What is our primary use case?
We are mainly using it for automation. Our main use case is providing in-house kind of cloud capabilities to the enterprises so they can utilize automated provisioning, backups, etc.
Different customers have different versions. We are probably using versions 6 and 7.
How has it helped my organization?
One of our main customers is a big tech company. We have created automated labs for their products. They have these events in which they wanted to do training on the event site, and they wanted to have on-the-go labs. We utilized vRA to do that. Another customer for whom we are using VMware vSphere and vRA is a government entity. They have other customers or end-users that are different departments of the government. They have provided them cookie-cutter and templates to provision the VMs and do the backups. So, they are using vRA along with vSphere and the stack to provide a kind of government cloud.
We use the following DevOps for Infrastructure capabilities: the cloud templating standard for VMware Cloud infrastructure and infrastructure pipelining for continuous delivery. Through these capabilities, we have achieved more control, more monitoring capabilities, and more efficiency in terms of delivering solutions with much more confidence and less number of failures. There is also less strain on our human resources, so everything becomes more easily manageable. These features have saved time for our developers. They have saved 30% to 40% of the time. Using DevOps infrastructure has definitely improved reliability.
vRA has helped to automate deployment for our developers. These automatic deployments have saved time. It has improved the self-service kind of deployments for the development teams. We have our own internal data centers, and we are also doing a lot of customer deployments. In both cases, it has reduced the time that they have to spend communicating internally with other people. They have these cookie-cutter operations that they can utilize. They can provision their own stuff or deploy their infrastructure pretty quickly. So, the dependencies are reduced, and the developers can focus more on their own part rather than calling the infrastructure team to provision or automate something.
We have been using VMware within our organization and for our customers, and vRA has enabled us to leverage existing VMware processes, systems, and training in our organization to support IT Ops.
vRA's automated processes have reduced infrastructure provisioning time. There is about a 60% reduction of time in infrastructure provisioning.
Our application provisioning time is also reduced by using vRA automated processes. We have Ansible and other stuff with vRA. There is a 60% to 80% reduction in time for application configuration. It has also reduced the time to market for our apps by at least 40%.
What is most valuable?
The automation part is most valuable. Because it is a VMware product, the automation capabilities that come with vRA are pretty extensive. We can integrate and build a lot of features on top of it, which makes it extremely useful for us.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using it in our own data centers and for our customers for almost five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is pretty stable. This is based on what I have heard or seen for different projects.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I would think that it is scalable. Our clients are usually looking for somebody who can deploy and configure their environments or provide some kind of managed services support. Around 10% to 15% of our customers are on VMware vSphere automation and vRA automation. Internally, there is a 25% utilization. We are planning to expand its usage this year, and we will see how multi-cloud automation can be utilized. We will try to implement things or use cases in a virtual environment, and then we can resell those use cases, provide support for those use cases, or give training to the customers.
How are customer service and support?
I have not worked with them myself, but our customers have VMware support, and we use their TAC accounts to raise an issue and get support.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously, we were mostly using manual processes. The reasons for implementing vRA were more control, visibility, and flexibility. We wanted to move away from manual, human intervention-based processes to automated processes, which would also provide more stability.
How was the initial setup?
Its initial setup is of medium complexity. It is not too straightforward, and it is not extremely complex. It can improve. There are technicalities that are involved.
We have done some deployments that have taken us less than a week. We have also done deployments that have taken us months. On average, it takes three to ten days.
The deployment strategy depends on the requirements. We like to have a repeatable model, but most of the time, customers have different needs. Wherever possible, we utilize a repeatable model.
What about the implementation team?
In our organization, we have five people who are dealing with VMware infrastructure. Our senior solutions architect has different kinds of certification in VMware solutions. There are two senior engineers and two junior engineers reporting to him. So, we have a team of five people for our internal management and external deployments.
What was our ROI?
We have received a return on investment. We are a lean team, and we are able to deliver more. We are able to manage more than what we could manage previously, and we don't have to have lots of people. We are also saving a lot of time, and it is also providing us more visibility.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I don't think we evaluated other solutions.
What other advice do I have?
While implementing a solution like vRA, the most important thing is to understand why you're using it for a use case. If you want to implement a solution to do automation, I would suggest seeing what kind of integrations it provides with different endpoints and plan around it. vRA provides pretty extensive integrations. My advice would be to first just understand why you want to use vRA and then have a strategic roadmap implemented. You should start with a basic implementation and then go on top of it.
vRA has enabled us to derive value from the cloud more rapidly, but we have not yet fully realized that value. We are planning to use the multi-cloud features more as we go along. It is in the roadmap that we have for this year. Similarly, vRA has enabled us to manage the cloud easily through its entire life cycle, but we have not exploited it fully. We have not utilized it for multi-cloud environments. We have mostly focused on the on-prem environments and on Azure and AWS to a certain extent. We are working on utilizing vRA along with other automations from our tech cloud. There is an internal roadmap that we have for this year in which we want to monitor multiple multi-cloud environments, not only for our own staff but also for our customers.
We have not used VMware Cloud Templates and iterative development for GitOps much. We have not used the multi-cloud Infrastructure as Code yet. We are planning to use it.
We have also not used vRA much to extend our security footprint into the cloud. We have done it here and there but not fully and not to the extent that I am happy about.
I would rate vRA an eight out of 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.