VMware Aria Automation Reviews

• Reliability
• Scalability

The product itself is future rich, because of the HA componentry. The DRS VMotion gives you the ability to lose physical hardware. It can predict to move workloads before hardware failures. That is a new feature with VMware. It senses the hardware is having issues. Another feature is it now has predictability built into it, which is something new.

The costing and pricing models of their product.

More than 15 years.

It is a stable product. You can run your Tier 1 and Tier 2 apps on it.

No issues.

When you are calling support, I would be considered more of an advanced user. When I am calling support, I have pretty much leveraged everything they have, like knowledge based articles and that type of thing. The support has been very good. When you call support, it actually works. Sometimes you get bounced around, and sometimes, you don't. I call support, and I get an answer, then you just kind of move on. 

We did have a previous solution 15 years ago, but we switched due to scalability.

The initial setup was straightforward. My mom could install it. 

Pricing needs to be improved.

No other options were evaluated. It is all based on the requirement, whichever problem you are trying to solve. A lot of the times the stuff I deal with is more on the enterprise side (larger). The product has been stellar. 

I have used the SMB Market as well; small media markets without issues. 

VMware is the pioneer of virtualization. They are way ahead of everybody else. Some of the other products have caught up, which has been fantastic because it has driven innovation. It is forcing the industry to evolve more quickly, innovate, and come up with better solutions. 

It is a very popular product. You have to do is you have to have a good understanding it. You can't just jump into it, especially half in. You have to understand what you are trying to solve. Have a good understanding of what you are trying to set up, like a defined solution.

• Automation
• Ability to deploy heavy workloads quickly
• Ease of use and the flexibility

• Ability to mimic more VCD functionality.
• Ability to share blueprints among tenants, or have a master blueprint repository, so you don't have to move the stuff between tenants. That's probably the number one feature.
• Improve functionality that we're looking for longterm.

It is very stable. It works well. It is easy to use once it's deployed, and is also easy to deploy.

We're starting small, but we see the ability to scale quickly and easily.

It's very good. I noticed with vRA, they are starting to ramp up more support. It started off slow, but it seems to be getting better.

Early on with version 6, it was very complex. When 7 was released, it was easier. Now, with 7.3 and cloud foundations (and everything), it's a lot easier.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

1. Reputation.
2. Support, reliability, and longevity of the company.

• Automation
• Catalog
• Blueprints

Probably more stability and just ensuring everything works out-of-the-box.

There is still a bit of a gap in terms of product maturity based on all the forums and things that we've seen, so we would like it to be much more mature than what we currently have.

There's some issues that we've encountered while standing it up.

As of now, it seems like it does scale. However, we haven't hit the point where we are deploying in a large scale.

So far, we haven't had too many issues reaching out to tech support.

It's fairly complex. The documentation continuously evolves and the product seems to change every couple months. It's trying to piece together different forums and documentations to figure out how to get a working solution.

Most important criteria for selecting a vendor: Brand recognition, but also VMware being the biggest. We thought that might be the best route in terms of support and community.

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.

There are a lot of different benefits with this product, because there are a lot of things that we're trying to automate. There's another guy within my group, he's the administrator of vROps. He's been able to implement a lot of things, and help us script things for monitoring, for patching, and a whole lot of things. It's definitely got a value and it saves us a lot of time.

I could see improving by just knowing how to script a little better, but other than that, I think the product itself is fine.

Very stable solution. We've had very good luck with it.

It's scalable. There are a lot of different things you could do with it. Really it's whatever you want to do. Whatever you want to put your mind to, to make it scale, it'll do it.

It's good. It's excellent. We haven't had any trouble. If there is something that we have trouble with, call them, and we're on the phone with engineering. They're good about taking care of us right away.

It's pretty straightforward. You can read some of the white papers on it. It's not difficult.

It's a great product. It saves us a lot of time. It cut down a lot of late nights for us.

vRA is a great tool. It gives a lot of flexibility. It gives the customer an experience to automate their processes, their provisioning process. So, we widely adopt that into our environment to automate a lot of provisioning processes to automate the VM provisioning. Thus, it's a great tool, which actually gives a lot of flexibility in terms of provisioning and orchestration.

I would say maybe a better interface. It looks very plain. So, a more user-friendly interface, so the vRealize Automation tool could be improved.

It is a very stable solution. It's a state-of-art kind of solution. It gives a lot of flexibility. It's customizable. You can tailor it according to how you want vRA to work for your organization. So it's a very stable tool. It's a very cool tool.

• It's scalable. You can scale it to whatever you want to do.
• It's customizable. You can tweak it to how you want to use the tool.

The tech support is pretty awesome. Whenever you have issues, you engage them. They are on top of the issues, and they get a resolution for you. It's a top-notch type of support from VM tech support whenever you face issues with vRA.

It is straightforward. It's not very complicated. Most of the tools that VMware develops are pretty straightforward. You just click off buttons. It's easily understandable, and it's easy to implement and use it.

It's one of the cool tools in the industry. Go get VMware.

• The agility that it offers.
• The flexibility that it offers.
• The scalability that it offers for us to serve our end customers.

That's really helpful.

At this point in time, it's support for multiple platforms. It already supports certain platforms, so extending that to the multiple cloud platforms and services, that's where we are looking to go.

We have been using it for the last couple of years, and it has pretty much worked for us without any issues.

It is very scalable. We are currently using some 20,000 workloads across multiple customers.

VMware support has been very helpful throughout the journey of using all of the VMware products. I rate them five out of five.

The basic setup is pretty easy, but then into the next phases it all really depends on what services you want your end customers to subscribe to. Depending on that, the complexity will vary.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor include:

• What is it really offering, for us as a customer, and for our end customers?
• How much flexible they have in understanding our needs and accommodating those needs.
• Support: How much support are they ready to offer, what are their capabilities in terms of getting us live, through the product lifecycle, and then helping us manage that product as we move along?

I think vRA stands at the top of the list of the products that we rate, because of the problems that it has helped us to solve, in terms of providing the services to our end customers. I think it has helped us a lot.

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.