VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) Review

Our primary use case of this solution is to automate with our various partners. It performs quite poorly, has a quite steep learning curve, and you have to invest an extraordinary amount of time to be able to do anything.

We did a POC with one of our customers. Their engineers do a lot of daily provisioning so let's say out of eight to ten working hours per day they'd spend around six or seven hours a day provisioning various kinds of stuff. We did the POC and we managed to cut those six or seven hours to around half an hour a day or so. It has helped increase the speed of provisioning. It cut out a lot of provisioning time on new virtual machines and new resources.

We like the various kinds of tools to automate stuff but not a lot of them have a self-service portal. If you were to compare it to different kinds of automation tools a self-service portal is unique.

I have not found this solution to be user-friendly. It's very complicated. The demo shows that you can automate anything but they only show basic scenarios. If you want to do anything more complicated than that, it becomes very complicated to set up. 

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

The stability is good enough. 

Our experience with technical support hasn't been so great. It can take a long time for them to respond to our questions and often the answer will be "we don't know."

We also looked at Cisco. 

The setup was straightforward. We upgraded to a newer version seamlessly. It worked really well. 

This solution is easier to set up than the alternative we looked at. The other one wasn't as powerful. If I were an automation ninja I could do much more with vRealize than the other solution I evaluated. 

I would rate this solution a neutral five. It has a lot of potential but it's very hard to use. It has a steep learning curve and you need to invest an obscene amount of time to be able to do anything. 

I would advise someone looking into this solution to be prepared to invest some serious time.