VMware Aria Automation Reviews

I use the solution to provision virtual machines. 

We automated many tool deployments with the help of the product, cutting short manual deployments and eliminating the need for human interaction. Its most valuable features include integrating various tools and working with different products using plugins. 

The tool's automation performance is excellent, and I rate it four point five out of ten. 

Maintaining the product requires effort and a good understanding of the environment, including how to set up the codes and other configurations. Pricing needs to be improved to improve the customer penetration. 

I have been using the product for four years. 

The tool is stable, but you will encounter issues when it hits the upper limit. 

VMware Aria Automation is easily scalable. My company has 15-20 users. 

I have used Red Hat before, and VMware Aria Automation is better. It is considered better due to its extensive experience in the field. The tool has acquired an existing product in the domain for several years.

The product's deployment process is much simpler than it used to be, especially with the latest version. While previous versions had multiple components and pillars, the latest version has significantly reduced complexity, improving the deployment process. It took a few weeks to complete. You would need two to four resources to complete the deployment. 

The tool's integration with the existing VMware infrastructure is easy due to product similarity. 

The solution's ROI is good. It can be enhanced with improvement in prices. 

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. 

We use VMware Aria Automation for autoscaling. We have multiple databases on multiple nodes. We leverage Aria Automation to migrate workloads to other nodes during the downfall. Additionally, it facilitates training VMs for rapid deployment as needed.

We can connect between multiple VMs in a matter of seconds.

The connectivity between VMs is easy, but they can be made more effective if we have a single proof point where we can configure all the biggest data at a single point. It will be very helpful for the deployment team. They could maintain every log from multiple VMs being collected or taken to adequate various VMs in a single cluster at a particular time.

I have been using VMware Aria Automation for two years.

We haven't got any instability in the VMware Automation.

I rate the solution's stability a ten out of ten.

We have to review some aspects while scaling the VMs due to the connectivity issue.

Internally, the solution is being used by around 10-15 people and 10,000-15,000 people across the globe. We use it daily because the application needs to be up and running for the whole day. Users are currently using Aria Automation.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

Technical support is good. If we have any issues, we call the team. They respond in no time.

Positive

We had an open-source Automation on the POC basis. It was in the development phase. We didn't deploy due to the security features.

The initial setup is moderate. There could be some trouble connecting multiple VMs to a single master node, but eventually, after getting some hands-on practice, one can leverage tools easily. During the initial period when the team struggled, they took around two hours to deploy. When everyone understood VMware, it took around 30-40 minutes. It was an in-house setup.

We require around three to four people consolidated into a single and deployment teams. They have multiple aspects of others. One was having all the monitoring logs. One was handling VM files or configuration files that need to be maintained. One was looking after all sorts of needs to maintain for every stage. One was a developer looking after all these team members and managing the deployment completely.

I rate the initial setup an eight out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy.

I rate the product’s pricing a nine out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.

We require only two people to maintain this solution, including one monitoring it and another going through all the software documents to be maintained.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We use SaltStack for configuration management, where we maintain configurations of 150 servers. It also helps with file integrity monitoring. 

We monitor the configurations against CIS standards. We run CIS benchmarks and maintain configurations with higher CIS values for each server. 

SaltStack's features are minimal. 

I have been using the solution for 14-15 years. 

We have had no issues with the tool's scalability. 

We don't have much interaction with the tech support team. 

I rate the tool's initial deployment a five out of ten. I rate adding a new server to an existing system a nine out of ten. It has pretty decent documentation for installation. 

SaltStack is an open-source product. 

I rate the product an eight out of ten. It is a strong and flexible solution. 

We use this technology including VMware to support our customers' critical information systems.

The feature of automated balancing which implemented between two data centers solely for the purpose of a recovery plan is valuable.

I'm not wanting any particular feature; but there should be cost reductions. VMware comes at a high cost, and that's why we are in the process of transitioning to a more affordable alternative.

I have been using VMware Aria Automation for the last five years. 

I would rate the stability seven out of ten. Ensuring hardware compatibility is crucial in our platform. However, it posed challenges as some of our servers were not compatible, necessitating extensive adjustments to make them function correctly. Regrettably, this incurred a substantial overall cost, which was quite troublesome.

I would rate it nine out of ten. 

It's quite different. I had a rather negative encounter in the past. VMware provides local support, where you can request them to review and validate a global architecture design, which comes at a significant cost. On one occasion, despite having VMware validate the design, we encountered errors and events that had not been considered by VMware.

Neutral

We used to rely on VMware for assistance when setting up and deploying our infrastructure. The initial setup is complex. It is deployed on-premises for us by VMware teams. In the case of customers, it is dependent on the user's requirements. I would rate it four out of ten.

We encountered numerous challenging use cases that made it tough for us to deploy and handle. While the feature itself is intriguing, the administrative aspect has been quite burdensome for us. So, to sum it up, the feature rates a seven in terms of quality. However, when you dive into it and take responsibility for its ongoing maintenance, it turns into a nightmare. So, I would rate seven out of ten. 

VMware Automation allows you to deploy your blueprint on-prem or on a public cloud, so you have a consistent, unified service catalog.  Users can request revisions to our infrastructure, applications, and resources from one portal on the private or public cloud. We only have one or two people with the knowledge and experience to use vRA and the vRA Orchestrator.

Aria Automation gives you the flexibility to deploy tenants with customized blueprints for permissions and policies. Version 7.8 consisted of multiple products, so you had to deploy a lot of virtual machines on one of the servers.  Starting from 8.6, VMware consolidated all the components into one Linux appliance. This allows the option to use vRA or DevOps capabilities.

They could extend the ability to use vRealize Orchestrator Automation for organizations with multiple tenants. It should be easier to operate and extend different capabilities from vRealize Orchestrator. Currently, it's difficult to build advanced services in Aria Automation because you need to use the vRealize Orchestrator. 

I have been using Aria Automation for about three or four years

Aria Automation is stable.

You can deploy a single node or an enterprise cluster consisting of three nodes. 

I rate VMware support six out of 10. 

Setting up Aria Automation is difficult. The complexity varies depending on the environment size and infrastructure. It has a lot of prerequisites. For example, it has to have a firewall prepared before installation. Aria Automation is deployed through an installer called vRealize that integrates VMware identity manager, Aria Automation, and the vRealize Lifecycle Manager. The deployment takes about three days.

I rate VMware Aria Automation seven out of 10. Aria Automation needs products like vRealize Orchestrator to extend its capabilities and accessibility. If you are using Aria Automation by itself, you won't get the features you want, and the license cost is high. It needs to be cheaper, easier to use, and have more native capabilities. 

Before deploying Aria Automation, you need to know the prerequisites for the nodes. Each appliance consists of multiple components, and each has its own log. You need to understand your use case and what you want to use so you can customize the services you need to provide. For simple services, you can use only Aria Automation. If you need to customize advanced services, you will have to purchase vRealize Orchestrator and also CI/CD DevOps tools.

My customers use it to build their private cloud infrastructure.

VMware Aria Automation improves the IT service delivery process. It can automate manual operations, but you need a development team with coding or programming skills to develop blueprints and automation workflows. 

While Aria Automation is a good product for that purpose, we haven't had many customers use it due to its cost and the development skills required. That's a challenge to consider.

Aria Automation can manage some aspects of public clouds, but I have no experience with that. We only use it for private cloud development.

The Blueprints feature is a good one. This feature supports the installation and improvement of automation processes. 

It includes a user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface that assists customers in automating routine tasks without the need for coding. These are simple routines, though.

The self-service functionality allows customers to provision VMs with a single click. They don't need to submit a request to the IT team and wait for them to create the VM. This reduces waiting time for the automation process.

I would like to see better integration capabilities. Maybe if they could develop libraries within Aria Automation for simpler integration with other third-party solutions, instead of just basic integration.

So, integration with backup solutions would be helpful. 

We have been working with this solution for five years. We used to work with the vRealize Automation version, but the name changed earlier.

It was also called VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite.

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten.

We have medium-sized businesses as our clients for this solution. 

The customer service and support are okay because the quality of the support varies from case to case. 

Neutral

The initial setup is difficult. I would rate my experience with the initial setup a six out of ten, with ten being easy. 

It is difficult because of load balancing and we need to prepare information and certificates, and there's a learning curve involved. In the past, this product didn't require any load balancers to deploy or certificates for deployment, but now it does.

For the setup only, we need two or three days. But for configuration to edit a routine or test a routine, it can take anywhere from maybe one to two weeks.

So, two to three days for setup and then one to two weeks for deployment.

I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive. 

I recommend the solution because we've worked with it for many years, but we only have two or three customers because of the price. So, we can't start many projects.

However, I would recommend this solution for the automation function itself, and how to group and publish those groupings is quite easy for customers to learn with Aria.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

VMware Aria Automation is mainly used with vRealize Orchestration to orchestrate provisioning. It segregates resource usage among different teams. If there are various tenants utilizing resources, vRA is essential for efficiently managing resource allocation. Whether it's provisioning machines in our data center, supporting customer infrastructure in AWS, Azure, or different vCenters, vRA streamlines the process. 

Instead of navigating through various console endpoints for provisioning workloads, vRA allows automation with a single click. This means we can automate the provisioning of not just a plain VM or OS but also include applications and databases in a single click. 

So, we can initiate the process, go about our tasks, and, within 30 to 40 minutes, depending on integrations, our VMs will be built. It significantly reduces manual efforts, and that's why it's called automation. 

With one click, we can get not just one but as many VMs as needed, with databases installed, all at the click of a button. It's a crucial and necessary product that people have been increasingly adopting.

VMware Aria Automation is important for day-to-day operations. It provides more granular visibility of our resources. 

Another valuable thing is the cost. We can easily get to know our IT gives us a cost of data as well, suppose we're going to provision any VM, if a customer or if a user is going to provision one VM, it depends on, again, it depends on the integration that one has done of config already. 

One of its features is, that once we're deploying a VM, we will get to know how much we'll pay for that. How much will be the GB storage per GB cost, how it will be the RAM cost, memory cost, everything would be there. 

And it gives us in-depth visibility into how many resources we are paying for. And suppose we just were purchasing memory GB and if we want to delete particular VMs, we can delete it and we can get the resources back. 

So for the customers, it's pretty convenient to see where they are putting their money into.

It's not open source as of now. The licensing costs and the operations support costs of the VRAs are higher. It's a VMware-based license. 

If I see the other competitors, they are open-source alternatives to VRA, like OpenStack and others. So I can use it on the flow. But in order to get VLS automation, it's an enterprise license that costs more, and hence, VMware support cost is also more.

I have experience with this solution. 

It is stable. But one of the drawbacks that Aria Automation had whenever there used to be an upgrade was that it never used to be very easy. It takes effort to upgrade from the current version to the new version. There used to be some challenges and changes that had to be done. 

The most recent release is based on the Kubernetes nodes now. So, it is easy now but it is not that easy because, with every new release, VMware comes up with something new. 

And how to adapt to new things and how to configure those things. And what all from the previous version will still get supported in a new version is always a new thing for us as well.

It is scalable. However, you cannot increase the number of VMware nodes on the fly. For instance, if you deployed it to a three-node cluster, you cannot simply expand that cluster. Instead, you have to deploy a new cluster with a new set of nodes.

I work in a product-based company, so we have customers for this solution in a service-based company, where we have a direct understanding of the number of customers we're supporting, whereas, in a product company, we only have access to customer usage data.

We can automate your workloads both on-premises or any software data center where you want that to be in. If we want that to be in the cloud, it's fine. If we want to provision it on-premises, it is fine. The installation is mostly done on devices. But as with AWS, if we want to use Google, if you want to use Azure, we can use those as endpoints to the VLS automation. And from the same console, we can automate workloads to be provisioned either on VMware Center, that is our own premises or onto our public cloud. So, VMware Aria Automation is there to automate your provisioning or any day one and day two operations. We can do it from one pane of glass to any endpoint, let it be cloud, or let it be our own premises.

So it doesn't have to be specific on AWS cloud or Azure cloud.

The setup needs coding. It's not easy. It's not straightforward. With the newest releases that we have ahead, we need someone who is good with the YAML codes. 

Now, there has been improvement. Previously, we should have a person who really knows Java, Python, and other codes that are being used. 

But for the recent release, we want one who should understand codes, one who should know how to, and one who should have knowledge about how to do REST API calls if we want to integrate different components with VRA. 

So, programming knowledge is a must when you're using VRA. The most tedious task will be to configure the VRA. Installation is easy; you can do it. 

However, configuring VRA with the whole of your setup within the data center is not easy. It will take some effort, and it has to be done right.

The deployment process is not fast. It will be time-consuming. A few of the modules are already there, but it is time-consuming. Moreover, it depends on the sort of integrations we want to do. If we want to integrate 15 components, different components with vRA for end-to-end provisioning, it will be consuming.

I strongly recommend gaining a thorough understanding of Aria before diving into it. Aria is not as straightforward as it initially appears. There are numerous aspects to consider, such as integrations, VRA usage, VRO, and so on. 

It's crucial to comprehend how Visualized Orchestration, Sensor Automation, and Sensor Orchestration work together harmoniously when orchestrating workflows. You really need to get proper VRA training before effectively utilizing it. It's not something you can pick up easily just by having coding knowledge. Some level of experience and training is essential for thorough usage.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. VMware Aria Automation has made a lot of things easier. It has really helped the operations team to spin up the virtual machines. Previously, if setting up infrastructure for the customer took weeks, now it can be done in a couple of days. It has reduced the time for the customers to get the infrastructure ready. So, I would definitely rate it nine. This solution has done a fabulous job over time. 

The product's most valuable features are ease of automation.

The product's features for hybrid cloud integration could be better. It should allow us to fetch reports from anywhere. Additionally, there should be better options for integration with mobile security platforms.

We have been using VMware Aria Automation for three years.

I rate the platform's stability a six out of ten. It could be better.

We have 89-90 VMware Aria Automation users in our organization. It is suitable for enterprises. I rate the platform's scalability a five out of ten. There could be automated features included for it.

We contacted the technical support team regarding migrating the workload. It is time-consuming and takes them a week to complete. The team could respond faster.

Neutral

I rate the initial setup process a seven out of ten. It takes ten days to complete. We build the platform according to the specific requirements of customers. Later, we transfer operating systems data on virtual machines.

VMware Aria Automation is expensive. They offer a bundle of products included, which we have to pay unnecessarily without a use case. I rate its pricing a ten out of ten.

I rate VMware Aria Automation a seven out of ten.

We primarily use this solution to deploy servers. It is run on our own private cloud that we put into place because our legacy infrastructure did not allow self-service. It was operated by administrators and other people. We have a requirement that disallows us to be open to the outside, which means that we can't interconnect with clouds like Azure.

Whether for legacy purposes or our cloud system, we use it for automation. We automate each and every task, such as deploying servers, network configuration, operating system deployment, and others. Deploying a server has 13 tasks starting with creating the VM and allocating storage on the network, to saving a password in a secure location.

Using this solution has greatly reduced the time it takes to deploy a server. It used to take at least one month, whereas now, to deploy a server takes two hours.

Using this product has changed the processes that the developers follow. It changed things for them but I don't know what they were doing before that.

We have used VRA to improve our security posture, in part because we can avoid relying on administrators and other people. The solution has all of the privileges necessary to deploy what we have to deploy. This means that we have better control over our security and the fact that we have automated the process, we know if it's not working, and we know whether everything is done correctly. If you rely on people, there can be human errors, in particular with respect to the firewalling not being properly done. There are specifics such as whether we had more ports open than necessary, or perhaps not enough. By automating everything, our process, including the security, has really improved the way that we handle the communication between the new server and the rest of the infrastructure.

Implementing VRA has enabled us to leverage other VMware products to support IT ops. We already had VMware products in our organization and adding VRA to the environment has helped make better use of those components. This was not our primary driver but it was a good plus for us later.

VRA has allowed us to save application provisioning time, as well. I estimate that our time to provision has gone from one week to one hour.

The most valuable feature is being able to deploy a virtual machine from a low level. We can automate everything including network configuration, firewall configuration, storage, storage attachment, OS deployment, middleware, and so forth.

We use some of the DevOps features for infrastructure capabilities including VMware cloud templates, infrastructure pipeline for continuous delivery, and interactive development for GitOps use cases. I am not responsible for using these features but they have given us a lot more flexibility in our development. 

The DevOps capabilities have saved time for the developers, although I do not have the exact details. I can say that it is significant. 

Multitenancy management is a little bit difficult to do, so it is an area that can be improved.

We have been using VMware vRealize Automation for more than five years.

The stability of this product is good. We use it on a daily basis.

Scalability-wise, this is a good solution.

We have approximately 100 people using the cloud-based part of the solution, whereas about 10 of them use the legacy system.

We do not currently have plans to increase our usage.

We did not have another similar solution prior to this one. However, VMware did help us to drive value from the cloud quicker than the previous process. VRA gives us more reliability and more flexibility, allowing us to deploy faster through task automation. However, I can't explain specific ways that it may have helped our business.

The initial setup was complex, although I wouldn't necessarily say that it is because of the solution. Rather, there is complexity because of our environment. I was not part of the implementation team so I do not know all of the details.

It took approximately one month to deploy.

Our in-house team was responsible for deployment. We have some VMware experts in the organization. Approximately five people are required for deployment and maintenance. There is a support engineer, a solution architect, and we are responsible for the level-three support.

This is not the type of solution we deploy with the goal of seeing a return on investment. It is mainly used to speed up server deployment and infrastructure deployment. As we are in the banking industry, the fact that we are faster to deliver infrastructure or applications is not part of a return on investment. We deployed the solution in order to provide better quality to our internal clients.

When people out of IT were asking for infrastructure, it took a long time and they were upset. We have started to deploy some shadow IT and the driver behind deploying VRA was to show that we now have the tools to deploy things more quickly. 

This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us.

We are currently using version 7 of the solution but we are transitioning to version 8.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We are mainly using it for automation. Our main use case is providing in-house kind of cloud capabilities to the enterprises so they can utilize automated provisioning, backups, etc.

Different customers have different versions. We are probably using versions 6 and 7.

One of our main customers is a big tech company. We have created automated labs for their products. They have these events in which they wanted to do training on the event site, and they wanted to have on-the-go labs. We utilized vRA to do that. Another customer for whom we are using VMware vSphere and vRA is a government entity. They have other customers or end-users that are different departments of the government. They have provided them cookie-cutter and templates to provision the VMs and do the backups. So, they are using vRA along with vSphere and the stack to provide a kind of government cloud.

We use the following DevOps for Infrastructure capabilities: the cloud templating standard for VMware Cloud infrastructure and infrastructure pipelining for continuous delivery. Through these capabilities, we have achieved more control, more monitoring capabilities, and more efficiency in terms of delivering solutions with much more confidence and less number of failures. There is also less strain on our human resources, so everything becomes more easily manageable. These features have saved time for our developers. They have saved 30% to 40% of the time. Using DevOps infrastructure has definitely improved reliability.

vRA has helped to automate deployment for our developers. These automatic deployments have saved time. It has improved the self-service kind of deployments for the development teams. We have our own internal data centers, and we are also doing a lot of customer deployments. In both cases, it has reduced the time that they have to spend communicating internally with other people. They have these cookie-cutter operations that they can utilize. They can provision their own stuff or deploy their infrastructure pretty quickly. So, the dependencies are reduced, and the developers can focus more on their own part rather than calling the infrastructure team to provision or automate something.

We have been using VMware within our organization and for our customers, and vRA has enabled us to leverage existing VMware processes, systems, and training in our organization to support IT Ops.

vRA's automated processes have reduced infrastructure provisioning time. There is about a 60% reduction of time in infrastructure provisioning. 

Our application provisioning time is also reduced by using vRA automated processes. We have Ansible and other stuff with vRA. There is a 60% to 80% reduction in time for application configuration. It has also reduced the time to market for our apps by at least 40%.

The automation part is most valuable. Because it is a VMware product, the automation capabilities that come with vRA are pretty extensive. We can integrate and build a lot of features on top of it, which makes it extremely useful for us.

We have been using it in our own data centers and for our customers for almost five years.

It is pretty stable. This is based on what I have heard or seen for different projects.

I would think that it is scalable. Our clients are usually looking for somebody who can deploy and configure their environments or provide some kind of managed services support. Around 10% to 15% of our customers are on VMware vSphere automation and vRA automation. Internally, there is a 25% utilization. We are planning to expand its usage this year, and we will see how multi-cloud automation can be utilized. We will try to implement things or use cases in a virtual environment, and then we can resell those use cases, provide support for those use cases, or give training to the customers. 

I have not worked with them myself, but our customers have VMware support, and we use their TAC accounts to raise an issue and get support.

Previously, we were mostly using manual processes. The reasons for implementing vRA were more control, visibility, and flexibility. We wanted to move away from manual, human intervention-based processes to automated processes, which would also provide more stability.

Its initial setup is of medium complexity. It is not too straightforward, and it is not extremely complex. It can improve. There are technicalities that are involved.

We have done some deployments that have taken us less than a week. We have also done deployments that have taken us months. On average, it takes three to ten days.

The deployment strategy depends on the requirements. We like to have a repeatable model, but most of the time, customers have different needs. Wherever possible, we utilize a repeatable model. 

In our organization, we have five people who are dealing with VMware infrastructure. Our senior solutions architect has different kinds of certification in VMware solutions. There are two senior engineers and two junior engineers reporting to him. So, we have a team of five people for our internal management and external deployments.

We have received a return on investment. We are a lean team, and we are able to deliver more. We are able to manage more than what we could manage previously, and we don't have to have lots of people. We are also saving a lot of time, and it is also providing us more visibility.

I don't think we evaluated other solutions.

While implementing a solution like vRA, the most important thing is to understand why you're using it for a use case. If you want to implement a solution to do automation, I would suggest seeing what kind of integrations it provides with different endpoints and plan around it. vRA provides pretty extensive integrations. My advice would be to first just understand why you want to use vRA and then have a strategic roadmap implemented. You should start with a basic implementation and then go on top of it.

vRA has enabled us to derive value from the cloud more rapidly, but we have not yet fully realized that value. We are planning to use the multi-cloud features more as we go along. It is in the roadmap that we have for this year. Similarly, vRA has enabled us to manage the cloud easily through its entire life cycle, but we have not exploited it fully. We have not utilized it for multi-cloud environments. We have mostly focused on the on-prem environments and on Azure and AWS to a certain extent. We are working on utilizing vRA along with other automations from our tech cloud. There is an internal roadmap that we have for this year in which we want to monitor multiple multi-cloud environments, not only for our own staff but also for our customers.

We have not used VMware Cloud Templates and iterative development for GitOps much. We have not used the multi-cloud Infrastructure as Code yet. We are planning to use it.

We have also not used vRA much to extend our security footprint into the cloud. We have done it here and there but not fully and not to the extent that I am happy about.

I would rate vRA an eight out of 10.