VMware Aria Automation Reviews

Our primary use case is to automate deployments of virtual machines and data actions. We have automated everything using vRA.

We have several customer teams that serve external customers. Previously, each team, when it received a change request to deploy a single virtual machine, had to create a ticket in our ticketing system. Then it had to go through a couple of departments. The time to get that all done was quite long, on the order of days. vRA has helped reduce the amount of time it takes to create a ticket in our ticketing system. We have been able to reduce the process to around 30 minutes. Obviously, it has reduced the cost and amount of work.

The automation part is valuable, especially where vRA integrates with vRO, because it reduces the amount of effort we have to make.

This solution is intuitive for the end user. For the guys who need to manage it, it is a bit more complex. It is quite hard to maintain, especially since a lot of work has to be custom-built, which takes a lot of effort.

Stability is not great, although, the latest release has been better.

Scalability is good.

I would rate their technical support as a six out of ten, but that's not completely their fault. A lot of our tickets have to be transferred to engineering. GSS has not been able to solve a lot of our issues.

We work a lot with VMware and were using vCloud Director previously. VMware architects came to our office and, after much discussion, vRA popped up as the best solution that fit our needs.

The setup, the installation, is straightforward, but only with the latest releases.

Upgrades are one of the points where incidents are happening. Every time we want to upgrade, a ticket needs to be created and moved to engineering because GSS is not able to help us. We are able to upgrade, but it takes quite a number of retries, which are very costly.

It's not a smooth upgrade process. For a DTA environment, which is very simple, it is a smooth process, but for our production environment, which is quite enhanced and has a lot of dependencies, it's not easy at all, and it results in a lot of errors.

We did it on our own.

We did not evaluate other vendors.

vRA 8, from what I have seen of it, in a session here at VMworld 2018 Europe, fulfills every need we have. The Service Broker is better. vRA simply speaks with all my other endpoints and I see a lot of benefits in that.

I would rate this solution as an eight because the way we set it up reduces the effort which would normally have been needed to deploy a virtual machine or perform data actions. I'm not giving it a higher score simply because of the difficulties we have run into in the past with it as well as the difficulties we continuously face during upgrades.

We are currently discussing if we should stay on vRA or move back to vCloud Director. For now, I would recommend vRA, having seen the roadmap of vRA 8, which, in my opinion, is really good.

The primary use case is the automation of the cyber functionalities. Right now, it is performing well.

For the cyber functionalities, we used to set up the functionalities manually using templates. Now, using the VMware vRealize self-service portal, the user can request a server, and we can better manage the lifecycle.

• Manageability of the blueprints.
• Integration with the rest of VMware solutions.
• Availability of the Orchestrator.
• It is intuitive and user-friendly.

Stability is fine. Though, we have seen some issues with upgrades or installations. This means we have to raise a call every time with VMware.

Scalability is good. It has been fine. We have been using it for quite some time and haven't seen any issues.

Normally, on the first call to technical support, you don't get the right person. The log analysis takes a long time. This is something which should be improved.

We were not using anything previously. We have been using VMware for quite some time.

We are trying to set up this new 7.4 in a distributed environment. Every time it was failing with different errors. Finally, we were able to finish it with notes that we had taken, and the help of VMware. However, later on in the product cycle, when applying the same procedure into our production environment, we followed all the guidelines and it still failed. This used to be a one day job, and it has been a one week job.

I would recommend use the solution.

We're moving from our normal IT support platform to be a service provider to our hospital. I am with a medical corporation managing more than 95 percent of the healthcare services in Qatar. There are many big hospitals under our IT Operations, and we're trying to move and be a service provider to them.

All the feedback that I have received so far from our administrators is very positive. The solution is user-friendly and intuitive.

1. Virtualization
2. The replication to our remote R&D data centers.

We would like them to improve the automation part. This is an upcoming area that we would like to focus on. We used to rely on other technologies to help us with VMware monitoring, but now, we're coming back to VMware technology. Hopefully, they will not take us down and provide something good. We have been watching their roadmaps, and it's promising. Therefore, I think it will be fine.

So far, stability has been good.

Scalability has been working fine.

Technical support is supportive. We are one of VMware's major customers in Qatar, so we receive good attention from them.

For the virtualization part, we have previously used Veeam.

We licensed VMware a long time ago. Now, we are moving from our legacy infrastructure to have a proper, private cloud environment.

Our upgrade experience was good.

We are a government service provider, so ROI is not a main KPI. However, we do plan to see ROI with any new implementation of new technologies being implemented within our environment.

We do regular technology refreshment from all our suppliers to be aware of the latest trends in the market and to select the most suitable ones which fit our needs.

We recommend VMware technologies to any of our colleagues or anyone asking to compare to other virtualization technologies in the market.

We have had VMware for more than twenty years. We are very old VMware customers and have a big setup.

We use it for the automation of VMs. It is performing okay.

We use it to deploy databases and testing environments. It spins up quickly and breaks down fast.

The automation is consistent.

The front-end is user-friendly and intuitive.

It is very difficult to make the automation work well. This is not product specific, but more due to environment and procedures that we have in our company.

The back-end has a steep learning curve.

The stability is good.

I used the technical support during upgrades. They came onsite and are very technical. They are very good

I am not aware of a previous solution. We moved to vRA because the business wanted quick, repetitive deployments.

It was a complex setup. We had to use the consultant from VMware to make the solution work well.

The upgrade was a very difficult task. We had to break everything down and build it up new in a new version.

We used a consultant from VMware for the deployment.

We use it to deploy virtual machines and integrate them into our structured environment.

The quick provisioning: We get a lot of things done automatically within hours. These things lasts days or weeks in further situations.

The solution is intuitive and user-friendly. E.g., you have less number of logins.

The stability is okay, but could be improved. We sometimes receive strange errors, which can only be solved with specialists.

We don't use the scalability.

The technical support will handle our requests quickly if understood. However, there are often misunderstandings depending on the information that we provide and they request.

We had another product before this, but we moved away from it to use vRealize Automation. The UI, administration possibilities, and the integration of the overall system were better than the former system, which was not up-to-date.

It improves the work, making it better. It also makes daily work much easier.

We're using it to automate the lifecycle of all the VMs that we are managing.

It is possible to completely automatize the creation and removal of a virtual machine. Not just technically, it also automates the monitoring and asset management. It can automate the entire technical and business processes related to it.

The portal is the most valuable feature. The Orchestrator with automation is also valuable. We try to leverage the automation and self-service portal. We trust these two feature allow us to increase time to market, agility, etc.

For the customer, it is intuitive and user-friendly.

The product was bought by VMware and they are trying to add features, which could be improved. For example, there is a Windows component and appliances with two different databases that have to be maintained in sync. This is a pretty nightmare to maintain.

I would like to have infrastructure simplification, such as one box and one appliance which does everything. Having to have a Windows machine with dedicated DBs is sort of crappy.

Now, it's pretty stable, as long as you do not touch it. However, upgrades are always a pain.

We do not need to scale it. One instance is sufficient.

Technical support has improved. Usually it takes some time for an engineer to respond. We try not to open basic tickets. Our tickets are usually linked to the box and can take several weeks to get a solution.

We used the Orchestrator that was free, but started to build some automation on top of it, then we needed to evaluate different tools in the market.

We have something that is very simple to set up: a single instance with minimal infrastructure. However, we have quite some customization.

Always something breaks when we do upgrade them. We tried to install the latest artifacts two weeks ago, then we had to rollback. We sent the log to support, and we're still waiting for a response.

We did the integration directly through VMware.

We assessed the market. We looked at VMware, Cisco, and a third vendor. VMware came out on top because of the integration. The service that we were providing the most is a virtual machine. So, it made more sense to use a VMware product to provide a VM machine.

I recommend going directly to the cloud which already has the self-service portal and other fancy features.

We use it mainly for cloud automation with private cloud solutions. It works fine with the exception of integration with public clouds and multi-tenant data centers.

It has been pretty successful for many of my customers so far.

vRA is user-friendly. It has the same layout and walk-through GUI, similar to other VMware products.

• Orchestration
• Out-of-the-box integration with Database-as-a-Service
• Storage-as-a-service
• Backup-as-a-service

More integration and out-of-the-box use cases would be nice.

It is very stable, especially for high availability features.

It has some limitations for scalability, especially for remote data center management. For some components, everything need to be centralized.

We only used tech support during the PoC and design phases, but they were good.

The initial setup is complex. There are too many components to integrate, especially when we integrated with different storage types and backup vendors. All the integration made it more complex.

We haven't upgraded yet.

If the use case matches, it is the perfect product for you.

We use vRealize Automation for our customers. We are an internal service company and use vRA for a SAFE Self Service portal for our customers to provide VMs.

We started five years ago with normal virtualization. Then, the platform grew and our customers requested additional services.

It provides faster SAFE services.

• It has the possibility to combine different clouds. 
• We can provide internal VMs and also VMs from AVS for our customers.
• Our users can order VMs using the API.

The API support could be better, because if your customers are developers, the first thing they do is Google, "How will this API function?" If you have vRA in the API, Google returns nothing. Therefore, my colleagues programmed an internal wrapper so the customers can talk with the API. We have to create our own documentation. 

It would be better if VMware would provide API documentation for developers and customers on the Internet.

It is stable.

The scalable is okay.

We have business-critical support, so this is the best support level available from VMware.

The setup process is good.

My team did the upgrade, but I did not hear anything bad about the experience.

The new version is user-friendly and intuitive. We have upgraded to 7.5, and this has been a good step for the product's usability.

Today, I would start with the vRA device. In the beginning, we did a lot of stuff with vRealize Orchestrator, so we had to develop our workflows on our own, which is a bit more complicated. So, vRA is good idea if you want to start and get quick results.