VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We use it to optimize and scale directory infrastructures from our customers.

Our customers have found the solution to be intuitive and user-friendly in the newest version. It is better than versions 5.0 and 6.0.

• VMware Infrastructure Planner
• VMware Capacity Planner, which provides a capacity planning overview.

We would like the return of the additional partner marketplaces, like DataCore. My customers miss the integration to DataCore.

The stability could be better. We run into issues when the database is temporarily full.

With the newest version, it's user friendly. You can add easily more nodes to on-premise. It's better than 6.0.

Technical support could be better. This has been a problem with many VMware products in the last few years, the support has not been good.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The predictive analysis of the infrastructure helps our customers to reduce downtime and improve capacity planning. Issues are fixed faster with vROps.

Other competitive tools are not as good. The whole stack with VMware is a complete solution to use.

It is easy to use from its deployment architecture to use cases. It is straightforward for customers to use. It's a good product and better than the earlier versions.

The primary use case is operations management for our customers, who are looking for more insight into their environments.

Our customer was able to tell their environment was overprovisioning VMs. So, they decommissioned some VMs, which had been created, and also wrote a policy around the creation of VMs. Now, people don't just randomly create VMs and use up all the company's resources.

It helps an organization quickly create test and dev environments for developers to come up with new software and patch tests.

• Its predication ability.
• Its GUI is easy to use, which makes it user-friendly.

Stability is good right from the start. Everything works smoothly. Integration with other systems is good. 

Scalability is very good. For example, there was one VM that we thought would not need a lot of resources, then we had to expand its resources on the fly.

Tech support is amazing. They will walk you through the implementation.

The initial setup is straightforward and intuitive. If you have all the data, networks, IPs, etc., then everything is easy.

The customer also has a chance to migrate some of their physical infrastructure onto the virtual environment.

The real ROI is the amount of savings seen on the infrastructure.

Get the right licensing and increase your licensing as you upgrade and grow. If you get the wrong licensing, it will be expensive, especially if you plan improperly. 

I've tried other solutions in the industry, and vROps is a good product in comparison.

I would definitely recommend the solution.

It is next, next, and next to use. You don't need to have much high tech knowledge. It is very intuitive.

Our use case is the monitoring of our storage system. 

We had Oracle running on VMware and wanted to have some metrics about the performance. Also, we wanted some metrics and benchmark tools for our applications, which are highly critical and latency sensitive, to integrate into dashboards so we can pinpoint issues and how they are related.

When we were having trouble with our Oracle Database, we could pinpoint the root cause that it was disk-related, i.e., disk misconfiguration. Therefore, in vROps, we could see the problem was related to disks.

It is easy to drill down directly to the root cause of a problem. It goes from network to storage and having access to all the metrics. When you run 100 percent virtual, then everything is in one tool.

I would like more application dashboards to be available.

It's very stable. We have never had issues with it.

It's very scalable. We have never had issues with it.

I have never needed to use their technical support.

We were not using another solution previously. We did not consider anything else before, because nothing else could read our entire VMware stack.

It was straightforward; next, next, and we were finished.

It was cost effective, because it fixed our problems.

We did consider some other vendors, but due to the pricing and features of those products, we skipped them quite quickly.

It creates simple dashboards. Let it run for a couple of weeks, then it collect all the data you need and you can start to play with it. It is easy to use.

Its first versions were a bit less user-friendly. However, in its latest versions, everything is done with the wizard. We just follow the wizard, and not much knowledge is needed to start directly with the product.

The primary use case of this product is to essentially integrate third-party applications, as well as appliances, with the vRealize Operations for monitoring and capacity planning purposes.

A lot of benefits of this solution come to my mind. It allows me to see how my entire infrastructure is performing in a simplified manner. It also gives me a waterfall analysis and a lot of custom badges to tell me if there are any health, risk, or efficiency issues that I am running into. This helps me plan better for my IT infrastructure.

The best feature that works in this solution is the ease of pluggability that is provides and analytics engine which runs behind the scenes.

The biggest way it is intuitive to the user is it allows you to create your custom dashboards. There are a number of widgets which are available to represent your data in the way you want, as well as in the priority you want to see them.

I would like to see more applications and out-of-the-box solutions for well-known applications, like Oracle or Microsoft Exchange. Certain out-of-the-box solutions for these applications, as well as containers. If I had a container solution deployed on top of a VMware infrastructure, or outside as well, it would be really helpful.

I have been working with this product since version 5.6. The stability of this product has been good. Through 6.7, there have been multiple improvements in terms of its GUI and performance. By default, support clustered more of its operations to support the skill and all of that works just fine.

The scalability of solution is actually fantastic. It runs in a clustered node. On top of that, the collector modules which are the work horses of collecting all the data, they give me to scale at the collector module level as well. This caters well to a large scale environment.

They are really good, primarily, because they are well-versed with the product and all its new features. From the 5.x series into the 6.0 series, the product has undergone transformation. While we were working with the product for integration, the technical support provided by VMware was fantastic.

I have seen a lot of custom home grown solutions in the industry before people started integrating with VMware Operations. 

I have been attending VMware events and part of the VMware club. Being part of VMware, I know about this product. That is where and how I started integrating with the product.

It's pretty straightforward. In the latest versions, after 6.4, the deployment has improved. It has simplified a lot. It gives me a programmable interface to automate my entire deployment. I can simply run a job and deploy the entire vRealize Operations solution quickly.

In terms of ROI, I have been working as a systems integrator. So, I am helping my customers when doing the integration. For multiple reasons, in terms of saving time and effort involved in identifying real issues and complex problems, that is the cost which has been saved. In terms of infrastructure monitoring, the returns are good.

The way it has helped improve troubleshooting helps me associate a lot of different infrastructure components, right up to the application layer. E.g., any issues coming in because an application is slowing down due to performance. Because of the hierarchy of all the objects labeled for that particular application, I can browse through the entire infrastructure and see where exact problem is. This helps me narrow down the surface area of the problem that I am trying to solve. That's a huge saving in terms of time required for resolving any particular issue. 

It also provides me with a very intuitive way of understanding my capacity usage, whether I'm running out of capacity and how long before I would need to bump up my capacity based on my usage history. So, it's helped me do capacity planning in an intelligent manner.

If you are running an infrastructure with a variety of components from various different vendors, and want to get monitoring all in one place, this is the solution to go with.

The important criteria when selecting a vendor for any solution:

1. How stable the product is.
2. The ease of usage.
3. Support's availability.

I would rate the solution somewhere between an eight and nine, because it has worked like a charm for me over the years.

It is a little bloated right now. I would like to see it broken out into microservices, so the overall footprint of the application is reduced. That would get it to a ten in my eyes.

1. There is the VMware environment for our operations.
2. We have another instance running for the VDI environment.

It allows me to automate a lot of tasks. Because in a college, we have many different operations going. We need to automate as much as possible. Generally, vROps does a good job.

The automation brings insight into how we will grow. I can look at it, then make my recommendations on what equipment we need to do for the next fiscal year.

• The automation is the most valuable feature.
• The UI is pretty easy to understand.
• It gives me insight into the environment.
  

• The learning curve is pretty steep, but support help decipher it for us.
• It could use more integration with the hardware.
• A reporting engine would be good, where the database could dump into something like Splunk integration, so we could write our own reports. That would be better.

It's completely stable. There's no problem with it.

Scalability is good.

We had a product called StrataCloud for years, which was good, but very complicated. It turned off the team. They wouldn't even bother looking at it, so we discontinued it.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. I had a few questions for support, but it was relatively easy.

It has helped me optimize certain VMs and made them more efficient.

The optimization is a huge return on investment alone.

Do it. Just start off small. Add one vCenter, then add the rest as you go.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Straightforward use; I don't want complex. 
• Reliability. 
• If it snaps into something, the better. Because our team is very small for our environment. The fewer consoles that we need to know (or access), the better.

We use it for a general health check of the environment: What is broken and what is not performing right. 

We can do a lot more with it, and we want to, but we haven't gotten as deep into it as we want to.

It allows us to engineer our infrastructure more efficiently, because vROps will tell us capacity-wise if we are overbuilt, so we can scale back. We have learned to right-size our stuff much better since we have been using vROps.

The dashboards are great. You can quickly see things at a glance without having to dig through a lot of data.

It allows us better visibility into our virtual infrastructure than we could get through vCenter or other tools by providing us a lot of metrics. vROps is good at spotting problems.

Some of the more advanced stuff takes a bit of time to dig into it. It takes a little longer to setup if you want really detailed stuff. They could make the learning curve smoother.

Stability has been good. We haven't had any downtime.

We haven't scaled ours out beyond a single appliance, but I know it can scale out farther.

The technical support is good and responsive.

The initial setup is straightforward. I was able to do it with little to no initial reading.

It has reduced the time to troubleshoot, because we would have to go to ten different places otherwise to get all the data that it gives you in one single picture. 

Start small. Don't try to put too much stuff in it at one time. This way you won't have information overload when you start receiving data back from it.

I was able to start using it quickly the first time.

I have been working with VMware for forever. It has been a good experience.

Most important information when selecting a vendor: 

• Be responsive.
• Provide good support.
• Have a solid product.

We use it for analytics and metrics of the system. We've had it installed for about a year but have really been using it just within the last month. We're still discovering the power behind it and what it can do for us.

It has helped to reduce time to troubleshoot issues and improved quality of service. As far as showing us where the problems are, what's useful is that it gives us suggested solutions to fix them, so that's helpful.

The most valuable features are the health tree and the alerts that tell us what's going on from a glance at the dashboard.

It's definitely stable.

It's scalable. We can add the Management Packs which have helped us. For example, we've added UCS Management Packs and that's been helpful.

We used technical support on a problem we were having when we did an upgrade, and when we had an issue with the integration of Log Insight. Technical support was great.

Definitely utilize any training resources you can find so you understand the product's power and what it can do. Trying to figure it out on your own is not so easy.

It's mostly user-friendly and intuitive. They're improving their dashboards which makes it a lot easier. Sometimes, drilling down and trying to find the exact thing you're looking for can prove challenging at first, but it's getting better.

Regarding cost savings through higher capacity utilization, we haven't seen that so much, but we're running pretty lean. It even tells us that now, so we didn't have a lot of capacity over-use.

I think it's a good product. I'm sure there's room for improvement: integration with some of the other things. I can't really say it's the best product that I've ever seen, but it's doing what we need it to do right now.

Primary use case for vRealize Operations is from an optimization standpoint. We're actually getting analytics from our VMs for over-provisioned VMs, under-provisioned VMs, and making the adjustments accordingly, per the recommendation from Operations.

One of the benefits for our organization, in particular, was the optimization piece where, historically, our virtual environment has always been over-provisioned. We've always tried to go from a physical to virtual, one-for-one. Now, with vRealize Operations, we're actually proving to the company that we're utilizing the virtual infrastructure to its fullest capability, but actually scaling back instead of adding more resources.

From a troubleshooting standpoint, beforehand it took us a lot of time to actually go into esxtop, pull the actual raw data that was happening from a storage level, a network level, a CPU/VCPU and memory level. But having all of these resources at our fingertips, from a graphical user interface, we can pinpoint the pitfall very easily. And it is very user-friendly, with the red, green, yellow "what's wrong." And getting the right teams involved faster has helped us the most with vRealize Operations.

Most valuable feature is the dashboards that we can customize per-user that logs into them. If we need to make a dashboard that's very high-level for our executive to see how our virtual environment's handling things, we can do that. Or, if we need to deep-dive technically, we can do that for our engineers. They really need to see the important stats that make our virtual environment work the most efficiently.

The solution is very user-friendly. From an installation standpoint, it only takes about half a day to a day to implement. Integration with vCenter is very seamless, starts collecting data, almost immediately once you make those connections, getting real-time data within the first 24 to 48 hours. User friendliness is very easy.

A lot of feedback that we're getting from some of our engineers who are actually using Operations today is that the graphics are very low-key. When it comes to red, yellow, green, yes, "Skittles Theory," but when it actually comes down to what's optimized and what's not optimized, it's very rudimentary. If they could actually make nicer pie charts or graphics involved in it, it would make it a lot easier to read the data on a higher level, rather than actually having to dive down and know specifically what you're looking at.

It's extremely stable. Since we implemented it, we haven't had a restart or reboot that wasn't for a maintenance period, and we've been up ever since, collecting data.

Scalability is very easy. Once you implement a new vCenter, it's pretty much just make the connection to the new vCenter and it automatically starts collecting data from all the VMs in that new vCenter. Clusters, DRS recommendations, HA recommendations, everything's at your fingertips and it's very easy to upscale, per your environment, for the growth of your company.

We didn't have a solution at the get-go. Once we implemented this, we actually saw the grand scheme, or a higher level, from top-down, of our whole virtualized environment, that we weren't getting before without really deep-diving into the underlying hypervisor level. That's really what we've been using it for.

We learned that we had the licensing for it, I downloaded the file, and just ran with it. It was very straightforward, just downloaded the file from the internet, uploaded into vCenter, ran it, IP address, log on to the web console and go.

We had a little bit of Hyper-V, but normally, mostly VMware.

If you're running VMware, implement vRealize Operations as soon as possible.

I would rate the solution and eight out of ten. The only reason why (it's not a ten) is because of that graphical interface (issue) that I just described.