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.

The primary use case is going to be managed services. We're a hosting provider and we're looking to provide provisionable resources across multiple cloud platforms and to be able to support Day 2 Operations. We're trying to fully manage the lifecycle process as well as fully integrate with all of our management end-points, whether it would be inventory, ITSM, or backups, etc.

Eliminating the need for our engineers to do any of this manually, and being able to focus their efforts on the deeper level customizations at the OS level - like installing applications and leveraging things that we would not necessarily want to offer in an automated sense just because of the diversification of the implementation - that has been of value to us.

I personally spend a lot of time in vRealize Orchestrator, so being able to directly tie into the back end on the APIs, I find that to be what really is the most advantageous thing for me.

The solution is intuitive, but not necessarily user-friendly. In particular, it's the documentation. It's a lot of going-through-the-weeds types of scenarios. There is just an abundance of information, so it's a matter of understanding how the objects or the relationships exist, and then, obviously, being able to access that information and knowing how to make use of it.

If there were a tighter integration with either AWS or Azure - being able to have a little bit more out-of-the-box, flexibility-wise, and the ability to realize that - it would help. You're getting out-of-the-box workflows that will literally allow you to provision, but there's a large development gap to cover the use cases that we're trying to provide or support.

The stability of the product has been good. However, I feel like the upgrade, doing more of the infrastructure administration, has been more problematic for my organization. But otherwise, it's been a good product.

Scalability is good. We haven't had any real concerns over that because we have a data center footprint. We haven't had any real limitations on acquisitioning new hardware so, at the rate at which we're growing, we're making the right projections and we haven't really exceeded our availability.

VMware tech support is not terrible. At times I feel like it's hard to get to the proper person to speak with, because I deal with vRealize Automation. It's a matter of trying to get straight to the second tier.

We just had vCenter. Ultimately, we were looking to take that to the next level. We wanted to allow our customers to be able to potentially consume the catalog items and to better leverage things, and to give more transparency to what we can provide. At the same time, we wanted them to not have to go through all of the ticket-raising process. We wanted to be able to allow them to get right to it.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. I've done it many times though, so at this point I can almost do it without documentation.

Compared to alternative solutions in this space, the feature set of this solution is unrivaled. I can't really think of anything else that has a better management platform, that would be as mature as this software.

Do your research beforehand, because the architecture itself can get you tripped up if you don't properly align your certificates. You definitely have to have an idea of where you want to end up.

There is certainly room for improvement with some of the little things I was talking about, like either better managing of the upgrade process, or just making the infrastructure deployment a little bit easier. It feels like all of the pieces have been automated on one level or another, like with the PowerShell scripts, doing all the IS, Windows boxes preparation. They just need to get it to be more end-to-end.

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.

Automating the data center.

We have faster delivery times through its automation.

The blueprint functionality of the product is intuitive and user-friendly. The concept of the blueprints is visual and easy to use.

I would like to see support for Google Cloud and Azure. Because they don't support Google and Azure today, we need something that's cohesive with our entire landscape. There is a gap right now with VMware. If you want support for these environments, you have to go elsewhere right now. Hopefully, product management will listen, hear, and change this.

The basic support is not there for Google Cloud and Azure. They are unable to provision nor do cost controls. Google is still left out. It is great that they have done AWS, but we are a retailer which means nothing to us because it is a competitor. Azure is good, but Google is where a lot of our development environments are.

Stability is good.

Its scalability still has room to improve when supporting Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure.

The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market.

We are currently looking at CMPs which give the functionality that support VMware and Google Compute Cloud, as well as Azure.

We moved to the solution because it is pushing the agility of IT.

The upgrade process was fine.

It has saved us a lot of time and work. It helped us to reorganize some of our service lines, so we could be more efficient. For example, on our open system server team, we had 15 people building servers, now we have two.

Once you've learned the product, it is very easy to use.

The entire automation orchestration of it. It integrates into all of the other products that we have, e.g., ServiceNow. 

We have a self-service portal, and it does that very well.

It has a learning curve.

We have no issues whatsoever with it. It's very stable.

We have no issues whatsoever with it. It's very scalable.

We have a technical account manager, but we also rely heavily on VMware's support team, who is excellent to work with.

Upgrades have been extremely simple with their Lifecycle Manager product.

We actually used a lot of VMware services because we didn't want it sitting in the box too long. We had them come in, then they had it up and running in two days. There was a lot of tweaking to do, but it was up and running in two days.

We have seen significant ROI. We used to have physical servers, it took 90 days to get a server, order it, buy it, and get it in. We have it down to 10 minutes, building a server with virtualization, and now that's too slow. So, we let the customer do it at their speed. Therefore, it is pretty much up in a couple of minutes and they have a server.

We usually look at least three other vendors minimum. 

We chose VMware years ago. We have also had Hyper-V and KVM. So, we've had different products from different vendors. However, now, we are down to just VMware, because it's very stable and reliable.

Talk to a lot of different companies and people that have done it. Find out what not to do and what to do. It will make your journey easier.

We are working on a lot of the digital transformation right now. We are working more on the Pivotal Container Service (PKS) product, and a lot of integrations that they're doing with the performance monitoring, the metrics, and KPIs. This is very important to us.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Transparency: Be very open with us. 
• Be very knowledgeable about their products, so that we don't have to go through three or four different people to get one answer.

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.

We are using it for developers to test code. Our Customer Care uses it to troubleshoot customer issues. We also have a training business unit and they deploy classes for customer training.

We've been using it for four years now. It performs well. It does the functions we need. We do have some issues from time to time. I wish there was a little bit of more maturity out of the product, but it is getting better with every release.

It has definitely increased speed of VM deployment. When a normal server-request would come in, it might take anywhere from three to four days to deploy. Now, within 15 minutes, they can click and have something up and running.

The IT support for developers is nice as well because they are able to manage the environment themselves.

Self-service: Letting the end-users deploy their own machines so the administrators are hands-off at that point.

The user-friendliness is seen in the minimal training that is required to get them up and running, to start deploying machines and accessing.

Something as simple as formatting the catalog in a different way would be helpful because there is no option for doing so. A lot of the contents for the virtual machine, blueprints that you can request, are hidden from view and there's no way to change the view.

It does go down from time to time. We have some issues with the appliances sometimes and we have to do reboots in the middle of the day. That affects the ability for them to deploy. Existing stuff that is already deployed, there's no downtime for that, but it does keep them from deploying at that time.

We have it deployed in a highly-available environment and scalability is nice because we just add another ESX host and then we are able to increase the capacity.

Technical support is helpful. Sometimes they can take a little while to get back to us, but for the most part, we end up finding a solution to cases.

We were using Lab Manager before but that was decommissioned so this was the next solution. We chose it because it did everything we needed it to do, it was the logical step from Lab Manager.

The criteria for the selection process included that we needed to have a self-service environment for our developers, that Customer Care be able to deploy machines, destroy machines, complete the entire VM lifecycle - and this does it.

The setup is fairly complex, but we've been using it for a while so I'm pretty knowledgeable about it now. Upgrades are pretty straightforward. We had a lot of problems originally deploying it, with some certificate issues. We had an engagement with VMware so they were able to help us get a proof of concept environment set up as well. So that was helpful.

It's a good solution. The deployment can be complex so I would recommend engaging professional services for setting up a proof of content environment to evaluate it.

I rate vRA at eight out of 10 because of issues with the stability of the appliances. But other than that, it's a pretty solid product. It does exactly what we need it to do and we are happy with it.

Primary use case is for automatic deployment of VMware guests.

It's performing as we want. We're not really asking anything too complex of it, but it does what we ask of it.

Our organization started to move a lot more towards automating all the things that we can. We're catching up to that, but we're definitely heading in that direction. It's one of those things that enables us to tie in with our other pieces, with automating the operating system, etc. VMware is then able to automate the build of our virtual machines.

In terms of infrastructure agility, we're still getting our feet under us in some areas, but it's definitely playing it's part and doing what it does well.

Our speed of provisioning has also improved. We used to build systems manually, which would take four hours or a day. Nowadays we're able to spin something up off a template that we update every so often and it takes about 20 minutes. We can take an existing template, build it back up, add some configuration for it, specific applications, turning things into what the developers need, and then we can have them deploy it off that. It makes it so that we can have customization within a framework.

The most valuable feature is the integration with some of our other automation platforms. We're starting into Jenkins, and it has a plug-in for other automation of operating systems and things. So it works together with our infrastructure. We don't have a very complex environment, we don't have NSX yet or anything really crazy, but all the things we do have, it has been able to interoperate with them.

It is intuitive and user-friendly. It took some growing. We had to figure it out in the beginning, but that was a couple versions ago. We like the improvements that have been made over time, so it's definitely been able to progress with the environment.

We don't have too complex of an environment, we're not doing machine-learning or any of the advanced features all that much. We're a pretty straightforward IT shop. We just provide servers, and then, from there, it's what the customer wants. The next step we would probably like to see is to have a customer portal, so instead of our having to punch the button, the customer could. But I believe that VMware offers enough that setting that up is more on us, rather than waiting for them offer it.

We needto learn more, advance our usage of the product. We're doing what we can with what we have, but we have to learn a bit more. Better training, or training modules, wouldn't hurt. I haven't personally looked through what the portal has, but more training is always good, so we could take a new employee and point him to the training and get him up to speed quickly. I have had 10 years or so experience with VMware, but I'm the old the guy in the department. Everybody else is newer than me on this and not everyone has my experience. So the training would be nice.

I've been impressed with the stability so far. It does what we ask it to. That's always nice. You don't have to think about it. We haven't had any downtime.

We can scale it up or down. We haven't needed to yet, but we can.

We haven't had to use technical support. I do a lot of blog reading, so I look up my answers on my own. But tech support, on other issues, has been where we need it to be.

We weren't using much. This was right at the beginning of when we were starting to automate things. We saw the VMware automation and decided that, since we had VMware, it would be the logical choice. And then we started with Jenkins for a lot of our other operating system features. Jenkins, of course, has plugins that talk to VMware natively, so it was a natural fit.

When selecting a vendor, the biggest thing for us is multi-operating system support. There is the classic divide. I'm on the Windows side. We have a Linux department also. When looking at different tools, something might be better for Linux but we have to have something that will work for both of us. We don't want to have two different tools for two operating systems. Whereas the Linux team wanted to use Puppet instead of Chef, Chef supports Windows and Linux both, better. The nice thing about VMware, aside from it being a lot more OS-agnostic, is that both teams can use the product. One product for both operating systems. That was one of the primary things. We could have a tool that runs great, but it might be a situation where, "Oh yeah, your Windows support is lame." That's the big thing for us, the interoperability between operating systems.

I thought the initial setup was straightforward. The biggest thing, once we had it set up, was to integrate it with the vCenter, but that was pretty straightforward. That was part of the workflow. It is automated within the product as part of the initial deployment, which is really handy.

The upgrade experience was also quite easy.

Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point.

There were not too many on our list. VMware was the natural fit. We saw the automation. We liked it. Chef, technically, will do automation. It has connections into VMware. We preferred having the VMware automation handle it. Chef will do it, but it doesn't have as many things. We would have had to write a lot more tools for it. It's one of those things where, instead of Chef's being the one tool to rule them all, where we do that for everything, we branched out to VMware automation to handle its subset.

Jenkins is a Swiss Army knife. It will do literally everything. The problem is that you have to tell it to do everything. You have to build all of the features into it that you want. There's a language to do it, but it just says, "here's the entire toolbox, do whatever you want." It doesn't have as many pre-packaged things. VMware has the ability to build things, but it has a lot of things preconceived, which is very handy. If I just need the basics, I need to stand up some VMs, it already has those workflows built in. Jenkins doesn't have nearly as many things built in. They can both expand to what we need, but VMware had some pre-provided things that were very handy to get off the ground quickly.

vRA has a very nice toolset for being able to integrate with VMware. It is great for being able to automate things within the VMware environment. We probably need to learn more about it, so we can fully realize its use, what the plugins for other things are. But it's doing everything that we need for now. We've seen that it has room to grow with us.