VMware Aria Automation Reviews

The primary use case for deployment of vRealize Automation was to facilitate a service provider web portal front-end to our Hosted Private Cloud and Business Continuity solution. This is a fully automated virtualized SDDC, using VMware as the base hypervisor. We also incorporate NSX for network automation, vCenter Orchestrator for workflow execution, and additional software packages to support the service as a whole (vROps, Log Insight, Network Insight, NSX Manager, etc.).

Our core networking is made up of a spine/leaf architecture using Cisco ACI/APIC and our storage is virtualized behind a Hitachi (HDS). We use SnapMirror and NetBackup as our DR tools.

We needed vRA to easily integrate with our hypervisor, orchestration, security (tenant segmentation, PCI), workflows, custom code, and internal monitoring/management tools. Since we didn’t have time to develop our own web front-end during the development sprints, vRA saved considerable time and resource cycles. Its ability to easily integrate with all of the VMware cloud products as well as public cloud providers, like AWS and Azure, out-of-the-box, makes it an even more powerful tool.

vRealize Automation is improving the way we host and serve up our fully hosted private cloud solutions as a cloud service provider. It has created efficiencies in how we deploy, manage, monitor, and develop within the service. It provides velocity both from management and customer perspectives, from ingesting new catalog items, developing new workflows for additional features, and/or allowing customer access to multiple guest OS instances at scale in a shorter time frame.

From a service provider perspective, its ability to integrate with vRealize Operations and vRealize business management suites provides a window for being able to execute predictive and reactive analysis that you can use to automate your cloud solution from a resource, management, and/or customer perspective.

vRA provides that single pane of glass for our cloud tenants to deploy, monitor, access, and manage their VMs/guest operating systems. vRA allows a cloud service provider to quickly build out a web portal front-end interface that easily integrates with all of the VMware vRealize products, providing an all-encompassing cloud solution.

Additional features also allowed us, as the service provider, to configure branding options for the site itself, as well as full integration into the orchestration layer, including workflows, security control, reporting, billing for our cloud admins, tenant admins, and end-user (customer).

The most valuable feature is vRA’s ability to integrate whether with additional VMware vRealize suites or other vendors' cloud products.

Also, vRA in combination with vCenter Orchestrator makes it very easy to design, import, and deliver quality workflows and blueprints. These can be used for various functions within the cloud portal, from both a production as well as a business-continuity perspective. Examples include automated failover activities in combination with SRM and SRA Replication, VM deployments based on a catalog, being able to roll out an entire LAMP stack dev environment with the click of a button, or ingest and inject data into back-end CMBDs, etc.

Its fully integrates with network and storage virtualization via NSX and workflow development, and secure APIs are available to customize automation using other vendor tools such as Puppet, Chef and/or PowerShell.

There are many features that I find extremely valuable but vRA’s ability to be a central hub for all of the parts that make up a hosted private or multi-tenant cloud solution is extremely valuable. Ultimately, the outcome of this design is a highly available and agile solution with a wide array of integration that enables you to provide a fully automated, scalable private cloud solution that can meet the market and customer demands now and in the future.

I have listed some additional features below for general reference:

• Easy integration into other VMware-based vRealize cloud products via SSO
• Single pane of glass interface
• Parameterized blueprints to enhance reusability and reduce sprawl
• Policy-based optimization of virtual machine placement
• NSX integration enhancements
• Enhanced control of NSX-provisioned load balancers
• Enhanced NAT port forwarding rules
• NSX security group and tag management
• Automated high-availability for NSX Edge Services
• NSX Edge size selection
• Enhanced vRealize Business for Cloud integration – cloud nanagement platform
• Improvements to high-availability
• Health Service
• Configuration Automation Framework – Puppet Integration
• REST API

Most of the areas for which there was room for improvement are being covered in the latest 7.4 release which will include all new workflows for additional management of a customer’s cloud and infrastructure, directly from the Web portal itself. Some of these features today require the ability to build out your own workflows, which can become complicated if you don’t have the knowledge base.

VMware is aware of this and is making the next version of vRA and vCenter Orchestrator with this in mind. They are going to include additional granular-level controls from within the self-service portal itself. This will allow us, the service provider, to pass these additional features on to our customer base giving them greater control and management of their dedicated cloud.

Some of the new vRA 7.4 release features include:

• New and enhanced curated blueprints and OVF files
• New custom form designer
• Enhanced multi-tenancy capabilities
• vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager now extends to IT content management 
• New IT content lifecycle management

No issues with Stability now working on testing out the new version on NSXt via blueprints which will provide a whole new level of control and management for our SDDC virtualized networking stack.

No issues currently with scalability of the product or its uses cases it was implemented for.

One of the best support and architecture teams we have ever worked with from a vendor perspective. Very knowledgeable and on the cutting edge of virtualization.

The software setup is fairly easy but does require knowledge of the VMware product suite. The complexity comes in whether this a service or a dedicated infrastructure. Normally in service oriented infrastructures which are purpose built for multi-tenancy where you have multiple customers hosting multiple sub-tenant customers which require many layers of micro-segmentation and security to be built in. In a dedicated infrastructure you are building for one business or a single customer even though they have segmented sub-tenants such as account, IT, Operations etc it is all internal to that business. The level of micro-segmentation and security is much less in complexity to provide a final solution.

We implemented a majority of the service internally and only reach out to the vendors developers prior to making changes in the design that could impact rework to correct bottle knocks and development dead ends. 

From experience working with other service provider cloud products, VMware vRealize Automation Center is the best out-of-the-box solution to quickly build out your cloud portal and fully integrate it into your orchestration layers, as well as your compute and storage infrastructures. It can support multiple public clouds as well as hypervisors, providing that single pane of glass for management, operations, and reporting. I would give it a nine out of 10 as there is always room for improvement, since cloud is always evolving.

We are using it to offer self-service capabilities to our customers, a self-service portal.

One of the huge benefits, of course, is that it gives direct control to the customer. They have a direct knowledge of what they're using. They know the resources that they're taking advantage of and how much it's actually costing them to take stuff. 

It's helping our operations actually get closer to our applications team because they're now starting to build automation around the information they get from the operations teams; when they build blueprints, for instance. So they're able to build these bigger application stacks and there's a better understanding, from both sides, of what's required.

I would like to see easier custom components for it - that would be the best way I could word it. It's more like custom items for it.

Also, the authentication piece could always use some work. They should make it a little bit more dynamic, a little bit easier to deal with large-scale AD deployments. They need to make it a little more enterprise-ready. That is the one thing that kills us. I hate harping on the authentication issue, but it is huge.

We have run into some issues with stability. Primarily, some of the components seem to go out of whack with each other sometimes but, for the most part, it's been stable. It's just that when it fails, to be honest, it seems to fail spectacularly. It has to do heavily with the authentication portion of it. That is one of our biggest issues with it.

Beyond that, vRO can get out of sync with vRA. We've run into that every once in a while. But it's very rare, compared to the authentication problem.

It seems to scale well. We haven't really had too many problems. There have been a couple of issues, but they have mainly been with our external systems, not the solution itself. It has been able to handle the churn workload.

Technical support has been really good. There have been a couple of issues, but they've been fixed, mostly in an update or a hotfix. And they've been willing to jump on calls almost immediately with us.

The solution we were using, technically, was ServiceNow but it wasn't as good for our environment. It was very good at creating small cookie-cutter, but not for large-scale.

When looking for a vendor the most important thing is support. Absolutely. If I don't understand the product, I need to make sure I can get an answer as quickly as possible.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. Everything was connected. There were little "gotchas" here and there, but either they were easy to resolve with tech support or the documentation usually had some comments about them.

We have already seen the return on it. We've been able to cut down the cost, the time dealing with the back and forth between customers. We can say, “I've got your server, now you can do this,” or, “Here's your server, it's already been provisioned and ready to go for your app."

Make sure you think out the entirety of your deployment because it's hard to change components after the fact. Make sure that the initial deployment is good. We got that from VMware. They were very good at understanding the size of the environment and they tried to scale it for that environment.

I would rate this solution at about eight out of 10. It has been good but, as I said, there are some faults. Overall, it has performed phenomenally and the support behind it has made it absolutely useful.

The primary use case is to deploy an automated self-service portal for virtual machines for testers and developers to use. It is performing well.

It benefits the speed of our development, and the speed of anything we test and send through to production. It helps us get things to market faster. We're able to get the application out and be more agile with it.

It also raises the caveat for people who like VM sprawl. We have people who don't clean up after themselves.

The self service portal: People don't have to come to us to request something. They can just go fill out a form. Within 30 minutes, they have what they requested.

Once you get in there and start to understand the product, it is more intuitive. However, for somebody coming in from the outside, it takes a while to understand it. There is a lot of terminology. I am the primary admin on it, but I have some guys who tend to support me when I'm gone, and they try to find stuff on it. They don't know the best place to look because some of the terms don't make a lot of sense to them. This is more of a training issue than just getting better familiar with the product. I would like them to improve the product training.

We had a stability issue just this morning. This past weekend was patch day, so it was Monday and patches were done Saturday. The form didn't display properly, so I had to reboot the vRA. Due to the HA, we had to reboot the vRA appliances to get it working again. This might be because the database were ripped out from underneath of it and never reconnected. However, this is not a common occurrence.

Version 7.3 seems to be more scalable than previous versions.

I have talked to some folks out of Denver who do a lot of the vRA support. We also use a partner out in the UK who helps to support us. Both are responsive.

We brought in vRA as part of a new product offering for our customers. It's what we have used from the ground up to provision virtual machines.

I worked with the UK partner to set up the 7.3 version. The upgrade process 6.x to 7.3 was a significant effort. I'm hoping that 7.3 to the next version is much smoother.

I'm very interested in the integration with Puppet. However, my organization doesn't have the funding for something like Puppet right now. If VMware would integrate that feature set (Puppet) into vRA. That would be very awesome.

Find out what the requirements are and what do you want do with it, then see if it fits. If you're looking to deploy virtual machines through a self-service portal, this product works well.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It meets our requirements.

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.

The primary use is to automate the provisioning of applications that my organization uses as well as sells to customers.

The time for provisioning a VM for one of our clients was cut in half. It's a lot easier, now, for a customer to come and ask for a solution. We can provide that solution to that customer on the same day that the request was made. Previously, it would have taken us days to get it done and, back then, I would find a lot of instances where errors were made, things were forgotten. But with the automation, everything is already in a step-by-step approach, so it makes it easier for us to provision for the customer. And the customer also feels a lot more secure knowing that they've gotten what they've requested, easily.

Among the valuable features are the ease and speed of creating the VMs. Originally, we provisioned them manually and it would take us two days to do the provisioning. We have a lot of internal items that need approvals from lines of business, but with the automation, we are able to provision a VM with the click of a button, within seconds. It cut down on the time as well as cut down on the expense and employee cost in provisioning.

It is also intuitive and user-friendly. Those who use the tool, they are techy, they understand the technology. However, with vRealize we can have a Help Desk individual, who might not be that techy, provision the different elements quite easily, with no almost training at all. That in itself is a plus for us, especially with our having a high turnover of staff. In training, they see how easy it is to use. The time for training to bring them up to speed is very short and they are then able to provision the application.

I would like to see a simpler way of provisioning it. As is, we can automate the provisioning of a VM. However, when it comes to the external IPs, that is outside of VMware. But that has to be automated as well. If there was a way for us to have the virtual machines connect to switches that are external to VMware, that would be great. That way, it would handle the entire workflow from creation and provisioning of a VM to the connectivity to the external IP addresses which allow our customers to have access to the VM. Currently, that IP configuration has to be done manually.

It's stable. To my knowledge, we have not had any downtime. If there was any downtime, it had nothing to do with VMware. It could have been our infrastructure itself. Or what we might have had a misunderstanding regarding how to get certain things done.

We have not had the opportunity to scale - instances where we need to scale up or down - but I believe it's quite scalable.

Technical support is very responsive. It's more of a partnership, as opposed to a customer-client relationship. They're knowledgeable.

We didn't have a previous solution. Regarding this solution, I don't think the cost was a major factor in its selection, based on what it offers. It was more of, "Can it meet our growing needs, as well as what is the experience that is out there?" Based on those issues, I am sure that is why it was selected.

We have another department that is involved in the initial setup. But I understand it's not straightforward and it's not complex. They have gotten the required training and they've been utilizing it for some time now. They, themselves, are quite knowledgeable in the solution. Clearly, they have been trained professionally. They work with VMware to do the initial setup.

VMware is not the only solution that we have. We also have Huawei's version of virtual machines. But VMware is our leading solution.

VMware is great.

We have multiple criteria when selecting a vendor. But in general, we look at

• support
• experience
• cost.

I rate this solution at eight out of 10 because of the high level of functionality that it has. Why not a 10? Because there are some things that we wish we could have in the application, which the solution will have at some point, from what I'm seeing, but at the present, they're not there.

• We use it for our own private hosting. 
• We do services for departments within the State of California. 
• We have a large agency where we design and deploy an automation solution around vRealize Automation.

It's done most of what we needed for our customers. However, custom integration had to be done with certain things which are not exotic.

I would like to see more out-of-the-box blueprints and workflows for the rest of VMware's products and its portfolio.

We would like them to continuously improve the product with upgrades, as they have been.

The product is stable. When we used it early on, the changes were so rapid that we had to be careful with versioning. We probably still have to be pretty careful between versioning. The environment includes NSX, as well as vRA. Therefore, we have to pay attention to making sure everything is compatible.

Scalability hasn't been a problem. For the agency where we have it deployed, there are 4500 to 5000 VMs.

The first version that we deployed was not long after VMware had acquired the product. This was with version 6 or 6.2 for a production deployment. There was a lot of work to do with certificates, etc. However, the setup is getting better with each version. 

If you do a deployment for a proof of concept, it is simple. When you start to do a deployment where you need higher availability and more resiliency, then the complexity goes up drastically.

From the customer perspective, the value was worth it.

Be particular about requirements and what your goals are with the customer. There is a lot more to this product than doing a deployment, so make sure you understand the use cases.

We use vRealize Automation for all of our court locations and the customers are able to, on any day of the week, 24/7, provision VMs at will and maintain them.

As opposed to the old days where customers put in a ticket and they waited three or four days to get a server provisioned for them, today they can get servers provisioned in five minutes. So, the time to market for our customers is much better, much improved. It's multi-tenanted, meaning one court customer doesn't see the other court customer. They're very happy about that.

For time to market, it's absolutely incredible that a court customer can come in and, within a few days, have the service provided to them. They can then spin up one or 100 servers. Before, it would take them six months to a year to get there. So, for time to market, there are incredible savings. And there are cost savings from their perspective as well. They don't have to manage HVAC and space and cooling and all of those things that they used to have to do. Today, all they have to do is provision a server and manage their users, which is what they should be focused on.

We don't know what they run, we don't manage them. We just provide the infrastructure and they are saved from having to purchase infrastructure, having to purchase licensing, and having to maintain servers internally. So it's a win-win for the courts and for us. We love the product.

The most valuable features are that it's multi-tenant and the ability for scale.

From a customer perspective, they log in and they have Catalog: what services are available to them. They simply click on that and then there's an option: I can have a Linux server, I can have a Windows server. They select it, configure it, how many CPUs, how much memory, how much storage, and hit the button, submit. It's that easy.

I would like to see more integration to do things like DR, from a court perspective. Today, for us, SRM doesn't scale because each of our customers has a local vCenter environment as well as the vCenter in our environment. So we can't get SRM to scale to the point to which we need. From an integration perspective, DR inside of that would be good.

Also virtual desktops. I know you can spin up virtual desktops in vRA, but they're not thin-provisioned. I don't know if that's because the other product, Horizon View, is there, but it would be nice to see more integration. I know NSX is getting more and more integrated. We talked a little about vROps. I see that integration coming in.

But for vRA, DR would be a service we'd like to be able to offer to the customers, and it should be integrated, in my opinion, in vRA.

We scale, we have 180 plus customers in the environment and we have courts with as few as maybe four servers and as many as 80. So it's a very diverse range of systems and they absolutely love it. It scales great.

vRA is pretty reliable. We use technical support more for upgrades.

In the event that we've had issues, cluster-wise perhaps, within VRA, we've had to use technical support, but very seldom. I can't point to an outage related to vRA. The outage is probably something else related to either NSX or vCenter itself, perhaps the PostgreSQL Database is filling up. But vRA itself has scaled incredibly well for us.

When we've needed it, the support itself is good, very good.

You have architectural design questions that you have to address. We have multiple sites, multiple data centers. One of the fundamental questions is, how do you get HA in vRA? Do you have active-active, active-standby? Today, for vRA, we deploy it out of one site and we use remote execution managers at the other site. We're kind of in an active-standby mode, if you will. We're semi single-point-of-failure, in that respect. We probably should move to get an active-active scenario, but we're not there today.

But the setup was not too bad. It's nothing like a vROps, for example.

vRA is great. If you're looking for a multi-tenanted solution that is very easy, from a customer perspective, to use, and make it seamless for the customer to actually get what they're looking for, i.e. a server, developers love this. For the customer, from the time to market and ease of use perspectives, you can't go wrong with vRA. It's that good.

I would rate it at about nine out of 10. If they would integrate DR, that would bring it to a 10.