VMware Aria Automation Reviews

It's our private cloud platform.

My engineers were able to pick it up quickly and we provisioned and created a private cloud in roughly three months.

Even with the virtualization, it would take us at least three or four days to create a VM. With vRA we have brought that down to seven minutes. The solution has helped increase infrastructure, agility, speed of provisioning, time to market, application agility. Everything got super fast.

It's also easier for IT to support developers. As soon as the developer wants a box, we can pretty much put it out there in a few minutes, instead of wading through a lot of manual paperwork and forms and email boxes and the like.

The solution is intuitive and user-friendly. It only took three months to start a private cloud. It was very good. Guys that didn't have a lot of knowledge in scripting picked up on it. Then I hired a VMware solutions architect and it just skyrocketed from there because he knew the ins and outs.

I can't say what new features I'd like right now because we're looking forward to the stuff that's in 7.5. I need some stick-time on 7.5 and then I can tell you what I want to see in 7.6 or 7.7.

It's very stable. We haven't had any issues and we've been using it for roughly two years. We're upgrading to the 7.5 now.

It scales fine. We've been scaling on storage but we actually have two divisions. We just deployed it to another division to help them out. The company I work for grows by acquisition so the new acquisitions are now getting this pointed to them so they can provision faster, with basically the same standards, instead of doing stuff manually.

Regarding technical support, because we have a solution architect on board, we have a lot of problems but his questions are not normal questions. His questions almost have to be escalated to a developer immediately. He doesn't ask anything simple or even just plain hard. His stuff is nearly impossible.

From that perspective, technical support has not done very well. But we have rockstars on the team and there's no way you're going to get great support because these guys are asking questions that even the rockstars of the VM world are scratching their heads about.

I brought VMware into the company in 2004. Before that it was manual, bare metal boxes.

I was involved in the initial setup but not as an engineer. Before I hired Alex, we had a guy put the stuff up. He did it in a couple of days. It was straightforward and it was functional, it worked really well. Then we got this new guy and he had so much insider knowledge. He worked out of Moscow. He was doing all the work for the all the other customers and we hired him in.

We're on 7.4, we're going to upgrade to 7.5 after Labor Day. Since we've gone live, we've done three upgrades and they've all been really good. No issues.

I can't provide numbers off the top of my head but going from three or four days to seven minutes to create a VM - and that seven minutes can go up to 50 servers wide - means it has worked beautifully.

We evaluated Hyper-V, that was a big failure. We looked at KBM, that was pretty good. We're using Acropolis Hypervisor right now. Everything is still primitive, but among the other ones, AHV from Nutanix seems to be the most stable functionally but it is still missing a whole lot of toolsets that you need. So we're not moving in that direction any time soon.

The other competitors are throwing everything at you for free but they don't have any management. You don't have the feature set that you have in vROps. vRA is much more sophisticated. You get what you pay for with VMware. You're getting all the feature set. Where everybody else is trying to give you stuff for free, they're harder to work with and then you spend more man-hours.

Start with VMware vRA. Other solutions haven't been in the game long enough. You're going to have a lot of custom-scripting that VMware already puts in there.

I rate it an eight out of 10 only because I wish we had a way to get through the technical support department faster. We've been with them long enough - and I've already talked to the sales guy about this - that they should almost have an "express lane." You lose two or three days going through the normal process. It goes to level-one and he bounces it to level-two, to level-three, when pretty much, because we've got this long history, they should know that when we call, it needs to be bounced all the way up to the top. That's just the reality.

We use vRealize Automation for all of our court locations and the customers are able to, on any day of the week, 24/7, provision VMs at will and maintain them.

As opposed to the old days where customers put in a ticket and they waited three or four days to get a server provisioned for them, today they can get servers provisioned in five minutes. So, the time to market for our customers is much better, much improved. It's multi-tenanted, meaning one court customer doesn't see the other court customer. They're very happy about that.

For time to market, it's absolutely incredible that a court customer can come in and, within a few days, have the service provided to them. They can then spin up one or 100 servers. Before, it would take them six months to a year to get there. So, for time to market, there are incredible savings. And there are cost savings from their perspective as well. They don't have to manage HVAC and space and cooling and all of those things that they used to have to do. Today, all they have to do is provision a server and manage their users, which is what they should be focused on.

We don't know what they run, we don't manage them. We just provide the infrastructure and they are saved from having to purchase infrastructure, having to purchase licensing, and having to maintain servers internally. So it's a win-win for the courts and for us. We love the product.

The most valuable features are that it's multi-tenant and the ability for scale.

From a customer perspective, they log in and they have Catalog: what services are available to them. They simply click on that and then there's an option: I can have a Linux server, I can have a Windows server. They select it, configure it, how many CPUs, how much memory, how much storage, and hit the button, submit. It's that easy.

I would like to see more integration to do things like DR, from a court perspective. Today, for us, SRM doesn't scale because each of our customers has a local vCenter environment as well as the vCenter in our environment. So we can't get SRM to scale to the point to which we need. From an integration perspective, DR inside of that would be good.

Also virtual desktops. I know you can spin up virtual desktops in vRA, but they're not thin-provisioned. I don't know if that's because the other product, Horizon View, is there, but it would be nice to see more integration. I know NSX is getting more and more integrated. We talked a little about vROps. I see that integration coming in.

But for vRA, DR would be a service we'd like to be able to offer to the customers, and it should be integrated, in my opinion, in vRA.

We scale, we have 180 plus customers in the environment and we have courts with as few as maybe four servers and as many as 80. So it's a very diverse range of systems and they absolutely love it. It scales great.

vRA is pretty reliable. We use technical support more for upgrades.

In the event that we've had issues, cluster-wise perhaps, within VRA, we've had to use technical support, but very seldom. I can't point to an outage related to vRA. The outage is probably something else related to either NSX or vCenter itself, perhaps the PostgreSQL Database is filling up. But vRA itself has scaled incredibly well for us.

When we've needed it, the support itself is good, very good.

You have architectural design questions that you have to address. We have multiple sites, multiple data centers. One of the fundamental questions is, how do you get HA in vRA? Do you have active-active, active-standby? Today, for vRA, we deploy it out of one site and we use remote execution managers at the other site. We're kind of in an active-standby mode, if you will. We're semi single-point-of-failure, in that respect. We probably should move to get an active-active scenario, but we're not there today.

But the setup was not too bad. It's nothing like a vROps, for example.

vRA is great. If you're looking for a multi-tenanted solution that is very easy, from a customer perspective, to use, and make it seamless for the customer to actually get what they're looking for, i.e. a server, developers love this. For the customer, from the time to market and ease of use perspectives, you can't go wrong with vRA. It's that good.

I would rate it at about nine out of 10. If they would integrate DR, that would bring it to a 10.

• Reliability
• Scalability

The product itself is future rich, because of the HA componentry. The DRS VMotion gives you the ability to lose physical hardware. It can predict to move workloads before hardware failures. That is a new feature with VMware. It senses the hardware is having issues. Another feature is it now has predictability built into it, which is something new.

The costing and pricing models of their product.

More than 15 years.

It is a stable product. You can run your Tier 1 and Tier 2 apps on it.

No issues.

When you are calling support, I would be considered more of an advanced user. When I am calling support, I have pretty much leveraged everything they have, like knowledge based articles and that type of thing. The support has been very good. When you call support, it actually works. Sometimes you get bounced around, and sometimes, you don't. I call support, and I get an answer, then you just kind of move on. 

We did have a previous solution 15 years ago, but we switched due to scalability.

The initial setup was straightforward. My mom could install it. 

Pricing needs to be improved.

No other options were evaluated. It is all based on the requirement, whichever problem you are trying to solve. A lot of the times the stuff I deal with is more on the enterprise side (larger). The product has been stellar. 

I have used the SMB Market as well; small media markets without issues. 

VMware is the pioneer of virtualization. They are way ahead of everybody else. Some of the other products have caught up, which has been fantastic because it has driven innovation. It is forcing the industry to evolve more quickly, innovate, and come up with better solutions. 

It is a very popular product. You have to do is you have to have a good understanding it. You can't just jump into it, especially half in. You have to understand what you are trying to solve. Have a good understanding of what you are trying to set up, like a defined solution.

• Automation
• Ability to deploy heavy workloads quickly
• Ease of use and the flexibility

• Ability to mimic more VCD functionality.
• Ability to share blueprints among tenants, or have a master blueprint repository, so you don't have to move the stuff between tenants. That's probably the number one feature.
• Improve functionality that we're looking for longterm.

It is very stable. It works well. It is easy to use once it's deployed, and is also easy to deploy.

We're starting small, but we see the ability to scale quickly and easily.

It's very good. I noticed with vRA, they are starting to ramp up more support. It started off slow, but it seems to be getting better.

Early on with version 6, it was very complex. When 7 was released, it was easier. Now, with 7.3 and cloud foundations (and everything), it's a lot easier.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

1. Reputation.
2. Support, reliability, and longevity of the company.

• Automation
• Catalog
• Blueprints

Probably more stability and just ensuring everything works out-of-the-box.

There is still a bit of a gap in terms of product maturity based on all the forums and things that we've seen, so we would like it to be much more mature than what we currently have.

There's some issues that we've encountered while standing it up.

As of now, it seems like it does scale. However, we haven't hit the point where we are deploying in a large scale.

So far, we haven't had too many issues reaching out to tech support.

It's fairly complex. The documentation continuously evolves and the product seems to change every couple months. It's trying to piece together different forums and documentations to figure out how to get a working solution.

Most important criteria for selecting a vendor: Brand recognition, but also VMware being the biggest. We thought that might be the best route in terms of support and community.

I think the ability to create blueprints and define our lab environments and vRAs. It's really easy for anyone to use it. Just drag and drop VMs and all these other components into the Blueprint Composer.

I think having the ability to create different tenants, having a catalog items, and having a different user base go in there and having them pick from the specific items that they want; have them be more living in control.

The additional features I would like to see are better integration with Horizon, or actually integration with Horizon since it doesn't seem to be existent, more integration with NSX, and also better integration with Code Stream.

So far, it's been stable. Although, we have a few issues with it. Mostly, the issues that we encounter have been integrations with Horizon, integration with NSX, and a little bit the integration with Code Stream as well.

Scalability is great. They allow you to deploy in different situations and scale up. If you want a bigger vRealize Automation installation, you just spin up more of these appliances.

They are very responsive, but I for one of the issues that I had, they were not able to answer my question. I had to get into more of the low level of the application and try to figure out a solution for it.

It was somewhat complex. The documentation is very long, and I was able to install it based on a blog that I found online. Someone had already previously installed it. They went step-by-step. I thought that was more useful than the documentation.

No, we were happy with what they demoed, and what they showed us.

I think the support and the feedback that we got from the salesperson, the response time that we got, we were really happy with it.

I give it a six out of 10 because we still haven't met what we intended it for.

It works very well just spinning up VMs, creating blueprints, for doing some of the basic stuff. But doing some of the more advanced stuff, it still needs a little bit more work.

There are a lot of different benefits with this product, because there are a lot of things that we're trying to automate. There's another guy within my group, he's the administrator of vROps. He's been able to implement a lot of things, and help us script things for monitoring, for patching, and a whole lot of things. It's definitely got a value and it saves us a lot of time.

I could see improving by just knowing how to script a little better, but other than that, I think the product itself is fine.

Very stable solution. We've had very good luck with it.

It's scalable. There are a lot of different things you could do with it. Really it's whatever you want to do. Whatever you want to put your mind to, to make it scale, it'll do it.

It's good. It's excellent. We haven't had any trouble. If there is something that we have trouble with, call them, and we're on the phone with engineering. They're good about taking care of us right away.

It's pretty straightforward. You can read some of the white papers on it. It's not difficult.

It's a great product. It saves us a lot of time. It cut down a lot of late nights for us.

vRA is a great tool. It gives a lot of flexibility. It gives the customer an experience to automate their processes, their provisioning process. So, we widely adopt that into our environment to automate a lot of provisioning processes to automate the VM provisioning. Thus, it's a great tool, which actually gives a lot of flexibility in terms of provisioning and orchestration.

I would say maybe a better interface. It looks very plain. So, a more user-friendly interface, so the vRealize Automation tool could be improved.

It is a very stable solution. It's a state-of-art kind of solution. It gives a lot of flexibility. It's customizable. You can tailor it according to how you want vRA to work for your organization. So it's a very stable tool. It's a very cool tool.

• It's scalable. You can scale it to whatever you want to do.
• It's customizable. You can tweak it to how you want to use the tool.

The tech support is pretty awesome. Whenever you have issues, you engage them. They are on top of the issues, and they get a resolution for you. It's a top-notch type of support from VM tech support whenever you face issues with vRA.

It is straightforward. It's not very complicated. Most of the tools that VMware develops are pretty straightforward. You just click off buttons. It's easily understandable, and it's easy to implement and use it.

It's one of the cool tools in the industry. Go get VMware.