VMware Aria Automation Reviews

• Automation
• The flexibility to actually build different components, in terms of virtual machines.

Our group, we do mostly the virtualization and a creation of systems. Therefore, it's not a cookie cutter build of a template, and that's it, it's more dynamic for our group.

It's increased the efficiency. There's less manual work through vRA. Now, Orchestrator is the one doing most of the work and making everything more automated.

I would like to see this additional features in the next release: The ability to have more dynamic forms. Some of the static forms that vRA provides in the XaaS form, they are good, but they could be a little more efficient. For instance, the calendar selections should have the ability to only go to a certain spot, as opposed to going out to something like 2040, for the requests.

Stability is really good. Once you got everything setup, even in its HA form, it's pretty stable.

Not as good, but there are some components in vRA that you can scale out a lot more quickly than other pieces.

In our group, more of the web solutions and the blog posts helped to grow our ability to use vRA.

They are always reachable by person and knowledgeable.

But because it's such a dynamic solution, at times VMware does have to go gather more resources in order to figure out the solution to things.

We had a previous VMware product called Lab Manager, then we had grown out of that box and decided to go with vRA.

I was involved in the setup. In the original version 5, it was very complex. Version 6 got a little better. Version 7 is much more improved.

In the first deployment, they sent an in-house team.

Microsoft.

Advice for looking at VM solutions:

Definitely research the product and see what's out there.

Look at blog posts of vRA. There's quite a few resources that you can search and find on the web which will basically get you on the ground running for deployment, even simply XaaS forms.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Support
• The cost is always important.
• The ability of their features to match with ours.

Multi-vendor cloud IT infrastructure personalization, resource provisioning and configuration, and it automates application delivery and container management.

It provide us a common console to manage workloads on our private and public cloud infrastructures.

Better integration with Azure cloud and Google Cloud Platform.

Two years.

vRA 7.2 onwards is quite a stable product.

New versions are quite scalable, but when it comes to managing a Telco environment, it has bottleneck.

A nine out of 10.

We have been using the older version (VMware vRealize Automation Center).

It's a quite straightforward setup in comparison with products in the same domain.

It's worth each penny.

No, we have been using VMware suite for a long time and we are pretty much comfortable with it.

Go for it. It's a perfect product of a heterogeneous environment.

Self-service and automation. They reduce the amount of time to build a virtual machine and reduce the operation costs.

The requesters create their own virtual machines now, instead of a series of tickets to get things built.

We're still running version 6. When we upgrade to version 7, a lot of our issues should be addressed already. Things like some of the flexibility, and some of the ease of automation.

It's very stable.

It's extremely scalable.

Since we moved to Business Critical Support, it's been very good. I always reach the right person.

We needed a self-provisioning front end. So, this was the best option.

Complex. We deployed the original version of vCAC and there wasn't a lot of documentation at the time. There are a lot of disparate parts that have to be deployed on multiple machines that involve a bunch of load bouncers. Issues like that.

We purchased PSO resources.

Licensing's expensive.

VM was the only one we really looked at.

The most important criteria when looking at various vendors are reliability, their position within the industry, and the ability to get references from existing customers.

Do a lot of planning upfront because some of the choices you make, when you initially deploy, you'll have to live with in the end. Sizing is the main one.

I would suggest hiring a PSO.

Execution modules. It is designed for system administrators rather than for developers. It covers maximum functionality and makes automation easy.

As it provides maximum functionality, it keeps automation short and sweet. This helps writing automation in a modular format. SaltStack helped us in optimizing infrastructure related tasks, such as operations.

There should be some mechanism to push agents to the target device. Also, it should focus on managing networking devices.

In order to manage Salt minions from a Salt master, we have to install the Salt agent. As of now, there is no mechanism by which we can push and install this agent on a target machine.

For example:

• A - Salt Master
• B - Windows machine

From A, we want to control B. For this to happen, B should have a Salt agent running on it. There should be some mechanism in which we are able to push and install a Salt agent from A to B. This is assuming that we have to provide an IP address and the credentials of B.

For now, there is concept of Saltify, in which we can partially achieve the above scenario.

We have been using this solution for close to a year.

We found some intermittent issues with the Windows minion connection.

The installation is straightforward and is pretty much a simple setup.

We have used the open source version. In open source, you will get good enough functionality.

We have evaluated this product against Puppet, Chef, and Ansible.

As a DevOps engineer, this CM tool is truly made for system administrator usability rather than for the developer.

For a few years, when we needed a server, it took us three months to deliver one. Now, we can bring one up in approximately 15 minutes.

Our delivery is now very fast.

It's very stable.

We're satisfied with the scalability of the solution.

They are very good. We have an account manager. We use the account manager, if necessary, and have with a relationship with them, so they can respond very quickly.

If you are looking to implement the product, do it together with VMware. It was a good experience for us.

The most valuable feature of the product is the automation for services; it’s the basis of my work. It is important because nowadays, in this complex world, services have become the base for everything. Having a large base is needed to better build what you need for your pipelines, as opposed to a few years ago, when the application was king.

We created pipelines for all our products.

The base library is missing some key elements such as networking management (mine is lacking on that front) and some more granularity on the apt part.

I have used it for 12 months.

I have not encountered any stability issues so far.

I have not encountered any scalability issues so far.

Technical support is just about right, in the sense that the product is well documented and information is easy to find.

We previously used Puppet, which was not suited for my current workload. We chose SaltStack because Ruby wasn't the language used by my team and we needed a master-client solution as opposed to a master-less one.

Initial setup was very easy.

Pricing and licensing is perfect the way it is.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated CFEngine.

Read the docs.

We primarily use it for restoration services.

The most important thing that we missed in vRanger was the possibility to mount several images instantaneously and present it so that we can run it immediately.

Stability is fine. 

The scalability is not good. It is slow to scale to our needs. 

The installation was complex and time consuming.

I would not recommend this product. I think that there are better products to meet your needs that are competitors on the market. 

We use it to deploy virtual machines and integrate them into our structured environment.

The quick provisioning: We get a lot of things done automatically within hours. These things lasts days or weeks in further situations.

The solution is intuitive and user-friendly. E.g., you have less number of logins.

The stability is okay, but could be improved. We sometimes receive strange errors, which can only be solved with specialists.

We don't use the scalability.

The technical support will handle our requests quickly if understood. However, there are often misunderstandings depending on the information that we provide and they request.

We had another product before this, but we moved away from it to use vRealize Automation. The UI, administration possibilities, and the integration of the overall system were better than the former system, which was not up-to-date.

It improves the work, making it better. It also makes daily work much easier.