VMware Aria Automation Reviews

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.

I think the ability to create blueprints and define our lab environments and vRAs. It's really easy for anyone to use it. Just drag and drop VMs and all these other components into the Blueprint Composer.

I think having the ability to create different tenants, having a catalog items, and having a different user base go in there and having them pick from the specific items that they want; have them be more living in control.

The additional features I would like to see are better integration with Horizon, or actually integration with Horizon since it doesn't seem to be existent, more integration with NSX, and also better integration with Code Stream.

So far, it's been stable. Although, we have a few issues with it. Mostly, the issues that we encounter have been integrations with Horizon, integration with NSX, and a little bit the integration with Code Stream as well.

Scalability is great. They allow you to deploy in different situations and scale up. If you want a bigger vRealize Automation installation, you just spin up more of these appliances.

They are very responsive, but I for one of the issues that I had, they were not able to answer my question. I had to get into more of the low level of the application and try to figure out a solution for it.

It was somewhat complex. The documentation is very long, and I was able to install it based on a blog that I found online. Someone had already previously installed it. They went step-by-step. I thought that was more useful than the documentation.

No, we were happy with what they demoed, and what they showed us.

I think the support and the feedback that we got from the salesperson, the response time that we got, we were really happy with it.

I give it a six out of 10 because we still haven't met what we intended it for.

It works very well just spinning up VMs, creating blueprints, for doing some of the basic stuff. But doing some of the more advanced stuff, it still needs a little bit more work.

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.

Being able to provide automation for my customers, essentially having guard rails on what they can deploy and how much it is they're deploying in my environment.

We're still rolling it out. It's starting to help a little bit and people are starting to be able to see the power of it. I expect it will help, but we're still early in the journey.

Improvements in the API. Make it easier because that's where we tend to struggle when we were working with other groups. We spend time trying to digest the API to figure out how to actually consume it.

The UI could stand a lot of improvement as well. It doesn't look like a modern UI, so it needs some work.

I've been using it for four or five years.

But in my current employer, I've only been there for about eight months. They had it, but nobody was actually pushing the solution.

I haven't really had any issues with stability over the last four or five years that I've been using it.

We tend to do smaller deployments than huge deployments of it because we're usually targeting multiple groups.

I haven't contact technical support yet, but I do have a contact with VMware that I feel is knowledgeable.

I didn't set up this environment, but I have done the setup previously.

The process has gotten better. It's still a bit of complex. Once it's setup, you shouldn't have to touch it much.

Upgrades have gotten easier as the solution has progressed. It used to be much more difficult. Now, the process is a lot more streamlined.

Not applicable. The company already had the product when they brought me onboard.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Features
• Stability
• A community who know the product and can share information about it.

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 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.

For us, it's a software-defined data center, automating compute, network security, and storage; all the infrastructure components.

Lifecycle management has improved substantially. We're no longer seeing customers holding on to their resources because they're no longer difficult to create or destroy. We've seen substantial amounts of both builds and retirements. 

It also cleans up a lot of the manual operations that used to take place - or that maybe didn't take place at all and now do. There's a lot less human error and we're seeing a lot of, let's say, "cleanliness" in our infrastructure now.

The solution has helped increase our agility, the speed of provisioning, and time to market. It allows our IT admins to deploy dozens of systems simultaneously, as opposed to operating in serial, building one system at a time. That has been pretty significant as well.

Lifecycle management. It allows my teams to create, manage, and retire all of our infrastructure objects in the data center.

Also, the XaaS Extensibility - Anything as a Service. We're starting to utilize that more and more.

One of the features that's a struggle today is some of the public cloud extensibility. Some of the plugins that are native to vRA and vRO, I'd like to see them come out earlier for vRO. I understand that in vRA, the plugins are a little bit more polished because vRA is the GUI. But we'd like to see them released earlier in vRO, prior to a GUI being released.

Azure, for example, is a public cloud provider but we have some instability issues with the plugin in vRO. It's okay for us if we separate the vRA from vRO plugin releases. So I'd like to see some increased stability in some of those public cloud plugins.

We don't really have a stability issue with it. It's not a product that really goes down for us. Although it's not a product we consider to be in our "five nines" of availability, like our other systems are, it's more a tool. We're able to maintain it after hours and patch as needed. But I can't even remember the last time it went down during business hours.

We haven't had any scalability issues. We're nearly 10,000 virtual machines that are registered to our vRealize Automation deployment. With Orchestrator, we did see some scalability concerns, but we clustered it and added some additional resources and we were able to scale it up. We haven't had an issue since.

Technical support could be improved. I definitely feel that the product is accelerating faster than the support engineers are able to keep up with the knowledge needed to know what's going on. The developers maintaining vRealize Automation are doing a great job improving it, but VMware is not doing a great job of training the people we call to get support for it.

Being that we have been involved since some of the early 5.x days, we compare a newer installation to the previous, and each time it gets better.

In terms of upgrades, we're just starting to use Lifecycle Manager, which assists with upgrades. I haven't been impressed, so far, with the maintenance of an existing complex infrastructure. But LCM has allowed us to deploy new vRA instances very rapidly, which is helpful for some of our LCM Code Stream movement between our Dev stage and Prod. But for maintaining the existing environment, we just use the out-of-box upgrade capability of the tool, which is so much easier now than it used to be.

We no longer have the significant issues we had in the past. Things are just getting better with each version.

My advice would be to heavily invest in training in vRO. vRO is the backbone of what vRA does. I also recommend that you come up with a plan. Don't try to automate everything in the first step. Find the good use case and make sure you offer new value to the customers that you're building it for, prior to just replacing what they have with something new. IT admins commonly don't like to have their interface changed so dramatically.

When looking for an IT vendor that would integrate in the data center, I look for an extensible API. It's very helpful when that vendor gives me the ability to either write a REST plugin, or they've written one themselves, and they're fully familiar with the software-defined lifecycle. It's great when they have a vRO plugin that I can tap into and orchestrate and automate but, if they don't, I need good documentation of their REST API and then we'll write our own vRO plugin. We haven't really seen many vendors integrate directly into vRA, but if they're tapping into vRO then we're in good shape. vRA and vRO, for us, are just brothers.

The solution, overall, used to not be intuitive and user-friendly but they've taken some good feedback in the last two years and made some significant improvements that have really helped us out in managing upgrades. It used to be very difficult to upgrade. It's gotten a lot simpler and that has made our lives quite a bit easier. Also, the stability of the distributed, highly-available infrastructure for vRA.

We use it for the deployment of new environments and multiple stacks, as well as deployment inside of NSX. It is also used for easy application deployment and container management.

We can do scripting and do customization after deployment. With vRA, we can integrate everything with a single-click. Then, there is also track management and change management control.

The repetitive tasks which took provisioning storage, network, and compute two to three weeks, now take five minutes.

I like the automation that it provides to deploy VMs and multiple apps. The integration with NSX and AWS for endpoints, which allows us to manage workloads, such as the comparison that it does between different VMs. It can do this in AWS or Azure.

Any new VM admin simplifies deployment. Instead of only deploying templates, we can deploy blueprints which are easier on day-to-day operations for an organization.

VMware should go the way of vROps, with everything in one machine, the ability to scale out, and a more distributed environment instead of having the usual centralized SQL database. 

Three-tier environments are not scalable.

They need to get away from Windows.

It depends, because you are still dependent on the Windows machine that does all the requests and pulls from other agents. It can scale out if you size it right the first time.

We used technical support with previous versions.

We knew we needed a new solution when we were falling behind and could not deploy what the business units needed.

The product has come a long way. Now, it is more streamlined and GUI-based. 

I have done parallel upgrades, then used my grade settings for it.

We also evaluated CA.

We chose VMware because we are a VM shop and the product allows multiple endpoints. We could also have endpoints for AWS.

While it's user-friendly use, you need to know what you are doing with it.

Get your requirements beforehand. Make sure of the services that you want to provide and have them nailed out. If you are just writing VMs, then you don't need vRA. If you are providing services, you're going to become a broker of services to people, so you have to plan ahead. Also plan the workloads that you're going to be providing because they will consume a lot.