VMware Aria Automation Reviews

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).

We were looking to have a single pane of glass (one console) to manage our complete infrastructure. It has helped us integrate having one user interface to manage our infrastructure and application templates.

vRA's multi-cloud strategy is very important to us as a cloud service provider.

The hardware that we use is Dell EMC.

The manual efforts of creating a VM for an individual customer has now been eliminated, e.g., creating a template or blueprint. With Orchestrator, we will take that blueprint and build a form for the customer. All this used to be done manually by an administrator, from a network, storage, and compute point of view. The admin's job is simple now versus the way we were doing it before.

It provides a single pane of glass for management. These types of platforms help us to have a holistic view.

The solution has helped us to automate deployment for developers. Before developers have to build another virtual machine, they can run code with VMware Code Stream integration. They can verify and download code, which really helps our developers be faster.

vRA has enabled us to derive value from the cloud more rapidly. We have seen increased services along with more integrations and catalogs. Now, we can create and update policies faster. 

The solution has freed up our time to concentrate on other things.

• vRealize Orchestrator
• Catalog Service

The policy control is excellent. There are multiple security controls that we can achieve by using this tool. When we were siloed, the policy implementation and control were difficult.

We use the solution’s following DevOps for infrastructure capabilities:

• The cloud templating standard for VMware Cloud infrastructure
• VMware Cloud Templates
• Infrastructure pipelining for continuous delivery
• We partially use iterative development for GitOps use cases, as it is not very good.

These capabilities boosts our administration and management from a technical point of view and help our team maintain the solution. Reliability improved because now the CI/CD and DevOps are integrated and managed under the same team using the same software.

They should concentrate on navigation and service improvements.

We have been using it for more than two years.

From the inception and kick-off meeting, VMware has been very professional from a project management standpoint. They know what their goal is and have all the ground work done. They have a dedicated Project Manager. They know what kind of resources that they need, so it happens in a very timely manner. We don't have any complaints from a VMware product management standpoint, because they are all professionals. 

I would rate the technical support post-deployment as a 10 out of 10.

Prior to using any VMware products, we had Cisco UCS Director. 

Prior to vRealize Automation, we had VMware vCloud Automation Center, or vCAC. It was not a mature product. At that point in time, everything was working in silos and the integration was difficult because the APIs were not mature. After we did the automation upgrade, this embedded everything, so it now has one single URL for accessing all applications. 

The initial setup was straightforward. From a product point of view, it is seamless. The code runs. The software is built into all the appliances, then everything is deployed automatically and integrated with the scripts.

There are commercial implications to start up vRA if a company has no hardware nor knowledge of the product.

Our deployment was one month. Integration and completion of the migration took another two months. Put together, it took us a total of 90 days to implement and start using it. 

For the initial setup, there were four people from my organization involved:

• One SME from compute and storage
• One SME from network
• One SME from application
  
• One technical project manager.

We have seen ROI. The more VMs that we create, the more services that we are creating for our customers. Our delivery times are reduced, so we have more productivity.

The DevOps for infrastructure capabilities has saved time for our developers by automating processes and reducing provisioning time. Task time has been reduced by 40 percent. 

When it comes to IT operations, 40 percent of our time has been reduced because of Code Stream.

From a budget point of view, the pricing is a bit on the higher side.

We did need to purchase some new hardware for the cloud because we wanted to upgrade it.

While we evaluated other options, vRA made it easy and quick for us to go with this solution as an existing VMware customer. With new products, there are training implications. Also, VMware is one of the market leaders.

If you are already a VMware, definitely consider the cost implications of going with vRA versus a competitor.

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is 100 percent mature on the private cloud. We don't have any issues working on it.

We are using other solutions from VMware to extend our network security.

Training is a continuous process. 

I would rate this product a nine 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.

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 are using it for infrastructure service, automating things in Active Directory, and deploying Microsoft SQL and Oracle databases. We are also using it to automate some scenarios within our infrastructure.

Having a one-stop-shop for our IT services is one of our goals. Exporting and democratizing the tools helps our end users to do their work efficiently and to be more agile. It helps to minimize the time to market for our product.

Using the solution we are able to automate database refreshment. This process used to consume a number of working days. With vRA fully automating this process, it is now down to five or 10 minutes. As a result, we're able to refresh our testing and development environments frequently. When we go with a new deployment in production, the deployment is based on a fresh copy of production. We're able to have multiple environments so that we can test more product concurrently.

We use VMware Cloud Templates and having a standard template to be deployed gives us a standard across our environment and minimizes the time it takes to provide services. Despite having 20 machines, we just do the configuration once and then we can deploy it across the whole infrastructure for all environments: production, testing, and development. And this reduces the time to market for our services. They improve reliability. They give us consistency. Having things assembled and having everything in one image helps us provide reliable services. And they have saved time for our developers.

Having an enterprise service catalog and being able to automate various parts of our infrastructure are among the most important components.

It needs to be more dynamic with variable customization to make new workloads more reliable. It also needs to be faster. We are exploring vRA version 8 right now and maybe what I'm requesting is available in the new version, but we haven't explored it fully yet.

We have been using VMware vRealize Automation for seven or eight years.

VMware's customer support for vRealize Automation is good. They are knowledgeable about the product and have improved their response time. The support is fine.

We did have a previous solution but I am not able to disclose its name. vRA is an end-to-end solution with all the capabilities.

The pricing is very high.

The goal was to bring the automation process to our customers using virtual machines. We were looking to do the hybrid connection with AWS. 

It can run on Linux and several versions of Windows that we have.

It gives you the flexibility to analyze and consume resources.

vRA provides a multi-cloud, self-service, infrastructure-as-a-service cloud consumption and delivery layer. We have a connection and activation between AWS and Azure. 

There is the possibility to use the central policy, especially using Active Directory. You can put this process into the company so someone can follow it. I can put this control on-prem and outside of our on-prem, using our cloud solution.

You can consume resources into the data center and hybrid with AWS.

I can use the console with the dashboard. I also have access to the portal from Azure.

We use the cloud blueprints for Linux. I can use different templates on-premise and on the cloud via GCP. We can use traditional templates or develop new templates, using them to manage integration with the solution.

In the future, I hope to use a portal from GCP.

I have been using it for approximately five years. During that time, we have used versions 6, 7, and 8.

This solution is used by six sysadmins.

This was our first solution of this type.

The initial setup was complex from beginning to delivery. The current version is a bit more complex than version 7 to deploy.

Our deployment took two days.

Six people from our company were involved in setting up vRA.

vRA has enabled us to derive value from the cloud faster. It is five to six times faster than traditional solutions.

It is easy to deliver IT support when compared to a traditional solution. With vRA, I click it, open it, and then it is available in a few minutes. It saves time because a traditional solution might take two to three hours where vRA takes a few minutes. It's a big difference.

We analyzed the market. We also looked at OpenStack, which is similar in its functionality to vRA. We chose vRA because of its integrations. Integrations were more difficult with OpenStack.

I would recommend doing an integration with hybrid cloud. With vRA, this is excellent.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).

We are using SaltStack SecOps for a rather large fleet of VMs that include a mixture of both Linux and Windows, with many different OS versions for each. It is used to view the compliance of the systems within our infrastructure.

This product brings all of the rich data that it collects under once central view. It makes the remediation of compliance or security issues quick and easy to understand. Being able to see this data allows us to be agile and we are able to make changes on a massive scale, thus reducing the manpower needed to implement changes. 

SaltStack has given us the ability to deal with systems at scale and rectify issues at scale. This, along with the fact that SaltStack is a event engine, allows teams to be able to to creatively attack problems and view problems within our infrastructure.

The SecOps product allows us to see where there may be issues, what a current patch level may be at, and what the recommended patch is.

As far as compliance, SecOps is able to reduce the time it takes us to verify our systems are compliant with policy.

The most valuable feature is the ability to see both compliance and vulnerabilities in a dashboard view. Being able to see that data in one place is a real game-changer. This, along with the rich metadata from our systems allows us to be able to drill down to very specific facts about each and every system. With this level of insight, we are able to make changes both at scale as well as at an individual system or application level.

SaltStack SecOps has the ability to react to events and also allows us to start reacting automatically to issues that might be in that infrastructure.

SaltStack is still growing, and so there are still those growing pains.

Sometimes in order to get the functionality you want, you need to update to the latest and greatest of the software.  For companies that traditionally like to wait for bugs to be found, this can be a bit painful.   Most of the downsides are because the product is growing and is becoming more and more useful, so I can't complain too much about that.  It's evident that SaltStack is listening to it's customers and wants to create a fully functional piece of software.

We have been using SaltStack for three months.

This product seems to handle our scale issues so far.

From our experience, there are not very many issues that we've found with the product in of itself. I'm sure that as we need to scale out, there may be some help/guidance that we need to inquire of support/professional services, but I'm confident that those groups within SaltStack will be able to provide the guidance that is needed to be successful.

Prior to this, we used Puppet/SaltStack open-source. The Puppet solution had scale issues, and SaltStack Open Source didn't have the SecOps product

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

SaltStack, when viewed in the light that it is an event engine, is a very powerful tool.