VMware Aria Automation Reviews

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.

Primary use case is, generally, a DevOps lab-type environment that we have, spread across multiple locations throughout the United States. It's meant for a DevOps shop, for our developers to spin up, spin down VMs or applications, and do their testing.

Big-time cost savings on administrative overhead without having to constantly manage virtual machines, spin them up, spin them down, manually. We can automate all of that now and most developers will be able to access a page, landing zone, and do that all themselves, rather than having an admin or someone on the team have to do it for them.

As far as increasing the infrastructure agility, that goes back to the cost savings. Being able to tear down entire development enclaves, essentially by pushing a button or invoking a command line, and spin them all back up, is immensely valuable for an Agile development shop.

It does help, to an extent, with speed of provisioning. But to me, I'm also thinking on the back end, the technical end, depending on which environment I'm on, it might have flash or, in some areas, it might have old spinning disk. So the speed is going to be limited to that as well. But as far as the software itself and using the API calls, it's definitely speedy.

It has definitely made it easier for IT to support developers. That is one of the main aspects of the product line. It's for having that in place, to not have to call up Joe Shmo Admin to say, "Hey, can you go manage this for me, spin this up for me?" You can have a portal for a developer, another user login, spin up the resources, shut them down if they need to, request apps, and all without having to bother your admin next door. 

Valuable features include the extensibility of it and the customization of a lot of the Blueprints, that you can customize, and the community as a whole. There's a ton of community-generated Blueprints that might be (helpful) to set up a design for your automation needs, that you can use as a base and go on from there and make changes to it. That would probably be the biggest thing.

Once it's deployed, managing it is pretty intuitive.

The deployment mechanisms for the initial deployment of the product line lack the appropriate documentation to give someone who's never used it before... Obviously, you want people who are knowledgeable in the product line before they deploy it, but there might be cases where someone wants to go to the website, go to the doc section, and do a step-by-step on how to deploy it. That's really not as brushed-up as other documents I've seen that they have. That would definitely be an improvement on their end.

I haven't had any stability issues with it.

Scalability, I have no issues with that as well. As long as I have the compute, storage, and network bandwidth to support it, the underlying infrastructure is there. It's pretty expandable.

Technical support has been fine, adequate. I have not really had any need for it, per se. It's more so self-taught and people going to training and learning how to use it. If we have an issue, it's generally really rare that we'd have to reach out and talk to tech support. So I don't have a lot of experience having to deal with them on it.

The deployment of it is not overly intuitive. It does require some knowledge about putting it out there and deploying it.

I have had the opportunity to upgrade it and that is definitely not the easiest of things to do, generally. As long as you follow the checklist, and which product line you're updating in the specific order, you won't break your system. But if you don't follow the sheet or "the law," you will definitely mess yourself up big-time.

Make sure that you know what you're getting into, first off, what it's for and what you might need it for because I might recommend maybe a less robust product line for your needs as opposed to something that's more of like a higher infrastructure, corporation-level product line, like vRealize.

Every version, they've updated the UI, scalability, added new products to be able to work with different cloud vendors. Overall, that part of it's fine, there have been improvements from version to version.

As far as automation techniques, like Chef or Puppet or Ansible, it's the age-old thing: Mac, Windows, Linux, whatever works for what I need, I'll use. I don't really have a preference, as long as it works for what I need.

Our primary use case for the product is automating the basic rollout of a VM.

Our experience with it has been very good. It's one of those things where, if you don't have to think about a product, it just does its thing, it's in the background, you don't have to worry about it, that's always handy.

We're not too complex, we're not a dot-com, but it does help us with smoothing out the variability of things. It makes it so that we can deploy things very easily. We don't use a lot of the higher features it has, but the basic things we do, we can just knock them out on a daily basis. It's not a problem to use.

The flexibility it has given us in being able to deploy things very quickly and easily, taking it from having to build up an image, and deploy something manually, which would take several hours or a day, we can do in 20 minutes; just roll out a template very easily. If we want a half-dozen different systems, we don't have to manually build them. We just point a domain to each: bang, bang, bang, done.

The solution has helped us to increase infrastructure agility, mostly because, in addition to it being able to do its thing on its own, it has tie-ins to other parts of our CI/CD pipeline. We use Jenkins for our build process which, of course, vRA has plugins for, to be able to integrate with it. We use Chef and there is the Chef build as part of our image that we standardized to deploy, and that can tie in with our section of the pipeline that it does for applications.

It has made it easier for IT to support developers because we can stand up boxes a lot quicker. We can have a test environment, we can actually just clone off something and make it a lot quicker and easier for them to deploy; quicker deployment, quicker testing, quicker into production.

The most valuable feature is that it's able to deploy several different operating systems, it's able to deploy whatever we want. We can take a template, spin it up, revise it, save it back off, and be able to have that for other departments. We can have one for our Dev team and one for our Research team which has some specific requirements. We can keep track of them and deploy things automatically.

The tool is also usable for Windows and Linux and Mac. We have people who access the tool who have different requirements. For example, I'm in Windows, but we have a Linux group that also uses the tool, and some of the people in the networking department use Macs. So it's very usable across different functional groups.

We have also found it to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's something that, because it has the workflows that are very easily graphed out - you can follow what it's doing, it's very picturesque, you can see what it's doing easily - it's something that you can hand over to a user who is not familiar with it and they can wrap their brain around it pretty quickly. The networking group, which doesn't access the finer features of VMware a lot, we give it to them. When they want to deploy a tool, they can see what it's doing very quickly. It's not something that you have to understand a scripting language for to see what it's doing.

I honestly don't see much room for improvement, but how can I take a new employee and ramp him up so he can be productive quickly? How do we get the training materials standardized so we can get him up and running really quickly?

The stability is good. It's one of those things that we can just stand up and forget. We haven't really had any problems with it. It's just there, and we can rely on it.

Scalability is one of those things we haven't used or needed. But it's there when do. We have confidence that it will meet our needs when we need them.

We haven't had to use tech support for the product. Part of that is that I do my own support. During the initial deployment, I had a few questions. We already had a VMware representative up there. So I asked him my questions. The support was good.

We have gone all the way from version 5.5 to version 8. VMware provided us the steps that we needed to do to go from this version to this version to this version, the progression we needed. From there, it was very straightforward.

I would easily give vRA a nine out of ten. It has done everything that we need. We're not the most complex use case, but it's done everything we need, we can just forget about it in the background.

It's a nine and not a ten because of the training stuff. It would be helpful to have a nice flow of training for a new employee. I'm the "old guy" of the shop and we're bringing on new people or new use cases. For example, the user-services department needs to start using it. How do we bring in new people to use its fleshed-out features, in addition to just our using it, where other departments are using it? How do we bring those people in? That's the only thing we really need.

We mostly use it for generating VMware instances.

Things are getting to a point now where you need to be able to do more with less. Anything you can automate is always going to help you in the long run. I'm in the government sector. We're in extreme "do-more-with-less," so we're constantly looking for solutions where we can automate things that we're doing on a day-to-day basis. That's especially true when you have repeatable processes. Automation becomes paramount to get your mission completed in a timely fashion.

It has helped us through time savings. We can do more with fewer people. It probably does, ultimately, improve time to market. But there's so much bureaucratic process in everything we do in the government sector, that it's really hard to improve time to market for anything we do.

When I've been on the console, I have found it very intuitive. There is not a lot to it; it's pretty self-explanatory. It leads you in a direction where you know what you're doing.

I would like to see more improvement in the way it integrates with other systems. That certainly wouldn't hurt.

We've been using this product for a while and the stability is fantastic. As long as we keep our hardware maintained, and we're doing everything we can on that front, I don't see any issues with stability.

The scalability is fantastic. It's there.

Personally, I have not had to use technical support. I know we, as an organization, do so frequently. We have our TAM who is onsite, so any time we do have any issues, the TAM is there to help us, assist us in getting to the right person, and in getting where we need to get to.

The initial setup is straightforward. Not for us, again, because of the bureaucracy, but, in and of itself, it is very straightforward. I've done a lot of it in the lab, and hands-on training. It's pretty straightforward and simple.

There has been a return on investment, although it's hard to measure.

In terms of advice, being here at VMworld 2018 is a start. I'm sitting through a lot of these presentations and there's a myriad of information available that is located right here, as opposed to me having to go search for it across the web.

When we consider working with a vendor, for us, government certifications help. From our perspective, ATOs and STIGs and all those types of things being in existence before we start to work with them are important, because having to obtain all those things from us is a difficult portion of it. Also, product support for integration with other systems, that's always a key to us. Those are the two main factors.