VMware Aria Automation Reviews

We use it mainly for cloud automation with private cloud solutions. It works fine with the exception of integration with public clouds and multi-tenant data centers.

It has been pretty successful for many of my customers so far.

vRA is user-friendly. It has the same layout and walk-through GUI, similar to other VMware products.

• Orchestration
• Out-of-the-box integration with Database-as-a-Service
• Storage-as-a-service
• Backup-as-a-service

More integration and out-of-the-box use cases would be nice.

It is very stable, especially for high availability features.

It has some limitations for scalability, especially for remote data center management. For some components, everything need to be centralized.

We only used tech support during the PoC and design phases, but they were good.

The initial setup is complex. There are too many components to integrate, especially when we integrated with different storage types and backup vendors. All the integration made it more complex.

We haven't upgraded yet.

If the use case matches, it is the perfect product for you.

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.

• Automation
• The flexibility to actually build different components, in terms of virtual machines.

Our group, we do mostly the virtualization and a creation of systems. Therefore, it's not a cookie cutter build of a template, and that's it, it's more dynamic for our group.

It's increased the efficiency. There's less manual work through vRA. Now, Orchestrator is the one doing most of the work and making everything more automated.

I would like to see this additional features in the next release: The ability to have more dynamic forms. Some of the static forms that vRA provides in the XaaS form, they are good, but they could be a little more efficient. For instance, the calendar selections should have the ability to only go to a certain spot, as opposed to going out to something like 2040, for the requests.

Stability is really good. Once you got everything setup, even in its HA form, it's pretty stable.

Not as good, but there are some components in vRA that you can scale out a lot more quickly than other pieces.

In our group, more of the web solutions and the blog posts helped to grow our ability to use vRA.

They are always reachable by person and knowledgeable.

But because it's such a dynamic solution, at times VMware does have to go gather more resources in order to figure out the solution to things.

We had a previous VMware product called Lab Manager, then we had grown out of that box and decided to go with vRA.

I was involved in the setup. In the original version 5, it was very complex. Version 6 got a little better. Version 7 is much more improved.

In the first deployment, they sent an in-house team.

Microsoft.

Advice for looking at VM solutions:

Definitely research the product and see what's out there.

Look at blog posts of vRA. There's quite a few resources that you can search and find on the web which will basically get you on the ground running for deployment, even simply XaaS forms.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Support
• The cost is always important.
• The ability of their features to match with ours.

For a few years, when we needed a server, it took us three months to deliver one. Now, we can bring one up in approximately 15 minutes.

Our delivery is now very fast.

It's very stable.

We're satisfied with the scalability of the solution.

They are very good. We have an account manager. We use the account manager, if necessary, and have with a relationship with them, so they can respond very quickly.

If you are looking to implement the product, do it together with VMware. It was a good experience for us.

Multi-vendor cloud IT infrastructure personalization, resource provisioning and configuration, and it automates application delivery and container management.

It provide us a common console to manage workloads on our private and public cloud infrastructures.

Better integration with Azure cloud and Google Cloud Platform.

Two years.

vRA 7.2 onwards is quite a stable product.

New versions are quite scalable, but when it comes to managing a Telco environment, it has bottleneck.

A nine out of 10.

We have been using the older version (VMware vRealize Automation Center).

It's a quite straightforward setup in comparison with products in the same domain.

It's worth each penny.

No, we have been using VMware suite for a long time and we are pretty much comfortable with it.

Go for it. It's a perfect product of a heterogeneous environment.

Fast provisioning and integration with public cloud. Our customers want the VMs to be up and running as early as possible. Also, some of our customers need their workloads to be running on the public clouds like AWS to minimize the cost. Using vRA, we can easily integrate AWS and can provision VMs on them.

Fast provisioning.

I don’t see configuration management feasibility. I think there should be a configuration management tool on the user dashboard. It can be used to patch/update the servers provisioned through vRA for an inbuilt facility.

We have seen couple of bugs.

Not really.

Good.

Good.

Yes. Poor vendor support and less stability.

It was straightforward but they still need to improve the IaaS components.

Compared to other vendors in the market the licensing cost is OK.

Yes. HPE.

Go for it.

Multi-tenancy is one of the best features for configuring a single portal for multiple departments/customers. Multi-tenancy allows us to use a single vRA portal to configure multiple tenants with their individual URLs. Also, this feature allows us to use shared infrastructure for multiple tenants.

The front end portal for end users, which communicates with infrastructure endpoints.

The infrastructure part and VM reconfigure need improvement so that the end user can smoothly perform all the tasks which they are directly performing on the endpoints.

Three years.

No.

No.

Excellent.

No.

Straightforward.

This is one of VMware's best products for automation.

We use it for the automation of VMs. It is performing okay.

We use it to deploy databases and testing environments. It spins up quickly and breaks down fast.

The automation is consistent.

The front-end is user-friendly and intuitive.

It is very difficult to make the automation work well. This is not product specific, but more due to environment and procedures that we have in our company.

The back-end has a steep learning curve.

The stability is good.

I used the technical support during upgrades. They came onsite and are very technical. They are very good

I am not aware of a previous solution. We moved to vRA because the business wanted quick, repetitive deployments.

It was a complex setup. We had to use the consultant from VMware to make the solution work well.

The upgrade was a very difficult task. We had to break everything down and build it up new in a new version.

We used a consultant from VMware for the deployment.