VMware Aria Automation Reviews

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. 

Mostly, vRA is for automating deployment. We use it with templates to deploy and maintain compliance based on the certifications we have. It's a way to maintain consistency across cloud and data center environments. 

We have about 30 to 40 engineers. They are primarily support engineers what we call platform hybrid teams. They create templates and help customers deploy VMs.

The main benefit of vRA is a faster deployment for our customers. Before implementing vRA, we were building VMs from scratch, but vRA allows us to create images, so we can deploy a VM in just a few minutes.

Obviously, it depends on the hardware installed and everything, but the time has been significantly reduced. Time is money. We want to provide as much flexibility in the private cloud and bring our customers as close to the private cloud as possible.

The preset policies and templates are useful. I would say that vRA is one of the best solutions we have. The CI/CD features also look helpful even though we aren't using them at the moment. We plan to get more involved and train our customers as much as possible.

The solution could be lighter. As an administrator, I would like to simplify the number of services I need to deploy. They took a significant step in that direction by removing all the Windows dependencies that we had in the past, but there are still a lot of services consuming resources. 

I would also like to see a richer API. This is true of all VMware solutions because the REST API is not the best.

I have been using vRA for the last three years. We've gone through different versions of the solution.

We haven't had major issues with vRA so far. Generally speaking, all the VMware infrastructure does work. I wouldn't say it's rock-solid, but we haven't experienced significant stability problems on the platform.

Our most significant deployment is two clusters working with a single instance, and it's running perfectly fine. It comprises two clusters of 15 ESXI servers each, so it's a massive deployment.

We do plan to increase usage and deploy vRA for other customers, but we currently have a small number of customers actively using it. Then we have our internal segment of vRA that we connect to a few small customers. But the idea is to expand it and add as many customers as possible.

I rate VMware support eight out of 10. We have a VMware service agreement, and we've used support a few times. It was helpful, but they needed to research some of our questions because our implementations tend to be a bit complex. That's why I don't give it a perfect 10.  

Positive

We had a home-grown solution before, but we changed to vRA because of it's simplicity and compatibility with all the tools we use.

I rate vRA eight out of 10 for ease of setup. The previous version of vRA was harder to deploy, but they have simplified it considerably. 

After the deployment, daily maintenance doesn't take more than one day a month. There is nothing much to be done once it's set up. The upgrading is sometimes a headache, and it takes longer. For deployment and maintenance, we need at least one network engineer, one platform engineer, and three storage people. That's because our team is split into three different tiers.

I would rate vRA six out of 10 for ROI. It's in the middle. We haven't quite broken it even yet, but we are close.

We pay a license based on volume. I rate VMware vRealize Automation four out of 10. The license is quite expensive. 

The engineering team evaluated a few solutions, but we went with vRA because it is the fastest and easiest.

I rate VMware vRealize Automation seven out of 10. I recommend it for any company that constantly deploys VMs. This tool will help you a lot. 

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.

I use the solution for configuring the clusters.

The solution's most valuable feature is stability.

They should provide more explanatory reports on error messages. It would be easier for the users to understand. Also, its configuration process could be better.

I have been using the solution for a year now.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

The solution's configuration process needs improvement. They should provide better documentation for easier understanding.

The solution is free of cost.

I rate the solution as an eight out of ten.

When I started working with VMware Aria Automation, I used it mostly to automate the server build process. We completely automated the entire VM-build and post-build processes. I then used the tool at another organization in relation to CICD pipelines.

We now see more hybrid cloud scenarios and enrollment of network automation as well.

VMware Aria Automation reduces the time to market when it comes to deploying new solutions. Usually, it takes three to six weeks to deploy a new solution. Now, with VMware Aria Automation and the automated blueprint, the overall time to market is an hour, depending on approval.

The solutions can be deployed across any cloud, which is a huge advantage when a customer requires machines to be deployed rapidly.

The extensibility of the solution when it comes to writing your own ABX actions is a valuable feature. You can write it in PowerShell, JavaScript, or Python, which is great.

I also like the fact that you can pause a build process, do other tasks, come back to it, and continue with the build process.

The ability to customize the entire user frontend experience with the design canvas is great as well.

When it comes to the orchestration workflow, you're on your own. The documentation and resources are very limited, and you have to learn everything on your own.

Though the product is very powerful by itself, many who work with it struggle to get up to speed. As a result, they view VMware Aria Automation as the icing on the cake and hold on to their PowerShell scripts on the backend.

I would also like to see more integration with third-party solutions. The documentation regarding integration with third-party tools such as ServiceNow needs to be improved.

I've been working with this solution for 10 years. My first deployment was back when it was called vCloud Automation Center or vCAC.

The stability of the vRA platform itself is very good, but because of Workspace ONE, I would rate the overall stability at seven out of ten.

In terms of scalability, I would rate this solution at eight out of ten.

The technical support team in Ireland is excellent, and they resolve issues on the same day. However, if your ticket ends up at another location, it may take a few days to receive a resolution. Overall, I would rate technical support at eight out of ten.

Positive

An experienced person will find the on-premises deployment easy to do. I would rate the initial deployment at nine out of ten for an experienced person. For one who is new to the solution, I would rate it at seven out of ten.

The initial setup may take anywhere between 40 minutes to one hour.

As is the case with any other automation product, VMware Aria Automation also requires a journey. You will need to start slow, build the platform, and make sure you have good out-of-the-gate use cases. You can start with automating basic server requests. If you already have CICD tools in your environment, then you can integrate them and try a few playbooks.

You will definitely need to train your staff so that they can keep moving forward with the tool. It is a complex product, and you will need at least one full-time employee who has experience with scripting and an interest in automation who can be dedicated to this solution.

Overall, VMware Aria Automation is flexible, reliable, and scalable. With VMware Aria Automation as a cloud service, it is even easier to deploy and manage. Therefore, I would give this solution an overall rating of eight out of ten.

Our company uses the solution to have better insights for our on-premises infrastructure. We use some metrics to decide the placement of workloads based on available capacity. We integrate with automation and make dynamic decisions while working on workflows. 

We are moving a lot of our infrastructure to the cloud so are reducing use of the solution. Right now, we have twenty developers who perform automation tasks. 

The operations manager does a fantastic job on the front end because it includes on-premises and cloud use cases that pertain to any infrastructure. The solution has made great progress in integrating all these things together. 

The solution allow us to define our own super metrics. If we cannot an out-of-the-box metric, then we can write and start using our own super metric instead of waiting for the solution to develop something. 

The licensing models are a bit confusing so should be simplified. 

The solution could include more integrations and supportability around the container space. They have already started to do this, but could expand support for Kubernetes platforms and DevOps tools used for Kubernetes clusters or cloud-native development. 

I have been using the solution for seven years. 

The solution is stable so I rate stability a ten out of ten. 

The solution is absolutely scalable. 

We have contacted technical support several times. On average, they do a pretty good job but sometimes drop support requests. There is always some amount of work we do ourselves because we customize beyond the out-of-the-box options. 

Support is rated an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The initial setup is pretty easy and deployment takes about an hour. 

There are a lot of prerequisites to fill before attempting installation. If something is not right, the solution may not work the way it is expected. 

I rate setup an eight out of ten. 

We implemented the solution in-house. 

The solution is pretty expensive. If you can afford it, you should absolutely buy the solution because it provides good workload management. 

If you have oversized or undersized workloads, then the solution catches them and gives you auto-scaling suggestions that save you a ton of money. The solution will even automate some of the work to keep performance and resources at  optimal levels. It saves you from the cost of expanding your infrastructure. 

There are various licensing models that can be a bit confusing. 

The solution is the best fit if you have a VMware infrastructure because it understands the native components. 

We do not see a similar product in the VMware infrastructure that works as good as the solution. 

Often times, when I think of a missing feature I end up seeing that it is planned for an upcoming release. The solution keeps up with development so it is a great option.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We primarily use it to automate workloads.

The most valuable features are the multimachine blueprint and advanced designer configuration.

Automation or scripting should be simplified so that administrators who are not experts can have a better grasp of automation.

My organization has been working with this solution for about six years.

We have had no issues with stability.

VMware Aria Automation is a very scalable solution because it integrates well with a couple of leading products in the industry. For products that are not already integrated, there are plugins or adapters that can be used with customization. 

Because we are a large organization, we probably have more than 30 people who use the solution.

The basic installation is quite easy. If you have all of the prerequisites ready, then within two to three working days the basic foundation can be created.

Two people could probably deploy and maintain one foundation of the solution.

We deployed the solution ourselves.

We have definitely seen an ROI because automation is directly related to productivity.

Try to use the maximum level of automation possible within VMware Aria Automation. It will help you to achieve the maximum results. This solution has a lot of other features other than provisioning, like tighter integration with third-party products, ISVs, backup software, and open APIs. To fully utilize the product, you would need to get into these areas along with normal provisioning.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate VMware Aria Automation at nine.

We have used it for infrastructure management between our hybrid cloud, provisioning and patching, using automation.

The automation functionality has been most valuable. With a click of a button, we are able to automate provisioning, the build of new hardware and apply patches. These are all extremely important and differentiated tasks that can be automated in SaltStack. 

The solution is very easy to code and to set up. It works on a YAML language which is very simple and does not require someone with programming experience to start using it. 

This solution could be integrated with more hardware for an improved offering. 

We have used this solution for five years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This solution is easy to scale.

The support from the customer service team is good. 

The pricing for this solution is roughly 20% lower than the competitive products in the market.

I would advise those considering this solution to ensure they have the necessary in-house talent or access to an external vendor who knows this solution well. It is not a widely used technology so it is important to ensure you can support it. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

I was part of the VMware team, doing a double role at VMware:

1. Leading a sales team for the large financial institutions, the top 50.
2. Defining what the roadmap for vRealize suite should be.

I worked for a consulting company. We helped a lot of customers with many things for vRA from provisioning workflows automation to approvals and policies management.

The solution provides a multi-cloud, self-service, infrastructure-as-a-service cloud consumption and delivery layer. vRA 7 was mostly focused on VMware-based internal clouds with a little bit of external clouds. vRA 8 is multi-cloud, which you can host on-prem too. Everybody is moving away to use the cloud, so it is pretty much a done deal that you need to have it.

If you want to start a VM database as a service, then you start a VM, but your customers don't know what size CPU or memories that they want. So, you can also scale it as needed. They can use vRA integration to monitor and scale up or down using the ESXi Server, then VRa works as an integration point.

A lot of its DevOps for infrastructure capabilities improve reliability. Much effort was put in by some customers, like a large automobile manufacturer, a large telecom, and two large banks, to achieve a certain level of capabilities in this space. These DevOps for infrastructure capabilities have saved time for developers. In one use case for a large marketplace, a typical release cycle took about 80 hours and was brought down to three hours by automating deployment for developers. The quicker that deployments happen, the faster that they can do their product release cycles.

When you start integrating vRA with the other VMware products, like vRealize Network Insight (vRNI). That is when it starts giving you the capabilities of extending your templates and networks across multiple hybrids and clouds.

If an organization has the capability of being able to use it in their application deployment lifecycle, then they can use the automated infrastructure deployment, but not many companies do. Not many companies say, "When I am going to deploy, I am also going to create 20 virtual machines and deploy on them." They normally start out by saying that there will be a separate team with managers in infrastructure and a separate team that does this in deployment. I have seen only one place that has done this, out of hundreds.

Two things help out a lot: 

1. Policy management.
2. Integration with other VMware feeds, like ESXi Server. They have a pretty tight integration with those.

If you are trying to automate your capacity management tasks, moving VMs and resizing them, then you need to integrate down to the policy level by reconfiguring the use of servers. That is where these kinds of integration points help you.

vRA's multi-cloud self-service cloud consumption and delivery layer comes with centralized policy control and governance.

VMware cloud templates: These are predefined templates that work across multiple cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. You can use the same templates across various clouds, even clouds that have AWS, Azure, and Google. So, you can have a blueprint and templates running across all of them.

vRA is most helpful in managing the whole lifecycle, taking out the server, bringing them back in, handling outages, and managing clusters, networks, and the entire infrastructure security out there as well as putting identity management all in one place. It creates a control point with its single pane of glass. You can control all the networks as well as their configuration and installation from one place, which is a strength of vRA.

Interoperability is more of an industry problem. There are multiple cloud provisioning tools out there, and vRA is just one of them. There are a lot of components out there, which all do certain things. There are some hard drives, particular types of servers, particular types of routers, load balancers, and firewalls, where some are stronger in one area and some in another. Interoperability between them would be a good thing.

With the workflow aspect, which has manual intervention, a policy needs to be approved by somebody. There could be better management of that piece with better templates. It is like a workflow engine, but does not have enough example templates to do certain things. A lot of people waste a lot of time trying to figure out the same thing, and everybody is trying to figure out the same thing, e.g., how to make a MySQL cluster in a Windows environment?

I used vRA for seven to eight years, then I moved out of the VMware world last year in January.

vRA 8 onwards is very stable. vRA 7 has some clunkiness, but version 8 is very stable.

Hardware depends upon the volumes. I had small customers who had two to three clusters of eight servers each to an enterprise customer with 80,000 servers.

They have a very big community with a lot of support. 

VMware has its own support, but it depends upon what level of customer you are. Bigger customers obviously get better support than smaller customers. However, bigger customers also try funky things. Smaller customers tend to do things based on the standard, so they normally don't run into problems. The technical support is pretty good.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward. 

From the time that a customer enters into an agreement to using the service, it takes two to three weeks minimum because it takes time to design the whole network.

You need to have a basic cloud infrastructure in place. With an existing cloud infrastructure, the initial setup takes a couple of days. Most of the time, it is a deployment where you are also building the cloud with it, then all kinds of things are required, like the network topology, routers, security, etc. That takes time.

vRA 8 is normally managed by a single guy.

Customers say this solution is costlier compared to its competitors.

The open source solutions are cheaper, but they lack documentation. They also have trouble keeping the documentation, drivers, etc. up-to-date.

For any cloud-related thing, you have to think it through. Things get sticky, like external firewalls. Distribute, network, and plan because you are not going to get it right the first few times.

vRA is an orchestration engine, like a workflow engine. What it comes down to, because it is more of a generic tool, what are you using it for? I have seen in places that it has helped people in ITOps.

VMware's goal is to build a long-standing partnership.

I would rate it as a nine (out of 10).