VMware Aria Automation Reviews

The most valuable features are:

• Setting configurations options dynamically for servers
• Pulling information about all computers

We are able to control updates on servers to streamline the process

There is still development for states and pillars. The software is open-source so it allows for extreme customizability. If there is something that you think could be improved, you can code it. Our company is currently working on a few projects to help improve and support SaltStack. I would like to see more training on how to use the many different options. There is a lot of of information to go over and it’s hard to keep it all straight. Other than that, if you put the time learning SaltStack, it is a pretty easy and very powerful tool.

We used this solution for a year and a half..

We have not had issues with stability.

We have had no scalability issues so far.

I don’t have experience with their support, but I heard they are helpful. There is a IRC chat that you can join to get help from your peers.

I was not a part of the setup, but from what I have read, it is pretty simple.

The software is open source. One has to pay for support.

Read the documentation to learn as much as you can.

• Configuration file templating: limits the amount of copy/pasted configuration across services with minor differences
• Near instant orchestration: no waiting to see if a change worked
• Well-formatted and detailed command output and logs: make troubleshooting easy and break/fix recovery fast

Developers and systems engineers could work together more closely.

Salt does not support performing remote actions that require a sudo password with Salt SSH (agentless Salt execution).

Ansible does support this feature.

I have used it for two years.

I have not encountered any stability issues in the last year.

Official documentation and community support are top notch.

We previously used CFEngine 2 and Chef; both solutions have a steep learning curve that requires a ton of domain-specific knowledge. Salt is configured from the ground up in YAML files and Python, so there's less domain-specific knowledge required and no hidden configuration files.

Salt's initial setup took about two days to go from knowing nothing to having a configured Apache Tomcat server serving our content. That's simple in my book. The complexity comes in when you want to add security policies or routing that aren't ordinary for a horizontally scaling web application; that takes some creativity.

Don't pay for it, use the free licensing options unless you don't have the staff to cover your SLAs.

We also looked at CFEngine 3, Chef, Ansible, and Puppet.

Look at Digital Ocean's guide for initially setting up the Salt server (https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/saltstack-infrastructure-installing-the-salt-master). Group your configurations by logical components, serve any environment/deployment-specific variables from pillar files, and keep templates as simple as possible (put logic for assigning variables in the *.sls files where there's likely to be other logic).

We mostly use it for generating VMware instances.

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

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

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

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

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

The scalability is fantastic. It's there.

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

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

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

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

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

We mainly use it for deploying SAP machines, SAP-type systems.

It allows some of the tenants to self-provision their machines, so they don't have to wait for us to create the machine for them. They can just do it themselves. It has helped improve our infrastructure agility.

All you do is just press a button, it cranks it out and everything is consistent, so that's one nice thing about it. The speed is also a valuable feature.

I don't find it to be user-friendly or intuitive because, in my case, when I have to deploy SAP systems, I need to jump between the vRA, the vRO, and the actual vCenter itself. I need to go back and forth to do different things. For example, with the vRA I'll deploy the base machine. With vRO, that's where I may have to get an IP address. If somebody's SAP machine has a secondary, virtual name, I need to get the next available IP address from vRO. And then, inside the vCenter, I need to do some firewall stuff, NXS. So it's not that user-friendly.

I wish they could make it just one application, just vRA, that does all that. There might be a way to do it but I haven't figured out how to do it yet.

Also, vCenter and vRA, I believe they share two different databases so sometimes you have to somehow sync them up. I wish there was only one database between the two or, somehow, one database would rule over the other one, so if you have both products, the vCenter might use the vRA database. Otherwise, when you do stuff in vCenter, you have to write a command on vRA to update the databases.

It's pretty stable. Once in a while we'll have a problem, but it will be something that's inside the vRA database that got corrupted somehow and they have to clear something out. For example, sometimes, when I deploy a machine, it'll be in the request queue and it'll stay there for a while. Then someone will have to go in there and do something to clear that queue.

It's scalable, in terms of adding Blueprints.

When looking for a vendor I look for a quick response to problems, and reliability. When there is a problem, VMware will help you chase it down. They'll follow up. I like their response times to our issues. They will also escalate.

My advice is: Get training.

I give vRA a seven out of ten, for now. In addition to the database issue I mentioned, it's not quite clear how to do certain things. I have not been given training on it. The learning curve is steep. For me, a lot of it is on-the-job training. There might be a better way to do things, a quicker way, but I don't know what it is right now. For now, I don't find it that intuitive to use.

• 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.

It is our service catalog for our hybrid cloud which is the most valuable feature.

It allows us to be more agile and provide services to our company more rapidly.

There is room for improvement for mostly stuff around containers and controlling containers.

This solution is very stable.

This solution is very scalable.

I have used technical support. They are excellent. We used their professional services to help us install it.

I just knew where the industry was going. I just knew that it has been moving for a long time in that direction and I was looking for something that we already owned. Also, the team was knowledgeable so that we could use them for orchestration.

The setup was complex. It's a lot of independent components that are put together that make up a software-defined data center. So, it's really complex. They sent an in-house team.

Support, cost, and functionality are the factors that we look for while selecting a vendor.

VMware was the only one that we actually looked at because the other option was OpenStack; we weren't going with OpenStack.

Do it and do it quickly.

It depends on what your app stack is and whether your cloud-native or not. However, if you have a monolithic stack like Oracle and the traditional data center apps, it's the way to go. But, if you are cloud centric and use a lot of web services, then it's probably not the right solution.

You should form a team, be committed to it and expect to put in a lot of work/effort/time into it.

Our primary use case of this solution is to automate with our various partners. It performs quite poorly, has a quite steep learning curve, and you have to invest an extraordinary amount of time to be able to do anything.

We did a POC with one of our customers. Their engineers do a lot of daily provisioning so let's say out of eight to ten working hours per day they'd spend around six or seven hours a day provisioning various kinds of stuff. We did the POC and we managed to cut those six or seven hours to around half an hour a day or so. It has helped increase the speed of provisioning. It cut out a lot of provisioning time on new virtual machines and new resources.

We like the various kinds of tools to automate stuff but not a lot of them have a self-service portal. If you were to compare it to different kinds of automation tools a self-service portal is unique.

I have not found this solution to be user-friendly. It's very complicated. The demo shows that you can automate anything but they only show basic scenarios. If you want to do anything more complicated than that, it becomes very complicated to set up. 

I would like to see support for multiple hypervisors. At the moment that support is only on paper, it doesn't actually work.

The stability is good enough. 

Our experience with technical support hasn't been so great. It can take a long time for them to respond to our questions and often the answer will be "we don't know."

We also looked at Cisco. 

The setup was straightforward. We upgraded to a newer version seamlessly. It worked really well. 

This solution is easier to set up than the alternative we looked at. The other one wasn't as powerful. If I were an automation ninja I could do much more with vRealize than the other solution I evaluated. 

I would rate this solution a neutral five. It has a lot of potential but it's very hard to use. It has a steep learning curve and you need to invest an obscene amount of time to be able to do anything. 

I would advise someone looking into this solution to be prepared to invest some serious time. 

We use it mainly for cloud automation with private cloud solutions. It works fine with the exception of integration with public clouds and multi-tenant data centers.

It has been pretty successful for many of my customers so far.

vRA is user-friendly. It has the same layout and walk-through GUI, similar to other VMware products.

• Orchestration
• Out-of-the-box integration with Database-as-a-Service
• Storage-as-a-service
• Backup-as-a-service

More integration and out-of-the-box use cases would be nice.

It is very stable, especially for high availability features.

It has some limitations for scalability, especially for remote data center management. For some components, everything need to be centralized.

We only used tech support during the PoC and design phases, but they were good.

The initial setup is complex. There are too many components to integrate, especially when we integrated with different storage types and backup vendors. All the integration made it more complex.

We haven't upgraded yet.

If the use case matches, it is the perfect product for you.