VMware Aria Operations Reviews

At Western Carolina University, we have a lot of classrooms that are going on, a lot of logins, a lot of thin clients. Right now, we mostly want to see usage. Also, we want to troubleshoot any kind of issues we may be having.

With vRealize, we have the ability to mold the template into what we want, what we want to see. Having that in real-time is really great. We can go to our managers, we can go to our higher-ups and say, “Hey, look at where we're at and what we're doing.” It's a really great product for that.

Having it right there, on point. You log in, you see everything that's happening right then. We can also export that, get information, print it out, show it to people. That's a big deal. People want to see that transparency. It's great that way.

I would like to see even more scalability and the ability to customize more templates to our advantage.

Also, we do like to be on the latest version of everything. I know VMware has their hands in a lot of different places, but if they could have a rollout and say, "Don't be using the latest and greatest, you've got to use two versions back to get to this, to be there at the latest and greatest." That would be wonderful.

We did run into a small issue. The latest version of it would not work with Horizon 7.5, so we had to roll back vRealize. But, they say it's coming out soon. Can't wait for it. We're looking forward to it. But other than that, it's been great.

I have no problems with it. As far as stability goes, it's been great.

Scalability is there, but it's on the sysadmin. VMware hands you a product and says, "Form it to what you want it to do." So it's on the sysadmins to make it do whatever they want, tailored to their needs. As long as the sysadmins know what they need, they can scale it to do whatever.

Technical support has been good, they usually get back to us pretty quickly. There's usually a lot of back and forth. We generally have an answer within three or four days, so that's pretty good.

We didn't really have anything. That's why this has been such a great integration into our system.

Among the most important criteria when selecting vendor, building a good relationship is a key step. If they are talkative, they respond, they give us the information we want, that's the best first step. And then, actually delivering on the product. There are a lot of times we get a product they say does something and we test it and find out it really doesn't have that capability, or there are caveats to it that weren't mentioned. So delivering on the products, their features, and building that relationship, are important when selecting a vendor.

I was in the room for the initial setup but was only slightly invovled. Some others guys were there doing it. But it wasn't that bad, probably took us about four hours to get it up and going.

I don't really have anything to compare it to right now, but on a scale from one to ten, it's about an eight. I expect to see some things getting better down the road, so I'm sure that number will go up.

I use it for monitoring and DRS automation.

It gives me metrics that I can share with the rest of my team. I can say, "Look, this server is performing poorly." Even down into the Windows Servers, which are my primary bread and butter, it gives me visibility into situations such as when they're running out of storage and I need to expand the drives. It gives that top-level visibility to get in and fix a lot of problems.

It helps us provide better quality of service. I'm still not going to it first for troubleshooting. I'm going to it and discovering things that I need to troubleshoot.

The visibility of the whole stack, everything all in one plane. 

One thing I don't like is that all the scales are self-referencing. So when I get a "one," is that one out of ten, one out of a hundred? I don't know. So I can say these servers are performing ten times better than that server but I don't know where the scale goes.

Also, the first "20 percent" of it is user-friendly, that quick, "fix this." The first level is easy, but to really dig down and get more information out of it, it gets beyond the scope of time that I have to put into it. A lot of it is that it indicates: "And there is a problem," and not all of those problems are autofix. And that's where I get stuck: "Oh there's a problem." It doesn't always give me the information to go fix it.

It has been rock solid.

I'm a small fish, so I'm not going to outgrow it any time soon.

I had some issues getting things set up in the beginning. I don't know what I did differently but somewhere in there it just clicked and it worked.

Most of my infrastructure is Windows, but Hyper-V isn't in the same class as VMware. It still feels like the new kid on the block. I've literally been using VMware since '99, product one. And being here, 20 years later, it's just VMware, it's there, it's what you use.

I don't know how to move past where I am. I feel like I'm only scratching the top 20 percent.

When looking to work with a vendor, I look for one that is knowledgeable, that understands my problems and the way I work, and that will be there when I need help.

We use it to monitor our VMware infrastructure.

It's very useful in making sure everything stays up and running at optimal performance. It's a matter of not having to continually monitor it by opening VMware and vCenter and looking at it. You can actually set it up to alert you if there's any problem. That's the biggest benefit.

The most valuable feature is the way you can look at your virtual machine and see if it's using too many resources or not enough, and you can add resources to it if you need to, or take some away to save on them.

From an IT department perspective, it does help in reducing the time to troubleshoot issues and in providing cost savings through higher capacity utilization.

It's mostly stable. There are a few glitches with it, but no downtime.

It's scalable.

I feel that I was better able to troubleshoot it myself by using Google than by using the tech support.

Before, we were just using basic VMware with no vCenter. We bought into the whole vSphere, and it came with the vROps.

The setup was fairly straightforward. There's a little bit of a learning curve to use it, but once you get it, it's pretty easy to use.

I wouldn't really call it ROI. It's more just a valuable tool for monitoring. It came with the package we bought for VMware.

I don't really know of any alternative solutions.

It's definitely worth using.

I use it on a daily basis to make sure that the VMs are up and running and that there aren't any issues with any of them. If there are, then it tells me exactly where to go to fix them.

It gives me more insight on issues like: Do we need to add more hardware to the clusters; when disks are low, to add more disk space. It's a preventive type of maintenance.

It has also immensely reduced the time to troubleshoot issues. It has improved the quality of service to users because it prevents downtime. And it lets me know how many VMs I can actually run on each individual host, which helps with cost savings through higher capacity utilization.

The most valuable feature is knowing whether or not you have issues with your hosts and VMs. There are other features where you can have it automatically adjusts things. I don't have it set to that level because I like to control things myself. That's a nice option but I'm just not at that point yet to let it control things.

It points out all kinds of issues that you might be having, whether or not your environment is actually running smoothly, too.

In terms of user-friendliness, there are a lot of areas that take a lot of time to research and figure out what the information is actually telling me, so that I know how to better use the product and troubleshoot issues that I see. It would be nice if they could fine-tune the user interface a little bit.

I haven't had any issues with stability at all. It works as expected.

I don't have a whole lot of hosts running that vROps actually monitors. I think we're up to 40 now but that's not a whole lot compared to what other people tell me what they run. It's working as expected.

I have not used technical support for vRealize Operations Manager yet. But I use it for the hosts. I need help with some of the things that Operations Manager identifies.

vROps actually came with the license package that we bought. Once I knew we owned it I just downloaded it and installed it.

The setup was pretty easy. It was an appliance, you just follow the bouncing ball, get it installed.

Because it helps me troubleshoot issues quickly, it saves a lot of time. If I didn't have it, it would probably take me a few days to troubleshoot the issues, versus a single pane telling me I've got an issue with this VM and pointing directly to what the problem is. It saves a lot of staff time.

My advice would be to purchase the product because it definitely helps troubleshoot issues in probably one-tenth of the time that it would take without it. It's something I wouldn't live without, at this point.

We use it for our virtualization and infrastructure. It's used for a lot of clusters, a lot of hosts, VM workloads on-prem and a little bit off-prem. It's doing great. Really no complaints.

Increases efficiency, drives down costs. Being able to consolidate everything on similar hardware is really helpful, as opposed to trying to manage a bunch of hosts. It has helped us reduce time to troubleshoot issues and quality of service is better because there is more uptime. Taking maintenance is a lot easier now than it used to be. We don't have to take as many outages.

The most valuable feature is all the metrics we get. They're really good. Being able to drill down and find out where the CPU and memory bottlenecks are and being able to tune them is really helpful.

It's intuitive and user-friendly, especially with the new clients. It's really nice. It's really easy to use. The HTML 5 client is light years ahead of the old one. Everything runs faster, it loads a lot quicker, it's a lot cleaner, the UI is easier to navigate.

The stability is high. Normally, the problems we have are hardware problems, not virtualization problems. They're usually related to the hardware vendor.

You just need to pop in a new host, install ESX, and go.

I haven't needed to use technical support.

I've done expansion of it but I have not been involved in the initial build. What I have done is pretty easy. I've had some guidance but the documentation is online and a lot of it is easy to find.

Of course the licensing, if they could make it cheaper, that would help. But they have to build out new features, so I understand.

Everybody virtualizes now. It's just the thing you do. It's so efficient. I could go through the list but being able to consolidate infrastructure, you save time, you save money, it's just something you do.

They have done a pretty good job. The new client is really good.

Its primary use case has been to give us a proper view of what is happening at an infrastructure level. This is why we opted for the product.

We have more than 137 locations across India. We started using it at a central location where our data center is located and it expanding it to locations. 

There is a lot of manual effort involved when drilling down into problems and determining where they are coming from. With this solution, we are able to see where problems are happening quickly and improve turnaround time, which matters to us.

The dashboard: I like that we receive an overview from it of what is happening in our environment.

The solution is somewhat intuitive and very user-friendly. It has interactive sessions which can then be built into reports.

It is quite stable. If you are putting up an infrastructure, it takes about a week to analyze it, then it starts giving you a results.

It is quite scalable. We have started using it in one location, then sending to another and another. Right now, we have 11 locations.

The technical support is great. 

For example, we opened a case because we were not sure on the best practices on how to put this up this solution, and the tech support helped us.

We did not previously use another solution. This is the first solution that we have used of its kind.

While the initial setup was somewhat straightforward, there is some complexity. Going forward, I would like there to be more clarity in the process. Because to complete the setup process, our team had to open up a case with the technical support, and they had to guide us through the process.

The solution helped us to reduce time to troubleshoot issues, improved our quality of service to our users, and it provides cost savings for high capacity utilization. Our manpower costs have been reduced due to the automation in conjunction with the usage of the dashboard.

As we continue to implement it across multiple environments, it reduces costs as well.

I always recommend this solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Brand name
• The vendor's skill set
• The technical support.

Our primary use case is to automate workflows within the corporate data center and to automate in and out of the cloud, spinning up workloads in both locations. So far, the performance has been great.

It has improved our time to deliver on systems, for development workloads. As we do that with our larger development platforms, they don't have to wait on us, as infrastructure, to spin those up. They can just spin up what they need and get to work.

There is also definitely a cost saving because we don't have to have as many people. A smaller workforce can take care of it in a timely manner.

The most valuable features are the Blueprints and Workflows, to be able to hand the self-service portal out; to get out of the way and let the developers spin up their workloads as they need them.

It is intuitive and user-friendly. As you go through it, with some of the wizards and some of the interfaces that are out there, I think it's fairly easy to step through, even when we're training new employees to work with the product.

I'd like to see the streamlining of more wizards, more tasks that are canned. And it would also be good to see some more features around building the Blueprints, just to make it a little easier.

It has been very stable, no issues.

Scalability: It's as big as we need it to be. We just add in new services, new hosts. It works really well.

I don't know that we have had to use technical support. We did our initial deployment with VMware Professional Services, so we really haven't had to get support on it at all.

We knew we needed to do something different. One of the big complaints from development had always been that they were waiting on us. We talked with our local VMware team about this and started down this road. It took about a year to get it done, but we finally got the buy-in by packaging it with NSX for our security folks - they've got deep pockets. So we were able to get the whole project done.

Our return on investment, again, is a lot on the people front. Instead of having to expand, we just run a leaner workshop and we have the people to do that. So the cost saving has been around not having to pay for additional employees to support our environment.

We looked at Cisco CloudCenter. We looked at it at the same time but we knew that 95 percent of our infrastructure runs VMware today, so we wanted to go with the same kind of ecosystem.

If you're heavily invested in VMware already, go this way. It's going to be a lot better in the long run.

I rate it a nine out of 10. To get to a 10, I would like to see those improvements around the UI and making things a little more user-friendly.

My primary use for it is monitoring and making sure that there are no issues anywhere. You have the various content packs that keep track of all of our different products and the various things we're using within the enterprise. It's a good central point for management. The performance has been good.

It has definitely helped us reduce the time to troubleshoot issues.

The most valuable features are the Heat Maps, and the various graphs and reporting features it has.

For the most part, it is intuitive and user-friendly. Sometimes you have to dig around a little bit to find stuff, but that's because of the way that they do the content, more than anything else.

The main concern would be just to make sure that there's some consistency when third-parties are building their various content packs for it. It seems like it's pretty random in terms of what you're going to get. A vendor is going to provide whatever they provide but it's really hit or miss in terms of how good the quality is. In terms of the things that are monitoring the vSsphere components etc., that's all solid, that's all pretty good.

It's stable. I haven't really had any issues with it. I think we have run into a couple of bugs but normally it seems to run okay.

We've been okay as far as the scalability goes. I'm not aware of any issues there.

Technical support is excellent.

In terms of the decision to go with vROps, It was more along the lines of, "Hey, this is out, this is available to you, it's going to improve things for you." It was a no-brainer because you don't want to do things the hard way.

How much more difficult would it have been to troubleshoot something if this solution wasn't there? It's really hard to say. It's a matter of digging into various different places, so I don't necessarily know how much there is an ROI on it. We trust this product, it seems to be a good tool that we make use of, and I wouldn't want to be without it.

I don't know that we really considered anything else in that pure category because, at that time, nothing really compared to it. Everybody had their own little management and monitoring solutions for their little bubbles. But there wasn't this all-inclusive, try to get other vendors to buy in and have one single monitoring solution.

My advice would be, just go ahead and buy it. It's going to be leaps and bounds ahead of doing it the hard way. It puts it all in one place, gives you a little bit of capacity planning, a better idea of what your actual capacity is, versus just looking at the spot values you get right out of VMware at a given point in time. In terms of looking at a VM, you can see how much RAM it is actually using over a period of time versus whatever the user claims: "Oh it's completely out of memory." We can say, "Is it? Is it really? Let's check it out."

I rate it at nine out of 10. It would be a 10 with just a little bit more arm-twisting on the people that are supplying their little add-ins, to make sure that they're of a sufficient quality to match whatever else is in VMware. They need third-party quality control, less so the actual VMware parts.