VMware Aria Automation Valuable Features

AN
IT Service Manager at Allianz

We are using vRealize Orchestrator (vRO).

vRA helps automate deployment for developers. We do a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment so it will suit each of our customers. So, we have different business units who have their own templates. Some customers might choose a backup solution, then some others will be choosing another one. All of these have been orchestrated. 

Some customers will also opt for a disaster recovery (DR) solution. If they choose the disaster recovery service during the deployment of the VM, then a DR solution will be offered to them and a VM will be created on our DR site. Everything will be synced through the VMware service.

This solution has made it very simple for developers. In a way, a layman or NOC guy can deploy a VM. Once they are familiar with the offerings, they can just deploy it without knowing what is going on in the back-end.

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NiteshKumar1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principle consultant at Infosys

VMware as a product, has existed for so many years, more than a decade. Now as we move to the public cloud world, we are seeing the acceptability of VMware on the public cloud as well. 

So we have Azure VMware solution as well as we have VMware running on AWS cloud as well, these days.

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Lekan Ogunwale - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at Ultrasightconsulting Limited

Currently, the primary feature we're using in VMware Aria Automation is its ability to execute tasks quickly. However, we haven't explored other features like workload management or the full stack yet. So it's hard to make comparisons or fully utilize its potential until we expand our usage.                 

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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.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
SurajSachdeva - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineer | Developer at Team Computers

We can connect between multiple VMs in a matter of seconds.

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Irshad Kazi - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Technical Consultant at ITC Infotech

The product saves a lot of time and cost for us. It has valuable features for creating a playbook.

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

The product's most valuable features are ease of automation.

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

The feature of automated balancing which implemented between two data centers solely for the purpose of a recovery plan is valuable.

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SS
Infrastructure Professional Service Team Lead at G-Able

The Blueprints feature is a good one. This feature supports the installation and improvement of automation processes. 

It includes a user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface that assists customers in automating routine tasks without the need for coding. These are simple routines, though.

The self-service functionality allows customers to provision VMs with a single click. They don't need to submit a request to the IT team and wait for them to create the VM. This reduces waiting time for the automation process.

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RA
CTO at Moca Financial

Two things help out a lot: 

  1. Policy management.
  2. Integration with other VMware feeds, like ESXi Server. They have a pretty tight integration with those.

If you are trying to automate your capacity management tasks, moving VMs and resizing them, then you need to integrate down to the policy level by reconfiguring the use of servers. That is where these kinds of integration points help you.

vRA's multi-cloud self-service cloud consumption and delivery layer comes with centralized policy control and governance.

VMware cloud templates: These are predefined templates that work across multiple cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. You can use the same templates across various clouds, even clouds that have AWS, Azure, and Google. So, you can have a blueprint and templates running across all of them.

vRA is most helpful in managing the whole lifecycle, taking out the server, bringing them back in, handling outages, and managing clusters, networks, and the entire infrastructure security out there as well as putting identity management all in one place. It creates a control point with its single pane of glass. You can control all the networks as well as their configuration and installation from one place, which is a strength of vRA.

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AP
Technical Manager at Gilead Sciences, Inc.

The most valuable feature is that, instead of doing the VMotion manually, we have automated everything with a script, using vRealize. That means I don't need to think about things like compatibility. The system will do everything for me and just give me a report.

It's very user-friendly. It is not hard to go and find things. There is a one-click Help that you can use to find all the documentation you need to manage it.

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

VMware Aria Automation is important for day-to-day operations. It provides more granular visibility of our resources. 

Another valuable thing is the cost. We can easily get to know our IT gives us a cost of data as well, suppose we're going to provision any VM, if a customer or if a user is going to provision one VM, it depends on, again, it depends on the integration that one has done of config already. 

One of its features is, that once we're deploying a VM, we will get to know how much we'll pay for that. How much will be the GB storage per GB cost, how it will be the RAM cost, memory cost, everything would be there. 

And it gives us in-depth visibility into how many resources we are paying for. And suppose we just were purchasing memory GB and if we want to delete particular VMs, we can delete it and we can get the resources back. 

So for the customers, it's pretty convenient to see where they are putting their money into.

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Awadhesh KumarMishra - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Architect at Kyndryl

We automated many tool deployments with the help of the product, cutting short manual deployments and eliminating the need for human interaction. Its most valuable features include integrating various tools and working with different products using plugins. 

The tool's automation performance is excellent, and I rate it four point five out of ten. 

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Tarek Nader - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. vRA Consultant at VMware

Aria Automation gives you the flexibility to deploy tenants with customized blueprints for permissions and policies. Version 7.8 consisted of multiple products, so you had to deploy a lot of virtual machines on one of the servers.  Starting from 8.6, VMware consolidated all the components into one Linux appliance. This allows the option to use vRA or DevOps capabilities.

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

The most valuable feature is the consistency it delivers, at the end of the day. We know that we have consistent images based off consistent Blueprints, check-pointed or QA'ed in a consistent manner.

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

The operations manager does a fantastic job on the front end because it includes on-premises and cloud use cases that pertain to any infrastructure. The solution has made great progress in integrating all these things together. 

The solution allow us to define our own super metrics. If we cannot an out-of-the-box metric, then we can write and start using our own super metric instead of waiting for the solution to develop something. 

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

The most valuable feature is being able to deploy a virtual machine from a low level. We can automate everything including network configuration, firewall configuration, storage, storage attachment, OS deployment, middleware, and so forth.

We use some of the DevOps features for infrastructure capabilities including VMware cloud templates, infrastructure pipeline for continuous delivery, and interactive development for GitOps use cases. I am not responsible for using these features but they have given us a lot more flexibility in our development. 

The DevOps capabilities have saved time for the developers, although I do not have the exact details. I can say that it is significant. 

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

The automation part is most valuable. Because it is a VMware product, the automation capabilities that come with vRA are pretty extensive. We can integrate and build a lot of features on top of it, which makes it extremely useful for us.

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

The preset policies and templates are useful. I would say that vRA is one of the best solutions we have. The CI/CD features also look helpful even though we aren't using them at the moment. We plan to get more involved and train our customers as much as possible.

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

There are many features in the solution. We can map all the service profiles. We can do the scripting in third-party applications. The solution provides multi-level approval features to download VMware workloads.

It also provides features like multi-tenancy. The tool seamlessly integrates with private and public clouds. There are a lot of good features in the solution. The product is very user-friendly.

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

The most valuable features are the multimachine blueprint and advanced designer configuration.

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UM
IT Infrastructure Manager at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
  1. Virtualization
  2. The replication to our remote R&D data centers.
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BP
Solutions Architect at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees

The solution has increased the infrastructure agility from people's perceptions of the infrastructure: Having an actual private cloud or something on-premise, which people can turn to a Window and provision things when they need it. The end result is it appears to be more agile, then the back-end is just the back end. 

  • vRealize Automation has improved the speed of provisioning just by automating things, making people think about whether a human really needs to do something or can we make the machines do it for us. It is a lot faster to deploy things now.
  • It has improved time to market. Just by improving them, making provisioning increases, time to provision, time to market is a definitely improved. 
  • It makes a developer's life easier. They don't have to interact with their sys admins for everything anymore. It's an empowering thing.

We can automate a number of things which weren't automated before, then tie into things like VMware NSX and vRealize Operations Manager. We put things into their hands directly that were never there before, so not only do they feel empowered, but they can get their job done faster.

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

The solution is intuitive and user-friendly. It only took three months to start a private cloud. It was very good. Guys that didn't have a lot of knowledge in scripting picked up on it. Then I hired a VMware solutions architect and it just skyrocketed from there because he knew the ins and outs.

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PN
Solution Architect at Presidio Networked Solutions

The extensibility of the solution when it comes to writing your own ABX actions is a valuable feature. You can write it in PowerShell, JavaScript, or Python, which is great.

I also like the fact that you can pause a build process, do other tasks, come back to it, and continue with the build process.

The ability to customize the entire user frontend experience with the design canvas is great as well.

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DU
Cloud Architect at Swisscom

We like the blueprint designer. We can create topologies with it. 

I have found it to be user-friendly because it's very UI centric. We have a problem that most of our developers would like to have it more on a flat file format. For our end user, it's just perfect.

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AO
Technical Project Manager at Bilgibim

The most valuable feature is the automation. They now save time because there is one person who manages all of the virtualization servers and the storage sites at this university. 

Another valuable feature is the flexible user interface. They can manage all of the servers, the full lifecycle of VMs, on one screen.

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

I personally spend a lot of time in vRealize Orchestrator, so being able to directly tie into the back end on the APIs, I find that to be what really is the most advantageous thing for me.

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RM
Sr. Technical Specialist at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • vRealize Orchestrator
  • Catalog Service

The policy control is excellent. There are multiple security controls that we can achieve by using this tool. When we were siloed, the policy implementation and control were difficult.

We use the solution’s following DevOps for infrastructure capabilities:

  • The cloud templating standard for VMware Cloud infrastructure
  • VMware Cloud Templates
  • Infrastructure pipelining for continuous delivery
  • We partially use iterative development for GitOps use cases, as it is not very good.

These capabilities boosts our administration and management from a technical point of view and help our team maintain the solution. Reliability improved because now the CI/CD and DevOps are integrated and managed under the same team using the same software.

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

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

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

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

The entire automation orchestration of it. It integrates into all of the other products that we have, e.g., ServiceNow. 

We have a self-service portal, and it does that very well.

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

The ability to customize your own portal. We've gotten to the point now where we've used it to create this whole environment for users to be able to self-provision their own machines and get them into networks. We have a very large number of different networks, which means that many options of where they can put those VMs; their own environment.

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

Integrating this tool with other technologies/third-party tools, that are not part of the VMware family, is the most valuable feature of this solution.

If we have a product that allows us to communicate with different products that are not part of its family and make things happen in their application, it is a wonderful thing.

It resembles the benefits of cloud computing and is achieving more things by using only one product.

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

The most valuable feature would be the scalability. It's very easy to add more capacity into it once you've already got it set up. It's just cases deploy, and more hypervisors and we're off.

In terms of provisioning, it has definitely helped speed-wise. It simplifies making the environment bigger because it's easier to scale out. We don't have the downtime of having to wait to get more hardware and to add it in.

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

It's intuitive and user-friendly for the user, but not intuitive and user-friendly for the implementer because the templates are not easy to set up. For the end user, it's quite easy, but it's a fulltime job for the implementer and we don't have the time for it. This is why we used a service to implement instead of us. We don't have the time to focus on that. 

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

The most valuable feature is the capacity to automate around the issues that come up, the alarms.

It's also absolutely easy and intuitive. It uses the same basic layout as the rest of the product suite so it's really easy to navigate, find your way around between the tabs and the areas.

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

The blueprint functionality of the product is intuitive and user-friendly. The concept of the blueprints is visual and easy to use.

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

vRA provides that single pane of glass for our cloud tenants to deploy, monitor, access, and manage their VMs/guest operating systems. vRA allows a cloud service provider to quickly build out a web portal front-end interface that easily integrates with all of the VMware vRealize products, providing an all-encompassing cloud solution.

Additional features also allowed us, as the service provider, to configure branding options for the site itself, as well as full integration into the orchestration layer, including workflows, security control, reporting, billing for our cloud admins, tenant admins, and end-user (customer).

The most valuable feature is vRA’s ability to integrate whether with additional VMware vRealize suites or other vendors' cloud products.

Also, vRA in combination with vCenter Orchestrator makes it very easy to design, import, and deliver quality workflows and blueprints. These can be used for various functions within the cloud portal, from both a production as well as a business-continuity perspective. Examples include automated failover activities in combination with SRM and SRA Replication, VM deployments based on a catalog, being able to roll out an entire LAMP stack dev environment with the click of a button, or ingest and inject data into back-end CMBDs, etc.

Its fully integrates with network and storage virtualization via NSX and workflow development, and secure APIs are available to customize automation using other vendor tools such as Puppet, Chef and/or PowerShell.

There are many features that I find extremely valuable but vRA’s ability to be a central hub for all of the parts that make up a hosted private or multi-tenant cloud solution is extremely valuable. Ultimately, the outcome of this design is a highly available and agile solution with a wide array of integration that enables you to provide a fully automated, scalable private cloud solution that can meet the market and customer demands now and in the future.

I have listed some additional features below for general reference:

  • Easy integration into other VMware-based vRealize cloud products via SSO
  • Single pane of glass interface
  • Parameterized blueprints to enhance reusability and reduce sprawl
  • Policy-based optimization of virtual machine placement
  • NSX integration enhancements
  • Enhanced control of NSX-provisioned load balancers
  • Enhanced NAT port forwarding rules
  • NSX security group and tag management
  • Automated high-availability for NSX Edge Services
  • NSX Edge size selection
  • Enhanced vRealize Business for Cloud integration – cloud nanagement platform
  • Improvements to high-availability
  • Health Service
  • Configuration Automation Framework – Puppet Integration
  • REST API
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JT
Customer Apps Manager at Telecommunications Services of Trinidad & Tobago Limited (TSTT)

Among the valuable features are the ease and speed of creating the VMs. Originally, we provisioned them manually and it would take us two days to do the provisioning. We have a lot of internal items that need approvals from lines of business, but with the automation, we are able to provision a VM with the click of a button, within seconds. It cut down on the time as well as cut down on the expense and employee cost in provisioning.

It is also intuitive and user-friendly. Those who use the tool, they are techy, they understand the technology. However, with vRealize we can have a Help Desk individual, who might not be that techy, provision the different elements quite easily, with no almost training at all. That in itself is a plus for us, especially with our having a high turnover of staff. In training, they see how easy it is to use. The time for training to bring them up to speed is very short and they are then able to provision the application.

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

The most valuable features are that it's multi-tenant and the ability for scale.

From a customer perspective, they log in and they have Catalog: what services are available to them. They simply click on that and then there's an option: I can have a Linux server, I can have a Windows server. They select it, configure it, how many CPUs, how much memory, how much storage, and hit the button, submit. It's that easy.

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

When managing vRA and trying to use the keep-it-simple model I found that setting up an access control system where anyone could request access with ease. I really thought that the ability to use AD groups throughout the product made it very easy to set up and grant user access at every level of the product.

The ability to extend vRA with vCO to add custom service designs was helpful in our deployment. It allowed us to eliminate blueprint sprawl.

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

You can consume resources into the data center and hybrid with AWS.

I can use the console with the dashboard. I also have access to the portal from Azure.

We use the cloud blueprints for Linux. I can use different templates on-premise and on the cloud via GCP. We can use traditional templates or develop new templates, using them to manage integration with the solution.

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

We like that it gives the user the possibility to deploy on their own, we have found that to be a very valuable feature.

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

The integration with the whole VRA ecosystem and in the enterprise environments are the features I have found to be the most valuable.

This solution is intuitive and user-friendly, although it is missing different ways it can be automated. I would like to use it not only to form the user interface but in a more programmatic way like APIs. 

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

The most valuable feature for us is the fact that it is self-service. 

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CF
Team Lead Private Cloud at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
  • It has the possibility to combine different clouds. 
  • We can provide internal VMs and also VMs from AVS for our customers.
  • Our users can order VMs using the API.
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it_user730290 - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

The most valuable feature is the governance system around deployment of solutions.

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

The most valuable feature of VMware Aria Automation is the versatile automation and deployments.

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

The most valuable features are the metrics and reporting aspects. The historical data and extraction enable us to tell where the trends are and where contentions may exist in the future.

I also like that it reduces the human interaction and requirement.

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

The most valuable feature is the portal where you can assign permissions to specific people to request specific items in the catalog and allow them to provision things for themselves. Or it enables them to request different services that you can create through vRO and vRA.

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

The most valuable feature is the process it provides us and the time it takes us to deliver to our clients.

I also find it to be intuitive and user-friendly.

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

What I like about the software are the performance and the optimization, based on the unit pricing.

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TG
Systems Engineer with 10,001+ employees

It integrates with our backup solution.

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

The most valuable features for us are capacity planning as well as environment life management; putting in specific templates and workflows that we know are secure. That solidifies the environments that we're in or that are being provisioned. We also know that every environment being provisioned has a lifespan. It affects capacity, so it's great for budgeting, from my perspective, and good for my team.

In terms of it being user-friendly, we have a technical group, so understanding what they're provisioning, what subnet they're going to be using, the security profiles we have, with a straight developer that doesn't have all the bells and whistles, that's one part. If it needs to be on a certain VLAN, they can put it there if it's going to be used for a different purpose. It's that ability and flexibility to provide the different choices for our team in a straightforward format so they can do the services themselves.

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

The self service portal: People don't have to come to us to request something. They can just go fill out a form. Within 30 minutes, they have what they requested.

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SH
Cloud Architect at Dyntek

The ability to provision to on-prem and public cloud using a standardized set of blueprints.

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it_user321303 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Systems Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees
  • The automation, that is, being able to automate server deployment, including the option to do it manually if you want.
  • Being able to collect logs and diagnostic information in one central location.
View full review »
DM
Sr. Manager, Open Systems Service Desk at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

The most valued feature is the streamlining of the DevOps process, automation and orchestration. It provides the ability for the entire Dev lifecycle to actually be incorporated into a single stream. That's our primary focus.

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

It's quite user friendly. Everyone can use it, even non-technical people. This is good, since we use it to build a self-service portal which even users with not a lot of technical background can use.

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

The automation part is valuable, especially where vRA integrates with vRO, because it reduces the amount of effort we have to make.

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YB
IT Architect at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
  • Manageability of the blueprints.
  • Integration with the rest of VMware solutions.
  • Availability of the Orchestrator.
  • It is intuitive and user-friendly.
View full review »
PS
Head of Cloud and Technology with 1,001-5,000 employees

The portal is the most valuable feature. The Orchestrator with automation is also valuable. We try to leverage the automation and self-service portal. We trust these two feature allow us to increase time to market, agility, etc.

For the customer, it is intuitive and user-friendly.

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

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

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

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

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

The self-service capabilities are by far the best that we've seen in terms of features. If the user is being able to log in and make requests himself, from the onboarding process all the way to the end, that's very helpful.

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

The most valuable feature is the automation of the deployment of the whole machine.

We also use it to pre-install the applications that the people selected when they ordered the machine, so they get a fully functional machine.

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

The most valuable feature is the integration with some of our other automation platforms. We're starting into Jenkins, and it has a plug-in for other automation of operating systems and things. So it works together with our infrastructure. We don't have a very complex environment, we don't have NSX yet or anything really crazy, but all the things we do have, it has been able to interoperate with them.

It is intuitive and user-friendly. It took some growing. We had to figure it out in the beginning, but that was a couple versions ago. We like the improvements that have been made over time, so it's definitely been able to progress with the environment.

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it_user746703 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
  • The agility that it offers.
  • The flexibility that it offers.
  • The scalability that it offers for us to serve our end customers.

That's really helpful.

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

To manage when VMs aren't being used, we have it set up so that it will auto-destroy them after a certain amount of time, obviously with permission from the user who owns it. 

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

I think the ability to create blueprints and define our lab environments and vRAs. It's really easy for anyone to use it. Just drag and drop VMs and all these other components into the Blueprint Composer.

I think having the ability to create different tenants, having a catalog items, and having a different user base go in there and having them pick from the specific items that they want; have them be more living in control.

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

Being able to provide automation for my customers, essentially having guard rails on what they can deploy and how much it is they're deploying in my environment.

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

The ability to quickly setup the self-provisioning of vSphere VMs was one of the primary drivers for us to use this product over others. Additionally, the product has several plugins and an almost limitless potentional for further automation using vRealize Orchestrator. Lastly, its integration with NSX is superb and very much a critical part of our VM provisioning.

We are using the following vRealize suite products: Log Insight, Operations, Orchestrator, Business for Cloud, and Automation.

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

Having an enterprise service catalog and being able to automate various parts of our infrastructure are among the most important components.

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

Lifecycle management. It allows my teams to create, manage, and retire all of our infrastructure objects in the data center.

Also, the XaaS Extensibility - Anything as a Service. We're starting to utilize that more and more.

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

I like the automation that it provides to deploy VMs and multiple apps. The integration with NSX and AWS for endpoints, which allows us to manage workloads, such as the comparison that it does between different VMs. It can do this in AWS or Azure.

Any new VM admin simplifies deployment. Instead of only deploying templates, we can deploy blueprints which are easier on day-to-day operations for an organization.

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

vRA's Orchestrator allows you to connect to a huge ecosystem with a huge number of third-party systems to automate any and every IT process that you can think of. It makes it very flexible. Makes it really adaptable as opposed to some other systems.

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

The most valuable features are:

  • How it takes what we used to do in the same process as manual steps, and automates them, such as creating servers.
  • It's self-service for creating your own virtual machine.
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it_user730275 - PeerSpot reviewer
Virtualization Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
  • Web front-ends
  • Orchestrator scripting engine
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SB
Principal Systems Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

I can make a blueprint with an Active Directory deployment. With everything prepared, people can start installing our products.

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

Let's take compute, for example. At compute we have seen, in a session here at VMworld 2018, with AWS or Azure or GCP, you are able to create an abstract layer on top of it and manage it. That's what automation at the cloud level is.

Similarly, when we are talking about hypervisors, whether it is Linux or Windows, we have been able to create hypervisors and to deploy the solutions on the same server. That's the kind of automation which we are bringing in. It's a complete solution.

Looking at the desktop level, desktop virtualization, VDI-related solutions are there.

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it_user746712 - PeerSpot reviewer
EVS Engineer 3 at Cabela's

There are a lot of different benefits with this product, because there are a lot of things that we're trying to automate. There's another guy within my group, he's the administrator of vROps. He's been able to implement a lot of things, and help us script things for monitoring, for patching, and a whole lot of things. It's definitely got a value and it saves us a lot of time.

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

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

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

We like the seamless, non-vendor-specific application that we can provide with it. We're a service provider, so we have all kinds of different clients and they have different applications. Automation works with all of them, pretty much across the industries. The ability for it to be compatible across many different products is really what's important to me because that's what's selling: being able to go cross-platform and be hybrid. That's the most important feature.

After that, ease of use would be up there too. We also like the GUI display which ties in the non-devs with the devs and helps them work together.

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

vRA is a great tool. It gives a lot of flexibility. It gives the customer an experience to automate their processes, their provisioning process. So, we widely adopt that into our environment to automate a lot of provisioning processes to automate the VM provisioning. Thus, it's a great tool, which actually gives a lot of flexibility in terms of provisioning and orchestration.

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

Most valuable thing is that it's flexible. You can do anything with coding.

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

It is our service catalog for our hybrid cloud which is the most valuable feature.

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DK
Systems engineer

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. 

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

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

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it_user746751 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Admin at a consultancy with self employed
  • Automation
  • Ability to deploy heavy workloads quickly
  • Ease of use and the flexibility
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it_user730152 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Architect at University of florida

We use it as a self-service customer portal, for all of our present customers. So far, it's going pretty well.

There are a lot less tickets, and we get more people onboard much faster.

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

The self-service portal, as well as the Orchestrator. They are important, because now, especially, I'm getting a lot of public cloud deployment. So the orchestration piece is really handy for day-to-day operations. I'm doing different item consultation management, as well as directly deployed in the public cloud. So those are the two most important features, they are very helpful.

Added features have improved it a lot recently in version 7.03, so you can deploy Azure VMs directly and you can do config management, or you can run scripts. It's really better than it used to be.

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AR
Senior Systems Administrator at Webroot Software

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

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

Ease of use, the GUI, is probably the best feature, so that really anybody can use it. You don't have to be technical to be able to deploy a VM.

I find it to be intuitive and user-friendly. Regarding some of the files that you feed it, you don't have to do a ton of development. You can feed it pretty standard configuration files. You don't have to be a developer, you don't have to know C# or Java or the like to get it going.

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JS
Systems Admin at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

I find the system to be intuitive and user-friendly. In general, I'm quite happy with the entire setup. Once you configure the system, navigating the portal is pretty simple. They use a lot of the vSphere UI interface structure so it's intuitive, especially if you have used anything vSphere-related before.

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it_user746754 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
  • Automation
  • Catalog
  • Blueprints
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it_user730203 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Self-service and automation. They reduce the amount of time to build a virtual machine and reduce the operation costs.

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

The most valuable features are:

  • Seeing how the actual servers are responding
  • CPU times
  • Memory times.

This allows us more scalability in terms of different applications in using specific servers.

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

Probably the extensibility as well as the out-of-the-box features it provides, which allow you to be very creative with things you can add on and customise. The extensibility is the most important part for me.

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

One of the valuable features is controlling VM standards and server sprawl while at the same time providing the ability for end users to self-provision VMs. This is enabled by the blueprint and resource reclamation features.

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LC
Team leader infrastructure at Asseco SEE

I like that it is easy to deploy the infrastructure.

I have found 7.4 to be user-friendly but 7.5 is not, in fact, it's a nightmare. They changed everything on the graphic user interface, the mode where the user interacts with the product. 

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

The most valuable feature is the way that it plugs into our monitoring systems, and Infoblox and Puppet.

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

The most valuable features are the Catalog View and the access control business group. Access provisioning is probably the main use case for us, so we can separate access to different Catalog items among the different business groups and have that tied back to our AD LDAP systems.

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

All you do is just press a button, it cranks it out and everything is consistent, so that's one nice thing about it. The speed is also a valuable feature.

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EK
Engineer with 5,001-10,000 employees

The automation of the redundant tasks and the implementation of ServiceNow are huge for us, as we are a cloud provider to the campus. It will allow us to automate a lot of tasks that constituents need done, which is very important to us.

In terms of it being user-friendly and intuitive, from what I've used, the little bit I've done in hands-on labs, it's been pretty easy.

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VB
Network Lead at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
  • Self-service for the servers
  • Reclamation
  • Self-service for all of our IT or development teams to expand and decrease their environments at will
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it_user715146 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assigned Client Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Multi-machine blueprints.

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

Orchestration capabilities are the most valuable feature of this solution.

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TR
Solutions Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
  • Integration with Infoblox, for IP management
  • Three-tier app deployment as one unified Blueprint
View full review »
it_user730221 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

What I like the most about vRA: Its seamless ability for users to be able to go pick a catalog item that we have created for them, while they are testing a new version of their code and say, "Okay, I want you to make my old version (based on these blueprints) run, please deploy me - my entire environment."

Whatever we do for the users, we use NSX integration for it, so they can have that encapsulated environment separate from their coworker trying to do the same code testing with the same IP address. Everything needs to be the exact same. That's what we love about it right now.

The biggest feature that we've seen so far is for them to lifecycle it out. A lot of times we have developers that build something, then they forget about it. Now, we lifecycle out after 30 days, so I don't have to waste those resources for a prolonged period of time.

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

Anything which operates "as a service". I have worked in the Cloud industry a long time, so I have a lot of experience with Cloud. I see that there is a lot of flexibility in anything that's a service. You can use it at any of the layers of Cloud, like infrastructure or software.

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MC
IT Professional

The customer can set up multiple machine blueprints. Therefore, we are able to customize the template of three machines, then the customer can deploy without knowing anything about the IT business. 

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

The product itself is future rich, because of the HA componentry. The DRS VMotion gives you the ability to lose physical hardware. It can predict to move workloads before hardware failures. That is a new feature with VMware. It senses the hardware is having issues. Another feature is it now has predictability built into it, which is something new.

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RE
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
  • Orchestration
  • Out-of-the-box integration with Database-as-a-Service
  • Storage-as-a-service
  • Backup-as-a-service
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EM
Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Self-service: Letting the end-users deploy their own machines so the administrators are hands-off at that point.

The user-friendliness is seen in the minimal training that is required to get them up and running, to start deploying machines and accessing.

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it_user730341 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure System Administrator at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Automation
  • The flexibility to actually build different components, in terms of virtual machines.

Our group, we do mostly the virtualization and a creation of systems. Therefore, it's not a cookie cutter build of a template, and that's it, it's more dynamic for our group.

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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

For a few years, when we needed a server, it took us three months to deliver one. Now, we can bring one up in approximately 15 minutes.

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

Multi-vendor cloud IT infrastructure personalization, resource provisioning and configuration, and it automates application delivery and container management.

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

Fast provisioning and integration with public cloud. Our customers want the VMs to be up and running as early as possible. Also, some of our customers need their workloads to be running on the public clouds like AWS to minimize the cost. Using vRA, we can easily integrate AWS and can provision VMs on them.

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

Multi-tenancy is one of the best features for configuring a single portal for multiple departments/customers. Multi-tenancy allows us to use a single vRA portal to configure multiple tenants with their individual URLs. Also, this feature allows us to use shared infrastructure for multiple tenants.

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

The automation is consistent.

The front-end is user-friendly and intuitive.

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

It's scalable. As the needs of the university grow, it's growing with us.

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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 team and vRA self-service portal helps our customers worldwide to provision machines and Day 2 operations automatically without logging tickets and wasting time.

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

The most valuable features are the EBS (Event Broker Subscription) and NSX integration with BP designer.

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it_user678801 - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Services at TUI InfoTec GmbH

The quick provisioning: We get a lot of things done automatically within hours. These things lasts days or weeks in further situations.

The solution is intuitive and user-friendly. E.g., you have less number of logins.

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AE
Head of IT at Interswitch

It provides visibility into the VM space.

It is user-friendly to a greater extent.

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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.
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