VMware Aria Automation Reviews

We use it for deploying, data recovery, and DR.

In terms of recovery, it takes only a tenth of the time that's required compared to a human element. It gives us time savings, which equals cost savings, which equals personnel savings.

Having the visibility of the infrastructure at that level helps greatly with infrastructure agility, application agility, and speed of provisioning.

The most valuable features are the metrics and reporting aspects. The historical data and extraction enable us to tell where the trends are and where contentions may exist in the future.

I also like that it reduces the human interaction and requirement.

It would be nice if, at the director level, the manager level, there was a pretty graphic. They don't like to see numbers and line items, they want to see graphs and scales and real-world pictures. That would support better reporting.

Thankfully, where we're at, we don't have the need for the criticality, we don't need a quick reaction to stability issues. But having the right resources available will help the stability.

We have scaled up. For me and my team, it's very easy.

On a scale of one to five, I would rate technical support a four. It's not always associated with the correct team on the first go-round, but eventually, we get the right people to get the right solution taken care of.

There is a war on wasted initiative and on waste of time, more than a concern about environmental resources, unfortunately. The war has been identified on multiple levels, especially deploying in our realm.

When looking to work with a vendor, the important criteria we look for are

• professionalism
• the value of the product for the return on investment
• personally, I look at energy costs and savings as well.
  

Without the right technical expertise, the initial setup can be a little more cumbersome, but with the knowledge and the backing of the infrastructure and the engineering, it's fairly simple.

We have upgraded many times. We know how to do it. It's fairly simple for us. We don't get the admins involved. The engineers take care of it all.

As far as ROI goes, we see it in the human time element in deploying, that's been a really big improvement. Cost savings go with that inherently.

We looked at a couple of other vendors but we went with VMware because VMware is standard. Why not go with the best?

Give it time to save you time.

We use it to automate workloads and it works well. The performance is as advertised.

It automates the creation of new VMs for us, so there is less human error, less work. It has simplified provisioning for us.

It integrates with our backup solution.

It is not intuitive or user-friendly. It's complicated as heck. We actually hired VMware Professional Services to come in. I understand the newer version, which we're not quite on yet, is easier and that the interface is better. But the product is really a profession unto itself. The user interface could be improved.

It's stable. Doesn't die.

We have not yet had to scale it but I understand that the product does scale.

I've used VMware tech support frequently. It's good, always good. They deliver. It's easy to get the person I need.

We did hire VMware to come in and do it, of course. I was not there, in this role, at the time. They came and it works.

We haven't gone through an upgrade process yet. That's on the roadmap. We'll do that before the end of the year but we also have to do vSphere and the rest of VMware stuff.

I don't think there was an ROI attached to the project. We just needed to automate some of these provisioning processes.

I would recommend vRealize Automation. 

If you don't already have experience in it, you're probably going to hire a partner to help deploy it and make it tie into your environment. Make sure the third-party stuff works with it, make sure the APIs are open. We use it to automate. During the provisioning process, we use it to talk to the Infoblox with the DNS stuff and the IP provisioning, and to talk to our Veeam too. Just make sure that the rest of your stuff is going to work with it.

I rate it a nine out of ten. To get it to a ten they should make it easier to use and to understand what it's doing.

We use vRealize Automation for monitoring and for some administration tasks. Anytime we do upgrades or patching, we just read the reports and it makes our lives easier.

Earlier we used to spend a whole day to collect all the information regarding upgrades or patches. When we introduced vRealize, it reduced the time to between 30 minutes and one hour to finish the whole job.

It has also improved provisioning a lot. Today, if I want to provision one VM, it takes me five minutes. Earlier, it would take a minimum of 30 minutes to go and choose everything. Now, I can just click once and it can provision my whole VM. We also integrated with our Alexa, so even through voice functionality I can create a VM. One of the guys at VMware, along with our partner, deployed that in our environment. If I say, "Hey, Alexa, I need a VM with four gigs of RAM," it will go and start creating it.

In addition, it has reduced our CapEx and OpEx, especially the OpEx values. Initially, we had 25 people to manage it. After going with vRealize, 15 people can do all the jobs and they can concentrate on other improvements as well. It's good for our company.

The most valuable feature is that, instead of doing the VMotion manually, we have automated everything with a script, using vRealize. That means I don't need to think about things like compatibility. The system will do everything for me and just give me a report.

It's very user-friendly. It is not hard to go and find things. There is a one-click Help that you can use to find all the documentation you need to manage it.

From a stability perspective, VMware is number one compared to other products that are available in the market. We have never had any major downtime, after going to vSphere 6.5 and afterward. Earlier, yes, there were challenges, but nowadays it's very smooth and very straightforward.

VMware products are meant for scalability. For example, today my environment is 1500 VDS's. We acquired a company with 300 users. To merge them, I didn't need to worry about anything like hardware because it was already there. I was able to do it on the fly in one shot.

What we like about VMware, especially if I compare it with other vendors, is the support. When we call directly, the technical people jump in and start supporting us. Deploying the solution is, maybe. a three-month process. After that, managing it can be painful. So when a vendor is ready to offer that kind of support, a customer is ready to adopt their solutions. That's why we like VMware support.

We are a VMware shop. We also have Citrix and Microsoft hypervisors but, compared to both of them, VMware is the best for us, for our environment.

When selecting a vendor, price is not the only criterion. The product availability and how much better their support is, are also important.

In the initial setup, I took care of the hardware part, but the software layer and other things were taken care of by my engineers. It was straightforward.

Currently, we are upgrading the environment. Compared to the earlier versions, from my experience, the upgrade process is easier; for example, the compatibility checks. I also don't need to go and find out the resources that are required. It tells me in one report what the current environment is like and, if I want to go to the next level, what things I need to take care of. Based on that I can make things happen.

In a year, I used to spend, say, $10 per user. Now it's $5 per user. That is our approximate return on investment, 

Citrix was on our short list. But over the last ten years, we have been a big VMware shop. We wanted to continue with VMware because we are confident that VMware can address any kind of problem situation, any challenges. But with Citrix, we didn't find that kind of credibility when we did solution testing, a PoC.

I rate VMware a nine out of ten. To get to a ten there are a few areas they could improve, especially vSAN. Performance-wise, there are no challenges, but from a product perspective, it is not that flexible. What we have in vSphere today is very flexible, but vSAN is not.

We use it to deploy virtual machines in our traditional VMware environment. We don't use it as a front-end for our customers but it works fine for us, on the back-end.

We can use some of its functionality to avoid having to write custom code for the placement of virtual machines. That is the main way we get use out of it. Also, the deployment time is less than it was before. It's all automated, it's quicker than when it was done by hand.

The most valuable feature is the automation of the deployment of the whole machine.

We also use it to pre-install the applications that the people selected when they ordered the machine, so they get a fully functional machine.

In terms of usability, It has had its challenges. It requires a lot of custom code to integrate into our environment. It can take a little while to get it to do what we want, takes some code instead of having built-in functionality. Part it is how we use it. It would be a lot easier to use in a greenfield scenario versus brownfield, which is the way we are using it.

I would also like to see them streamline the install. It's split between Windows and Linux appliances, and it would be easier if it was all appliances. I think they're going that way.

The stability is pretty good now; previous versions, not so much, but it has improved. In earlier versions, we had issues with crashes, but the latest version has been much better.

We have not had any problems with scalability. We're not pushing the boundaries on the number of deployments with it, but no issues.

Technical support has been good. We have MCS, the mission-critical support, and they've been good. The occasions when it is taking a while to get back to us is when the technical support person needs to contact engineering. That handoff between engineering and support takes some time, at times.

We had a little homegrown thing but that doesn't really count.

When selecting a vendor, if we already have an established relationship with the vendor, it's easier than going to a new vendor and establishing a new relationship.

Setup in the previous version was not so straightforward. They have made big improvements in the later versions. The first one was a pain but the new one is fine. A couple of versions back, they added an automated install that did not exist in the earlier versions that we deployed.

Upgrading took a little while because we did a side-by-side upgrade. There was a code migration, all our custom code needed to be migrated, so it took a little bit of work. But, overall, it was fine.

Time savings are our ROI, the time to deploy machines. I haven't done any studies on the exact ROI, but saving time is always good.

Right now, it works for what we use it for. We're not using all its features, but the pieces that we use work fine.

We use vRealize Automation not only to track the utilization of the environment but to deploy new VMs on a regular basis. When DevOps decide they need a whole bunch of VMs spun up for a new version of an application we are already running, we can duplicate everything we've already got, spin them all up, get them running. When they're done with whatever test case they have going on, we can either move them over to staging or we can completely wipe out the entire environment, and that's a lot easier to monitor and manage.

Simplification. It gives us one interface to control multiple environments. It's an easier way to look at how a large chunk of information or data or processors are being used, and what they're being used for.

I would like to see it expanding, growing in all of the cloud-based stuff that they are really pushing towards, and have it be more capable of what it is already doing. But in reality, that's probably our own fault because we're a little bit behind on the version of VMware that we're running. It's probably just that we need to get caught up on our version.

The stability is 95 percent. There are some situations where it gets a little bit clumsy. When it gets really big, when you're dealing with a very large deployment, it can be a little bit difficult, but it's better than nothing. It does a significant job, given what it's tasked to do.

Scalability is probably the best part about it. You can take things that you've already defined, that you've already built once, and build them again multiple times, without significant effort.

I haven't used technical support but my co-worker has, more than once, to deal with issues we were having while we were in the process of setting it up. I was off on other tasks so I never really had to deal with tech support. But, from what he said, it worked out well. They knew what they were talking about, they helped us get it sorted out.

There were other solutions that were used previously, but this one is the main one I have used, personally. Before coming to Bass Pro, where I am working now, it was a lot of VMware on bare metal and dealing with it directly. vRealize wasn't there.

We see our ROI is in terms of the reduced workload, because we can see a lot of things on one place and don't have to spend a lot of time going out looking for them, and in the simplification of deployment. Again, we can go to one place, do what we need to do, go off and work on other projects and come back and it's taken care of it itself.

I give the solution a nine out of ten. Again, that's probably our own being behind. It's entirely possible the newest version is a ten. It's the whole extension, further into more modern technology, but we're not on the newest version at the moment. So it's probably already there and we don't see it yet. We're trying to get everything pulled together between our company and several other companies, to be on the same version. We're in the process of upgrading to the 6.5 and then, hopefully, very soon to 6.7.

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.

It is used to deploy and manage unified configs in an engineering environment. It has performed pretty well.

It has improved things, absolutely. We had a lot of config drift before, and this really helps us keep it on track.

Speed to provision is probably our biggest, significant gain.

• Integration with Infoblox, for IP management
• Three-tier app deployment as one unified Blueprint

I haven't had any issues with the stability.

We've only used it within our lab engineering environment, which is up to 1,000 VMs at any point, so it's been pretty solid.

I was a VMware consultant for years and I saw successes with it in other people's environments.

The initial setup was very easy. The upgrade was also pretty easy. It was not quite as easy when I piloted it through Lifecycle Manager, but that was in its infancy. It has probably gotten better.

The solution itself has a learning curve to get used to building the Blueprints, but once you've done it, it gets much quicker.

Our time to deliver a fully unified, three-tier app, at the right version, is one-twentieth what it was before. There is no manual intervention. No IP management. It just dramatically simplifies all of our processes.

I haven't had the opportunity to use many comparable products.

My advice would be, use it with NSX and with Infoblox.

I give it an eight out of ten, mostly due to the learning curve to catch up to where you need to be. Some third-party integration, that would still be nice to see.

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.