VMware Aria Automation Reviews

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.

We use it to be able to see everything within our VM space.

It has helped our organization tremendously.

It provides visibility into the VM space.

It is user-friendly to a greater extent.

It is stable.

It is scalable.

I have used the technical support once or twice, and they were good.

We are highly virtualized, so we like anything related to VMware because we need the visability their products provide. We need to know what is going on, so we can supervise our operations.

The setup is difficult. You need a technical person to help you set it up.

We have not upgraded yet.

I would recommend this solution.

We have used it mostly for our internal IT. We haven't really published it for customers or other groups to be able to use it. But we've actually just hit the surface. We've used it for rebooting servers, adding applications, automating some scripts; general things like that.

It has improved our organization by automating some of our processes. Automating processes saves us time. If we are able to schedule, say, a server reboot, instead of actually having to log in at 8:00 at night, when we wouldn't normally be on our network - scheduling a reboot after, say, a patch or something. It just allows us to not have to work. It does it automatically.

The most valuable feature of vRealize Automation is being able to - as the name says -automate VMware executions, to be able to automatically reboot; servers, power them up; add applications. That's useful to us in IT.

To improve the product, possibly the interface could be more informational. There's a nice tree structure on the left, but being able to know what to do with that tree structure could possibly be improved a little bit with right-click menus or more information. I'm sure the Help menu is fine, but just more intuitive, maybe.

We haven't really had any problems with stability. Usually, for what we use it for, it has been very stable, very dependable. I feel like it's done a good job.

I feel vRA is scalable. Being able to develop it more, and get more installations, more things to use it for, will be able to help us scale it out and use it for more people.

I have not had to use tech support for vRA, so I don't really have any experience with that. But I'm sure it's wonderful.

I personally have not upgraded the program, but the people that actually manage it have not had any issues with it. That being said, it's still a fairly small installation, or a very small group of people that use the product. We haven't expanded it to be able to know, with the installation, how it has gone.

The solution is user-friendly, to a degree. I feel like you still have to know a little bit of the ins and outs of how to get into it, some of the commands to use for what, exactly, you're trying to do. But besides that, it's pretty user-friendly.

In terms of increasing infrastructure agility with it, we have, maybe to a small degree. I don't feel that, with our implementation of vRealize Automation, we have really gotten very far. We've only scratched the surface. Like I said, we only use it for our internal IT, and we're just being able to save a little bit of time by the things that we do. We haven't really dug deep into what it's capable of.

It has made it easier for IT to support developers but I don't feel like we're at that point yet where the developers are involved. We have it as a future (goal) to involve our developers and have them be able to get on a webpage, and be able to do things automatically, without them having to put in a ticket or request us to do something for them; just making it automated. As we get to that point, though, I think it will be very useful.

Our primary use case is for our QA department. They use it to deploy machines when they need to test something out. It has performed well. They are able to spin up a new instance of Windows virtual machine and test whatever use case they have, then turn it back down whenever they are done. 

The infrastructure has helped us to greatly increase our agility.

The most valuable feature is that I do not have to create a virtual machine for these people and have them do a small task with it, then dispose of it. 

I find the solution to be intuitive and user-friendly for the end user. For the administrator, it can be a little challenging. For the administrator, there are a lot of moving parts. It is fine once you figure out where the knobs are you need to twiddle, but it can be a challenge to get it up and running.

There are a lot of moving parts. It could be improved if the solution were more consolidated.

The stability is good.

The scalability is fine when you go with the high availability deployment.

I have had to use tech support, and they are really good. 

I was not involved in the initial setup. I was involved in the upgrade, which was fine with support.

I would rate the solution as an eight out of ten. It has been extremely useful for our end users. To administer, it has been a bit more difficult.

It is primarily used for developers to spin up their own VMs and destroy them at will, afterwards my group spins it up in production machines. Probably, its most valuable feature is it takes time off of my schedule to quickly, securely, and conveniently deploy virtual machines, then I can work on other things.

The big benefit is it will spin up VMs quickly so it would take about 13 to 15 minutes to deploy a virtual machine. Whereas, if I were doing it based on an email from users who are requesting VMs, it might take time for me to hear back from them. This could be anywhere from an hour to a day. It's extremely convenient to be able to spin something up and be able to work on other things, because it's already done it, making my workload lighter.

Quantifying can be a little difficult because we recently rolled out. It is probably 90 percent quicker to get something out the door than it was before. For developers, depending on who is building VMs for them, sometimes they request anywhere from 20 to 100. Now, we can deploy them in a matter of an hour, where previously it might have taken me three days to deploy out 100 VMs.

It would be nice in the next release if they added in tool tips. Whether you're putting it together, adding a blueprint, or you're making a change in the system, highlighting or selecting something and having it tell you what it does or what it will do would be nice. Because it's such a complex system, it's hard to work with unless you've been using it for years to know what everything is doing.

So far, stability is great. We haven't had anything crash or be taken down by bugs that we've come across. 

We left room to be able to expand in the future. This was the job of our consulting company.

Previously, it was just me manually building VMs. 

When my workload started increasing and I started getting more tasks, my manager noticed that it took longer to deploy VMs. At which point, our senior admin knew about this product and suggested that we move forward with putting it into the new environment.

The setup process isn't intuitive and user-friendly, but once it's set up everything after that is easy. It can be as hard as you want it to be, or it could be as easy as you want it to be depending on how you're setting it up. 

It is completely upgraded to the newest right now. 

I spent about a month working on the set up. It was pretty complex. 

It takes a smart person well-versed in anything from JavaScript to building out blueprints to somebody who knows vCenter and vSphere. 

To deploy it, we brought in a consulting company because were strapped for user availability to set it up. Therefore, having a consulting company sped up the process of putting it together.

Since it's fairly new, we don't know the ROI yet. 

As far as value is concerned, it has been essential to our environment. We have been able to deploy VMs quickly and the developers have their own sandbox, so they can spin up and destroy VMs at their own will. 

It was always going to be VMware, because that's our primary virtual machine deployment. 

It is a solid 10. It's completely taken a lot of time off my plate so I can concentrate on other things, including learning the product as well as vRO, vRealize Orchestrator. 

If it's too complex for you, get a consulting company, because it makes the process a lot easier. I would definitely speak with other people who have implemented it in their environment. We've actually done that in the past for other products. It's nice to hear what other companies think about the product. It will help accelerate your decision.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. Ease-of-use.
2. Functionality to the point where it's not going to break, and there are no bugs in it. If the product has been long known to contain very harsh setup routines, it's going to take a long time for bugs get fixed, or there are multiple bugs which keep showing up in every version, this is something that I don't want to deal with.