VMware Aria Automation Reviews

We use it to monitor our production VMware infrastructure. We use it to watch for things like resource contention and to automate around mostly similar needs.

The benefits are that it gives you a heads-up display and dashboard of the way everything's running. The ability to automate around those tasks is really where we get the value. It helps click the buttons and keep the lights green when nobody's there to do it for you. The automation really is priceless.

Without a doubt, in our infrastructure, we mostly use it to keep the lights green in a day-to-day operational way. But absolutely, in the future, we plan to use it for automation and deploying a more DevOps mentality and products, which should speed up our time to market.

The most valuable feature is the capacity to automate around the issues that come up, the alarms.

It's also absolutely easy and intuitive. It uses the same basic layout as the rest of the product suite so it's really easy to navigate, find your way around between the tabs and the areas.

I always like to see some improvement. I think they could probably do more if they created more actions and more use cases to automate things.

It's very stable. We haven't had any downtime whatsoever.

I haven't run into any scalability issues with it yet.

I can't recall any specific instances where we have had to use technical support.

I've deployed multiple versions of it, but I have not upgraded. It's not the simplest deployment, but the documentation is there and it's easy to follow. Googling helped with the implementation as well.

There are always features that could be added. I've looked at other solutions such as Turbonomic. They check a lot of the same boxes, but I prefer the VMware interface and usability.

My advice is "do it."

Functionality really is the most important criterion when selecting a vendor. If I can purchase a product or a service that is going to check all the boxes, that's more important to me than price, personally. The company signs the checks though, so they might see it differently.

What we do with it is we've taken a very lengthy deployment process and we have shrunk it from what was a months-long process down to a matter of hours.

We've also had benefits with configuration consistency because the machine is doing it for us. We aren't manually typing in, editing config files, and all that.

Security, it's helped us integrate other products like VMware's NSX product, so we have the east-west traffic security rather than just north-south. The cost savings that we have with the man hours that used to be sunk into actually deploying these VMs is a huge savings for us.

I spend a lot of time talking with some of the product's team members making requests. Machine prefix, which is what they call their naming scheme, I wish that it was more flexible. Right now, you're relying on creating your own system and leveraging vRealize Orchestrator to handle it if you have something more complex than their basic needs, which is just the name and then the number at the end.

Version control for blueprints: As it stands, you can make any changes you want. There's no record of it. Everything else is pretty much how I want it.

I will say the VRA has its problems. We have had issues with stability. We initially deployed on Version 7.1, and there are issues with the high availability feature that it had. It forced you to manually failover the database, and so it wasn't an actually automated HA feature. That has been solved in 7.3. I haven't seen any issues with it, yet.

I haven't had it deployed for very long, but just like small things like selecting stuff, the blueprint design campus, I've noticed, has a really bad memory leak, so it can be hard to edit blueprints. Overall, as long as you know how to administer the IaaS boxes, you should be good to go.

It gets a rap for being an incredibly complex product to deploy, specifically because it's a highly scalable solution. You have to know how to set up all these different pieces, deploy Windows boxes, set up IaaS, configure your load balancers, whether that's in NSX or, say, an F5, which is what we use, or whatever else you're going to use.

Technical support is usually pretty good. I've gotten hot fixes turned around in two or three days. Sometimes, it's very tough because of how complex a product is, to know where exactly the problem lies, so it's nice to have VMware support to lean back on whenever that's the case.

It's very not straightforward. Perspective: I just deployed the newest version 7.3. It took me about a week total, just a solid 40 hours of work, to get it deployed fully. There are issues with some of the documentation. Mostly, it was fine, but there's a bug with the installation wizard that I spent a long time trying to sludge through by myself, but after opening a support case, they were able to get it taken care of really quickly.

It has a long way to go still but, for what it does, it does well and it helps enable you. Even if there are a lot of problems with the product itself that still need to be fixed, I don't think that they outweigh the actual business value that you'll get by having the product if you do a lot of deployments or if you need to provide access to developers. There's a whole myriad of cases that you could be using it for. If it falls within one of those cases, it can be extremely helpful.

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.

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.

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.

Our primary use case is to automate deployments of virtual machines and data actions. We have automated everything using vRA.

We have several customer teams that serve external customers. Previously, each team, when it received a change request to deploy a single virtual machine, had to create a ticket in our ticketing system. Then it had to go through a couple of departments. The time to get that all done was quite long, on the order of days. vRA has helped reduce the amount of time it takes to create a ticket in our ticketing system. We have been able to reduce the process to around 30 minutes. Obviously, it has reduced the cost and amount of work.

The automation part is valuable, especially where vRA integrates with vRO, because it reduces the amount of effort we have to make.

This solution is intuitive for the end user. For the guys who need to manage it, it is a bit more complex. It is quite hard to maintain, especially since a lot of work has to be custom-built, which takes a lot of effort.

Stability is not great, although, the latest release has been better.

Scalability is good.

I would rate their technical support as a six out of ten, but that's not completely their fault. A lot of our tickets have to be transferred to engineering. GSS has not been able to solve a lot of our issues.

We work a lot with VMware and were using vCloud Director previously. VMware architects came to our office and, after much discussion, vRA popped up as the best solution that fit our needs.

The setup, the installation, is straightforward, but only with the latest releases.

Upgrades are one of the points where incidents are happening. Every time we want to upgrade, a ticket needs to be created and moved to engineering because GSS is not able to help us. We are able to upgrade, but it takes quite a number of retries, which are very costly.

It's not a smooth upgrade process. For a DTA environment, which is very simple, it is a smooth process, but for our production environment, which is quite enhanced and has a lot of dependencies, it's not easy at all, and it results in a lot of errors.

We did it on our own.

We did not evaluate other vendors.

vRA 8, from what I have seen of it, in a session here at VMworld 2018 Europe, fulfills every need we have. The Service Broker is better. vRA simply speaks with all my other endpoints and I see a lot of benefits in that.

I would rate this solution as an eight because the way we set it up reduces the effort which would normally have been needed to deploy a virtual machine or perform data actions. I'm not giving it a higher score simply because of the difficulties we have run into in the past with it as well as the difficulties we continuously face during upgrades.

We are currently discussing if we should stay on vRA or move back to vCloud Director. For now, I would recommend vRA, having seen the roadmap of vRA 8, which, in my opinion, is really good.

We use it to push out automation for all of our servers, not only to developers who are requesting what we call "cattle" - they want hundreds of servers to be able to test - but also to start getting away from the "onesie, twosie" builds, to save us more time on deploying so we can work on other projects.

Time savings. It takes about an hour less for me to deploy a VM using automation then it would if I had to do it manually.

It does a lot of things automatically that would take our group, when we're already strapped for time, a lot of time to go through and clean stuff out of databases and the like.

Overall, it has helped to reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot issues and improved the quality of service to users.

To manage when VMs aren't being used, we have it set up so that it will auto-destroy them after a certain amount of time, obviously with permission from the user who owns it. 

I want to see HTML 5. I want to get rid of JavaScript. First off, I know nothing about JavaScript. That doesn't mean I'm going to know anything better about HTML 5, but I do know that we have a lot of issues with Java crashing when we're using vCenter. I obviously don't want that to happen with the vRealize Automation and Orchestrator side.

So far it's very stable. We haven't had any crashes, any issues with it. The problems that we have had have been in configuring things because we're already in the last stage where we're accepting the consultant's work. So we're finding little things here and there.

But otherwise, generally, the system has been up. We haven't had any downtime with it, other than the stuff that needs to be configured a little better.

It should be scalable. We have left room for it to be scalable. But right now we have a target area that we have it set at, and it's perfectly set that way.

I was doing it by hand.

The end-user portion is user-friendly. When you're actually building it, it's a little complicated in setting it up.

For example, in vRealize Automation, there are a lot of different areas where you have to go in and set up key components that have to link to other areas. We had a consultant come in and build our system. If I had to do it on my own, I'd have been spending a couple of hours trying to figure it out. And whether it would work or not, obviously I'd be testing it. But once I actually get to know the product it would be a lot quicker.

I've seen ROI on my end because I've been able to deploy some VMs quicker which has left time for me to go into vRA and configure it a little better. We have not pushed it out to our developers yet, but that's coming soon.

Absolutely go for it. I believe in it. I've seen and I've heard companies talk about how valuable it is. My only suggestion is, if you're strapped for time, get a consultant or some third-party or VMware Support to help you with the deployment. There are a lot of "gotchas" in there that we didn't know about and I'm glad we did go with a consulting company.

I give it a nine out of ten. I never really like giving something 100 percent because there's always room for improvement. I feel that it's a very solid system but there are little tweaks in there that could be done better.

For example, HTML 5, which I hear is coming. But also, to me, they should make it easier to figure stuff out. It's a little hard when you're trying to branch out and do it on your own. If the consultant goes away for a day and you're trying to figure things out, tooltips or some sort of help or some sort of highlighting of things that would give little tidbits indicating you need to link this to this over in this direction, etc; that would help out new people.

As a software development company with a smaller staff, we've got a lot of technical people - the operations team and myself. Being able to give provisioning of environments over to our developers and the different teams has enabled them to put up environments faster and also freed up time for the IT team. This is really one of our bread and butter solutions for our developers.

As a development company, we have different versions that need to be provisioned constantly, and the build-up/tear-down of this, for the IT team, used to take forever. We have a lean staff. We haven't increased in people but we have increased our company size. To be able to do more with less, that's one big piece of it.

Also, having a fixed capacity plan, that's another piece, for budgeting. The organization it provides has been truer to the needs of spending.

We've just shifted to an Agile development as well, so there has absolutely been an improvement in speed to market. We now have consistent release plans because we have these environments as ready as they are.

The most valuable features for us are capacity planning as well as environment life management; putting in specific templates and workflows that we know are secure. That solidifies the environments that we're in or that are being provisioned. We also know that every environment being provisioned has a lifespan. It affects capacity, so it's great for budgeting, from my perspective, and good for my team.

In terms of it being user-friendly, we have a technical group, so understanding what they're provisioning, what subnet they're going to be using, the security profiles we have, with a straight developer that doesn't have all the bells and whistles, that's one part. If it needs to be on a certain VLAN, they can put it there if it's going to be used for a different purpose. It's that ability and flexibility to provide the different choices for our team in a straightforward format so they can do the services themselves.

Regarding that networking piece, more hands-on pieces, that come with that purchase to help you get to that good spot might be an area that would help.

It's very stable. The one little hiccup we had was with some of the networking but I think that was more our physical switch configurations, supports and protocols. When you try to lock things down you have to know it end-to-end. But once it's in place, it's rock solid. I think the stability on the network side is there. It was more on us, to be honest.

Right now, we're also installing a vRealize Automation in India and expanding. The fact that we're moving from the US to India just shows the power of being able to add capacity, CPU to it, as much as we need. If we need to grow that fixed capacity, we can.

It scales horizontally too with users, more systems, it's easy.

We have used technical support in the past. Not through me but through my team. We have a high expectation, we need that fast turnaround. We've had nothing more than a day or two, tops, in terms of turnaround time. They're very knowledgeable.

Before, it was piecemeal. We had templates. We had some VDI pools for some of these things. It was just a constant revision of that and it would sit idle for too long. So, for the whole pool, if one or two people were using it, great; but if 10 were using it, then it was not the most efficient way to operate.

When selecting a vendor the most important criterion is the relationship, to be honest. Pricing, you can beat people up and have negotiations on it. Pricing, obviously, at some point was an issue, that factors into it. And we need to make sure all the technology fits. But having a relationship with the vendor that can be with you through the good times but also the bad, that makes it worthwhile.

I was not involved, my team was. We did not bring in VMware to help. We have some knowledgeable folks. They knew it pretty well, so I think they liked the hands-on approach a little bit more. They got it up. It wasn't quite perfect but with some support, they were able to round it out and make it the great solution it is today.

We've got education credits through VMware, so we are training on this constantly. I think it's a matter of using the resources that are out there and focusing on this.

Rubrik is one we are looking at. And the whole AWS Hybrid Cloud is definitely on my roadmap.

For a specific business, you need to know what you're trying to do. For ours, it's a match that I wish we would have had immediately. It has paid dividends.

I give vRA a nine out of 10. Sure, there's room for improvement. I don't know all of those areas, I'd let my more technical people speak on that. For us, this has been one of those solutions where ownerships loves it, appreciates it, sees the difference.