VMware Aria Automation Benefits

AN
IT Service Manager at Allianz

vRA has helped almost every team. For example, it has helped the development team and our training team.

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Lekan Ogunwale - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at Ultrasightconsulting Limited

The process for customers to automate with VMware Aria Automation is predominantly manual. Requests are made through tickets, which are assigned to Resolver tools. Approvals may come via email, and the execution team logs into Aria Automation to input and execute the requested tasks. Overall, it involves a mix of manual processes, email communication, and ticketing systems.

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SS
Infrastructure Professional Service Team Lead at G-Able

VMware Aria Automation improves the IT service delivery process. It can automate manual operations, but you need a development team with coding or programming skills to develop blueprints and automation workflows. 

While Aria Automation is a good product for that purpose, we haven't had many customers use it due to its cost and the development skills required. That's a challenge to consider.

Aria Automation can manage some aspects of public clouds, but I have no experience with that. We only use it for private cloud development.

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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.
RA
CTO at Moca Financial

If you want to start a VM database as a service, then you start a VM, but your customers don't know what size CPU or memories that they want. So, you can also scale it as needed. They can use vRA integration to monitor and scale up or down using the ESXi Server, then VRa works as an integration point.

A lot of its DevOps for infrastructure capabilities improve reliability. Much effort was put in by some customers, like a large automobile manufacturer, a large telecom, and two large banks, to achieve a certain level of capabilities in this space. These DevOps for infrastructure capabilities have saved time for developers. In one use case for a large marketplace, a typical release cycle took about 80 hours and was brought down to three hours by automating deployment for developers. The quicker that deployments happen, the faster that they can do their product release cycles.

When you start integrating vRA with the other VMware products, like vRealize Network Insight (vRNI). That is when it starts giving you the capabilities of extending your templates and networks across multiple hybrids and clouds.

If an organization has the capability of being able to use it in their application deployment lifecycle, then they can use the automated infrastructure deployment, but not many companies do. Not many companies say, "When I am going to deploy, I am also going to create 20 virtual machines and deploy on them." They normally start out by saying that there will be a separate team with managers in infrastructure and a separate team that does this in deployment. I have seen only one place that has done this, out of hundreds.

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AP
Technical Manager at Gilead Sciences, Inc.

Earlier we used to spend a whole day to collect all the information regarding upgrades or patches. When we introduced vRealize, it reduced the time to between 30 minutes and one hour to finish the whole job.

It has also improved provisioning a lot. Today, if I want to provision one VM, it takes me five minutes. Earlier, it would take a minimum of 30 minutes to go and choose everything. Now, I can just click once and it can provision my whole VM. We also integrated with our Alexa, so even through voice functionality I can create a VM. One of the guys at VMware, along with our partner, deployed that in our environment. If I say, "Hey, Alexa, I need a VM with four gigs of RAM," it will go and start creating it.

In addition, it has reduced our CapEx and OpEx, especially the OpEx values. Initially, we had 25 people to manage it. After going with vRealize, 15 people can do all the jobs and they can concentrate on other improvements as well. It's good for our company.

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

Speed to market. It helps us to improve the rate at which we deploy and the consistency in which we deploy. It has allowed us to scale up and scale down very quickly.

As we meet our open enrollment periods and then we come off of those enrollment periods and go into a normal operational state, we now have that ability to flex down that environment or flex up the environment quickly.

Another side of the coin is the supporting of DevOps. Now, with the advent of the automation, we've been able to give DevOps the ability to spin up environments, give them lease times, and then have it automatically reclaim the environment. So we can build workflows around DevOps processes that are more consistent. Our past configuration was that they would spin up whole DevOps environments of full, physical machines and they would run indefinitely. That was "Bob's" Dev environment and then "Joe" would come and say, "I want one." And then we'd have all these environments. Now, I can give him his environment for 48 hours and I can take it away and he can spin up another one. Or I can archive it. It allows us to be a little bit more agile.

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

Using this solution has greatly reduced the time it takes to deploy a server. It used to take at least one month, whereas now, to deploy a server takes two hours.

Using this product has changed the processes that the developers follow. It changed things for them but I don't know what they were doing before that.

We have used VRA to improve our security posture, in part because we can avoid relying on administrators and other people. The solution has all of the privileges necessary to deploy what we have to deploy. This means that we have better control over our security and the fact that we have automated the process, we know if it's not working, and we know whether everything is done correctly. If you rely on people, there can be human errors, in particular with respect to the firewalling not being properly done. There are specifics such as whether we had more ports open than necessary, or perhaps not enough. By automating everything, our process, including the security, has really improved the way that we handle the communication between the new server and the rest of the infrastructure.

Implementing VRA has enabled us to leverage other VMware products to support IT ops. We already had VMware products in our organization and adding VRA to the environment has helped make better use of those components. This was not our primary driver but it was a good plus for us later.

VRA has allowed us to save application provisioning time, as well. I estimate that our time to provision has gone from one week to one hour.

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AJ
CTO/CEO at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

One of our main customers is a big tech company. We have created automated labs for their products. They have these events in which they wanted to do training on the event site, and they wanted to have on-the-go labs. We utilized vRA to do that. Another customer for whom we are using VMware vSphere and vRA is a government entity. They have other customers or end-users that are different departments of the government. They have provided them cookie-cutter and templates to provision the VMs and do the backups. So, they are using vRA along with vSphere and the stack to provide a kind of government cloud.

We use the following DevOps for Infrastructure capabilities: the cloud templating standard for VMware Cloud infrastructure and infrastructure pipelining for continuous delivery. Through these capabilities, we have achieved more control, more monitoring capabilities, and more efficiency in terms of delivering solutions with much more confidence and less number of failures. There is also less strain on our human resources, so everything becomes more easily manageable. These features have saved time for our developers. They have saved 30% to 40% of the time. Using DevOps infrastructure has definitely improved reliability.

vRA has helped to automate deployment for our developers. These automatic deployments have saved time. It has improved the self-service kind of deployments for the development teams. We have our own internal data centers, and we are also doing a lot of customer deployments. In both cases, it has reduced the time that they have to spend communicating internally with other people. They have these cookie-cutter operations that they can utilize. They can provision their own stuff or deploy their infrastructure pretty quickly. So, the dependencies are reduced, and the developers can focus more on their own part rather than calling the infrastructure team to provision or automate something.

We have been using VMware within our organization and for our customers, and vRA has enabled us to leverage existing VMware processes, systems, and training in our organization to support IT Ops.

vRA's automated processes have reduced infrastructure provisioning time. There is about a 60% reduction of time in infrastructure provisioning. 

Our application provisioning time is also reduced by using vRA automated processes. We have Ansible and other stuff with vRA. There is a 60% to 80% reduction in time for application configuration. It has also reduced the time to market for our apps by at least 40%.

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

Simplification. It gives us one interface to control multiple environments. It's an easier way to look at how a large chunk of information or data or processors are being used, and what they're being used for.

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

The main benefit of vRA is a faster deployment for our customers. Before implementing vRA, we were building VMs from scratch, but vRA allows us to create images, so we can deploy a VM in just a few minutes.

Obviously, it depends on the hardware installed and everything, but the time has been significantly reduced. Time is money. We want to provide as much flexibility in the private cloud and bring our customers as close to the private cloud as possible.

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

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

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

Digital transformation is more of a people problem than a technology problem in many cases. It is getting people used to the idea of self-service people and not having to go talk to the sys admin all the time, and empowering people to get things done. That's a real big thing. That's probably the biggest part of the change that this tool has on our organization: empowerment.

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

My engineers were able to pick it up quickly and we provisioned and created a private cloud in roughly three months.

Even with the virtualization, it would take us at least three or four days to create a VM. With vRA we have brought that down to seven minutes. The solution has helped increase infrastructure, agility, speed of provisioning, time to market, application agility. Everything got super fast.

It's also easier for IT to support developers. As soon as the developer wants a box, we can pretty much put it out there in a few minutes, instead of wading through a lot of manual paperwork and forms and email boxes and the like.

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PN
Solution Architect at Presidio Networked Solutions

VMware Aria Automation reduces the time to market when it comes to deploying new solutions. Usually, it takes three to six weeks to deploy a new solution. Now, with VMware Aria Automation and the automated blueprint, the overall time to market is an hour, depending on approval.

The solutions can be deployed across any cloud, which is a huge advantage when a customer requires machines to be deployed rapidly.

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DU
Cloud Architect at Swisscom

For repeated installations and the provisioning of VMs, we now have a clear definition of what has been installed, and we can monitor all that stuff. There are some functions for the ICDs, and we have continuous development and deployment.

It theoretically could help provision new clients faster if you adhere to the limits of the product then it makes provisioning the new client a lot faster. If you have customers like we have that are really demanding and want special solutions it will end up in huge customization.

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

We like vRA because it helps make systems available on time for our customers, on demand. Previously, if a customer requested machines or servers it would take three or four days to deliver. But now we can give them specific tools, or a portal, where they can shop and select which server they want. We provision servers faster. For example, to get a database machine provisioned it would take a week. Now it's a matter of 30 minutes.

Also, we now have control over the network, the server team, the storage. We only need a single team, customers are only talking to one team.

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AO
Technical Project Manager at Bilgibim

Now the customer can manage its own server requirements directly. This is very important because, before that, the process included signing off on forms and sending them to the IT Director. It took at least 10 days to create a VM and send it to the person who needed it. Now, it's no more than a half hour to activate a new VM at the customer's site.

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

Eliminating the need for our engineers to do any of this manually, and being able to focus their efforts on the deeper level customizations at the OS level - like installing applications and leveraging things that we would not necessarily want to offer in an automated sense just because of the diversification of the implementation - that has been of value to us.

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

The manual efforts of creating a VM for an individual customer has now been eliminated, e.g., creating a template or blueprint. With Orchestrator, we will take that blueprint and build a form for the customer. All this used to be done manually by an administrator, from a network, storage, and compute point of view. The admin's job is simple now versus the way we were doing it before.

It provides a single pane of glass for management. These types of platforms help us to have a holistic view.

The solution has helped us to automate deployment for developers. Before developers have to build another virtual machine, they can run code with VMware Code Stream integration. They can verify and download code, which really helps our developers be faster.

vRA has enabled us to derive value from the cloud more rapidly. We have seen increased services along with more integrations and catalogs. Now, we can create and update policies faster. 

The solution has freed up our time to concentrate on other things.

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

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. 

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

It has saved us a lot of time and work. It helped us to reorganize some of our service lines, so we could be more efficient. For example, on our open system server team, we had 15 people building servers, now we have two.

Once you've learned the product, it is very easy to use.

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

We used to do everything manually. Up until just a few months ago, we used to have little reviews where, if they wanted a VM, they would come to us, tell us what they wanted, then someone on the team would actually submit the vRA form in an older version of vRA.

Now, the end user can go in and request what they want and do all that themselves, as long as they know enough about their application to get what they need. So, if you're just trying to add a couple of VMs or projects, where you know pretty well what you want, you don't have to spend days getting in line to talk about it, or worse, like back in the old days where you had to spend weeks waiting for someone to get it done.

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

We can automate the infrastructure services, which in turn reduces manual work, saves time, and eventually leads to more productivity.

It can be used effectively for IaaS and PaaS. Thus, there is only one type of software to be managed by various departments/teams in the organization.

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

In the past, we released several steps to implement an application in the company. The first step was the project charter. You explain what you want to do or how you want to do it and what the costs would be for this. This means that before having the project charter, you don't have any budget. The SunBox is free of charge: they think, they deploy, they test. If it's working, they do a project charter, if it's not working they go back and try other stuff.

It has helped with provisioning. I know several projects that were going faster with the up to date cloud. In the past, they would implement and if it wasn't the right step they would have to go back, discuss with us getting a new server with the right sizing, then they would implement, test and go back. With this, they implement, they test it, if it's not the right stuff, they just throw it out and implement the new stuff. It's direct. If they just increase the size then it's less work for everybody and everybody can achieve their work easily and quickly.

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

The benefits are that it gives you a heads-up display and dashboard of the way everything's running. The ability to automate around those tasks is really where we get the value. It helps click the buttons and keep the lights green when nobody's there to do it for you. The automation really is priceless.

Without a doubt, in our infrastructure, we mostly use it to keep the lights green in a day-to-day operational way. But absolutely, in the future, we plan to use it for automation and deploying a more DevOps mentality and products, which should speed up our time to market.

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

We have faster delivery times through its automation.

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

vRealize Automation is improving the way we host and serve up our fully hosted private cloud solutions as a cloud service provider. It has created efficiencies in how we deploy, manage, monitor, and develop within the service. It provides velocity both from management and customer perspectives, from ingesting new catalog items, developing new workflows for additional features, and/or allowing customer access to multiple guest OS instances at scale in a shorter time frame.

From a service provider perspective, its ability to integrate with vRealize Operations and vRealize business management suites provides a window for being able to execute predictive and reactive analysis that you can use to automate your cloud solution from a resource, management, and/or customer perspective.

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

The time for provisioning a VM for one of our clients was cut in half. It's a lot easier, now, for a customer to come and ask for a solution. We can provide that solution to that customer on the same day that the request was made. Previously, it would have taken us days to get it done and, back then, I would find a lot of instances where errors were made, things were forgotten. But with the automation, everything is already in a step-by-step approach, so it makes it easier for us to provision for the customer. And the customer also feels a lot more secure knowing that they've gotten what they've requested, easily.

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

As opposed to the old days where customers put in a ticket and they waited three or four days to get a server provisioned for them, today they can get servers provisioned in five minutes. So, the time to market for our customers is much better, much improved. It's multi-tenanted, meaning one court customer doesn't see the other court customer. They're very happy about that.

For time to market, it's absolutely incredible that a court customer can come in and, within a few days, have the service provided to them. They can then spin up one or 100 servers. Before, it would take them six months to a year to get there. So, for time to market, there are incredible savings. And there are cost savings from their perspective as well. They don't have to manage HVAC and space and cooling and all of those things that they used to have to do. Today, all they have to do is provision a server and manage their users, which is what they should be focused on.

We don't know what they run, we don't manage them. We just provide the infrastructure and they are saved from having to purchase infrastructure, having to purchase licensing, and having to maintain servers internally. So it's a win-win for the courts and for us. We love the product.

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

We were able to reduce the delivery time of requesting a VM from three weeks to under 10 minutes using the vRealize Automation Suite.

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

It gives you the flexibility to analyze and consume resources.

vRA provides a multi-cloud, self-service, infrastructure-as-a-service cloud consumption and delivery layer. We have a connection and activation between AWS and Azure. 

There is the possibility to use the central policy, especially using Active Directory. You can put this process into the company so someone can follow it. I can put this control on-prem and outside of our on-prem, using our cloud solution.

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

Before it would take months to deploy a VM, now, with this solution, we can deploy many VMs in one hour. We can do a stack of them with Mediaware.

This solution has definitely helped increase the speed of provisioning. We can now deploy many VMs in one hour. We also don't need to call in as many teams to deploy them. Now it's just one team and they can deploy the machines way faster. It's very good.

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

The whole VMware ecosystem allows us to serve multiple customers, multiple organizations and also multiple units per customer. We can cover every level without using the whole VRA and the rest of the ecosystem. We don't need to use a separate product to provide separate functionalities for the customer. We can cover all the use cases using only one product on our side which is really helpful. The operators are able to provide daily maintenance of the systems and they don't have to take care of multiple deployments. They can just use one setup to serve everyone.

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

It has helped our company by speeding things up. For example, a year ago it took a long time for a potential VM owner to request a VM and we ultimately wouldn't be able to use it. Now, we can request it for ourselves with our self-service portal. We're using NSX firewalls and it's easy to protect ourselves. We had a Hadoop cluster and the data must be protected within the that cluster. The owner created a fence around his own VM's by using the self-service portal and creating a firewall.

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

It provides faster SAFE services.

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KP
Principal Engineer at T-Mobile

One of the huge benefits, of course, is that it gives direct control to the customer. They have a direct knowledge of what they're using. They know the resources that they're taking advantage of and how much it's actually costing them to take stuff. 

It's helping our operations actually get closer to our applications team because they're now starting to build automation around the information they get from the operations teams; when they build blueprints, for instance. So they're able to build these bigger application stacks and there's a better understanding, from both sides, of what's required.

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

It cuts out a lot of waste, unutilized hardware, and improves performance.

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

In terms of recovery, it takes only a tenth of the time that's required compared to a human element. It gives us time savings, which equals cost savings, which equals personnel savings.

Having the visibility of the infrastructure at that level helps greatly with infrastructure agility, application agility, and speed of provisioning.

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

The benefits are that it reduces the administrators' having to manually make all these VDIs and deploy servers. It's really an optimization tool for administration. It helps by reducing the amount of time that administrators and engineers have to spend to provision and manage specific VDIs and servers. It puts that work on the end-user, and then the automation engine does it.

We have integrated our CICD pipeline into an automatic catalog request through some API calls. It can request and provision new virtual machines behind the NSX load balancer straight out of the CIDC pipeline, add those nodes to the load balancer, request SSL certs, and do SSL termination at the load balancer so that it's not encrypted behind the scenes - all of which has really been helpful. So it has helped to increase infrastructure agility, speed of provisioning, time to market, application agility, and made it easier for IT to support developers.

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

Before, it took us two days to provision new machines, and today the whole process is done in about two hours. Previously, there were a lot of complaints about how long it took to create a new machine. The process was manual. We had to create the machines and put the data on the CMDB but, nowadays, it's super-fast, magical, too easy. About two years ago, the process was based on 15 people. Nowadays, we use three people to manage things.

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MT
Principal Vendor Manager at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

Without it in our data center, we would have to have a different solution. It's what we thought was the best architecture for our company.

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TG
Systems Engineer with 10,001+ employees

It automates the creation of new VMs for us, so there is less human error, less work. It has simplified provisioning for us.

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

As a development company, we have different versions that need to be provisioned constantly, and the build-up/tear-down of this, for the IT team, used to take forever. We have a lean staff. We haven't increased in people but we have increased our company size. To be able to do more with less, that's one big piece of it.

Also, having a fixed capacity plan, that's another piece, for budgeting. The organization it provides has been truer to the needs of spending.

We've just shifted to an Agile development as well, so there has absolutely been an improvement in speed to market. We now have consistent release plans because we have these environments as ready as they are.

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

It benefits the speed of our development, and the speed of anything we test and send through to production. It helps us get things to market faster. We're able to get the application out and be more agile with it.

It also raises the caveat for people who like VM sprawl. We have people who don't clean up after themselves.

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SH
Cloud Architect at Dyntek

It has reduced provisioning time from roughly three to six weeks to about an hour on a private cloud, and about 25 minutes on public cloud.

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it_user730266 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Specialist with 5,001-10,000 employees

It's cut our server deployment times down from weeks to an hour.

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

I can build machines quickly and deploy them from a central location to whichever worldwide datacenter we need. Also, we can collect system logs from all clusters and hosts, and then we're able to troubleshoot and view logs in one central location. This is a good thing because it saves time.

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

The benefit to our organization is time to market. It has streamlined the process so that they can deploy systems, test the systems, and get the product to market faster. Speed of provision is much faster than what we used to manage, especially when we incorporate Day 2 Operations. We can get that into the automation and allow for that to take place, as opposed to the DevOps teams doing that all manually.

It has absolutely helped to increase infrastructure agility - not to its capacity by any stretch, but we're working towards that. It definitely has allowed us to be a little bit more agile.

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

We are able to provision VMs much faster than before. Therefore, students can click VMs, submit their form, and VMs will be provisioned automatically.

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

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

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YB
IT Architect at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Productivity has definitely increased. We are not relying on engineers to actually build out the infrastructure anymore. That's the main benefit. From an infrastructure perspective, it has definitely increased productivity, ensuring that the engineers' time is well spent on other, more important tasks, rather than the basic provisioning that they were doing earlier. 

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

We can use some of its functionality to avoid having to write custom code for the placement of virtual machines. That is the main way we get use out of it. Also, the deployment time is less than it was before. It's all automated, it's quicker than when it was done by hand.

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

Our organization started to move a lot more towards automating all the things that we can. We're catching up to that, but we're definitely heading in that direction. It's one of those things that enables us to tie in with our other pieces, with automating the operating system, etc. VMware is then able to automate the build of our virtual machines.

In terms of infrastructure agility, we're still getting our feet under us in some areas, but it's definitely playing it's part and doing what it does well.

Our speed of provisioning has also improved. We used to build systems manually, which would take four hours or a day. Nowadays we're able to spin something up off a template that we update every so often and it takes about 20 minutes. We can take an existing template, build it back up, add some configuration for it, specific applications, turning things into what the developers need, and then we can have them deploy it off that. It makes it so that we can have customization within a framework.

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

Time savings. It takes about an hour less for me to deploy a VM using automation then it would if I had to do it manually.

It does a lot of things automatically that would take our group, when we're already strapped for time, a lot of time to go through and clean stuff out of databases and the like.

Overall, it has helped to reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot issues and improved the quality of service to users.

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it_user305391 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Engineer at SynchroNet

What we do with it is we've taken a very lengthy deployment process and we have shrunk it from what was a months-long process down to a matter of hours.

We've also had benefits with configuration consistency because the machine is doing it for us. We aren't manually typing in, editing config files, and all that.

Security, it's helped us integrate other products like VMware's NSX product, so we have the east-west traffic security rather than just north-south. The cost savings that we have with the man hours that used to be sunk into actually deploying these VMs is a huge savings for us.

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

We're still rolling it out. It's starting to help a little bit and people are starting to be able to see the power of it. I expect it will help, but we're still early in the journey.

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

We have given internal IT developers the ability to self-provision VMs for development and testing. This has been a hit with our staff. I have talked to several of them involved in the POC and it has drastically increased their efficiency since they do not need to wait on IT Ops. Additionally, the publishing of templates, firewall rules, and software installs in the system has increased the communication and transparency between IT development and IT operations.

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

Having a one-stop-shop for our IT services is one of our goals. Exporting and democratizing the tools helps our end users to do their work efficiently and to be more agile. It helps to minimize the time to market for our product.

Using the solution we are able to automate database refreshment. This process used to consume a number of working days. With vRA fully automating this process, it is now down to five or 10 minutes. As a result, we're able to refresh our testing and development environments frequently. When we go with a new deployment in production, the deployment is based on a fresh copy of production. We're able to have multiple environments so that we can test more product concurrently.

We use VMware Cloud Templates and having a standard template to be deployed gives us a standard across our environment and minimizes the time it takes to provide services. Despite having 20 machines, we just do the configuration once and then we can deploy it across the whole infrastructure for all environments: production, testing, and development. And this reduces the time to market for our services. They improve reliability. They give us consistency. Having things assembled and having everything in one image helps us provide reliable services. And they have saved time for our developers.

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

Lifecycle management has improved substantially. We're no longer seeing customers holding on to their resources because they're no longer difficult to create or destroy. We've seen substantial amounts of both builds and retirements. 

It also cleans up a lot of the manual operations that used to take place - or that maybe didn't take place at all and now do. There's a lot less human error and we're seeing a lot of, let's say, "cleanliness" in our infrastructure now.

The solution has helped increase our agility, the speed of provisioning, and time to market. It allows our IT admins to deploy dozens of systems simultaneously, as opposed to operating in serial, building one system at a time. That has been pretty significant as well.

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

We can do scripting and do customization after deployment. With vRA, we can integrate everything with a single-click. Then, there is also track management and change management control.

The repetitive tasks which took provisioning storage, network, and compute two to three weeks, now take five minutes.

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

It allows people to move into orchestration and automation, and most customers want to get into that but they don't really know how. vRO and vRA gives them a step through the door to allow them to start building upon. It gives you a framework, it gives you a baseline to let you build from there.

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

It's shortened down our SLA's for VMs. When vendors request an application for various VM's, we used to take a two week process (approximately) from building a VM, QAing, and building it. Now, it can be done in a matter of two days, at max, thus, shortening the process.

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

We're automating a lot of OS builds. The front-end gives us a way for users to go and request those services and the orchestrator pirate lets us automate a lot of the functions involved in them.

It's like a streamline deposit made more available.

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

It is mostly for our tech support to test new versions, find bugs, and troubleshoot what is happening at customer sites.

It has made it easier for IT to support developers. Our tech support people are happy with it.

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

The product is really excellent. VMWare provides a complete ecosystem. And it covers multi-cloud, which is where the market is going. We are able to cover compute, network, storage, etc. We have been able to take it to the next level where VMWare is providing the validated designs, VVD. 

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

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.

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

So far we haven't really implemented it on our own organization as far as using it with IT in the workplace internally. But vRA has helped us bring in a lot of customers because they use things like Chef and Puppet, and this works in that same kind of realm. So it has drawn those customers to us. We are, as part of our VMware venture, working on our expertise in that realm.

Where it is implemented, in the little bits that we've labbed it out, internally, it has, obviously, increased our infrastructure agility. Otherwise, we wouldn't be continuing to implement it. Once you get all the pieces together, it improves delivery times for internal labs for our internal teams.

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

We provided the ability to request virtual machines to our end users. Before, this was a very manual process, which took engineers to do. Now, it's an automated process.

vRA has enabled us to leverage existing VMware processes, systems, and training in our organization to support IT ops. 

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

It allows us to be more agile and provide services to our company more rapidly.

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DK
Systems engineer

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.

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

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.

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

Starting from vRA 7, deployment, such as an upgrade. It's so simple, so easy, so interactive. In the past, we had to go through a bunch of operations, but now it's just one click and it can update the vRA client at the back end.

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AR
Senior Systems Administrator at Webroot Software

The infrastructure has helped us to greatly increase our agility.

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

It allows us to deploy servers on a much faster basis. Instead of deploying a VM from a template and going through the process of configuring that VM, with vRA we're able to click once and it does everything: grabs an IP, joins it to the domain, loads whatever configuration agents are needed. It does all of that without manual intervention.

It has definitely improved the speed of provisioning over the old-school way of deploying a VM from a template.

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JS
Systems Admin at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

It decreases a lot of manual labor involved in the initial deployment of systems. Instead of my having to go deploy a template and join it to the domain and add software to it, all that is pre-staged once and never done again.

It has also increased the infrastructure agility a lot. A perfect example is that I use Veeam Backup, so I deploy additional proxies whenever our network changes. I don't have to go out and sign in to the vSphere host because I have a different location. I can add additional resources from one location to my disaster recovery management console.

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

It's done most of what we needed for our customers. However, custom integration had to be done with certain things which are not exotic.

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

The requesters create their own virtual machines now, instead of a series of tickets to get things built.

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

Resource management. That's the biggest thing. We're not scaling solutions too much larger than what they actually should be. We can actually take back a lot of the memory with some of the solutions that we're not necessarily using overall. This kind of management is probably the most beneficial.

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

The extensibility allows you to take custom or proprietary requirements and make them happen. Where there's a lot of products, it will give you a set number of used cases, and if you have something that's outside of those, then it can be difficult to make that happen, but the vRealize Automation product allows you to just extend beyond what we'd initially expect them to be used for and make your own custom scripts that can be executed as well as the things that come out-of-the-box.

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

We no longer need to waste cycles manually building VMs and experience delays associated with service requests attached to those build functions.

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

It has cut down the time for building out a machine. A process that used to take three hours is down to 20 to 30 minutes. If the users need a machine fast, we can get it presented to them quicker. So it has absolutely helped with the speed of provisioning.

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

It's the backbone for VM deployments for our main production data center.

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

It allows some of the tenants to self-provision their machines, so they don't have to wait for us to create the machine for them. They can just do it themselves. It has helped improve our infrastructure agility.

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

It has helped IT to support development. For example, one of our customers has a development team and, before this solution, it would take ten days to develop and test their solution. Now, it is down to one day.

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EK
Engineer with 5,001-10,000 employees

In terms of benefits, we haven't gotten there yet, but increasing our infrastructure agility, speed of provisioning, time to market, application agility, and making it easier for IT to support developers, are all reasons we have it and are looking to get it working. We have had it set up for six months or so.

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

It provides us with rapid deployment and reclamation of servers. It has also increased the infrastructure agility, application agility, improved time to market, and made it easier for IT to support developers.

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

Prior to the deployment and utilization of vRealize environment infrastructure, deployments (VMs, IPs, DNS, firewall rules, load balancers) would take up to three months. After utilizing vRA we have reduced this to less than an hour for a complete, production-ready infrastructure deployment.

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it_user667686 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Provisioning time is reduced from two weeks to 60 minutes.

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TR
Solutions Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

It has improved things, absolutely. We had a lot of config drift before, and this really helps us keep it on track.

Speed to provision is probably our biggest, significant gain.

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it_user730221 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It has made our developers be a bit more agile, instead of like old days, where it was, "Okay, we need a new environment, I've got to spin up the whole thing for them." Now, it's, "Hey, if you need a new environment, go to this URL, click these catalog items, whichever ones you might be working on."

The external Linux script is all automated for the developers. They just need to be able to say, "Hey, I need this new code pulled down," That's all. They don't even have to build their own workflows anymore. As for the VMware side, we can build the workflows for them, or work with somebody in the DevOps team to build workflows. So now all the developers have to do is click a couple of buttons, then they're working and they're on their way.

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

I have worked in client-facing roles and at enterprise level. We have used VMware vRA. The best has been, from the infrastructure side, having storage as a service for customers. On top of that we add functionality for monitoring and alerts.

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MC
IT Professional

Our purchase unit had a lot fears in upgrading their environment into production, so we customized it for them. What we did was virtualized the production environment and set it up to the Lab Manager. Then, they could test on Lab Manager on the application, including upgrades, updates, etc.

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

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.

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

It has definitely increased speed of VM deployment. When a normal server-request would come in, it might take anywhere from three to four days to deploy. Now, within 15 minutes, they can click and have something up and running.

The IT support for developers is nice as well because they are able to manage the environment themselves.

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

It's increased the efficiency. There's less manual work through vRA. Now, Orchestrator is the one doing most of the work and making everything more automated.

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it_user730179 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Of IT Operations Back End at a leisure / travel company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Our delivery is now very fast.

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

It provide us a common console to manage workloads on our private and public cloud infrastructures.

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

Fast provisioning.

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

The front end portal for end users, which communicates with infrastructure endpoints.

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

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

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

We are part of a Cloud service provider. It has helped our business to grow and scale.

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

Multiple BPs can be deployed with EBS and PG (Property Group) in a lot less time.

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AE
Head of IT at Interswitch

It has helped our organization tremendously.

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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.