VMware Aria Automation Reviews

Our primary use case is production IT, VM provisioning workloads. It performs pretty well most of the time.

It's the backbone for VM deployments for our main production data center.

The most valuable features are the Catalog View and the access control business group. Access provisioning is probably the main use case for us, so we can separate access to different Catalog items among the different business groups and have that tied back to our AD LDAP systems.

Early on, we had a lot of troubles. Most of those were short-knit runs. And we do have difficulties trying to upgrade.

I also don't find it to be entirely user-friendly. There are a lot of complicated menus within menus within menus. Things move around from version to version

We're looking forward to some of the Catalog enhancements that I know are coming in the upcoming versions.

Earlier on there were some problems and with upgrades, and there were some other problems as well. But in between, it tends to run pretty well. We leave it alone.

It has met our needs scale-wise, in that environment.

The setup was complex. Even with the Professional Services, it took days and days to try and get it installed and working right.

We have had the opportunity to upgrade and it failed. We're having troubles with that. We're still working on it.

If you have the validated designs or PSO guidance for setup, go with that now. Try to keep it as out-of-the-box as possible, in a supported configuration.

I rate this solution at seven out of ten. By now, it does the job we need it to do most of the time. There are definitely areas where it could use some improvements.

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.

Anything which operates "as a service". I have worked in the Cloud industry a long time, so I have a lot of experience with Cloud. I see that there is a lot of flexibility in anything that's a service. You can use it at any of the layers of Cloud, like infrastructure or software.

I have worked in client-facing roles and at enterprise level. We have used VMware vRA. The best has been, from the infrastructure side, having storage as a service for customers. On top of that we add functionality for monitoring and alerts.

There are a lot of improvements required with regards to vRealize Automation. There are a couple of areas I would like to pinpoint. There are a couple of workflows missing from the storage side, so we can't easily add to my current blueprint.

Almost eight years.

Yes, in older versions. For example, 5.1. There were a lot of stability issues. Now it seems pretty stable.

Scaling works quite well. I have vRealize Automation and on the Cloud I have IBM Blue Mix. So I have scaling of my environment and I can scale my storage.

There is very little documentation with regards to when your single sign-on password changes annually. Then there are a lot of issues with regards to setting up the database and syncing up the single sign-on passwords. At the end of the entire environment there is a network and rebuilding the entire environment is inevitable sometimes. So there needs to be documentation.

I had used OpenStack but I would not say it is great. There are a lot of pickups of bad information. I would say vRealize Automation is much better.

I would give the latest version of vRealize Automation a 10 out of 10 because it helped minimize the setup time.

It requires very limited time to set up an enterprise environment. There is a lot of inter-configuration required to ensure your environment is built properly.

As a VMware partner, we use it to help us automate the deployment of VMs.

It has helped IT to support development. For example, one of our customers has a development team and, before this solution, it would take ten days to develop and test their solution. Now, it is down to one day.

The user interface is not that intuitive. If it is for technical people like me, it is intuitive, but not for the common man. It's intuitive for me because I know what the technology is behind it. For me, because I use it repeatedly, the same type of use case, it's okay, but for our customers, it would be very difficult.

I would also like to see a test environment, testing before implementing, to see how it will relate to existing things. That would make it feature-rich.

If you don't make any technical changes, it works. You need a test scenario before implementing changes.

It's scalable. It's very good in scaling.

Technical support is good.

The implementation for vRealize is straightforward. The upgrade experience is pretty good, satisfactory.

I would say our clients see an ROI of 30 percent.

I recommend this solution, though it is not that great. It is okay for what it is for. When it works it's great. For me, personally, I don't want a call from a customer that it failed. Most of the time it works. If it doesn't, then we do troubleshooting.

I rate it a seven out of ten because it needs improvement in stability, performance, and quality.

We use it to automate redundant tasks. We're limited to two guys, so automation is beneficial and we'll probably implement it with ServiceNow, down the road.

In terms of benefits, we haven't gotten there yet, but increasing our infrastructure agility, speed of provisioning, time to market, application agility, and making it easier for IT to support developers, are all reasons we have it and are looking to get it working. We have had it set up for six months or so.

The automation of the redundant tasks and the implementation of ServiceNow are huge for us, as we are a cloud provider to the campus. It will allow us to automate a lot of tasks that constituents need done, which is very important to us.

In terms of it being user-friendly and intuitive, from what I've used, the little bit I've done in hands-on labs, it's been pretty easy.

That ServiceNow implementation is a little rough, but those guys in Ohio are doing a great job on it. Seeing things like that, things that integrate would be great. Anything that has REST APIs should have a plugin, that's really what makes it powerful.

So far, so good, in terms of the stability.

The scalability is very good. That's one of the reasons we like it. Is scales great.

Understand your business processes before working with it. That's what we're doing right now: getting a better grasp of our business processes and how the lifecycle of these VMs work, so we can better utilize vRealize Automation.

I rate it at eight out of ten because of its intuitiveness, its ease of use, and the features that it will bring to us - a two-man team - will be like having a couple of extra guys on hand. And that's really great. I know PowerCLI is there and we can always script it out. But automation is really a powerful tool that we're looking forward to using, that will make it a lot easier. It covers a lot more. So we're happy about that.

The most valuable feature is the governance system around deployment of solutions.

It cuts out a lot of waste, unutilized hardware, and improves performance.

Automation: We want to be able to have a lot more preconfigured solutions. Where a user can go into the marketplace, pick out the preconfigured solution, and deploy that straight out without having a highly-skilled employee specifically for this role.

It is fairly stable. We've so far not had any major outages with it. If we have any misconfiguration issues, it's pretty quick to use the automated system to find the problem, diagnose it, and fix it, then you back it up.

It is very scalable, at least for our environment. We have thousands of ESXi infrastructure, and for that, it works well.

Have not really used it.

We wanted to scale, and these days, everything is being automated. Therefore, we needed a solution that did not require us to reinvent the wheel or create new automation scripts here and there, but used something already built into the system, which we could use to automate our web flows.

It was straightforward, but it needed technical expertise in this particular area. For those competent in the field that could help us, we utilized them to set it up.

An in-house team.

We looked at VMware. We looked at AWS automation capabilities, but at the end of the day we decided to go with VMware, because VMware was an all-in-one platform that we could use.

Go for the product, but make sure you have experienced folks on the platform that can help your admins to ramp up and go to market quickly.

When selecting a vendor, make sure:

• They have continuous support.
• The performance of their platform will scale, even if you load up the system to a point.
• The system actually will be able to dynamically detect flaws and prompt the admin to go fix the flaw.

The most valuable features are:

• Seeing how the actual servers are responding
• CPU times
• Memory times.

This allows us more scalability in terms of different applications in using specific servers.

Resource management. That's the biggest thing. We're not scaling solutions too much larger than what they actually should be. We can actually take back a lot of the memory with some of the solutions that we're not necessarily using overall. This kind of management is probably the most beneficial.

There is some performance lag, but that could be on our end.

Great. I haven't noticed anything.

I would say great. For different solutions, it allows us to scale.

I haven't. My company has though. I haven't heard anything negative with it. It's all been positive.

We were not using something else, but internally we were overscaling a lot of different solutions and we were getting criticism from upper-level management.

I was not involved.

Look into it heavily when researching similar products, especially if you're looking in terms of budgetary issues with different servers or how you're gonna scale something. It allows you to have pretty concrete data to show to your management.

I wasn't a part of the decision-making process. I know VMware was one of the top choices.

Make sure, and this solution does this, it touches on everything you want to see in a solution in terms of CPU memory. This is such an all-encompassing solution.

Someone that's willing to be a good partner with us. Someone who's responsive, and who when they set us up, or when we enter a partnership, they don't just disappear afterward.