VMware Aria Automation Reviews

It has saved us a lot of time and work. It helped us to reorganize some of our service lines, so we could be more efficient. For example, on our open system server team, we had 15 people building servers, now we have two.

Once you've learned the product, it is very easy to use.

The entire automation orchestration of it. It integrates into all of the other products that we have, e.g., ServiceNow. 

We have a self-service portal, and it does that very well.

It has a learning curve.

We have no issues whatsoever with it. It's very stable.

We have no issues whatsoever with it. It's very scalable.

We have a technical account manager, but we also rely heavily on VMware's support team, who is excellent to work with.

Upgrades have been extremely simple with their Lifecycle Manager product.

We actually used a lot of VMware services because we didn't want it sitting in the box too long. We had them come in, then they had it up and running in two days. There was a lot of tweaking to do, but it was up and running in two days.

We have seen significant ROI. We used to have physical servers, it took 90 days to get a server, order it, buy it, and get it in. We have it down to 10 minutes, building a server with virtualization, and now that's too slow. So, we let the customer do it at their speed. Therefore, it is pretty much up in a couple of minutes and they have a server.

We usually look at least three other vendors minimum. 

We chose VMware years ago. We have also had Hyper-V and KVM. So, we've had different products from different vendors. However, now, we are down to just VMware, because it's very stable and reliable.

Talk to a lot of different companies and people that have done it. Find out what not to do and what to do. It will make your journey easier.

We are working on a lot of the digital transformation right now. We are working more on the Pivotal Container Service (PKS) product, and a lot of integrations that they're doing with the performance monitoring, the metrics, and KPIs. This is very important to us.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Transparency: Be very open with us. 
• Be very knowledgeable about their products, so that we don't have to go through three or four different people to get one answer.

The ability to customize your own portal. We've gotten to the point now where we've used it to create this whole environment for users to be able to self-provision their own machines and get them into networks. We have a very large number of different networks, which means that many options of where they can put those VMs; their own environment.

We used to do everything manually. Up until just a few months ago, we used to have little reviews where, if they wanted a VM, they would come to us, tell us what they wanted, then someone on the team would actually submit the vRA form in an older version of vRA.

Now, the end user can go in and request what they want and do all that themselves, as long as they know enough about their application to get what they need. So, if you're just trying to add a couple of VMs or projects, where you know pretty well what you want, you don't have to spend days getting in line to talk about it, or worse, like back in the old days where you had to spend weeks waiting for someone to get it done.

Since I haven't been able to get as far into version 7, I haven't actually gotten into the guts of it, I don't know if this taking place already. But perhaps more blueprints of common tasks that are already there, so you have more of a place to start from. They may be there in 7, I haven't gotten a chance to look. It would need to have a base of, "Oh, I want to connect and build a VM and have these things," something to start from. Especially for people who don't have the teams that we've had working on it, they could get going quicker.

In the later versions, 6 and 7, it seems very stable. Really, it's nothing within the program itself that ever seems to cause the failures. It's some other component it's reaching out to which tends to have a problem, and that's not vRA at all. It's very good about telling you what's dead. It's usually more that the other application is having a fault and vRA tries to utilize it and gets an error back from the application, which then gets back to vRA.

It's not an even an integration problem. It's the application that it's going out to is not working properly. Then, it lets us know that it's not able to, for instance, connect to a Linux VM to the management product and register it. If it gets a failure there, it tells the folks who are managing the vRA. They tell us, and we go in. We check the management server. "Oh, it's not working. Well, let's go ahead and we need to restart it."

It's the same story on the other side with it connecting to AD. If for whatever reason, there's a problem with it connecting to AD, they'll go look at it. "Oh, this is the main controller having a problem."

It seems to scale up pretty well. If you're talking about how many classes it manages, the older version, the 6.0 series, we actually have it managing all of our clusters across both of our major datacenters; we're talking about being able to build in to dozens of different clusters. So, it's scaled very well.

You can do quite a few at once. Usually, it's more the order of what it's getting back from an independent service. Sometimes, they can step on each other if you put too many off at once, but that has to do with the fact it's trying to request a sequence number; you're trying to get two sequences at once. But that's not really as problem with vRA. It's the way that it was setup to retrieve stuff from these other third parties.

I haven't been the one that's had to call.

Complex. Part of the reason it's complex is that it's like a blank slate. You have to go out there and make your own environments. It doesn't really do anything for you, so if you've got an idea of what you want to do, you have a path forward. But if you don't, if you're just sitting there looking at the blank screen, it could be daunting for some people.

We kind of knew what we wanted and it just took a while to get all those things setup. You have so many different components. Nothing within in our environment was simple, so every management product that we use was probably different than what anyone else would use. So getting all that to work, finding an interface that worked well, that was really why it became complex. It was the complexity of our environment behind it.

So it's not necessarily vRA, it's just that if you don't already have something that's out-of-the-box which says, "Oh, we do all these things..." (I'm harkening back to vCloud Director, because vCloud Director was an all-in-one that did everything).

I think documentation and support are probably the most important things. If you don't care about documentation and support, you can grab a free one and try and build it. If you want someone who is going to be able to answer your questions, someone who's got the documentation already, so when you have a given error, they have it right on their webpage: "This is what this error means. Go do this." VMware's very good about that.

Overall, VMware is very good. It's very stable, very extensible, but it does have a relatively high learning curve. So folks that don't have the resources to dedicate to it may not be able to get very far. I do think it's a very good product, but it's very much a build-your-own product. That's good in other ways.

I would suggest people think about: "How much of this do you want to figure out yourself?" Because even within that process of building your own, you still have that layer of support. If you're looking at which one to pick, pick the one that's going to be able to provide you with advice. We've had professional services working with us on a lot of it at different points in getting it up and running. That's been a very nice driving force towards getting it to completion.

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.

Our primary use case is to deploy a private cloud. It has integrated well with an in-house-developed front end. Then we have the vRA's all over the backend and all the deployments in the vSphere. 

The most valuable feature would be the scalability. It's very easy to add more capacity into it once you've already got it set up. It's just cases deploy, and more hypervisors and we're off.

In terms of provisioning, it has definitely helped speed-wise. It simplifies making the environment bigger because it's easier to scale out. We don't have the downtime of having to wait to get more hardware and to add it in.

I have found bits of this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. We've been on a training course for it because it's quite a big product. We don't really use it the way it's intended to be used. We don't use it the standard way, so it takes a bit more poking around.

We haven't had any problems stability-wise with vRA.

We haven't hit any limits yet, scalability is good. 

We have a support contract with VMware but we haven't had to use their technical support. 

The setup was fairly simple. It's a matter of integrating it with all the other systems and then getting all the sorts to match with the certain policies we've got.

We integrated in-house. 

It's not cheap. It would be more expensive to get an alternative though because we'd have to buy the extras for it.

I would rate this solution an eight. There's always room for improvement, nothing's perfect but we haven't had any major problems because of it or with it.

I would advise someone looking into this solution to check out the training before you get it and not afterward because it covers all of the deployment.

It's a SunBox for the people developing apps for the healthcare company. They can submit the project chapter, implement what they want based on the template that we have in the vRealize Automation, check, compare, and then at the end, they can build a project charter with all the needed components.

In the past, we released several steps to implement an application in the company. The first step was the project charter. You explain what you want to do or how you want to do it and what the costs would be for this. This means that before having the project charter, you don't have any budget. The SunBox is free of charge: they think, they deploy, they test. If it's working, they do a project charter, if it's not working they go back and try other stuff.

It has helped with provisioning. I know several projects that were going faster with the up to date cloud. In the past, they would implement and if it wasn't the right step they would have to go back, discuss with us getting a new server with the right sizing, then they would implement, test and go back. With this, they implement, they test it, if it's not the right stuff, they just throw it out and implement the new stuff. It's direct. If they just increase the size then it's less work for everybody and everybody can achieve their work easily and quickly.

It's intuitive and user-friendly for the user, but not intuitive and user-friendly for the implementer because the templates are not easy to set up. For the end user, it's quite easy, but it's a fulltime job for the implementer and we don't have the time for it. This is why we used a service to implement instead of us. We don't have the time to focus on that. 

I would like to see more stability, something that is integrated and that checks that all of the servers are working well. Also, the ability to customize templates. 

I would like to see them implement vRealize into the cloud. It would be very smart for us to have vRealize in the cloud as a service that can be deployed internally. Then we don't have to implement anything anymore. We only need to take care of templates. 

The stability is why I rated it a seven and not higher. There were several cases where we had to restart some services because it wasn't working correctly anymore. People cannot extend their machine or replay their machine. There is no alert to say that there is a problem and that we should stop the service. The monitoring system is not very good.

Scalability is perfect. We haven't had any issues.

We have found their technical support to be good. 

It was a logical and smart decision for us to have this solution in place. It makes sense for my business. We used Orchestrate, the original version. It was the first automated system that could deploy complete solutions. We decided to go with this solution because it was evolving and I just followed the evolution. We switched to vRealize three years ago.

I wouldn't say the initial setup was straightforward but it wasn't complex.  

The upgrade experience went well. It's working well.

We used a service to implement. We did our research and now we have a good guy from VMware services. We plan to keep him. If we always have new people coming into deployment services it can take at least five days to teach them how the system works and to do all of the certifications needed. Our plan is to stick with this guy from VMware services. 

The ROI that we see is that people don't have to work too hard to have something done and therefore they have more time to market. They save time, which is money. We are an American company so if you save time, any implementation that we do is the implementation of a tool that can submit new work to FDA. One day is like one million.

I also have a lot fewer people asking me questions or for help. I don't need to be as involved in the discovery phase. People can now do their own job with something free and automated. They are happy.

We conducted studies on other options. We found other possibilities that were cheaper but so far this is what's working well for us and as of now we don't want to change. 

We use it to monitor our production VMware infrastructure. We use it to watch for things like resource contention and to automate around mostly similar needs.

The benefits are that it gives you a heads-up display and dashboard of the way everything's running. The ability to automate around those tasks is really where we get the value. It helps click the buttons and keep the lights green when nobody's there to do it for you. The automation really is priceless.

Without a doubt, in our infrastructure, we mostly use it to keep the lights green in a day-to-day operational way. But absolutely, in the future, we plan to use it for automation and deploying a more DevOps mentality and products, which should speed up our time to market.

The most valuable feature is the capacity to automate around the issues that come up, the alarms.

It's also absolutely easy and intuitive. It uses the same basic layout as the rest of the product suite so it's really easy to navigate, find your way around between the tabs and the areas.

I always like to see some improvement. I think they could probably do more if they created more actions and more use cases to automate things.

It's very stable. We haven't had any downtime whatsoever.

I haven't run into any scalability issues with it yet.

I can't recall any specific instances where we have had to use technical support.

I've deployed multiple versions of it, but I have not upgraded. It's not the simplest deployment, but the documentation is there and it's easy to follow. Googling helped with the implementation as well.

There are always features that could be added. I've looked at other solutions such as Turbonomic. They check a lot of the same boxes, but I prefer the VMware interface and usability.

My advice is "do it."

Functionality really is the most important criterion when selecting a vendor. If I can purchase a product or a service that is going to check all the boxes, that's more important to me than price, personally. The company signs the checks though, so they might see it differently.

Automating the data center.

We have faster delivery times through its automation.

The blueprint functionality of the product is intuitive and user-friendly. The concept of the blueprints is visual and easy to use.

I would like to see support for Google Cloud and Azure. Because they don't support Google and Azure today, we need something that's cohesive with our entire landscape. There is a gap right now with VMware. If you want support for these environments, you have to go elsewhere right now. Hopefully, product management will listen, hear, and change this.

The basic support is not there for Google Cloud and Azure. They are unable to provision nor do cost controls. Google is still left out. It is great that they have done AWS, but we are a retailer which means nothing to us because it is a competitor. Azure is good, but Google is where a lot of our development environments are.

Stability is good.

Its scalability still has room to improve when supporting Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure.

The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market.

We are currently looking at CMPs which give the functionality that support VMware and Google Compute Cloud, as well as Azure.

We moved to the solution because it is pushing the agility of IT.

The upgrade process was fine.

The primary use case for deployment of vRealize Automation was to facilitate a service provider web portal front-end to our Hosted Private Cloud and Business Continuity solution. This is a fully automated virtualized SDDC, using VMware as the base hypervisor. We also incorporate NSX for network automation, vCenter Orchestrator for workflow execution, and additional software packages to support the service as a whole (vROps, Log Insight, Network Insight, NSX Manager, etc.).

Our core networking is made up of a spine/leaf architecture using Cisco ACI/APIC and our storage is virtualized behind a Hitachi (HDS). We use SnapMirror and NetBackup as our DR tools.

We needed vRA to easily integrate with our hypervisor, orchestration, security (tenant segmentation, PCI), workflows, custom code, and internal monitoring/management tools. Since we didn’t have time to develop our own web front-end during the development sprints, vRA saved considerable time and resource cycles. Its ability to easily integrate with all of the VMware cloud products as well as public cloud providers, like AWS and Azure, out-of-the-box, makes it an even more powerful tool.

vRealize Automation is improving the way we host and serve up our fully hosted private cloud solutions as a cloud service provider. It has created efficiencies in how we deploy, manage, monitor, and develop within the service. It provides velocity both from management and customer perspectives, from ingesting new catalog items, developing new workflows for additional features, and/or allowing customer access to multiple guest OS instances at scale in a shorter time frame.

From a service provider perspective, its ability to integrate with vRealize Operations and vRealize business management suites provides a window for being able to execute predictive and reactive analysis that you can use to automate your cloud solution from a resource, management, and/or customer perspective.

vRA provides that single pane of glass for our cloud tenants to deploy, monitor, access, and manage their VMs/guest operating systems. vRA allows a cloud service provider to quickly build out a web portal front-end interface that easily integrates with all of the VMware vRealize products, providing an all-encompassing cloud solution.

Additional features also allowed us, as the service provider, to configure branding options for the site itself, as well as full integration into the orchestration layer, including workflows, security control, reporting, billing for our cloud admins, tenant admins, and end-user (customer).

The most valuable feature is vRA’s ability to integrate whether with additional VMware vRealize suites or other vendors' cloud products.

Also, vRA in combination with vCenter Orchestrator makes it very easy to design, import, and deliver quality workflows and blueprints. These can be used for various functions within the cloud portal, from both a production as well as a business-continuity perspective. Examples include automated failover activities in combination with SRM and SRA Replication, VM deployments based on a catalog, being able to roll out an entire LAMP stack dev environment with the click of a button, or ingest and inject data into back-end CMBDs, etc.

Its fully integrates with network and storage virtualization via NSX and workflow development, and secure APIs are available to customize automation using other vendor tools such as Puppet, Chef and/or PowerShell.

There are many features that I find extremely valuable but vRA’s ability to be a central hub for all of the parts that make up a hosted private or multi-tenant cloud solution is extremely valuable. Ultimately, the outcome of this design is a highly available and agile solution with a wide array of integration that enables you to provide a fully automated, scalable private cloud solution that can meet the market and customer demands now and in the future.

I have listed some additional features below for general reference:

• Easy integration into other VMware-based vRealize cloud products via SSO
• Single pane of glass interface
• Parameterized blueprints to enhance reusability and reduce sprawl
• Policy-based optimization of virtual machine placement
• NSX integration enhancements
• Enhanced control of NSX-provisioned load balancers
• Enhanced NAT port forwarding rules
• NSX security group and tag management
• Automated high-availability for NSX Edge Services
• NSX Edge size selection
• Enhanced vRealize Business for Cloud integration – cloud nanagement platform
• Improvements to high-availability
• Health Service
• Configuration Automation Framework – Puppet Integration
• REST API

Most of the areas for which there was room for improvement are being covered in the latest 7.4 release which will include all new workflows for additional management of a customer’s cloud and infrastructure, directly from the Web portal itself. Some of these features today require the ability to build out your own workflows, which can become complicated if you don’t have the knowledge base.

VMware is aware of this and is making the next version of vRA and vCenter Orchestrator with this in mind. They are going to include additional granular-level controls from within the self-service portal itself. This will allow us, the service provider, to pass these additional features on to our customer base giving them greater control and management of their dedicated cloud.

Some of the new vRA 7.4 release features include:

• New and enhanced curated blueprints and OVF files
• New custom form designer
• Enhanced multi-tenancy capabilities
• vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager now extends to IT content management 
• New IT content lifecycle management

No issues with Stability now working on testing out the new version on NSXt via blueprints which will provide a whole new level of control and management for our SDDC virtualized networking stack.

No issues currently with scalability of the product or its uses cases it was implemented for.

One of the best support and architecture teams we have ever worked with from a vendor perspective. Very knowledgeable and on the cutting edge of virtualization.

The software setup is fairly easy but does require knowledge of the VMware product suite. The complexity comes in whether this a service or a dedicated infrastructure. Normally in service oriented infrastructures which are purpose built for multi-tenancy where you have multiple customers hosting multiple sub-tenant customers which require many layers of micro-segmentation and security to be built in. In a dedicated infrastructure you are building for one business or a single customer even though they have segmented sub-tenants such as account, IT, Operations etc it is all internal to that business. The level of micro-segmentation and security is much less in complexity to provide a final solution.

We implemented a majority of the service internally and only reach out to the vendors developers prior to making changes in the design that could impact rework to correct bottle knocks and development dead ends. 

From experience working with other service provider cloud products, VMware vRealize Automation Center is the best out-of-the-box solution to quickly build out your cloud portal and fully integrate it into your orchestration layers, as well as your compute and storage infrastructures. It can support multiple public clouds as well as hypervisors, providing that single pane of glass for management, operations, and reporting. I would give it a nine out of 10 as there is always room for improvement, since cloud is always evolving.