VMware Aria Automation Reviews

The goal was to bring the automation process to our customers using virtual machines. We were looking to do the hybrid connection with AWS. 

It can run on Linux and several versions of Windows that we have.

It gives you the flexibility to analyze and consume resources.

vRA provides a multi-cloud, self-service, infrastructure-as-a-service cloud consumption and delivery layer. We have a connection and activation between AWS and Azure. 

There is the possibility to use the central policy, especially using Active Directory. You can put this process into the company so someone can follow it. I can put this control on-prem and outside of our on-prem, using our cloud solution.

You can consume resources into the data center and hybrid with AWS.

I can use the console with the dashboard. I also have access to the portal from Azure.

We use the cloud blueprints for Linux. I can use different templates on-premise and on the cloud via GCP. We can use traditional templates or develop new templates, using them to manage integration with the solution.

In the future, I hope to use a portal from GCP.

I have been using it for approximately five years. During that time, we have used versions 6, 7, and 8.

This solution is used by six sysadmins.

This was our first solution of this type.

The initial setup was complex from beginning to delivery. The current version is a bit more complex than version 7 to deploy.

Our deployment took two days.

Six people from our company were involved in setting up vRA.

vRA has enabled us to derive value from the cloud faster. It is five to six times faster than traditional solutions.

It is easy to deliver IT support when compared to a traditional solution. With vRA, I click it, open it, and then it is available in a few minutes. It saves time because a traditional solution might take two to three hours where vRA takes a few minutes. It's a big difference.

We analyzed the market. We also looked at OpenStack, which is similar in its functionality to vRA. We chose vRA because of its integrations. Integrations were more difficult with OpenStack.

I would recommend doing an integration with hybrid cloud. With vRA, this is excellent.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).

We were looking to have a single pane of glass (one console) to manage our complete infrastructure. It has helped us integrate having one user interface to manage our infrastructure and application templates.

vRA's multi-cloud strategy is very important to us as a cloud service provider.

The hardware that we use is Dell EMC.

The manual efforts of creating a VM for an individual customer has now been eliminated, e.g., creating a template or blueprint. With Orchestrator, we will take that blueprint and build a form for the customer. All this used to be done manually by an administrator, from a network, storage, and compute point of view. The admin's job is simple now versus the way we were doing it before.

It provides a single pane of glass for management. These types of platforms help us to have a holistic view.

The solution has helped us to automate deployment for developers. Before developers have to build another virtual machine, they can run code with VMware Code Stream integration. They can verify and download code, which really helps our developers be faster.

vRA has enabled us to derive value from the cloud more rapidly. We have seen increased services along with more integrations and catalogs. Now, we can create and update policies faster. 

The solution has freed up our time to concentrate on other things.

• vRealize Orchestrator
• Catalog Service

The policy control is excellent. There are multiple security controls that we can achieve by using this tool. When we were siloed, the policy implementation and control were difficult.

We use the solution’s following DevOps for infrastructure capabilities:

• The cloud templating standard for VMware Cloud infrastructure
• VMware Cloud Templates
• Infrastructure pipelining for continuous delivery
• We partially use iterative development for GitOps use cases, as it is not very good.

These capabilities boosts our administration and management from a technical point of view and help our team maintain the solution. Reliability improved because now the CI/CD and DevOps are integrated and managed under the same team using the same software.

They should concentrate on navigation and service improvements.

We have been using it for more than two years.

From the inception and kick-off meeting, VMware has been very professional from a project management standpoint. They know what their goal is and have all the ground work done. They have a dedicated Project Manager. They know what kind of resources that they need, so it happens in a very timely manner. We don't have any complaints from a VMware product management standpoint, because they are all professionals. 

I would rate the technical support post-deployment as a 10 out of 10.

Prior to using any VMware products, we had Cisco UCS Director. 

Prior to vRealize Automation, we had VMware vCloud Automation Center, or vCAC. It was not a mature product. At that point in time, everything was working in silos and the integration was difficult because the APIs were not mature. After we did the automation upgrade, this embedded everything, so it now has one single URL for accessing all applications. 

The initial setup was straightforward. From a product point of view, it is seamless. The code runs. The software is built into all the appliances, then everything is deployed automatically and integrated with the scripts.

There are commercial implications to start up vRA if a company has no hardware nor knowledge of the product.

Our deployment was one month. Integration and completion of the migration took another two months. Put together, it took us a total of 90 days to implement and start using it. 

For the initial setup, there were four people from my organization involved:

• One SME from compute and storage
• One SME from network
• One SME from application
  
• One technical project manager.

We have seen ROI. The more VMs that we create, the more services that we are creating for our customers. Our delivery times are reduced, so we have more productivity.

The DevOps for infrastructure capabilities has saved time for our developers by automating processes and reducing provisioning time. Task time has been reduced by 40 percent. 

When it comes to IT operations, 40 percent of our time has been reduced because of Code Stream.

From a budget point of view, the pricing is a bit on the higher side.

We did need to purchase some new hardware for the cloud because we wanted to upgrade it.

While we evaluated other options, vRA made it easy and quick for us to go with this solution as an existing VMware customer. With new products, there are training implications. Also, VMware is one of the market leaders.

If you are already a VMware, definitely consider the cost implications of going with vRA versus a competitor.

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is 100 percent mature on the private cloud. We don't have any issues working on it.

We are using other solutions from VMware to extend our network security.

Training is a continuous process. 

I would rate this product a nine out of 10.

VMware Aria Automation is used for automation.

The most valuable feature of VMware Aria Automation is the versatile automation and deployments.

VMware Aria Automation could improve reporting of the policies. They are difficult to customize. We have many policies but they are not able to be modified to what we want.

I have been using VMware Aria Automation for approximately three years.

The solution has been stable and smooth in operation.

We have one customer using the solution. The solution is best suited for enterprise companies.

The solution is scalable.

The support is good.

I rate the support from VMware Aria Automation a nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup of VMware Aria Automation was not difficult.

We did the deployment of the test environment.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate VMware Aria Automation an eight out of ten.

We are using it for infrastructure service, automating things in Active Directory, and deploying Microsoft SQL and Oracle databases. We are also using it to automate some scenarios within our infrastructure.

Having a one-stop-shop for our IT services is one of our goals. Exporting and democratizing the tools helps our end users to do their work efficiently and to be more agile. It helps to minimize the time to market for our product.

Using the solution we are able to automate database refreshment. This process used to consume a number of working days. With vRA fully automating this process, it is now down to five or 10 minutes. As a result, we're able to refresh our testing and development environments frequently. When we go with a new deployment in production, the deployment is based on a fresh copy of production. We're able to have multiple environments so that we can test more product concurrently.

We use VMware Cloud Templates and having a standard template to be deployed gives us a standard across our environment and minimizes the time it takes to provide services. Despite having 20 machines, we just do the configuration once and then we can deploy it across the whole infrastructure for all environments: production, testing, and development. And this reduces the time to market for our services. They improve reliability. They give us consistency. Having things assembled and having everything in one image helps us provide reliable services. And they have saved time for our developers.

Having an enterprise service catalog and being able to automate various parts of our infrastructure are among the most important components.

It needs to be more dynamic with variable customization to make new workloads more reliable. It also needs to be faster. We are exploring vRA version 8 right now and maybe what I'm requesting is available in the new version, but we haven't explored it fully yet.

We have been using VMware vRealize Automation for seven or eight years.

VMware's customer support for vRealize Automation is good. They are knowledgeable about the product and have improved their response time. The support is fine.

We did have a previous solution but I am not able to disclose its name. vRA is an end-to-end solution with all the capabilities.

The pricing is very high.

Our use case is infrastructure automation, like self-service.

We utilize all the blades that we had available in the computes, mostly going into VMware vCenter.

When I have been using it, it has been mostly for private compute.

We provided the ability to request virtual machines to our end users. Before, this was a very manual process, which took engineers to do. Now, it's an automated process.

vRA has enabled us to leverage existing VMware processes, systems, and training in our organization to support IT ops. 

Most valuable thing is that it's flexible. You can do anything with coding.

VMware needs to make it to where it is not as custom. Right now, you spend a lot of time making the services work. In order to get it up and running initially, that takes time. I would like it if they didn't require custom code and we could get it running out-of-the-box.

I have been using vRA for about five years.

Stability is pretty important. For example, if the platform goes down and people can't provision anymore, people are relying on the automation versus old manual processes.

Our developers and IT consumers use it as well as other infrastructure teams.

vRA is the means for 90 percent of our infrastructure requests. There are use cases where things, like big data or bare-metal, don't necessarily provision this type of stuff.

The service of VMware during our deployment was average; I wouldn't say VMware support is exceptional.

Post-deployment, it takes time to get to the right people in order to get proper support.

We did use a previous product, but integrating it with VMware was very custom.

There is complexity to the setup. You have to custom write code for any integrations. It took six months to make it end user ready.

There were about 10 of us involved in the setup. We have just a cloud team.

We have seen ROI from replacing manual processes with automation.

vRA has helped to automate deployment for developers. The solution increases developers’ responsibilities and productivity because now they can provision their own VMs and focus on the code.

The solution’s automated processes have reduced infrastructure provisioning time. Automation takes the time down to about an hour. Whereas, it could take days if it was done manually. This time reduction also applies to vRA's automated processes, which have reduced application provisioning time.

The solution has reduced time to market for our apps. It takes the burden off of our internal processes, which can now provision VMs in an automatic fashion.

It is pricey for what you get. Nutanix is cheaper.

We did not evaluate other options.

Make sure you give yourself enough time to implement or replace all your use cases as a business.

The solution requires specific expertise with it to be able to use it effectively.

I would rate this product as a seven (out of 10). 

We are using SaltStack SecOps for a rather large fleet of VMs that include a mixture of both Linux and Windows, with many different OS versions for each. It is used to view the compliance of the systems within our infrastructure.

This product brings all of the rich data that it collects under once central view. It makes the remediation of compliance or security issues quick and easy to understand. Being able to see this data allows us to be agile and we are able to make changes on a massive scale, thus reducing the manpower needed to implement changes. 

SaltStack has given us the ability to deal with systems at scale and rectify issues at scale. This, along with the fact that SaltStack is a event engine, allows teams to be able to to creatively attack problems and view problems within our infrastructure.

The SecOps product allows us to see where there may be issues, what a current patch level may be at, and what the recommended patch is.

As far as compliance, SecOps is able to reduce the time it takes us to verify our systems are compliant with policy.

The most valuable feature is the ability to see both compliance and vulnerabilities in a dashboard view. Being able to see that data in one place is a real game-changer. This, along with the rich metadata from our systems allows us to be able to drill down to very specific facts about each and every system. With this level of insight, we are able to make changes both at scale as well as at an individual system or application level.

SaltStack SecOps has the ability to react to events and also allows us to start reacting automatically to issues that might be in that infrastructure.

SaltStack is still growing, and so there are still those growing pains.

Sometimes in order to get the functionality you want, you need to update to the latest and greatest of the software.  For companies that traditionally like to wait for bugs to be found, this can be a bit painful.   Most of the downsides are because the product is growing and is becoming more and more useful, so I can't complain too much about that.  It's evident that SaltStack is listening to it's customers and wants to create a fully functional piece of software.

We have been using SaltStack for three months.

This product seems to handle our scale issues so far.

From our experience, there are not very many issues that we've found with the product in of itself. I'm sure that as we need to scale out, there may be some help/guidance that we need to inquire of support/professional services, but I'm confident that those groups within SaltStack will be able to provide the guidance that is needed to be successful.

Prior to this, we used Puppet/SaltStack open-source. The Puppet solution had scale issues, and SaltStack Open Source didn't have the SecOps product

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

SaltStack, when viewed in the light that it is an event engine, is a very powerful tool.

DevOps is our primary use case. It's performing okay. We're getting ready to upgrade and move into an HA environment, so it will be much better.

The benefit to our organization is time to market. It has streamlined the process so that they can deploy systems, test the systems, and get the product to market faster. Speed of provision is much faster than what we used to manage, especially when we incorporate Day 2 Operations. We can get that into the automation and allow for that to take place, as opposed to the DevOps teams doing that all manually.

It has absolutely helped to increase infrastructure agility - not to its capacity by any stretch, but we're working towards that. It definitely has allowed us to be a little bit more agile.

The most valued feature is the streamlining of the DevOps process, automation and orchestration. It provides the ability for the entire Dev lifecycle to actually be incorporated into a single stream. That's our primary focus.

We still struggle a little bit with the configuration as far as making sure that we have all the endpoints where they need to be, because that's not as agile as we'd like in the back-end. We're working towards that with our DevOps teams to make sure that we're touching the right endpoints and getting the right data.

Also, what we would like to see is a lot more integration across platforms, multi-cloud. I think that's coming.

in general, it took us a long time to get it off the ground. We had a lot of issues upfront and we determined that we just needed to scrap it. I think we scrapped it two or three times before we actually got it built the way we wanted, and we're still not where we need to be. We have had downtime. There have been some issues, but we're also two iterations behind on version. We're getting ready to move to a new HA environment and go on to the newest product line.

Right now, it doesn't scale for us, but it will once we move into the new environment. It will probably scale five years out, especially with the way that we can integrate different endpoints.

Technical support has been phenomenal. Most of the time we get to the right person, but not always. We eventually do because we know who we need to talk to.

Previously, we used a product called LiveManager. It was not across the entire organization, it was just a subset, so there was nothing really prior to this.

When looking at a vendor, the most important criterion is how good a partner will they be? Will they be around? Is it somebody that we can trust and that has been utilized in the marketplace? In addition, is the solution scalable? And then we'll look at cost.

No way was the initial setup straightforward. We scrapped it multiple times. Going through some of the sessions today, here at VMworld 2018, we see that they're incorporating some of the certificate management and so forth. That's where our biggest challenge was.

Upgrading was pretty straightforward. In-place upgrades worked really well for what we've done. There wasn't a whole lot to that. It worked well.

Really, it's all about the initial setup and making sure that it is set up right.

We haven't calculated an ROI but we've realized ROI in manpower.

At the time, there wasn't really any competition when we decided to go this route. It was really only VMware.

In general, I'd recommend vRA but make sure that your framework is set, that you understand what your processes are so that you can fit into the framework.

It's not intuitive and user-friendly but we've made it that way. We've allowed the DevOps teams to incorporate some of their components inside of the catalogs themselves, so we give them a little bit more flexibility, rather than dictating what they need to do. That way, it really runs true to their process.

I rate vRA about an eight out of ten because of the inability to get this thing stood up, initially. We weren't the first to actually do it, and yet, it seemed like we were the first to do it. But because of its scalability, it's a product that we decided to go with.

We primarily use it for restoration services.

The most important thing that we missed in vRanger was the possibility to mount several images instantaneously and present it so that we can run it immediately.

Stability is fine. 

The scalability is not good. It is slow to scale to our needs. 

The installation was complex and time consuming.

I would not recommend this product. I think that there are better products to meet your needs that are competitors on the market. 

Our primary use case of this solution is to provide our clients with a virtual private cloud. It has been performing very well. We've had some multi-tenancy issues but VMware has been very supportive. 

For repeated installations and the provisioning of VMs, we now have a clear definition of what has been installed, and we can monitor all that stuff. There are some functions for the ICDs, and we have continuous development and deployment.

It theoretically could help provision new clients faster if you adhere to the limits of the product then it makes provisioning the new client a lot faster. If you have customers like we have that are really demanding and want special solutions it will end up in huge customization.

We like the blueprint designer. We can create topologies with it. 

I have found it to be user-friendly because it's very UI centric. We have a problem that most of our developers would like to have it more on a flat file format. For our end user, it's just perfect.

I would like to see multi-tenancy in NSX and better functionality. 

We have found this solution to be stable as long as we don't test its limits. We have had huge installations where we had some problems with performance and stability. 

If you have a normal use case like a conventional enterprise and use it for yourself then you might never test its limits. In our case, our customers are creating a lot of business groups and this led to a lot of problems later on.

Their technical support is very good and swift. 

We switched because we don't want to focus on the cloud management platform. We want to have this resolved and supported by a vendor because we are system integrators and want to supply the services and the knowledge above that. 

The initial setup was complex because we have a high availability cluster. Especially when it comes to upgrades, we have a lot of downtimes and problems. The upgrade experience has been painful. 

The product as a whole was offered by Dell EMC but we used VMware as an integrator and for the setup. We still have some VMware specialists working within our team.

We have seen ROI. 

We built everything from scratch, it ended up being very costly. 

I would rate this solution a seven because it hasn't perfectly adapted to our use cases with multi-tenancy. 

If you're looking into this solution I would tell you that if you use this solution only within your own company, you'll be fine. If you have a business like ours, it can get complicated. 

My primary use case for this solution is to automate the development of the infrastructure. I deployed the VM for the development team.

I like that it is easy to deploy the infrastructure.

I have found 7.4 to be user-friendly but 7.5 is not, in fact, it's a nightmare. They changed everything on the graphic user interface, the mode where the user interacts with the product. 

7.4 is okay but we have had some issues with 7.5. We have issues with the approval process of the request. The link for the approval doesn't work. I opened a ticket with VMware and I still haven't gotten an answer. I don't like the infrastructure.  

I have found the scalability to be good. We share infrastructure with multiple machines and infrastructure servers. 

Technical support isn't great. I opened a ticket with them two weeks ago and have yet to receive an answer. 

We knew that we needed to switch to this solution because our customers asked for it. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It's easy to deploy. 

The upgrade experience was a nightmare. I upgraded from 7.4 to 7.5 and it's been terrible. 

I am the integrator. I do the deployment for our customers. 

Our customers have seen ROI but I don't know the exact numbers. 

I would rate this solution a nine and would advise someone looking into this or a similar solution to invest in VMware Orchestrator. It's behind vRealize Automation for almost everything. You should know vRealize Orchestrator first and then try to deploy, install, and configure vRealize Automation.