VMware Aria Automation Reviews

We use it for monitoring.

The benefits include a smoother migration to cloud services and access to new features, but overall, it doesn’t seem to have a significant impact.

I like its capacity, the self-service portal, and operational automation. The most beneficial feature is that it saves time when creating new virtual machines, deploying security measures, and writing infrastructure code, making things easier and faster. We have a standard we follow, reducing the time spent repeatedly rewriting everything.

The integration is a bit tight. I need the right package to use it properly. The new automation processes for VMware are messy, and support could be better.

We’ve been using VMware Aria Automation for six months.

Overall, it’s stable.

I don’t have complaints about its scalability; it seems fine.

When we call support, responses take a long time, and urgent issues can’t wait days for a reply.This leads to operational troubles.

Negative

We evaluated four different options, including Nutanix for virtualization and Ansible for automation.

The experience was not straightforward; we used the Gradios version before, so it wasn’t a new experience, but it was typical.At first, we received direction from VMware technicians, but after the first month, we had to handle everything ourselves. It took longer than expected because of hardware issues and is not fully complete yet.

I would rate it high because, compared to other solutions, VMware’s pricing is quite expensive. VMware products have become significantly more costly in recent years, leading to higher costs.

If you can afford it, I would recommend it. Its integration with virtualization and high availability features make it valuable. I don’t see a direct integration of AI; it seems more about resource management and efficiency than advanced AI features.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

My customers use it to build their private cloud infrastructure.

VMware Aria Automation improves the IT service delivery process. It can automate manual operations, but you need a development team with coding or programming skills to develop blueprints and automation workflows. 

While Aria Automation is a good product for that purpose, we haven't had many customers use it due to its cost and the development skills required. That's a challenge to consider.

Aria Automation can manage some aspects of public clouds, but I have no experience with that. We only use it for private cloud development.

The Blueprints feature is a good one. This feature supports the installation and improvement of automation processes. 

It includes a user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface that assists customers in automating routine tasks without the need for coding. These are simple routines, though.

The self-service functionality allows customers to provision VMs with a single click. They don't need to submit a request to the IT team and wait for them to create the VM. This reduces waiting time for the automation process.

I would like to see better integration capabilities. Maybe if they could develop libraries within Aria Automation for simpler integration with other third-party solutions, instead of just basic integration.

So, integration with backup solutions would be helpful. 

We have been working with this solution for five years. We used to work with the vRealize Automation version, but the name changed earlier.

It was also called VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite.

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten.

We have medium-sized businesses as our clients for this solution. 

The customer service and support are okay because the quality of the support varies from case to case. 

Neutral

The initial setup is difficult. I would rate my experience with the initial setup a six out of ten, with ten being easy. 

It is difficult because of load balancing and we need to prepare information and certificates, and there's a learning curve involved. In the past, this product didn't require any load balancers to deploy or certificates for deployment, but now it does.

For the setup only, we need two or three days. But for configuration to edit a routine or test a routine, it can take anywhere from maybe one to two weeks.

So, two to three days for setup and then one to two weeks for deployment.

I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive. 

I recommend the solution because we've worked with it for many years, but we only have two or three customers because of the price. So, we can't start many projects.

However, I would recommend this solution for the automation function itself, and how to group and publish those groupings is quite easy for customers to learn with Aria.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We use the product for automation purposes for high CPU utilization. We can create a playbook using it.

The product saves a lot of time and cost for us. It has valuable features for creating a playbook.

VMware Aria Automation could be more user-friendly. It is complex to use for new users. It should have automated tools or drag-and-drop functionality.

We have been using VMware Aria Automation for one year.

It is a stable product.

We have three VMware Aria Automation users in our organization. It is a scalable product.

The technical support team takes time to reply to queries. 

Neutral

We have used Dell IDPA before. We switched to VMware Aria Automation for more flexibility. It integrates with many VMware products, including Nutanix and ESXI data centers and hypervisor.

The deployment is easy. It takes a day to complete. It requires two to three executives from the network, data center, reporting, and implementation department to work on it. It can be integrated on-premises and on the cloud. 

The product is easy to maintain. One executive can maintain 500 virtual machines. It needs two more executives to manage more than 500 different cloud accounts.

They should provide one license for all the sub-products. For example, if we purchase VMware Aria Automation, they should also add a license for VMware vRealize Automation. It is tricky to upgrade and manage multiple licenses together. We have to pay additional costs for support services for critical issues.

I rate VMware Aria Automation a seven out of ten. They should provide only one license and free support services until the product’s life cycle ends. Also, its support team should respond faster.

The product's most valuable features are ease of automation.

The product's features for hybrid cloud integration could be better. It should allow us to fetch reports from anywhere. Additionally, there should be better options for integration with mobile security platforms.

We have been using VMware Aria Automation for three years.

I rate the platform's stability a six out of ten. It could be better.

We have 89-90 VMware Aria Automation users in our organization. It is suitable for enterprises. I rate the platform's scalability a five out of ten. There could be automated features included for it.

We contacted the technical support team regarding migrating the workload. It is time-consuming and takes them a week to complete. The team could respond faster.

Neutral

I rate the initial setup process a seven out of ten. It takes ten days to complete. We build the platform according to the specific requirements of customers. Later, we transfer operating systems data on virtual machines.

VMware Aria Automation is expensive. They offer a bundle of products included, which we have to pay unnecessarily without a use case. I rate its pricing a ten out of ten.

I rate VMware Aria Automation a seven out of ten.

I'm not a decision-maker at my current firm. It is a huge company called Allianz Technology. We have vRealize deployed, and I'm part of the administration team. We manage our infrastructure and compute storage as well as the virtualization part with vRA.

We have a lot of internal customers and entities of Allianz whom we treat as customers. They make use of the internal cloud portal to spin up VMs and manage them.

Our vRA 8.0 is a distributed deployment in Europe, the US, and Australia.

vRA has helped almost every team. For example, it has helped the development team and our training team.

We are using vRealize Orchestrator (vRO).

vRA helps automate deployment for developers. We do a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment so it will suit each of our customers. So, we have different business units who have their own templates. Some customers might choose a backup solution, then some others will be choosing another one. All of these have been orchestrated. 

Some customers will also opt for a disaster recovery (DR) solution. If they choose the disaster recovery service during the deployment of the VM, then a DR solution will be offered to them and a VM will be created on our DR site. Everything will be synced through the VMware service.

This solution has made it very simple for developers. In a way, a layman or NOC guy can deploy a VM. Once they are familiar with the offerings, they can just deploy it without knowing what is going on in the back-end.

We are migrating from vRA version 7 to 8, but the migration is really hectic and time-consuming. There are no straightforward paths to migrate. We are doing an entirely new deployment to go to vRA version 8.0, then somehow get all of the VMs to vRA 8.0. Therefore, it would have been great if VMware had some solutions to upgrade from vRA 7 to 8 seamlessly. This includes the management of all the objects or VMs from the older version. Unfortunately, it is not there.

We have been using vRA for more than three years. Previously, we were on vRA 7.4. Currently, we are operating everything in vRA 8.0. We have been migrating our entire managed VMs and everything to vRA 8.0, which is an ongoing process.

vRA has been pretty stable, unlike vSphere infrastructure. With vSphere, while nothing has happened, there are a number of integrations that could break. However, on the vRA front, it has been good and stable. There hasn't been a single situation where we have run into a big issue and had an outage, which is great. 

It is too early to come to a conclusion on vRA 8 because it is still getting migrated, but the initial impression is good. It is better than vRA 7.

vRA 8 is really scalable. There are a lot of integrations that have been much easier compared to vRA 7. For example, Orchestrator is now built into vRA rather than being a Java-based application, like it was in vRA 7, which has been good.

In our organization, there are around 20,000 to 30,000 users. These could be project managers, application owners, etc.

Their technical support is good. Whenever we have had issues, the VMware support team was spot on, especially with vRA. However, this has not been the case so much with their other solutions, especially like vROps, where we had been having issues for a couple of months without any actual fixes.

At my previous firm, I worked with vCloud Automation Center (vCAC). vCAC only evolved into the vRA later on. While primitive, it was stable and good to use, though not very customizable.

vRA was the first solution of this type for my current organization.

vRA version 7 was very complex to set up. vRA version 8 is pretty straightforward, whereas version 7 was very complex. It could have been better, but they are on the right path with things.

It has been a very major upgrade. We are doing a lot of other customizations and a strategy session, along with this vRA 8 migration, bringing all our storage solutions to a single vendor. All of this is happening in the background. Earlier, we had a different backup solution for different locations, like APAC and the US. That is why it is taking a very long time to do our migration to vRA 8.

This vRA 8 migration is just one part. There are any number of other things that are coming together with this vRA 8 upgrade. So, it has been complex and happening for over two months. We are hoping to combat it by next month.

We have an internal architecture team. They decide how a deployment should go at a high level. Once the decision is made, only then we will implement it. They considered options, like there should be a single portal for global customers' entry within Allianz. Whenever they choose a location within the portal, the request should go to that location. That is why they went for a single distributed deployment this time. Earlier, it was an entirely different instance for each location, which was totally not connected in any way.

Now, it's a distributed deployment, which means if a customer logins in using a single portal. They just use the drop-down location for wherever they want the VMs to be, then the request will go towards the deployment of that location and dispatch properly on the front-end. 

We have our own DevOps team who does all the orchestration, integration, and whatever other integrations that we want to do. We will check with the vendor of that application, along with VMware, then plan accordingly. We have a lot of integrations with applications, like Brokerage and ServiceNow.

We need 10 to 15 staff members for deployment and maintenance. We need an architect, an engineering team to do all the customizations, a monitoring team, a DevOps team, and a support team for any post-deployment support of vRA.

vRA's automated processes have reduced infrastructure provisioning time. Whenever a customer builds a VM, they can choose the number of instances. They can just click the drop-down, select the number of instances, and that many VMs will be deployed in a single go. This has been great because previously they were afraid of doing it manually. Now, every time the technical team needs to deploy, they can provide all the parameters. Its automated processes have brought down the overall time to a fourth or fifth from our previous manual deployment's time.

This is just for supporting our internal needs for all our internal customers. So, we don't actually make any money from this cloud offering.

We evaluated Cisco ONE Cloud and Nutanix Calm. We were using VMware solutions in the past. We received good feedback about vRA and that is why we went for it.

Cisco had a lot of limitations on its networking. They needed their own virtual piece rather than any generic or VMware-default distributed switch. That was a major limitation. For the Cisco switch, they own the hardware layer so you need Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS). Cisco UCS doesn't have that much of a customer base, so the development would be slow and have even buggier fixes. Any release for bug fixes or patches would take time

There are different AWS and Azure services, but these are not connected with our vRA as of now. In future, we will maybe look for some type of hybrid setup.

For applications, we are still provisioning the manual way after deployment. We have included some of the basic applications into our blueprints. So, they will get deployed along with the VM spin-up. If we haven't integrated the application centrally, then it is because we didn't get the customer approval because they felt like some customizations may need to be done during each deployment of the application. Therefore, they didn't agree to the integration of applications into the blueprints.

We are trying to onboard other internal customers into our vRA. We have been onboarding customers even onto vRA 7. So, it is a never-ending process because it is a huge company.

I would rate this product as a nine out of 10.

We use SaltStack for configuration management, where we maintain configurations of 150 servers. It also helps with file integrity monitoring. 

We monitor the configurations against CIS standards. We run CIS benchmarks and maintain configurations with higher CIS values for each server. 

SaltStack's features are minimal. 

I have been using the solution for 14-15 years. 

We have had no issues with the tool's scalability. 

We don't have much interaction with the tech support team. 

I rate the tool's initial deployment a five out of ten. I rate adding a new server to an existing system a nine out of ten. It has pretty decent documentation for installation. 

SaltStack is an open-source product. 

I rate the product an eight out of ten. It is a strong and flexible solution. 

I am working on the architectural and design part of the product. We use it for capacity planning, reclamations of reports, infrastructure monitoring, alerts monitoring, and notifications.

There are many features in the solution. We can map all the service profiles. We can do the scripting in third-party applications. The solution provides multi-level approval features to download VMware workloads.

It also provides features like multi-tenancy. The tool seamlessly integrates with private and public clouds. There are a lot of good features in the solution. The product is very user-friendly.

The costing models in the previous version have been moved to vRO. The process is not simplified in vRO. I don't like this change in the new version.

Currently, I am using the latest version of the solution.

Once the product is customized and implemented, it is stable. We need a lot of effort during the initial stages.

It is a scalable tool. We can scale it horizontally and vertically. Our organization has plenty of users, including internal and external customers.

We use break/fix support. We don't get problems very often. Whenever there is an upgrade or customization, we use break/fix.

Setting up the primary components is easy, but sometimes scripting is complex. It is not a simple product. It is vast. Deployment, planning, mapping to the business requirement, and including the stakeholders take a lot of time. Modifying the product according to the business is challenging. Business is very dynamic, and we must tailor the features based on the business needs. We use a private cloud.

A lot of information gathering is required to deploy the product. We need to understand the business requirement, demonstrate various features, integrate many endpoints, customize the tool, integrate backup, and integrate scripting to auto-install various software. Deploying and configuring the solution takes a lot of time. It is a full-time job. It requires a dedicated team of people. There are a lot of components. It is challenging.

We need an experienced team to maintain the solution.

ROI is purely defined by how individuals define their goals to meet their business expectations. ROI can be easily achieved if we do proper planning. If we don't map the technology to the business, ROI cannot be achieved. That is the drawback. If you map the technology clearly to the business requirement, document the process, and approve the proof of concept with all the stakeholders, then deploying the solution makes sense. It would get better results in terms of ROI.

The tool is expensive since it is an enterprise product. The cost and the business requirement must be justified before deploying the solution in the cloud environment.

Before deploying the product, we must have a blueprint of how we want to use it. Then, we can plan it accordingly. We must plan the organizational needs before deployment. It will ensure minimum changes while deploying because it needs a lot of integration. A lot of third-party vendors will be involved during customization. However, having proper planning, knowledge, and technical abilities and integrating multi-skill vendors will make a perfect blend of technology for a better experience. Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.

We use SaltStack to configure virtual machines, ESXi hosts, or any Windows product.

The product’s most valuable feature is its ability to provide environmental security.

There could be better initial documentation for the product.

We have been using SaltStack for six months now.

It is a stable product. I rate its stability an eight out of ten.

The platform scales well. We can configure multiple systems. I rate its scalability a ten out of ten.

We can contact VMware support. But we find out the solutions ourselves. Although, its online documentation needs a lot of improvement.

Negative

We have deployed SaltStack on a hybrid cloud. It is difficult to set up and requires one executive to operate the deployment. I rate the process a six out of ten.

It is an open-source product.

The product works great for changing configurations. I recommend it for the DevSecOps environment. I rate it a seven out of ten as it is not user-friendly.