VMware Aria Automation Reviews

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.

I use the solution in my company for our day-to-day tasks, like the creation of VMs, policy assignments, and some network mappings to the virtual machines, which are all done through the tool's automated policies in Aria Operations.

The most helpful feature of the product stems from the fact that you can create a lot of virtual machines automatically using the tool's automation features.

The high price of the tool is an area of concern where improvements are required.

I have been using VMware Aria Automation for two years.

The product is stable.

It is a highly scalable solution.

My company has an additional team that consists of people who coordinate directly with the VMware support team.

From the usability point of view, if you have experience working on other platforms, then you will feel familiar working with VMware Aria Automation, and it would mostly be the same experience. Only VMware Aria Automation's interface would feel different compared to the interfaces of the Other products one may have experienced with in the past. Most of the features are the same in VMware Aria Automation and in the other products that are similar to it.

In my company, we work with other tools, but there are dedicated teams who are assigned specifically to use each product.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The solution can be deployed in a month.

It is an expensive product. After VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, there was a rise in the price of VMware Aria Automation. My company's procurement team handles the pricing part.

I did see a significant improvement in our company's IT efficiency, especially when there were a lot of deployments, as it eased up the efforts.

The most beneficial feature of the product for my company's on-premises infrastructure revolves around VMware vSphere and VMware Aria. I can't speak in much depth about other tools as I have not been exposed to other products since some other team in my company handles them.

My company has not integrated VMware Aria Automation with some other tools or platforms.

I rate the tool a seven and a half to eight 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.

I use the solution to provision virtual machines. 

We automated many tool deployments with the help of the product, cutting short manual deployments and eliminating the need for human interaction. Its most valuable features include integrating various tools and working with different products using plugins. 

The tool's automation performance is excellent, and I rate it four point five out of ten. 

Maintaining the product requires effort and a good understanding of the environment, including how to set up the codes and other configurations. Pricing needs to be improved to improve the customer penetration. 

I have been using the product for four years. 

The tool is stable, but you will encounter issues when it hits the upper limit. 

VMware Aria Automation is easily scalable. My company has 15-20 users. 

I have used Red Hat before, and VMware Aria Automation is better. It is considered better due to its extensive experience in the field. The tool has acquired an existing product in the domain for several years.

The product's deployment process is much simpler than it used to be, especially with the latest version. While previous versions had multiple components and pillars, the latest version has significantly reduced complexity, improving the deployment process. It took a few weeks to complete. You would need two to four resources to complete the deployment. 

The tool's integration with the existing VMware infrastructure is easy due to product similarity. 

The solution's ROI is good. It can be enhanced with improvement in prices. 

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. 

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. 

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. 

VMware Aria Automation is mainly used with vRealize Orchestration to orchestrate provisioning. It segregates resource usage among different teams. If there are various tenants utilizing resources, vRA is essential for efficiently managing resource allocation. Whether it's provisioning machines in our data center, supporting customer infrastructure in AWS, Azure, or different vCenters, vRA streamlines the process. 

Instead of navigating through various console endpoints for provisioning workloads, vRA allows automation with a single click. This means we can automate the provisioning of not just a plain VM or OS but also include applications and databases in a single click. 

So, we can initiate the process, go about our tasks, and, within 30 to 40 minutes, depending on integrations, our VMs will be built. It significantly reduces manual efforts, and that's why it's called automation. 

With one click, we can get not just one but as many VMs as needed, with databases installed, all at the click of a button. It's a crucial and necessary product that people have been increasingly adopting.

VMware Aria Automation is important for day-to-day operations. It provides more granular visibility of our resources. 

Another valuable thing is the cost. We can easily get to know our IT gives us a cost of data as well, suppose we're going to provision any VM, if a customer or if a user is going to provision one VM, it depends on, again, it depends on the integration that one has done of config already. 

One of its features is, that once we're deploying a VM, we will get to know how much we'll pay for that. How much will be the GB storage per GB cost, how it will be the RAM cost, memory cost, everything would be there. 

And it gives us in-depth visibility into how many resources we are paying for. And suppose we just were purchasing memory GB and if we want to delete particular VMs, we can delete it and we can get the resources back. 

So for the customers, it's pretty convenient to see where they are putting their money into.

It's not open source as of now. The licensing costs and the operations support costs of the VRAs are higher. It's a VMware-based license. 

If I see the other competitors, they are open-source alternatives to VRA, like OpenStack and others. So I can use it on the flow. But in order to get VLS automation, it's an enterprise license that costs more, and hence, VMware support cost is also more.

I have experience with this solution. 

It is stable. But one of the drawbacks that Aria Automation had whenever there used to be an upgrade was that it never used to be very easy. It takes effort to upgrade from the current version to the new version. There used to be some challenges and changes that had to be done. 

The most recent release is based on the Kubernetes nodes now. So, it is easy now but it is not that easy because, with every new release, VMware comes up with something new. 

And how to adapt to new things and how to configure those things. And what all from the previous version will still get supported in a new version is always a new thing for us as well.

It is scalable. However, you cannot increase the number of VMware nodes on the fly. For instance, if you deployed it to a three-node cluster, you cannot simply expand that cluster. Instead, you have to deploy a new cluster with a new set of nodes.

I work in a product-based company, so we have customers for this solution in a service-based company, where we have a direct understanding of the number of customers we're supporting, whereas, in a product company, we only have access to customer usage data.

We can automate your workloads both on-premises or any software data center where you want that to be in. If we want that to be in the cloud, it's fine. If we want to provision it on-premises, it is fine. The installation is mostly done on devices. But as with AWS, if we want to use Google, if you want to use Azure, we can use those as endpoints to the VLS automation. And from the same console, we can automate workloads to be provisioned either on VMware Center, that is our own premises or onto our public cloud. So, VMware Aria Automation is there to automate your provisioning or any day one and day two operations. We can do it from one pane of glass to any endpoint, let it be cloud, or let it be our own premises.

So it doesn't have to be specific on AWS cloud or Azure cloud.

The setup needs coding. It's not easy. It's not straightforward. With the newest releases that we have ahead, we need someone who is good with the YAML codes. 

Now, there has been improvement. Previously, we should have a person who really knows Java, Python, and other codes that are being used. 

But for the recent release, we want one who should understand codes, one who should know how to, and one who should have knowledge about how to do REST API calls if we want to integrate different components with VRA. 

So, programming knowledge is a must when you're using VRA. The most tedious task will be to configure the VRA. Installation is easy; you can do it. 

However, configuring VRA with the whole of your setup within the data center is not easy. It will take some effort, and it has to be done right.

The deployment process is not fast. It will be time-consuming. A few of the modules are already there, but it is time-consuming. Moreover, it depends on the sort of integrations we want to do. If we want to integrate 15 components, different components with vRA for end-to-end provisioning, it will be consuming.

I strongly recommend gaining a thorough understanding of Aria before diving into it. Aria is not as straightforward as it initially appears. There are numerous aspects to consider, such as integrations, VRA usage, VRO, and so on. 

It's crucial to comprehend how Visualized Orchestration, Sensor Automation, and Sensor Orchestration work together harmoniously when orchestrating workflows. You really need to get proper VRA training before effectively utilizing it. It's not something you can pick up easily just by having coding knowledge. Some level of experience and training is essential for thorough usage.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. VMware Aria Automation has made a lot of things easier. It has really helped the operations team to spin up the virtual machines. Previously, if setting up infrastructure for the customer took weeks, now it can be done in a couple of days. It has reduced the time for the customers to get the infrastructure ready. So, I would definitely rate it nine. This solution has done a fabulous job over time.