VMware Aria Automation Reviews

Our primary use case for this solution is for making a cloud through ICDC. We have to integrate them into many VM masses with vRA.

Before it would take months to deploy a VM, now, with this solution, we can deploy many VMs in one hour. We can do a stack of them with Mediaware.

This solution has definitely helped increase the speed of provisioning. We can now deploy many VMs in one hour. We also don't need to call in as many teams to deploy them. Now it's just one team and they can deploy the machines way faster. It's very good.

We like that it gives the user the possibility to deploy on their own, we have found that to be a very valuable feature.

We have and we haven't found this solution to be user-friendly. In this case, we have another portal in the front because we have some use cases we can add to the products so we use another portal for that to reply to all of the requirements.

This version has all of the features we want. 

Stability is good. It helps us provide more services and give more capacities. It improved our infrastructure and gives us more possibilities to provide our users. It's a very good product.

Scalability is good. We also use other solutions and we are still beginners with these products. We still have to set the time to configure it so that we can maximize its benefits.

We had to use their technical support only once. We didn't have any issues with them, they were great.

The setup was complex in many ways. The first reason is that we have many teams who work on it so it gets complicated gathering all of the people needed. The second reason is that it can be complicated to install it quickly, and within a reasonable amount of time.  

We have a VMware PSO at work who is very good. He was experienced and had good knowledge so we were very happy. We are very enthusiastic to continue with VMware in the future.

I would rate this solution a nine because we've had a good experience with their consultants. Also, because the product is evolving. 

I would advise someone looking into this or a similar solution, to test the solution beforehand and to be in contact with VMware for advice and help with configuration. You'll realize this solution isn't so complicated.

Our primary use case of this solution is to automate with our various partners. It performs quite poorly, has a quite steep learning curve, and you have to invest an extraordinary amount of time to be able to do anything.

We did a POC with one of our customers. Their engineers do a lot of daily provisioning so let's say out of eight to ten working hours per day they'd spend around six or seven hours a day provisioning various kinds of stuff. We did the POC and we managed to cut those six or seven hours to around half an hour a day or so. It has helped increase the speed of provisioning. It cut out a lot of provisioning time on new virtual machines and new resources.

We like the various kinds of tools to automate stuff but not a lot of them have a self-service portal. If you were to compare it to different kinds of automation tools a self-service portal is unique.

I have not found this solution to be user-friendly. It's very complicated. The demo shows that you can automate anything but they only show basic scenarios. If you want to do anything more complicated than that, it becomes very complicated to set up. 

I would like to see support for multiple hypervisors. At the moment that support is only on paper, it doesn't actually work.

The stability is good enough. 

Our experience with technical support hasn't been so great. It can take a long time for them to respond to our questions and often the answer will be "we don't know."

We also looked at Cisco. 

The setup was straightforward. We upgraded to a newer version seamlessly. It worked really well. 

This solution is easier to set up than the alternative we looked at. The other one wasn't as powerful. If I were an automation ninja I could do much more with vRealize than the other solution I evaluated. 

I would rate this solution a neutral five. It has a lot of potential but it's very hard to use. It has a steep learning curve and you need to invest an obscene amount of time to be able to do anything. 

I would advise someone looking into this solution to be prepared to invest some serious time. 

Our primary use case is to deploy a private cloud. It has integrated well with an in-house-developed front end. Then we have the vRA's all over the backend and all the deployments in the vSphere. 

The most valuable feature would be the scalability. It's very easy to add more capacity into it once you've already got it set up. It's just cases deploy, and more hypervisors and we're off.

In terms of provisioning, it has definitely helped speed-wise. It simplifies making the environment bigger because it's easier to scale out. We don't have the downtime of having to wait to get more hardware and to add it in.

I have found bits of this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. We've been on a training course for it because it's quite a big product. We don't really use it the way it's intended to be used. We don't use it the standard way, so it takes a bit more poking around.

We haven't had any problems stability-wise with vRA.

We haven't hit any limits yet, scalability is good. 

We have a support contract with VMware but we haven't had to use their technical support. 

The setup was fairly simple. It's a matter of integrating it with all the other systems and then getting all the sorts to match with the certain policies we've got.

We integrated in-house. 

It's not cheap. It would be more expensive to get an alternative though because we'd have to buy the extras for it.

I would rate this solution an eight. There's always room for improvement, nothing's perfect but we haven't had any major problems because of it or with it.

I would advise someone looking into this solution to check out the training before you get it and not afterward because it covers all of the deployment.

We use vRA to deliver automation on top of the solutions we provide which are desktops, servers, and multiple other products. These products require more actions to implement than what the vendor offers. Our primary use case is integrating customer's environments and performing data operations.

The whole VMware ecosystem allows us to serve multiple customers, multiple organizations and also multiple units per customer. We can cover every level without using the whole VRA and the rest of the ecosystem. We don't need to use a separate product to provide separate functionalities for the customer. We can cover all the use cases using only one product on our side which is really helpful. The operators are able to provide daily maintenance of the systems and they don't have to take care of multiple deployments. They can just use one setup to serve everyone.

The integration with the whole VRA ecosystem and in the enterprise environments are the features I have found to be the most valuable.

This solution is intuitive and user-friendly, although it is missing different ways it can be automated. I would like to use it not only to form the user interface but in a more programmatic way like APIs. 

I would like to see more automation, more ways to automate automation tasks. We are already working on the first evaluations of the next version of vRealize 8 and have found it to be promising.

There are some issues with stability. We discovered some bugs and we constantly have to work with VMware to figure out a way to fix them. There is no ideal product, it doesn't exist, which is why we are okay with this product. We don't have critical problems that are causing our production problems. 

We don't have any problems with scale. We are running VRA at a very big scale with multiple deployments and don't have any issues with scalability. 

We constantly use technical support and we've found it to be okay. At times I would like it to work faster. Of course, I would prefer to have engineers available all the time and to always have direct access to all the engineers that are directly implementing the solution, but I'm aware it's not possible. The relationship we have now requires building trust on both sides.

The setup that we have implemented in our enterprise is complex. It's not the exact set up that VMware recommends by default to their customers. We get a lot of help from their consultants to help us with our non-standard design. The entire setup took more effort but it's understandable because it's non-standard.

Sometimes we need to get help from VMware consultants. They help us to upgrade the infrastructure and fix issues that we can't fix on our own. They are very helpful and we've had a very good experience with the VMware consultants. We don't use them all the time because we have our onsite engineers who integrate the product. For the mission critical stuff, we use consultants from VMware. Our interactions with VMware consultants is one of the best experiences with this solution. This is something I benefit the most from.

We constantly do upgrades, once they are released, and we have found them to be very straightforward, I cannot complain at all. From our side, it's more difficult because we have customers who are our clients so we need to schedule all the maintenance windows with them. We also need to ensure after the upgrade that everything is properly tested. But these are mostly problems that come from serving big enterprises which have their own policies. But upgrading the product itself is very straightforward and we never get any serious problems.

We evaluated other solutions, VMware was one of many that were looked at. The main reason we chose VMware and VRA was because it's a vendor that provides the whole stack, the whole ecosystem of solutions. We didn't want different products from different vendors, we wanted a full stack. 

I rated this solution a seven because I wouldn't give a ten to any product since there is no such thing as an ideal product. Developers complain about some minor stuff so it's still not always the perfect product for us. I wouldn't give it a lower score because at the end it does what it's supposed to do. We are using it, customers are happy, it brings customers which makes money. It does the job.

I would advise someone who is looking into VRA or a similar solution to try to network with other companies, to learn from the mistakes they've made, from the stuff they've discovered. Also, I would advise using VMware to help you design the architecture you are trying to implement, don't do everything yourselves.

It's a SunBox for the people developing apps for the healthcare company. They can submit the project chapter, implement what they want based on the template that we have in the vRealize Automation, check, compare, and then at the end, they can build a project charter with all the needed components.

In the past, we released several steps to implement an application in the company. The first step was the project charter. You explain what you want to do or how you want to do it and what the costs would be for this. This means that before having the project charter, you don't have any budget. The SunBox is free of charge: they think, they deploy, they test. If it's working, they do a project charter, if it's not working they go back and try other stuff.

It has helped with provisioning. I know several projects that were going faster with the up to date cloud. In the past, they would implement and if it wasn't the right step they would have to go back, discuss with us getting a new server with the right sizing, then they would implement, test and go back. With this, they implement, they test it, if it's not the right stuff, they just throw it out and implement the new stuff. It's direct. If they just increase the size then it's less work for everybody and everybody can achieve their work easily and quickly.

It's intuitive and user-friendly for the user, but not intuitive and user-friendly for the implementer because the templates are not easy to set up. For the end user, it's quite easy, but it's a fulltime job for the implementer and we don't have the time for it. This is why we used a service to implement instead of us. We don't have the time to focus on that. 

I would like to see more stability, something that is integrated and that checks that all of the servers are working well. Also, the ability to customize templates. 

I would like to see them implement vRealize into the cloud. It would be very smart for us to have vRealize in the cloud as a service that can be deployed internally. Then we don't have to implement anything anymore. We only need to take care of templates. 

The stability is why I rated it a seven and not higher. There were several cases where we had to restart some services because it wasn't working correctly anymore. People cannot extend their machine or replay their machine. There is no alert to say that there is a problem and that we should stop the service. The monitoring system is not very good.

Scalability is perfect. We haven't had any issues.

We have found their technical support to be good. 

It was a logical and smart decision for us to have this solution in place. It makes sense for my business. We used Orchestrate, the original version. It was the first automated system that could deploy complete solutions. We decided to go with this solution because it was evolving and I just followed the evolution. We switched to vRealize three years ago.

I wouldn't say the initial setup was straightforward but it wasn't complex.  

The upgrade experience went well. It's working well.

We used a service to implement. We did our research and now we have a good guy from VMware services. We plan to keep him. If we always have new people coming into deployment services it can take at least five days to teach them how the system works and to do all of the certifications needed. Our plan is to stick with this guy from VMware services. 

The ROI that we see is that people don't have to work too hard to have something done and therefore they have more time to market. They save time, which is money. We are an American company so if you save time, any implementation that we do is the implementation of a tool that can submit new work to FDA. One day is like one million.

I also have a lot fewer people asking me questions or for help. I don't need to be as involved in the discovery phase. People can now do their own job with something free and automated. They are happy.

We conducted studies on other options. We found other possibilities that were cheaper but so far this is what's working well for us and as of now we don't want to change. 

We use it to deploy virtual machines and for self-managed firewalls within NSX. It's a self-service portal to speed up things.

It has helped our company by speeding things up. For example, a year ago it took a long time for a potential VM owner to request a VM and we ultimately wouldn't be able to use it. Now, we can request it for ourselves with our self-service portal. We're using NSX firewalls and it's easy to protect ourselves. We had a Hadoop cluster and the data must be protected within the that cluster. The owner created a fence around his own VM's by using the self-service portal and creating a firewall.

The most valuable feature for us is the fact that it is self-service. 

We have found this solution to be user-friendly but there is room for improvement. The interface is not very modern, although version 7.5 is a lot better.

I would like to see a richer GUI or Visual Studio. If you create a GUI with Visual Studio, it would be much richer than what we have now with the array. 

Most of the time the upgrade experience has been good but sometimes things break after upgrading. For example, some API codes stopped working.

The Orchestrator also has a lot of room for improvement. It's a bit slow.

I would rate this solution a seven and not a ten because there's still room for improvement. 

I'm setting it up as a simple solution. It's much more stable than the highest available variant. We have a lot of intel machines providing a solution.

Scalability is good enough as it is.

We've had to use their technical support and I would say that it's pretty good. We're mostly happy with the service except when a service engineer needs to go to engineering it can take a lot of time. It would be very nice if they would improve that. 

The initial setup was complex. There were a lot of steps. I would suggest for them to cut back on the number of steps to make it easier. Although with every version, the steps are becoming easier. For example, the certificates in the previous versions were a lot more complicated. It has improved. 

We implemented in-house. 

We already had VMware, it was a logical step to choose this solution.

If you're looking into vRA, I would advise that you to choose it but don't customize it.

Primary use case is building a self-service portal for students at our university. It has performed quite well up until now.

We are able to provision VMs much faster than before. Therefore, students can click VMs, submit their form, and VMs will be provisioned automatically.

It's quite user friendly. Everyone can use it, even non-technical people. This is good, since we use it to build a self-service portal which even users with not a lot of technical background can use.

We upgraded twice. The last upgrade was a bit problematic. 

Up until now, it has been quite stable. However, we have not pushed it to its boundaries.

Its scalability looks good, but we have not experienced it yet. 

So far, technical support has been quite good. I have reached quite competent employees of VMware who have helped me a lot.

We did not use another product previously.

We had to invest in a new solution because we had to react faster to customer demands. Previously, it took a long time from requesting a new virtual machine to provisioning it. Now, it is much quicker for the customer. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

We deployed it ourselves.

It made the provisioning of the virtual machines easier and faster. We can react more quickly to customers' demands.

We did not evaluate anything else. We have so many VMware products that it was a logical conclusion for us to chose this one.

We are overall satisfied with the product.

Give it a try. Try it out in the labs from VMware. Evaluate it quite deeply, and see if it fits for your purpose or company.

We use it for automating the deployment of multiple virtual machines.

Our purchase unit had a lot fears in upgrading their environment into production, so we customized it for them. What we did was virtualized the production environment and set it up to the Lab Manager. Then, they could test on Lab Manager on the application, including upgrades, updates, etc.

The customer can set up multiple machine blueprints. Therefore, we are able to customize the template of three machines, then the customer can deploy without knowing anything about the IT business. 

It is not intuitive nor easy to use. Lab Manager was very intuitive, and it was built with VMware functions. However, VMware vRealize Automation bought it, and we have not been happy with it. We would like them to go back to the Lab Manager that we used to use.

The stability on the 6.2 version is very bad. It crashes. VMware tech support knows the IIS component is a bit buggy.

We have 30 virtual machines.

The technical support is okay.

The initial setup is very complex because we have a bunch of customization workflows. They were built-in features that we had to program as code with Orchestration. 

We haven't upgraded because we had to set up the entire environment with the vRealize Orchestration scripts. We have to do it again from the scratch.

We used a reseller for the deployment who was great.

I think we will be leaving the platform. 

For our business case, it was the wrong product, but there was nothing else on the market at the time. When we deployed our virtual machines, we had a very big template with 30 to 40 machines. It was difficult to configure all the virtual machines and blueprints. It was locked when it was deployed with vShield, and now, there is NSX and vShield is no longer supported.