VMware Aria Automation Reviews

We use this technology including VMware to support our customers' critical information systems.

The feature of automated balancing which implemented between two data centers solely for the purpose of a recovery plan is valuable.

I'm not wanting any particular feature; but there should be cost reductions. VMware comes at a high cost, and that's why we are in the process of transitioning to a more affordable alternative.

I have been using VMware Aria Automation for the last five years. 

I would rate the stability seven out of ten. Ensuring hardware compatibility is crucial in our platform. However, it posed challenges as some of our servers were not compatible, necessitating extensive adjustments to make them function correctly. Regrettably, this incurred a substantial overall cost, which was quite troublesome.

I would rate it nine out of ten. 

It's quite different. I had a rather negative encounter in the past. VMware provides local support, where you can request them to review and validate a global architecture design, which comes at a significant cost. On one occasion, despite having VMware validate the design, we encountered errors and events that had not been considered by VMware.

Neutral

We used to rely on VMware for assistance when setting up and deploying our infrastructure. The initial setup is complex. It is deployed on-premises for us by VMware teams. In the case of customers, it is dependent on the user's requirements. I would rate it four out of ten.

We encountered numerous challenging use cases that made it tough for us to deploy and handle. While the feature itself is intriguing, the administrative aspect has been quite burdensome for us. So, to sum it up, the feature rates a seven in terms of quality. However, when you dive into it and take responsibility for its ongoing maintenance, it turns into a nightmare. So, I would rate seven out of ten. 

We use vRealize Automation for our customers. We are an internal service company and use vRA for a SAFE Self Service portal for our customers to provide VMs.

We started five years ago with normal virtualization. Then, the platform grew and our customers requested additional services.

It provides faster SAFE services.

• It has the possibility to combine different clouds. 
• We can provide internal VMs and also VMs from AVS for our customers.
• Our users can order VMs using the API.

The API support could be better, because if your customers are developers, the first thing they do is Google, "How will this API function?" If you have vRA in the API, Google returns nothing. Therefore, my colleagues programmed an internal wrapper so the customers can talk with the API. We have to create our own documentation. 

It would be better if VMware would provide API documentation for developers and customers on the Internet.

It is stable.

The scalable is okay.

We have business-critical support, so this is the best support level available from VMware.

The setup process is good.

My team did the upgrade, but I did not hear anything bad about the experience.

The new version is user-friendly and intuitive. We have upgraded to 7.5, and this has been a good step for the product's usability.

Today, I would start with the vRA device. In the beginning, we did a lot of stuff with vRealize Orchestrator, so we had to develop our workflows on our own, which is a bit more complicated. So, vRA is good idea if you want to start and get quick results.

Primary use case is, generally, a DevOps lab-type environment that we have, spread across multiple locations throughout the United States. It's meant for a DevOps shop, for our developers to spin up, spin down VMs or applications, and do their testing.

Big-time cost savings on administrative overhead without having to constantly manage virtual machines, spin them up, spin them down, manually. We can automate all of that now and most developers will be able to access a page, landing zone, and do that all themselves, rather than having an admin or someone on the team have to do it for them.

As far as increasing the infrastructure agility, that goes back to the cost savings. Being able to tear down entire development enclaves, essentially by pushing a button or invoking a command line, and spin them all back up, is immensely valuable for an Agile development shop.

It does help, to an extent, with speed of provisioning. But to me, I'm also thinking on the back end, the technical end, depending on which environment I'm on, it might have flash or, in some areas, it might have old spinning disk. So the speed is going to be limited to that as well. But as far as the software itself and using the API calls, it's definitely speedy.

It has definitely made it easier for IT to support developers. That is one of the main aspects of the product line. It's for having that in place, to not have to call up Joe Shmo Admin to say, "Hey, can you go manage this for me, spin this up for me?" You can have a portal for a developer, another user login, spin up the resources, shut them down if they need to, request apps, and all without having to bother your admin next door. 

Valuable features include the extensibility of it and the customization of a lot of the Blueprints, that you can customize, and the community as a whole. There's a ton of community-generated Blueprints that might be (helpful) to set up a design for your automation needs, that you can use as a base and go on from there and make changes to it. That would probably be the biggest thing.

Once it's deployed, managing it is pretty intuitive.

The deployment mechanisms for the initial deployment of the product line lack the appropriate documentation to give someone who's never used it before... Obviously, you want people who are knowledgeable in the product line before they deploy it, but there might be cases where someone wants to go to the website, go to the doc section, and do a step-by-step on how to deploy it. That's really not as brushed-up as other documents I've seen that they have. That would definitely be an improvement on their end.

I haven't had any stability issues with it.

Scalability, I have no issues with that as well. As long as I have the compute, storage, and network bandwidth to support it, the underlying infrastructure is there. It's pretty expandable.

Technical support has been fine, adequate. I have not really had any need for it, per se. It's more so self-taught and people going to training and learning how to use it. If we have an issue, it's generally really rare that we'd have to reach out and talk to tech support. So I don't have a lot of experience having to deal with them on it.

The deployment of it is not overly intuitive. It does require some knowledge about putting it out there and deploying it.

I have had the opportunity to upgrade it and that is definitely not the easiest of things to do, generally. As long as you follow the checklist, and which product line you're updating in the specific order, you won't break your system. But if you don't follow the sheet or "the law," you will definitely mess yourself up big-time.

Make sure that you know what you're getting into, first off, what it's for and what you might need it for because I might recommend maybe a less robust product line for your needs as opposed to something that's more of like a higher infrastructure, corporation-level product line, like vRealize.

Every version, they've updated the UI, scalability, added new products to be able to work with different cloud vendors. Overall, that part of it's fine, there have been improvements from version to version.

As far as automation techniques, like Chef or Puppet or Ansible, it's the age-old thing: Mac, Windows, Linux, whatever works for what I need, I'll use. I don't really have a preference, as long as it works for what I need.

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.

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. 

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.

The primary use case is the automation of the cyber functionalities. Right now, it is performing well.

For the cyber functionalities, we used to set up the functionalities manually using templates. Now, using the VMware vRealize self-service portal, the user can request a server, and we can better manage the lifecycle.

• Manageability of the blueprints.
• Integration with the rest of VMware solutions.
• Availability of the Orchestrator.
• It is intuitive and user-friendly.

Stability is fine. Though, we have seen some issues with upgrades or installations. This means we have to raise a call every time with VMware.

Scalability is good. It has been fine. We have been using it for quite some time and haven't seen any issues.

Normally, on the first call to technical support, you don't get the right person. The log analysis takes a long time. This is something which should be improved.

We were not using anything previously. We have been using VMware for quite some time.

We are trying to set up this new 7.4 in a distributed environment. Every time it was failing with different errors. Finally, we were able to finish it with notes that we had taken, and the help of VMware. However, later on in the product cycle, when applying the same procedure into our production environment, we followed all the guidelines and it still failed. This used to be a one day job, and it has been a one week job.

I would recommend use the solution.

My customer is the largest in Turkey, a university. The university has more than 48 servers in its data center, and they ask for between at least five to ten virtual machines daily.

They were looking for a solution that automates VM creation, especially for SQL sites, because they have a very large SQL Server requirement, especially for project management. They are looking for an HPC solution. We performed a PoC at the customer's site using vRealize Automation. After that, they bought it for all their sockets, approximately 100 sockets.

Now the customer can manage its own server requirements directly. This is very important because, before that, the process included signing off on forms and sending them to the IT Director. It took at least 10 days to create a VM and send it to the person who needed it. Now, it's no more than a half hour to activate a new VM at the customer's site.

The most valuable feature is the automation. They now save time because there is one person who manages all of the virtualization servers and the storage sites at this university. 

Another valuable feature is the flexible user interface. They can manage all of the servers, the full lifecycle of VMs, on one screen.

Turkey does not have a big presence on the automation side. We have only one customer. Maybe some new applications can be added based on the technology. For example, maybe SAP could be added, because the customer is currently only using it for the database site, and the other VMware systems.

It is stable. We haven't had any problems with vRA and it has been working for more than three years. We upgraded to the new version without any problems, and the customer is using it.

In terms of scalability, this customer is looking to expand and they have to plan to buy and multiply their resources. After that, because they like vRA, they want to buy vSAN because they also want to automate the storage scalability and storage for the VM sites.

The setup is very easy. We performed the installation with the customer.

Buy the solution. There is no problem. For the last three years, our customer hasn't had any problem. With vRA, the customer saves time.