VMware Aria Automation Reviews

When managing vRA and trying to use the keep-it-simple model I found that setting up an access control system where anyone could request access with ease. I really thought that the ability to use AD groups throughout the product made it very easy to set up and grant user access at every level of the product.

The ability to extend vRA with vCO to add custom service designs was helpful in our deployment. It allowed us to eliminate blueprint sprawl.

We were able to reduce the delivery time of requesting a VM from three weeks to under 10 minutes using the vRealize Automation Suite.

The way this product handles logging has a long way to go. VMware addresses this by using agents to gather the logs from various locations and condense them for you.

Managing templates and the way they interact with blueprints needs improvement. If you change a template, you have to go change every blueprint that it was assigned to. There needs to be a template clustering or grouping object.

It lacks the expected seamless integration with vCenter. Objects like templates, storage clusters, or naming changes were not automatically reconciled by vCAC. This often led to full error logs when the only issue was a lack of syncing between vCenter and vCAC.

I began working with vRealize Automation (vCAC) two years ago, in mid-2014. The first six months of this time was spent designing use cases and configuring the out-of-the-box settings such as reservations, blueprints, templates, resource allocation, entitlements, and chargeback. For approximately the next year, we enhanced the out-of-the-box product using vCO/vRO to automate IPAM integration, DNS, monitoring, storage selection, template management, and tagging.

The system was already deployed when I arrived; it had been accomplished by VMware professional services. However, it was not configured, so that was my challenge: Determining the best way to set up business groups, allocate resources, user access and entitlement, create blueprints, manage templates, create the business catalog, and then add features and functions.

The product was stable if no changes were being made. Adding a new endpoint, agent, or fabric often led to some sort of related or sometimes unrelated errors. We were usually able to catch these in our integration environment and avoid them in production.

The system functioned stable with no real issues. The one problem we encountered was around data collection at remote sites.

We grew our deployment upwards of five sites and the system functioned as desired.

Our sales reps have always tried to sell us something such as professional services, then when we finally caved in and said yes, they never delivered the resources. Rating = 6/10.

We often solved the problem ourselves before support could answer our question. It seemed like a trial-and-error game with VMware’s support on this product. Try this, oh that didn’t work, try this, still no, let me ask someone, no reply for days, then the guy is off and a new guy comes in, start over. I spoke to the department manager multiple times. Rating = 7/10.

It was implemented by VMware professional services with an excellent level of expertise.

Prior to my arriving on the team, they compared this product to OpenStack and KVM.

VMware’s vRealize Automation is a good product, made for large enterprises. From my experience, vRA requires a highly skilled team to maintain, version upgrades without downtime are not possible, and overall it doesn’t scale fast. Every change requires weeks of planning and testing to see how the product is going to respond.

With the release of vRealize Automation 7, there is a deployment wizard that reduces the complexity of setup. Make sure you have very knowledgeable technical staff to operate this product on a daily basis. There are 15 roles that come with the product by default; it’s a lot to learn.

The vRealize Suite is a great product for those that want excellent governance and tight controls. Integration with Active Directory groups works flawlessly for both vRA business groups and entitlements.

In order to truly take advantage of the power of vRA/vCAC, you need vRealize Orchestrator. It’s a totally separate entity to maintain, patch, upgrade, connect to vCenter Server and of course manage its code.

One of the valuable features is controlling VM standards and server sprawl while at the same time providing the ability for end users to self-provision VMs. This is enabled by the blueprint and resource reclamation features.

We no longer need to waste cycles manually building VMs and experience delays associated with service requests attached to those build functions.

More detailed documentation on implementing feature sets and more examples of real world processes would help.

We have used this solution for less than three months.

We have not encountered any issues with stability yet.

We have not yet looked into scaling out the solution.

I have not needed to use technical support yet.

I did not previously use a different solution. This is the first automation tool that I have used.

The initial setup was straightforward. However, the more advanced capabilities of the tool are more difficult to understand and implement.

Be informed and reach out to your VMware sales rep to answer questions.

Take as much training as you can before trying to deploy and use the product.

The ability to programmatically describe the desired state of a single, or an entire fleet of servers, on-premises, and in a cloud environment.

SaltStack gave us very useful automation tools that allowed us to standardize our environment, move at a much faster pace through repeatable deployments, and self-documentation of our infrastructure.

It allows us to describe the desired state of our entire fleet of servers through simple to understand syntax and templates all available at a single place.

This is great for things like documenting what a single machine or a group of machine does and how they are configured. It is also good in the event that one of them is lost and a new one needs to be provisioned quickly.

Instead of setting it up by hand, we end up telling it "you are this type of machine" and SaltStack will take care of ensuring that the machine becomes what is expected.

It also means that any machine of "this type" will be setup in a consistent manner thus avoiding unexpected surprises that could potentially become the cause of outages.

Each new version seems to bring a new set of bugs to the table and upgrading is risky, especially for a tool at the core of the operations and infrastructure.

A hardened set of tests would be much appreciated.

We have encountered many bugs during upgrades in the past and it seemed to me like those could have been caught by the developers at a much earlier stage then after doing a widespread release.

We have used this solution three years in production

We have encountered several issues when we upgraded to 2015.8. Some of those were eventually fixed by the community and through fixes we submitted to the project.

We have managed a fleet of hundreds of servers without any scalability issues on the horizon.

We have not requested technical support.

We evaluated Chef, CF Engine, and Puppet and we ultimately decided on SaltStack because:

• It is written in Python: Introspecting the code base, committing fixes and improving on the tools were easy for us to do.
• The amount of tools already baked in the product and the extensive list of formulas made available by the community.

The initial setup was simple enough to get started and see the benefits that the solution brings. There are many tutorials available to get someone started.

Unfortunately, our experience is limited to the open-source (community) version. We have no information in regards to the enterprise offering.

We evaluated CF Engine, Chef, Puppet, Capistrano, and Fabric.

Take some time to learn the types of problems it can solve and you will easily see the benefits that it can bring.

The ability to quickly setup the self-provisioning of vSphere VMs was one of the primary drivers for us to use this product over others. Additionally, the product has several plugins and an almost limitless potentional for further automation using vRealize Orchestrator. Lastly, its integration with NSX is superb and very much a critical part of our VM provisioning.

We are using the following vRealize suite products: Log Insight, Operations, Orchestrator, Business for Cloud, and Automation.

We have given internal IT developers the ability to self-provision VMs for development and testing. This has been a hit with our staff. I have talked to several of them involved in the POC and it has drastically increased their efficiency since they do not need to wait on IT Ops. Additionally, the publishing of templates, firewall rules, and software installs in the system has increased the communication and transparency between IT development and IT operations.

As with all recent VMware products, more focus needs to be done on QA. I encountered far too many bugs for an enterprise product. Additionally, more native vRA integration for various parts of the VM lifecycle will take some of the onus off the engineer to learn so much about Orchestrator.

I used version 6.2.0 for five months and version 7.0.1 for 11 months.

We did have stability problems. I encountered several issues with the product after the upgrade from 6.2.0 to 7.0.1. I would highly recommend that anyone looking to move to 7.x from 6.x should do a migration rather than an upgrade. VMware did not do enough QA on the product in order to handle in-place upgrades.

We did not encounter scaling issues because we had a limited release of the product since it was a POC.

Technical support from the frontline technicians is very good, but if your problem has to be routed to “engineering” then be prepared to wait for days (sometimes weeks) for resolution.

We did not have an existing automation product.

We already owned vRealize Automation as part of our suite licensing. We did evaluate the Cisco UCS Director product for one month and found it too complex to setup.

The initial deployment of vRealize Automation was not complex, but it was tedious and error prone. This was the 6.2.0 version and these issues have been fixed in the 7.x versions.

I would advise heavy VMware shops to look into getting suite licensing and leverage the VMware ELA framework if possible. Additionally, I would highly recommend that NSX is purchased in conjunction with vRealize Automation in order to get the most out of the product.

We evaluated Cisco UCS Director.

Do your research ahead of time and try to find others in your area who have already deployed the product. Your VMware rep can usually provide contacts that may be able to provide advice. Additionally, start talking to internal developers at your company and see what pain points they have and how automation can help. This communication will also help when you start publishing catalog items in automation, because a lot of more advanced workflows will require knowledge of Javascript and PowerShell. Lastly, start working with Orchestrator now. It has the steepest learning curve, but it is critical to understand how it works for advanced workflows. Orchestrator is already included with your vCenter licensing.

• Bulk/Remote execution
• Event/Reactor system
• Configuration Management

These features serve as the most critical pieces for automating anything, not just state, but also execution and remediation.

I don’t want to build automation that just does a thing or two. I want to build automation that is intelligent, part of the fabric of our environment, and is somewhat self-sustaining. I think SaltStack can help me do this.

SaltStack provides the capability necessary to truly streamline our SDLC and environment management. From a high level, it allows coders to code, testers to test (automated testing too), and admins to admin in the most inter-connected and effective way possible.

• Web UI
• Maintenance of their code

We have been using this for three years.

There are some issues here and there, such as nuances with Windows and minions ‘falling asleep’, but its manageable.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I would give technical support a rating of 8/10.

I was using more of a Frankenstein automation solution previously, and the reason for switching was the capability of SaltStack, performance, and ramp up time (ease of use).

The setup was pretty straightforward. It took some time getting familiar with all the configuration options and playing around with pillars and grains. On the whole, it was relatively easy to get going.

I think they are going to have a tough time with the Enterprise licensing. So much can be done with the Open Source side, and especially for smaller shops. I personally think the pricing for Enterprise is hard to justify.

We looked at Chef, Ansible, and Puppet.

Do it and take full advantage of its capability. Be creative and automate everything you can with it.

Orchestration capabilities are the most valuable feature of this solution.

Provisioning time is reduced from two weeks to 60 minutes.

• Better integration with the public cloud and DevOps toolset

I have used this solution for three years.

We did not encounter any major stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

The technical support is very good; they have come a long way in supporting vRA. Now, issues are being resolved in hours.

The installation for vRA 6.x was complex, but for vRA 7.x was simple.

There are so many features that this product has, so evaluate all of them.

From day 1 that it went into production, we started seeing its benefits.

We are using the vRealize Orchestrator heavily.

The most valuable features are the EBS (Event Broker Subscription) and NSX integration with BP designer.

Multiple BPs can be deployed with EBS and PG (Property Group) in a lot less time.

IaaS components: I have an assumption that all the IaaS components will be migrated to a Linux appliance, then I think the communication between the Linux appliance and the IaaS components will happen faster and smoother.

We have used this version for almost 1.5 years. We previously used version 7.0.

Sometimes, we encountered stability issues, but they were negligible.

Sometimes, we encountered scalability issues but they were negligible.

Very Good.

Technical support was good.

This is the first product we used.

Installation was straightforward and simple .

It’s very helpful for us to have this product. We already gained the benefits after installation and configuration.

We did not look at alternatives; this is the ultimate product.

Use it for automation in order to achieve Agility, Efficiency and Control over the IT Service Delivery..

Integrating this tool with other technologies/third-party tools, that are not part of the VMware family, is the most valuable feature of this solution.

If we have a product that allows us to communicate with different products that are not part of its family and make things happen in their application, it is a wonderful thing.

It resembles the benefits of cloud computing and is achieving more things by using only one product.

We can automate the infrastructure services, which in turn reduces manual work, saves time, and eventually leads to more productivity.

It can be used effectively for IaaS and PaaS. Thus, there is only one type of software to be managed by various departments/teams in the organization.

vRA is a very good product, that supports different vendors connecting to it. Currently, it feels like a complete product and I don’t have any areas that need to be improved.

It automatically becomes large, when we need to connect different vendors to it.

It can be made larger, so that the organizations can also use it for physical infrastructure.

I have used this solution for a year.

We did encounter some stability issues. I found the GUI that we use in vRA to be unstable sometimes. For example, there was no proper update of the tasks that were provided. Sometimes it took a little longer to provide new updates.

I have not approached technical support yet.

It was easy to set up this product.

As soon as I started using this tool, I started seeing results immediately. This product is flexible and easy to implement. Its multi-tenancy support makes it more effective for use with different customers.