VMware Aria Automation Reviews

It is similar to a lab system for testing our software versions. We also use it for cloning customer environments for troubleshooting.

It is mostly for our tech support to test new versions, find bugs, and troubleshoot what is happening at customer sites.

It has made it easier for IT to support developers. Our tech support people are happy with it.

I can make a blueprint with an Active Directory deployment. With everything prepared, people can start installing our products.

It is bleeding edge technology, but at times, it is buggy. 

It is too broad scale and complicated. It takes too many clicks to do things.

I would like a simplified version of the interface for small businesses. We started with Lab Manager. For us, Lab Manager was the perfect tool. It was easy and simple. It had all the screens for machines right up. vRA is too many clicks for the normal, simple user.

Stability is okay. However, this is one of the products which I have had support work on the most.

Scalability is endless. What I would like to see in vRealize Automation is an SMB version, a simplified version, but still have the advanced options. For example, we use a lot of fenced deployments. We have five virtual machines deployed to fenced environments, which is our most common scenario. 

We are a small office with only 600 people and about 16 technical support personnel.

Technical support is very good. I recently had a tech support case last week, and I got the answers that I needed.

We switched because VMware canceled the Lab Manager products. So, we were looking for something, then we started with vCloud, but VMware canceled vCloud too. Thus, it has been a very rocky road. My one message to VMware, "Stick with one direction and stop cancelling products all the time."

I have done all the version setups. For one year, we could not get the first version to work. I think this was version 6.0, but the latest version 7 is good.

I had a consultant help me a little bit. I did most of the work myself because I like owning the products.

Before, we had the vCloud suites, then suddenly we split out to NSX and had to pay two licenses extra just fenced because we don't use microsegmentation for firewall rollouts. Therefore, a simplified version for small businesses would be good.

We are embedded with VMware. We also use OpenStack, but it requires a lot more investment from IT.

It is a complicated product, but you can do anything with it.

We're moving from our normal IT support platform to be a service provider to our hospital. I am with a medical corporation managing more than 95 percent of the healthcare services in Qatar. There are many big hospitals under our IT Operations, and we're trying to move and be a service provider to them.

All the feedback that I have received so far from our administrators is very positive. The solution is user-friendly and intuitive.

1. Virtualization
2. The replication to our remote R&D data centers.

We would like them to improve the automation part. This is an upcoming area that we would like to focus on. We used to rely on other technologies to help us with VMware monitoring, but now, we're coming back to VMware technology. Hopefully, they will not take us down and provide something good. We have been watching their roadmaps, and it's promising. Therefore, I think it will be fine.

So far, stability has been good.

Scalability has been working fine.

Technical support is supportive. We are one of VMware's major customers in Qatar, so we receive good attention from them.

For the virtualization part, we have previously used Veeam.

We licensed VMware a long time ago. Now, we are moving from our legacy infrastructure to have a proper, private cloud environment.

Our upgrade experience was good.

We are a government service provider, so ROI is not a main KPI. However, we do plan to see ROI with any new implementation of new technologies being implemented within our environment.

We do regular technology refreshment from all our suppliers to be aware of the latest trends in the market and to select the most suitable ones which fit our needs.

We recommend VMware technologies to any of our colleagues or anyone asking to compare to other virtualization technologies in the market.

We have had VMware for more than twenty years. We are very old VMware customers and have a big setup.

Our primary use case is to automate the end-user request for either a VDI or a server virtual machine.

It has taken some time to implement vRA. Over the different versions, we had a lot of problems doing some upgrades, but as of right now, it's working really well.

The benefits are that it reduces the administrators' having to manually make all these VDIs and deploy servers. It's really an optimization tool for administration. It helps by reducing the amount of time that administrators and engineers have to spend to provision and manage specific VDIs and servers. It puts that work on the end-user, and then the automation engine does it.

We have integrated our CICD pipeline into an automatic catalog request through some API calls. It can request and provision new virtual machines behind the NSX load balancer straight out of the CIDC pipeline, add those nodes to the load balancer, request SSL certs, and do SSL termination at the load balancer so that it's not encrypted behind the scenes - all of which has really been helpful. So it has helped to increase infrastructure agility, speed of provisioning, time to market, application agility, and made it easier for IT to support developers.

The most valuable feature is the portal where you can assign permissions to specific people to request specific items in the catalog and allow them to provision things for themselves. Or it enables them to request different services that you can create through vRO and vRA.

We do partner with VMware on their beta testing, so we have already communicated some of the features we'd like to see back to VMware. I don't know that I'm allowed to speak about it because it's on an NDA.

Stability has gotten a lot better. However, the vRO aspect, when you have a multi-vRA head, is a little bit finicky still. vRO still needs to stay on one appliance and be one application, because, when you have two, you can't see runs on the other one that are happening when you're not logged into that one.

Scalability is good. We have extended its reach out into our DR site and out into the hybrid cloud. The extendability is really much better than it was in the early days of vRA.

I haven't personally used tech support. I know that we have used VMware's preventative tickets when we're getting ready to do upgrades so that we have support on-call when something goes wrong, because something usually goes wrong.

We had no automation engine before we started vRA a couple of years ago. It was something that our directors and our management really wanted to get into our environment so we could automate some of these processes that are very redundant.

When selecting a vendor, interoperability - whether it can operate with the other solutions that we've already implemented - is important. Also, how much the vendor is willing to help and work with us to make their solution viable is another factor.

We have had the opportunity to upgrade the solution multiple times. The upgrade to vRA 7.3 was painful. The most recent upgrade we did to 7.4 was very sleek, it was smooth, it went really well.

We have seen value from it. We've seen that typically, the people who are provisioning VDIs and server VMs can now utilize most of their time towards other projects and moving the environment forward, instead of just hammering out virtual machines all day.

We haven't really looked at a lot of competitors. We do use SCCM, which isn't really a competitor, but it's a different type of management. It seems that vRA works a little bit better in the vSphere environment because it can connect to all the other VMware products really easily.

Use it, but be ready to invest a lot of time, man-hours, into building it out in the way that you want to use it. It can do a lot of things, and that's one of the problems - that it can do a lot of things. So you have to know what you want it to do before it'll do what you want it to.

In terms of it being intuitive and user-friendly, from an end-user perspective, I believe it is. From the administration and development side, it's a little bit complex. It takes a little bit of time to understand how everything works behind the scenes of vRA and vRO, but once you start learning it, it's kind of intuitive, once you get your feet wet with it.

I rate vRA about a nine out of 10, because of some of the "gotchas" that aren't really well documented. But it is very valuable for us in how we've implemented it and how we're utilizing it.

The primary use is to automate the provisioning of applications that my organization uses as well as sells to customers.

The time for provisioning a VM for one of our clients was cut in half. It's a lot easier, now, for a customer to come and ask for a solution. We can provide that solution to that customer on the same day that the request was made. Previously, it would have taken us days to get it done and, back then, I would find a lot of instances where errors were made, things were forgotten. But with the automation, everything is already in a step-by-step approach, so it makes it easier for us to provision for the customer. And the customer also feels a lot more secure knowing that they've gotten what they've requested, easily.

Among the valuable features are the ease and speed of creating the VMs. Originally, we provisioned them manually and it would take us two days to do the provisioning. We have a lot of internal items that need approvals from lines of business, but with the automation, we are able to provision a VM with the click of a button, within seconds. It cut down on the time as well as cut down on the expense and employee cost in provisioning.

It is also intuitive and user-friendly. Those who use the tool, they are techy, they understand the technology. However, with vRealize we can have a Help Desk individual, who might not be that techy, provision the different elements quite easily, with no almost training at all. That in itself is a plus for us, especially with our having a high turnover of staff. In training, they see how easy it is to use. The time for training to bring them up to speed is very short and they are then able to provision the application.

I would like to see a simpler way of provisioning it. As is, we can automate the provisioning of a VM. However, when it comes to the external IPs, that is outside of VMware. But that has to be automated as well. If there was a way for us to have the virtual machines connect to switches that are external to VMware, that would be great. That way, it would handle the entire workflow from creation and provisioning of a VM to the connectivity to the external IP addresses which allow our customers to have access to the VM. Currently, that IP configuration has to be done manually.

It's stable. To my knowledge, we have not had any downtime. If there was any downtime, it had nothing to do with VMware. It could have been our infrastructure itself. Or what we might have had a misunderstanding regarding how to get certain things done.

We have not had the opportunity to scale - instances where we need to scale up or down - but I believe it's quite scalable.

Technical support is very responsive. It's more of a partnership, as opposed to a customer-client relationship. They're knowledgeable.

We didn't have a previous solution. Regarding this solution, I don't think the cost was a major factor in its selection, based on what it offers. It was more of, "Can it meet our growing needs, as well as what is the experience that is out there?" Based on those issues, I am sure that is why it was selected.

We have another department that is involved in the initial setup. But I understand it's not straightforward and it's not complex. They have gotten the required training and they've been utilizing it for some time now. They, themselves, are quite knowledgeable in the solution. Clearly, they have been trained professionally. They work with VMware to do the initial setup.

VMware is not the only solution that we have. We also have Huawei's version of virtual machines. But VMware is our leading solution.

VMware is great.

We have multiple criteria when selecting a vendor. But in general, we look at

• support
• experience
• cost.

I rate this solution at eight out of 10 because of the high level of functionality that it has. Why not a 10? Because there are some things that we wish we could have in the application, which the solution will have at some point, from what I'm seeing, but at the present, they're not there.

We use it as a self-service customer portal, for all of our present customers. So far, it's going pretty well.

There are a lot less tickets, and we get more people onboard much faster.

Between I think 7.0 and 7.1, when we first had it, the IDM Appliance had a lot of issues with SSL. Upgrade has been a issue, we always have to call in and open up the ticket for assistance. It's just not been that good. I think 7.2 to 7.3, which one of our engineers just did, was actually the only time we've actually been able to do an upgrade well.

Also, there's a couple of UI things that we'd like to see improved, but we'll put in future requests for those.

It's been better, but it did not start off so well. We've been using it since 6.0, and 6.0 had a lot of issues. Early 7.x versions had a lot of issues as well.

We're actually not that big, so we do a simple deployment.

We use them for all our issues, though it took awhile. It seems like we're getting the right people now.

The CIO asked us to set up self-service for visiting. We looked at a couple other things. We actually bought a different product first and it did not work at all. It was a Abatix. We did that for about a year and a half, but it just didn't work like it was supposed to.

Then, we came up with a requirements document for what we're actually trying to achieve for that project. Afterwards, we start evaluating the various metrics.

It was complicated. 7.0 was a lot easier.

We're doing cross-training now, so the guy that actually took over for 7 is cross-training the rest of us, and it's been a lot easier for us.

With 6.0, it's just less Windows machines.

It's a product worth looking at.

When managing vRA and trying to use the keep-it-simple model I found that setting up an access control system where anyone could request access with ease. I really thought that the ability to use AD groups throughout the product made it very easy to set up and grant user access at every level of the product.

The ability to extend vRA with vCO to add custom service designs was helpful in our deployment. It allowed us to eliminate blueprint sprawl.

We were able to reduce the delivery time of requesting a VM from three weeks to under 10 minutes using the vRealize Automation Suite.

The way this product handles logging has a long way to go. VMware addresses this by using agents to gather the logs from various locations and condense them for you.

Managing templates and the way they interact with blueprints needs improvement. If you change a template, you have to go change every blueprint that it was assigned to. There needs to be a template clustering or grouping object.

It lacks the expected seamless integration with vCenter. Objects like templates, storage clusters, or naming changes were not automatically reconciled by vCAC. This often led to full error logs when the only issue was a lack of syncing between vCenter and vCAC.

I began working with vRealize Automation (vCAC) two years ago, in mid-2014. The first six months of this time was spent designing use cases and configuring the out-of-the-box settings such as reservations, blueprints, templates, resource allocation, entitlements, and chargeback. For approximately the next year, we enhanced the out-of-the-box product using vCO/vRO to automate IPAM integration, DNS, monitoring, storage selection, template management, and tagging.

The system was already deployed when I arrived; it had been accomplished by VMware professional services. However, it was not configured, so that was my challenge: Determining the best way to set up business groups, allocate resources, user access and entitlement, create blueprints, manage templates, create the business catalog, and then add features and functions.

The product was stable if no changes were being made. Adding a new endpoint, agent, or fabric often led to some sort of related or sometimes unrelated errors. We were usually able to catch these in our integration environment and avoid them in production.

The system functioned stable with no real issues. The one problem we encountered was around data collection at remote sites.

We grew our deployment upwards of five sites and the system functioned as desired.

Our sales reps have always tried to sell us something such as professional services, then when we finally caved in and said yes, they never delivered the resources. Rating = 6/10.

We often solved the problem ourselves before support could answer our question. It seemed like a trial-and-error game with VMware’s support on this product. Try this, oh that didn’t work, try this, still no, let me ask someone, no reply for days, then the guy is off and a new guy comes in, start over. I spoke to the department manager multiple times. Rating = 7/10.

It was implemented by VMware professional services with an excellent level of expertise.

Prior to my arriving on the team, they compared this product to OpenStack and KVM.

VMware’s vRealize Automation is a good product, made for large enterprises. From my experience, vRA requires a highly skilled team to maintain, version upgrades without downtime are not possible, and overall it doesn’t scale fast. Every change requires weeks of planning and testing to see how the product is going to respond.

With the release of vRealize Automation 7, there is a deployment wizard that reduces the complexity of setup. Make sure you have very knowledgeable technical staff to operate this product on a daily basis. There are 15 roles that come with the product by default; it’s a lot to learn.

The vRealize Suite is a great product for those that want excellent governance and tight controls. Integration with Active Directory groups works flawlessly for both vRA business groups and entitlements.

In order to truly take advantage of the power of vRA/vCAC, you need vRealize Orchestrator. It’s a totally separate entity to maintain, patch, upgrade, connect to vCenter Server and of course manage its code.

The ability to quickly setup the self-provisioning of vSphere VMs was one of the primary drivers for us to use this product over others. Additionally, the product has several plugins and an almost limitless potentional for further automation using vRealize Orchestrator. Lastly, its integration with NSX is superb and very much a critical part of our VM provisioning.

We are using the following vRealize suite products: Log Insight, Operations, Orchestrator, Business for Cloud, and Automation.

We have given internal IT developers the ability to self-provision VMs for development and testing. This has been a hit with our staff. I have talked to several of them involved in the POC and it has drastically increased their efficiency since they do not need to wait on IT Ops. Additionally, the publishing of templates, firewall rules, and software installs in the system has increased the communication and transparency between IT development and IT operations.

As with all recent VMware products, more focus needs to be done on QA. I encountered far too many bugs for an enterprise product. Additionally, more native vRA integration for various parts of the VM lifecycle will take some of the onus off the engineer to learn so much about Orchestrator.

I used version 6.2.0 for five months and version 7.0.1 for 11 months.

We did have stability problems. I encountered several issues with the product after the upgrade from 6.2.0 to 7.0.1. I would highly recommend that anyone looking to move to 7.x from 6.x should do a migration rather than an upgrade. VMware did not do enough QA on the product in order to handle in-place upgrades.

We did not encounter scaling issues because we had a limited release of the product since it was a POC.

Technical support from the frontline technicians is very good, but if your problem has to be routed to “engineering” then be prepared to wait for days (sometimes weeks) for resolution.

We did not have an existing automation product.

We already owned vRealize Automation as part of our suite licensing. We did evaluate the Cisco UCS Director product for one month and found it too complex to setup.

The initial deployment of vRealize Automation was not complex, but it was tedious and error prone. This was the 6.2.0 version and these issues have been fixed in the 7.x versions.

I would advise heavy VMware shops to look into getting suite licensing and leverage the VMware ELA framework if possible. Additionally, I would highly recommend that NSX is purchased in conjunction with vRealize Automation in order to get the most out of the product.

We evaluated Cisco UCS Director.

Do your research ahead of time and try to find others in your area who have already deployed the product. Your VMware rep can usually provide contacts that may be able to provide advice. Additionally, start talking to internal developers at your company and see what pain points they have and how automation can help. This communication will also help when you start publishing catalog items in automation, because a lot of more advanced workflows will require knowledge of Javascript and PowerShell. Lastly, start working with Orchestrator now. It has the steepest learning curve, but it is critical to understand how it works for advanced workflows. Orchestrator is already included with your vCenter licensing.

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.