VMware Aria Automation Room for Improvement

AN
IT Service Manager at Allianz

We are migrating from vRA version 7 to 8, but the migration is really hectic and time-consuming. There are no straightforward paths to migrate. We are doing an entirely new deployment to go to vRA version 8.0, then somehow get all of the VMs to vRA 8.0. Therefore, it would have been great if VMware had some solutions to upgrade from vRA 7 to 8 seamlessly. This includes the management of all the objects or VMs from the older version. Unfortunately, it is not there.

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NiteshKumar1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principle consultant at Infosys

There is an area of improvement. For example, you are migrating from a customer's existing data center to a new target data center. To facilitate this transition, you'll initially need to evaluate the customer's aging hardware hosting VMware, which is nearing the end of its operational life. The customer expresses the intention to upgrade to a newer version, necessitating an overhaul of everything in the new data center. As a Systems Integrator (SI), consultant, or architect, your recommendation would be to acquire the latest hardware with a specified configuration and then install VMware on top of it.

However, there's a crucial aspect related to the infrastructure requirements for VMware to run seamlessly on that hardware. If there's an opportunity to potentially reduce these infrastructure prerequisites, it would be highly beneficial. This is because a higher number of VMware licenses requires more infrastructure capacity from Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) or Colocation partners.

Consequently, when discussing the operation of this virtualized environment from VMware over a contractual period of five years, the overall cost to the customer is influenced by the infrastructure requirements. If there's a feasible way to decrease these prerequisites for the infrastructure supporting the virtualization layer, it would be advantageous in terms of cost for the customer.

Any customer in today's world exists or wants to exist in a hybrid model, so in future releases, we would like to see this. So, going forward, if this virtualized environment would exist, it has to be a combination of on-premise plus public cloud Azure/AWS. 

It should be more seamless when your interface or when you are interacting with workloads running on-premise VMware/AWS VMware. So it is only there in some capacity and space, and I'm aware of it. And Azure and VMware already have a tie-up on the same lines, but at the same time, if it is more seamless, if it is more interchangeable, if you could move your workloads, or if you can access your workloads or your virtual machines irrespective of whatever platform it is running, whether it is on-premises, or cloud or public cloud, it'll be a lot more comfortable for a user than the user to consume that infrastructure. Firstly, it needs to have a combination of deployment and be more seamless for the customers.

Secondly, more software-defined features, more in terms of managing the infrastructure pool in a software-defined way. Managing the infrastructure pool in a more optimized fashion is going to be the key in the upcoming times. 

It's not just on-premise, but at the same time, it should also be the public cloud as well. Probably because when I meet my customers, this is one thing that I always tell them. I have seen people moving from on-premise public cloud only to realize at the end of the month that they end up paying a higher bill compared to what they were paying when they were running their business on-premise. The reason is that they do not understand or do not realize the full potential of the public cloud, and the way it should be consumed, the way it should be used, and the way it should be scheduled to ensure that the billing at the end of the month is very optimal. You pay for what exactly you need, not everything that you have from the cloud. That's not a way to use the cloud, whether it is on-premise or from the cloud.

For example, an enterprise has over 100 applications. Out of that 100 applications, only 25 applications are running the production instances, and the remaining 75 are running non-production instances. It can be a development environment, a test environment, a sandbox, etc. In this case, you need to run only the 25 applications on the public cloud 24/7. You do not need to run your remaining 75 applications 24/7. Because, eventually, your developers, testers, quality managers, and whoever will use the non-production environment only when they're in the office and working on those applications. Then why do we need to have those applications, which are non-production in nature, lower environments? So we're running on the public cloud all the time because, for a cloud provider, it is a virtual machine; whether you are consuming it for production work or non-production work, it is going to charge you the same bill.

And if you are not optimizing, if you're not scheduling workloads, you are actually wasting money. You're wasting your money, and your bills, which you are going to pay with the public cloud provider provided, are going to be bad. It's going to be crazy. And then customers do not know what to do in this situation. And you cannot fight with the public cloud provider because they would say, "I had given you all the possibilities, all the opportunities to learn about it, the way you should be functioning it, the way you should be utilizing it. If you are not using it the way it should be used, That's not my problem."

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Lekan Ogunwale - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at Ultrasightconsulting Limited

Our current use cases aren't very complex, but as our environment grows, we're seeing a greater need for automation. We're considering expanding our automation efforts, especially since other competitive products are starting to offer similar features.

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Buyer's Guide
VMware Aria Automation
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about VMware Aria Automation. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
SurajSachdeva - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineer | Developer at Team Computers

The connectivity between VMs is easy, but they can be made more effective if we have a single proof point where we can configure all the biggest data at a single point. It will be very helpful for the deployment team. They could maintain every log from multiple VMs being collected or taken to adequate various VMs in a single cluster at a particular time.

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Irshad Kazi - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Technical Consultant at ITC Infotech

VMware Aria Automation could be more user-friendly. It is complex to use for new users. It should have automated tools or drag-and-drop functionality.

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Vijayamurugan  K - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr MANAGER at L&T Technology Services

The product's features for hybrid cloud integration could be better. It should allow us to fetch reports from anywhere. Additionally, there should be better options for integration with mobile security platforms.

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Nicolas Lethellier - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Architect and DevOps Facilitator at Thales

I'm not wanting any particular feature; but there should be cost reductions. VMware comes at a high cost, and that's why we are in the process of transitioning to a more affordable alternative.

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SS
Infrastructure Professional Service Team Lead at G-Able

I would like to see better integration capabilities. Maybe if they could develop libraries within Aria Automation for simpler integration with other third-party solutions, instead of just basic integration.

So, integration with backup solutions would be helpful. 

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RA
CTO at Moca Financial

Interoperability is more of an industry problem. There are multiple cloud provisioning tools out there, and vRA is just one of them. There are a lot of components out there, which all do certain things. There are some hard drives, particular types of servers, particular types of routers, load balancers, and firewalls, where some are stronger in one area and some in another. Interoperability between them would be a good thing.

With the workflow aspect, which has manual intervention, a policy needs to be approved by somebody. There could be better management of that piece with better templates. It is like a workflow engine, but does not have enough example templates to do certain things. A lot of people waste a lot of time trying to figure out the same thing, and everybody is trying to figure out the same thing, e.g., how to make a MySQL cluster in a Windows environment?

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Simranjit Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

It's not open source as of now. The licensing costs and the operations support costs of the VRAs are higher. It's a VMware-based license. 

If I see the other competitors, they are open-source alternatives to VRA, like OpenStack and others. So I can use it on the flow. But in order to get VLS automation, it's an enterprise license that costs more, and hence, VMware support cost is also more.

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Awadhesh KumarMishra - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Architect at Kyndryl

Maintaining the product requires effort and a good understanding of the environment, including how to set up the codes and other configurations. Pricing needs to be improved to improve the customer penetration. 

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Tarek Nader - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. vRA Consultant at VMware

They could extend the ability to use vRealize Orchestrator Automation for organizations with multiple tenants. It should be easier to operate and extend different capabilities from vRealize Orchestrator. Currently, it's difficult to build advanced services in Aria Automation because you need to use the vRealize Orchestrator. 

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LH
Sr Virtualization Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It is not super-intuitive. It does require some skills to understand how to use it. I had no problem, but I had spent a lot of time already learning this product ahead of moving it to an operational status. But as we did so, we had a hard time bringing some people from other groups into the fold, to script and work against this environment. So, the ability to build workflows within that automation needs to be streamlined.

In terms of additional features, I would like it to be able to poll my vCenter infrastructure more rapidly and adapt to changes quickly. It should alert me and let me know when there are broken components, as a result of underlying infrastructure changes. It needs to be more stringent.

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VK
Lead Software Engineer-Cloud Development at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

The licensing models are a bit confusing so should be simplified. 

The solution could include more integrations and supportability around the container space. They have already started to do this, but could expand support for Kubernetes platforms and DevOps tools used for Kubernetes clusters or cloud-native development. 

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CS
Solutions Architect at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Multitenancy management is a little bit difficult to do, so it is an area that can be improved.

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SS
Senior Systems Admin at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to see it expanding, growing in all of the cloud-based stuff that they are really pushing towards, and have it be more capable of what it is already doing. But in reality, that's probably our own fault because we're a little bit behind on the version of VMware that we're running. It's probably just that we need to get caught up on our version.

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JP
Product Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

The solution could be lighter. As an administrator, I would like to simplify the number of services I need to deploy. They took a significant step in that direction by removing all the Windows dependencies that we had in the past, but there are still a lot of services consuming resources. 

I would also like to see a richer API. This is true of all VMware solutions because the REST API is not the best.

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HaridevNagula - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead Specialist at Hitachi Systems, Ltd.

The costing models in the previous version have been moved to vRO. The process is not simplified in vRO. I don't like this change in the new version.

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Abhishek_Agarwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Automation or scripting should be simplified so that administrators who are not experts can have a better grasp of automation.

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UM
IT Infrastructure Manager at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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BP
Solutions Architect at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees

vRealize Automation on the back-end is still a little complicated. It has a lot of moving pieces, simplifying that from a pure infrastructure point of view would be a good thing. I would then like to have more out-of-the-box functionality and integrations with VMware components.

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JJ
IT Manager at a individual & family service with 10,001+ employees

I can't say what new features I'd like right now because we're looking forward to the stuff that's in 7.5. I need some stick-time on 7.5 and then I can tell you what I want to see in 7.6 or 7.7.

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PN
Solution Architect at Presidio Networked Solutions

When it comes to the orchestration workflow, you're on your own. The documentation and resources are very limited, and you have to learn everything on your own.

Though the product is very powerful by itself, many who work with it struggle to get up to speed. As a result, they view VMware Aria Automation as the icing on the cake and hold on to their PowerShell scripts on the backend.

I would also like to see more integration with third-party solutions. The documentation regarding integration with third-party tools such as ServiceNow needs to be improved.

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DU
Cloud Architect at Swisscom

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

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AJ
Senior Infrastructure Design at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I don't think it's intuitive or user-friendly. I think it's a good tool. Any automation tool, these days, the learning curve is kind of high. You're teaching sysadmins who never developed stuff. Maybe they modified a little bit of code and now you tell them, "Hey, here's the tool, use it." But you have to know a little bit of DevOps. So you have to train them how to do the scripting.

They could also improve a lot on the interface itself.

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AO
Technical Project Manager at Bilgibim

Turkey does not have a big presence on the automation side. We have only one customer. Maybe some new applications can be added based on the technology. For example, maybe SAP could be added, because the customer is currently only using it for the database site, and the other VMware systems.

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KB
Senior Associate at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

The solution is intuitive, but not necessarily user-friendly. In particular, it's the documentation. It's a lot of going-through-the-weeds types of scenarios. There is just an abundance of information, so it's a matter of understanding how the objects or the relationships exist, and then, obviously, being able to access that information and knowing how to make use of it.

If there were a tighter integration with either AWS or Azure - being able to have a little bit more out-of-the-box, flexibility-wise, and the ability to realize that - it would help. You're getting out-of-the-box workflows that will literally allow you to provision, but there's a large development gap to cover the use cases that we're trying to provide or support.

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RM
Sr. Technical Specialist at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

They should concentrate on navigation and service improvements.

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DP
Infrastructure Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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DW
IT Manager at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

It has a learning curve.

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it_user730257 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user660039 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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MS
Vice president at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

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AD
Technical Manager at a pharma/biotech company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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. 

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RT
Virtualization Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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CN
Director of Infrastructure at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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ES
Technical Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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
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JT
Customer Apps Manager at Telecommunications Services of Trinidad & Tobago Limited (TSTT)

I would like to see a simpler way of provisioning it. As is, we can automate the provisioning of a VM. However, when it comes to the external IPs, that is outside of VMware. But that has to be automated as well. If there was a way for us to have the virtual machines connect to switches that are external to VMware, that would be great. That way, it would handle the entire workflow from creation and provisioning of a VM to the connectivity to the external IP addresses which allow our customers to have access to the VM. Currently, that IP configuration has to be done manually.

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it_user587121 - PeerSpot reviewer
Linear Dimensions, Consultant at a government with 10,001+ employees

I would like to see more integration to do things like DR, from a court perspective. Today, for us, SRM doesn't scale because each of our customers has a local vCenter environment as well as the vCenter in our environment. So we can't get SRM to scale to the point to which we need. From an integration perspective, DR inside of that would be good.

Also virtual desktops. I know you can spin up virtual desktops in vRA, but they're not thin-provisioned. I don't know if that's because the other product, Horizon View, is there, but it would be nice to see more integration. I know NSX is getting more and more integrated. We talked a little about vROps. I see that integration coming in.

But for vRA, DR would be a service we'd like to be able to offer to the customers, and it should be integrated, in my opinion, in vRA.

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it_user438321 - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager at a media company with 5,001-10,000 employees

The way this product handles logging has a long way to go. VMware addresses this by using agents to gather the logs from various locations and condense them for you.

Managing templates and the way they interact with blueprints needs improvement. If you change a template, you have to go change every blueprint that it was assigned to. There needs to be a template clustering or grouping object.

It lacks the expected seamless integration with vCenter. Objects like templates, storage clusters, or naming changes were not automatically reconciled by vCAC. This often led to full error logs when the only issue was a lack of syncing between vCenter and vCAC.

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AC
IT Consultant at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees

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

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SD
Cloud engineer at a government with 10,001+ employees

We have and we haven't found this solution to be user-friendly. In this case, we have another portal in the front because we have some use cases we can add to the products so we use another portal for that to reply to all of the requirements.

This version has all of the features we want. 

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MK
DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I would like to see more automation, more ways to automate automation tasks. We are already working on the first evaluations of the next version of vRealize 8 and have found it to be promising.

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MS
Project Architect at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

We have found this solution to be user-friendly but there is room for improvement. The interface is not very modern, although version 7.5 is a lot better.

I would like to see a richer GUI or Visual Studio. If you create a GUI with Visual Studio, it would be much richer than what we have now with the array. 

Most of the time the upgrade experience has been good but sometimes things break after upgrading. For example, some API codes stopped working.

The Orchestrator also has a lot of room for improvement. It's a bit slow.

I would rate this solution a seven and not a ten because there's still room for improvement. 

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CF
Team Lead Private Cloud at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

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.

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KP
Principal Engineer at T-Mobile

I would like to see easier custom components for it - that would be the best way I could word it. It's more like custom items for it.

Also, the authentication piece could always use some work. They should make it a little bit more dynamic, a little bit easier to deal with large-scale AD deployments. They need to make it a little more enterprise-ready. That is the one thing that kills us. I hate harping on the authentication issue, but it is huge.

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it_user730290 - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Automation: We want to be able to have a lot more preconfigured solutions. Where a user can go into the marketplace, pick out the preconfigured solution, and deploy that straight out without having a highly-skilled employee specifically for this role.

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Min Chan Myae - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at Access Spectrum Company Limited

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.

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ND
Virtualization Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

It would be nice if, at the director level, the manager level, there was a pretty graphic. They don't like to see numbers and line items, they want to see graphs and scales and real-world pictures. That would support better reporting.

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DG
Systems Engineer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We do partner with VMware on their beta testing, so we have already communicated some of the features we'd like to see back to VMware. I don't know that I'm allowed to speak about it because it's on an NDA.

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WP
Executive Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

They need to help in managing the change of corporate culture involved in establishing the solution.

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TG
Systems Engineer with 10,001+ employees

It is not intuitive or user-friendly. It's complicated as heck. We actually hired VMware Professional Services to come in. I understand the newer version, which we're not quite on yet, is easier and that the interface is better. But the product is really a profession unto itself. The user interface could be improved.

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CD
IT Director at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

Regarding that networking piece, more hands-on pieces, that come with that purchase to help you get to that good spot might be an area that would help.

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KM
DevOps Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Once you get in there and start to understand the product, it is more intuitive. However, for somebody coming in from the outside, it takes a while to understand it. There is a lot of terminology. I am the primary admin on it, but I have some guys who tend to support me when I'm gone, and they try to find stuff on it. They don't know the best place to look because some of the terms don't make a lot of sense to them. This is more of a training issue than just getting better familiar with the product. I would like them to improve the product training.

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SH
Cloud Architect at Dyntek

The ability to provision native cloud services as well as the ability to provision Azure VMs in the same way we provision AWS VMs. Right now, it's a broken process. Azure is kind of a work around. It would be good to have native address support and paths servicing offerings from Azure and AWS offered natively through VRA.

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it_user321303 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Systems Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

They just need to keep expanding it adding additional features.

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DM
Sr. Manager, Open Systems Service Desk at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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RN
Systems Engineer at a educational organization with 51-200 employees

We upgraded twice. The last upgrade was a bit problematic. 

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PP
Technical consultant at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

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.

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PS
Head of Cloud and Technology with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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BW
Systems Administrator at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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AN
Systems Administrator at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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?

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BK
Ops Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

I'm curious to test out the features that have been announced. We'll see how that goes from a hybrid perspective. I'm looking forward most to the hybrid capabilities.

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MU
IT Solutions Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

In terms of usability, It has had its challenges. It requires a lot of custom code to integrate into our environment. It can take a little while to get it to do what we want, takes some code instead of having built-in functionality. Part it is how we use it. It would be a lot easier to use in a greenfield scenario versus brownfield, which is the way we are using it.

I would also like to see them streamline the install. It's split between Windows and Linux appliances, and it would be easier if it was all appliances. I think they're going that way.

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AN
Systems Administrator at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

We don't have too complex of an environment, we're not doing machine-learning or any of the advanced features all that much. We're a pretty straightforward IT shop. We just provide servers, and then, from there, it's what the customer wants. The next step we would probably like to see is to have a customer portal, so instead of our having to punch the button, the customer could. But I believe that VMware offers enough that setting that up is more on us, rather than waiting for them offer it.

We needto learn more, advance our usage of the product. We're doing what we can with what we have, but we have to learn a bit more. Better training, or training modules, wouldn't hurt. I haven't personally looked through what the portal has, but more training is always good, so we could take a new employee and point him to the training and get him up to speed quickly. I have had 10 years or so experience with VMware, but I'm the old the guy in the department. Everybody else is newer than me on this and not everyone has my experience. So the training would be nice.

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it_user746703 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

At this point in time, it's support for multiple platforms. It already supports certain platforms, so extending that to the multiple cloud platforms and services, that's where we are looking to go.

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BW
Systems Administrator at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I want to see HTML 5. I want to get rid of JavaScript. First off, I know nothing about JavaScript. That doesn't mean I'm going to know anything better about HTML 5, but I do know that we have a lot of issues with Java crashing when we're using vCenter. I obviously don't want that to happen with the vRealize Automation and Orchestrator side.

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it_user746757 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The additional features I would like to see are better integration with Horizon, or actually integration with Horizon since it doesn't seem to be existent, more integration with NSX, and also better integration with Code Stream.

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it_user305391 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Engineer at SynchroNet

I spend a lot of time talking with some of the product's team members making requests. Machine prefix, which is what they call their naming scheme, I wish that it was more flexible. Right now, you're relying on creating your own system and leveraging vRealize Orchestrator to handle it if you have something more complex than their basic needs, which is just the name and then the number at the end.

Version control for blueprints: As it stands, you can make any changes you want. There's no record of it. Everything else is pretty much how I want it.

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it_user730173 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Infrastructure Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Improvements in the API. Make it easier because that's where we tend to struggle when we were working with other groups. We spend time trying to digest the API to figure out how to actually consume it.

The UI could stand a lot of improvement as well. It doesn't look like a modern UI, so it needs some work.

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it_user674106 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

As with all recent VMware products, more focus needs to be done on QA. I encountered far too many bugs for an enterprise product. Additionally, more native vRA integration for various parts of the VM lifecycle will take some of the onus off the engineer to learn so much about Orchestrator.

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TE
Cloud and Automation Manager at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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DB
IT Director at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

One of the features that's a struggle today is some of the public cloud extensibility. Some of the plugins that are native to vRA and vRO, I'd like to see them come out earlier for vRO. I understand that in vRA, the plugins are a little bit more polished because vRA is the GUI. But we'd like to see them released earlier in vRO, prior to a GUI being released.

Azure, for example, is a public cloud provider but we have some instability issues with the plugin in vRO. It's okay for us if we separate the vRA from vRO plugin releases. So I'd like to see some increased stability in some of those public cloud plugins.

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RC
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

VMware should go the way of vROps, with everything in one machine, the ability to scale out, and a more distributed environment instead of having the usual centralized SQL database. 

Three-tier environments are not scalable.

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JM
Delivery Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

They are doing well as far as iterating quickly, iterating by often adding small things. I think there should be even more integrations with third-party systems. You have Infoblox and Puppet which great. Let's add Chef to the mix and just keep them coming.

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it_user730134 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Lead at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Implementation directly with our SRM product, because we know what the other products are out there that VM is offering, such as Site Recovery Manager (SRM). There are ties which you can customize to put them into that, but it would be nice if it came as an out-of-the-box feature.

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it_user730275 - PeerSpot reviewer
Virtualization Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I want to see them get rid of the IS component and make it a VMware appliance. There are a lot of requirements for Windows servers, which is not good for our environment. This makes configuration and installation tough.

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SB
Principal Systems Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

It is bleeding edge technology, but at times, it is buggy. 

It is too broad scale and complicated. It takes too many clicks to do things.

I would like a simplified version of the interface for small businesses. We started with Lab Manager. For us, Lab Manager was the perfect tool. It was easy and simple. It had all the screens for machines right up. vRA is too many clicks for the normal, simple user.

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GN
Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

A lot of automation issues are coming up in the market. Customers are looking at containers, among the new technologies which are coming up. How we can integrate with the multi-cloud? I can see, in the sessions happening here at VMworld 2018, that all these things are getting addressed, but the container-related solutions are something I am looking forward to.

We are thinking about containers. PKS is one of the issues. We would like to do a container service. In addition, the VMware Kubernetes Engine is something which we are focusing on.

From the storage perspective, we will bring in vSAN; NSX-T from the networking perspective. But what is the is the overall solution? How would this compare with what the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is providing? That is something which we have to look at it. 

VMware has something called VVD, VMWare validated design. How far the container solutions are going to be a part of that is also something which we'll be looking at.

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it_user746712 - PeerSpot reviewer
EVS Engineer 3 at Cabela's

I could see improving by just knowing how to script a little better, but other than that, I think the product itself is fine.

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BT
Senior Systems Administrator at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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IC
Product Engineer at a tech company with 5,001-10,000 employees

They can improve on the dashboard representations and the options for non-technical people. I would like to see the ability to customize that and maybe provide them with helpful guides to what subscriptions they have. Sometimes, I find that I have to do more explanation to people who do approvals. I would really like to customize the display to the terms they use in their particular business unit. So a little bit more of a nod to the customization of the UI for non-technical users would be helpful.

Also, I expect it's going to come with time, but there is not too much documentation out there because it's fairly new, and not very many people use the little niche product. So more documentation.

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it_user746724 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

I would say maybe a better interface. It looks very plain. So, a more user-friendly interface, so the vRealize Automation tool could be improved.

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AK
Sr. Cloud Automation Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

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.

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it_user730323 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Infrastructure Manager at a mining and metals company with 10,001+ employees

There is room for improvement for mostly stuff around containers and controlling containers.

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DK
Systems engineer

I would like to see support for multiple hypervisors. At the moment that support is only on paper, it doesn't actually work.

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AR
Solution Architect at a aerospace/defense firm with 51-200 employees

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

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it_user746751 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Admin at a consultancy with self employed
  • Ability to mimic more VCD functionality.
  • Ability to share blueprints among tenants, or have a master blueprint repository, so you don't have to move the stuff between tenants. That's probably the number one feature.
  • Improve functionality that we're looking for longterm.
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it_user730152 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Architect at University of florida

Between I think 7.0 and 7.1, when we first had it, the IDM Appliance had a lot of issues with SSL. Upgrade has been a issue, we always have to call in and open up the ticket for assistance. It's just not been that good. I think 7.2 to 7.3, which one of our engineers just did, was actually the only time we've actually been able to do an upgrade well.

Also, there's a couple of UI things that we'd like to see improved, but we'll put in future requests for those.

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it_user727512 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

One thing I have seen, although it might just be my personal experience, it's the High Availability. I get a lot of requests and in two different models, the simple model and distributed. With distributed, installation is a pain. I have always gotten into errors when employing a distributed environment, which provides High Availability. So on that, improvements can be made so the process can go more smoothly.

Another thing that's not the best, during deployment, is if we have to integrate managing physical servers. Right now, it's limited to a mature VM environment only. Physical would be helpful.

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AR
Senior Systems Administrator at Webroot Software

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.

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MW
Systems Engineer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

An improvement - and maybe this is already a feature that I don't know about - would be to be able to deploy to public cloud. Deployments to the public cloud would probably be a good feature if it's not already there, to be able to deploy to AWS or Azure, etc.

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JS
Systems Admin at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

I don't know if it can integrate with vRealize or vROps in order to already manage what has been done. Right now I'm very big into vROps to pull reports on all my VMs. I don't know if that capability is there already, but if I could integrate it more, if they went hand-in-hand, it would be easy. Not only could I deploy everything in one place, but I could go to another place just to pull my reports on what has been done.

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DB
Chief Architect at Enterprise Networking Solutions (ENS-Inc)

I would like to see more out-of-the-box blueprints and workflows for the rest of VMware's products and its portfolio.

We would like them to continuously improve the product with upgrades, as they have been.

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it_user746754 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Probably more stability and just ensuring everything works out-of-the-box.

There is still a bit of a gap in terms of product maturity based on all the forums and things that we've seen, so we would like it to be much more mature than what we currently have.

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it_user730203 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

We're still running version 6. When we upgrade to version 7, a lot of our issues should be addressed already. Things like some of the flexibility, and some of the ease of automation.

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it_user730281 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Network Server Analyst at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

There is some performance lag, but that could be on our end.

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it_user715128 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Automation and Cloud Specialst at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Yes, certainly. The ability to manage the product in code; so infrastructure is code. It certainly has improved in the last version, but it still isn't quite at the level that some of its competition is in. It's not infrastructure is called native, overlooks is getting closer to it, so that's probably the biggest single improvement to suggest.

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it_user713790 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

More detailed documentation on implementing feature sets and more examples of real world processes would help.

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DR
CEO at Lidoma

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.

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NW
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

I don't find the solution to be intuitive and user- friendly. The GUI is really complicated. Tracking down logs and errors is very hard. Then, it takes a specialized JavaScript person to build.

Also, I'm not sure how the upgrades are going now, but they definitely need to evolve the upgrade process. 

Finally, the logs are very generalized. Giving more of an indicator of what's actually going wrong, rather than just a generic error code, would help.

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PJ
Cloud Services Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

Early on, we had a lot of troubles. Most of those were short-knit runs. And we do have difficulties trying to upgrade.

I also don't find it to be entirely user-friendly. There are a lot of complicated menus within menus within menus. Things move around from version to version

We're looking forward to some of the Catalog enhancements that I know are coming in the upcoming versions.

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JK
Sys Admin at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

I don't find it to be user-friendly or intuitive because, in my case, when I have to deploy SAP systems, I need to jump between the vRA, the vRO, and the actual vCenter itself. I need to go back and forth to do different things. For example, with the vRA I'll deploy the base machine. With vRO, that's where I may have to get an IP address. If somebody's SAP machine has a secondary, virtual name, I need to get the next available IP address from vRO. And then, inside the vCenter, I need to do some firewall stuff, NXS. So it's not that user-friendly.

I wish they could make it just one application, just vRA, that does all that. There might be a way to do it but I haven't figured out how to do it yet.

Also, vCenter and vRA, I believe they share two different databases so sometimes you have to somehow sync them up. I wish there was only one database between the two or, somehow, one database would rule over the other one, so if you have both products, the vCenter might use the vRA database. Otherwise, when you do stuff in vCenter, you have to write a command on vRA to update the databases.

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AB
Field Service Engineer at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

The user interface is not that intuitive. If it is for technical people like me, it is intuitive, but not for the common man. It's intuitive for me because I know what the technology is behind it. For me, because I use it repeatedly, the same type of use case, it's okay, but for our customers, it would be very difficult.

I would also like to see a test environment, testing before implementing, to see how it will relate to existing things. That would make it feature-rich.

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EK
Engineer with 5,001-10,000 employees

That ServiceNow implementation is a little rough, but those guys in Ohio are doing a great job on it. Seeing things like that, things that integrate would be great. Anything that has REST APIs should have a plugin, that's really what makes it powerful.

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VB
Network Lead at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

Other than the features that are supposed to already be in place with the new version - meaning the tight integration with vROps, which they said was there but wasn't - the ability to migrate between clusters is a big deal right now. If you try to migrate a current client, create a research pool for a client, and they have multiple ESX clusters, you can't get it. It's so painful to do. The new version that we will be going to is supposed to do that automatically. And I will believe it until it doesn't work.

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it_user715146 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assigned Client Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

There are a lot of usability issues which I have. Overall, the product feels bloated and cumbersome. It feels like you are very locked in to what VMware has decided is the "way to do things" and you have to spend a lot of time developing custom code and logic to get around these artificial limitations.

Specifically, the blueprint design canvas has had a terrible memory leak error for several versions which makes designing blueprints difficult and time consuming.

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it_user667686 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
  • Better integration with the public cloud and DevOps toolset
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it_user730221 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

One of the things we saw in the initial phase was our integration with our development domains, where if we want to have more than one domain tied to it with users, we're seeing that as a struggle. However, VMware has said, some of these features have been worked out with IAM Appliances. So we are seeing a bit of improvement there, though we want to be able to see multiple domains that we can integrate into the same tenant space a little more seamlessly.

There are still some features that I would like to see changed. One pain point we have seen is users are able to set their lease expirations to zero, which means the lifecycle management gets disabled. So, it has some limitations there that we have seen. However, that's something VMware has gotten back to us and said should be fixed in future releases.

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it_user509208 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Solutions Architect at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

There are a lot of improvements required with regards to vRealize Automation. There are a couple of areas I would like to pinpoint. There are a couple of workflows missing from the storage side, so we can't easily add to my current blueprint.

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MC
IT Professional

It is not intuitive nor easy to use. Lab Manager was very intuitive, and it was built with VMware functions. However, VMware vRealize Automation bought it, and we have not been happy with it. We would like them to go back to the Lab Manager that we used to use.

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DL
Principal Architect at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

The costing and pricing models of their product.

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RE
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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

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EM
Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Something as simple as formatting the catalog in a different way would be helpful because there is no option for doing so. A lot of the contents for the virtual machine, blueprints that you can request, are hidden from view and there's no way to change the view.

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it_user730341 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure System Administrator at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to see this additional features in the next release: The ability to have more dynamic forms. Some of the static forms that vRA provides in the XaaS form, they are good, but they could be a little more efficient. For instance, the calendar selections should have the ability to only go to a certain spot, as opposed to going out to something like 2040, for the requests.

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it_user722256 - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder & CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Better integration with Azure cloud and Google Cloud Platform.

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it_user619107 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Analyst at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I don’t see configuration management feasibility. I think there should be a configuration management tool on the user dashboard. It can be used to patch/update the servers provisioned through vRA for an inbuilt facility.

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it_user716568 - PeerSpot reviewer
Private Cloud Lead at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The infrastructure part and VM reconfigure need improvement so that the end user can smoothly perform all the tasks which they are directly performing on the endpoints.

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DV
Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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BM
Computer Repairman with 5,001-10,000 employees

There is room for improvement but, hopefully, everything is being been addressed already. For example, integrations. VMware is going crazy with M&A and integrations take time, so I can't complain.

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it_user715152 - PeerSpot reviewer
Deployment Lead at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Implementation should not be so complex. Certificate replacement should be easier.

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it_user661293 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Technical Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

IaaS components: I have an assumption that all the IaaS components will be migrated to a Linux appliance, then I think the communication between the Linux appliance and the IaaS components will happen faster and smoother.

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Buyer's Guide
VMware Aria Automation
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about VMware Aria Automation. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.