vRealize Automation

What do you like best?

The best thing is that end user (who don't have much knowledge about VRA) can easily provision machines in cloud as well as hypervisor based endpoints in just three simple steps:

1) Login into VRA.

2) Select the catalog item (machine type like RHEL, Windows etc) that user wants to provision.

3) Specify the compute(CPU, RAM) and storage for the machine and click on submit.

Normally it will take 20..30 mins for a machine with smaller dependencies to get deployed.

Also the Scalability feature helps the user to increase the compute, storage as required in future.

Also, VRA is Role bases access control(RBAC). Each user will see the different tabs in VRA GUI according to the role assigned to him.

What do you dislike?

Currently I am working on VRA 7.6 and the user's session get timed out automatically after 20..30 mins. This thing is really irritating.

We also tried to increase this timeout value but it didn't helped.

Also when we have to change reservation for large number of VM's (100+), then there is no option for bulk change. We have to search the VM one by one under managed machines section then click change reservation. This task requires a lot of human effort. In our environment to overcome this manual effort we developed a V.RO workflow that can change the reservation for bulk of VM's .

Recommendations to others considering the product:

VRA should be used in environments where new machine deploying requirement is 10 to 20 per week.

It will save a lot of time as users can easily deploy machines without having much knowledge of the complete infrastructure.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

In our environment have various windows, linux, sql servers, oracledb server, single slave sql, 2 slave sql servers and various others blueprint which allow end users to provision machines in just one go.

Also we are providing the resizing capability so that the VM can be reconfigured in future as required.