiple levels, especially deploying in our realm.

When looking to work with a vendor, the important criteria we look for are

• professionalism
• the value of the product for the return on investment
• personally, I look at energy costs and savings as well.
  

Without the right technical expertise, the initial setup can be a little more cumbersome, but with the knowledge and the backing of the infrastructure and the engineering, it's fairly simple.

We have upgraded many times. We know how to do it. It's fairly simple for us. We don't get the admins involved. The engineers take care of it all.

As far as ROI goes, we see it in the human time element in deploying, that's been a really big improvement. Cost savings go with that inherently.

We looked at a couple of other vendors but we went with VMware because VMware is standard. Why not go with the best?

Give it time to save you time.

We use it to automate workloads and it works well. The performance is as advertised.

It automates the creation of new VMs for us, so there is less human error, less work. It has simplified provisioning for us.

It integrates with our backup solution.

It is not intuitive or user-friendly. It's complicated as heck. We actually hired VMware Professional Services to come in. I understand the newer version, which we're not quite on yet, is easier and that the interface is better. But the product is really a profession unto itself. The user interface could be improved.

It's stable. Doesn't die.

We have not yet had to scale it but I understand that the product does scale.

I've used VMware tech support frequently. It's good, always good. They deliver. It's easy to get the person I need.

We did hire VMware to come in and do it, of course. I was not there, in this role, at the time. They came and it works.

We haven't gone through an upgrade process yet. That's on the roadmap. We'll do that before the end of the year but we also have to do vSphere and the rest of VMware stuff.

I don't think there was an ROI attached to the project. We just needed to automate some of these provisioning processes.

I would recommend vRealize Automation. 

If you don't already have experience in it, you're probably going to hire a partner to help deploy it and make it tie into your environment. Make sure the third-party stuff works with it, make sure the APIs are open. We use it to automate. During the provisioning process, we use it to talk to the Infoblox with the DNS stuff and the IP provisioning, and to talk to our Veeam too. Just make sure that the rest of your stuff is going to work with it.

I rate it a nine out of ten. To get it to a ten they should make it easier to use and to understand what it's doing.

We use it to deploy virtual machines in our traditional VMware environment. We don't use it as a front-end for our customers but it works fine for us, on the back-end.

We can use some of its functionality to avoid having to write custom code for the placement of virtual machines. That is the main way we get use out of it. Also, the deployment time is less than it was before. It's all automated, it's quicker than when it was done by hand.

The most valuable feature is the automation of the deployment of the whole machine.

We also use it to pre-install the applications that the people selected when they ordered the machine, so they get a fully functional machine.

In terms of usability, It has had its challenges. It requires a lot of custom code to integrate into our environment. It can take a little while to get it to do what we want, takes some code instead of having built-in functionality. Part it is how we use it. It would be a lot easier to use in a greenfield scenario versus brownfield, which is the way we are using it.

I would also like to see them streamline the install. It's split between Windows and Linux appliances, and it would be easier if it was all appliances. I think they're going that way.

The stability is pretty good now; previous versions, not so much, but it has improved. In earlier versions, we had issues with crashes, but the latest version has been much better.

We have not had any problems with scalability. We're not pushing the boundaries on the number of deployments with it, but no issues.

Technical support has been good. We have MCS, the mission-critical support, and they've been good. The occasions when it is taking a while to get back to us is when the technical support person needs to contact engineering. That handoff between engineering and support takes some time, at times.

We had a little homegrown thing but that doesn't really count.

When selecting a vendor, if we already have an established relationship with the vendor, it's easier than going to a new vendor and establishing a new relationship.

Setup in the previous version was not so straightforward. They have made big improvements in the later versions. The first one was a pain but the new one is fine. A couple of versions back, they added an automated install that did not exist in the earlier versions that we deployed.

Upgrading took a little while because we did a side-by-side upgrade. There was a code migration, all our custom code needed to be migrated, so it took a little bit of work. But, overall, it was fine.

Time savings are our ROI, the time to deploy machines. I haven't done any studies on the exact ROI, but saving time is always good.

Right now, it works for what we use it for. We're not using all its features, but the pieces that we use work fine.

We use vRealize Automation not only to track the utilization of the environment but to deploy new VMs on a regular basis. When DevOps decide they need a whole bunch of VMs spun up for a new version of an application we are already running, we can duplicate everything we've already got, spin them all up, get them running. When they're done with whatever test case they have going on, we can either move them over to staging or we can completely wipe out the entire environment, and that's a lot easier to monitor and manage.

Simplification. It gives us one interface to control multiple environments. It's an easier way to look at how a large chunk of information or data or processors are being used, and what they're being used for.

I would like to see it expanding, growing in all of the cloud-based stuff that they are really pushing towards, and have it be more capable of what it is already doing. But in reality, that's probably our own fault because we're a little bit behind on the version of VMware that we're running. It's probably just that we need to get caught up on our version.

The stability is 95 percent. There are some situations where it gets a little bit clumsy. When it gets really big, when you're dealing with a very large deployment, it can be a little bit difficult, but it's better than nothing. It does a significant job, given what it's tasked to do.

Scalability is probably the best part about it. You can take things that you've already defined, that you've already built once, and build them again multiple times, without significant effort.

I haven't used technical support but my co-worker has, more than once, to deal with issues we were having while we were in the process of setting it up. I was off on other tasks so I never really had to deal with tech support. But, from what he said, it worked out well. They knew what they were talking about, they helped us get it sorted out.

There were other solutions that were used previously, but this one is the main one I have used, personally. Before coming to Bass Pro, where I am working now, it was a lot of VMware on bare metal and dealing with it directly. vRealize wasn't there.

We see our ROI is in terms of the reduced workload, because we can see a lot of things on one place and don't have to spend a lot of time going out looking for them, and in the simplification of deployment. Again, we can go to one place, do what we need to do, go off and work on other projects and come back and it's taken care of it itself.

I give the solution a nine out of ten. Again, that's probably our own being behind. It's entirely possible the newest version is a ten. It's the whole extension, further into more modern technology, but we're not on the newest version at the moment. So it's probably already there and we don't see it yet. We're trying to get everything pulled together between our company and several other companies, to be on the same version. We're in the process of upgrading to the 6.5 and then, hopefully, very soon to 6.7.

Our primary use case is to automate the end-user request for either a VDI or a server virtual machine.

It has taken some time to implement vRA. Over the different versions, we had a lot of problems doing some upgrades, but as of right now, it's working really well.

The benefits are that it reduces the administrators' having to manually make all these VDIs and deploy servers. It's really an optimization tool for administration. It helps by reducing the amount of time that administrators and engineers have to spend to provision and manage specific VDIs and servers. It puts that work on the end-user, and then the automation engine does it.

We have integrated our CICD pipeline into an automatic catalog request through some API calls. It can request and provision new virtual machines behind the NSX load balancer straight out of the CIDC pipeline, add those nodes to the load balancer, request SSL certs, and do SSL termination at the load balancer so that it's not encrypted behind the scenes - all of which has really been helpful. So it has helped to increase infrastructure agility, speed of provisioning, time to market, application agility, and made it easier for IT to support developers.

The most valuable feature is the portal where you can assign permissions to specific people to request specific items in the catalog and allow them to provision things for themselves. Or it enables them to request different services that you can create through vRO and vRA.

We do partner with VMware on their beta testing, so we have already communicated some of the features we'd like to see back to VMware. I don't know that I'm allowed to speak about it because it's on an NDA.

Stability has gotten a lot better. However, the vRO aspect, when you have a multi-vRA head, is a little bit finicky still. vRO still needs to stay on one appliance and be one application, because, when you have two, you can't see runs on the other one that are happening when you're not logged into that one.

Scalability is good. We have extended its reach out into our DR site and out into the hybrid cloud. The extendability is really much better than it was in the early days of vRA.

I haven't personally used tech support. I know that we have used VMware's preventative tickets when we're getting ready to do upgrades so that we have support on-call when something goes wrong, because something usually goes wrong.

We had no automation engine before we started vRA a couple of years ago. It was something that our directors and our management really wanted to get into our environment so we could automate some of these processes that are very redundant.

When selecting a vendor, interoperability - whether it can operate with the other solutions that we've already implemented - is important. Also, how much the vendor is willing to help and work with us to make their solution viable is another factor.

We have had the opportunity to upgrade the solution multiple times. The upgrade to vRA 7.3 was painful. The most recent upgrade we did to 7.4 was very sleek, it was smooth, it went really well.

We have seen value from it. We've seen that typically, the people who are provisioning VDIs and server VMs can now utilize most of their time towards other projects and moving the environment forward, instead of just hammering out virtual machines all day.

We haven't really looked at a lot of competitors. We do use SCCM, which isn't really a competitor, but it's a different type of management. It seems that vRA works a little bit better in the vSphere environment because it can connect to all the other VMware products really easily.

Use it, but be ready to invest a lot of time, man-hours, into building it out in the way that you want to use it. It can do a lot of things, and that's one of the problems - that it can do a lot of things. So you have to know what you want it to do before it'll do what you want it to.

In terms of it being intuitive and user-friendly, from an end-user perspective, I believe it is. From the administration and development side, it's a little bit complex. It takes a little bit of time to understand how everything works behind the scenes of vRA and vRO, but once you start learning it, it's kind of intuitive, once you get your feet wet with it.

I rate vRA about a nine out of 10, because of some of the "gotchas" that aren't really well documented. But it is very valuable for us in how we've implemented it and how we're utilizing it.

It is used to deploy and manage unified configs in an engineering environment. It has performed pretty well.

It has improved things, absolutely. We had a lot of config drift before, and this really helps us keep it on track.

Speed to provision is probably our biggest, significant gain.

• Integration with Infoblox, for IP management
• Three-tier app deployment as one unified Blueprint

I haven't had any issues with the stability.

We've only used it within our lab engineering environment, which is up to 1,000 VMs at any point, so it's been pretty solid.

I was a VMware consultant for years and I saw successes with it in other people's environments.

The initial setup was very easy. The upgrade was also pretty easy. It was not quite as easy when I piloted it through Lifecycle Manager, but that was in its infancy. It has probably gotten better.

The solution itself has a learning curve to get used to building the Blueprints, but once you've done it, it gets much quicker.

Our time to deliver a fully unified, three-tier app, at the right version, is one-twentieth what it was before. There is no manual intervention. No IP management. It just dramatically simplifies all of our processes.

I haven't had the opportunity to use many comparable products.

My advice would be, use it with NSX and with Infoblox.

I give it an eight out of ten, mostly due to the learning curve to catch up to where you need to be. Some third-party integration, that would still be nice to see.