VMware Aria Operations Reviews

A central dashboard for evaluating the health of our whole vCenter environment. We also have some Blue Medora plugins which extend that functionality to Cisco UCS and NetApp. Therefore, I can turn this dashboard over to my boss, my coworkers, or the whole team, and they can login and see the clusters at a glance without having to go login everywhere and grubble for statistics.

It does exactly what it's supposed to do. It gives all your coworkers, management, and users a dashboard that gives the current state of the entire vSphere ecosystem, which is very nice to have.

We have an Enterprise Plus license, so there's a long list of stuff that you get with the Enterprise Plus license, and I'd like to see a better integration of all the vRealize components. For example, I was trying to give vRealize Orchestrator a try, and I kept looking at the documentation for vRealize Automation, not knowing that they were completely different products. So, I installed vRealize Orchestrator. Then I went out and asked the expert session, and he talked me into installing vRealize Automation/vRealize Operations. It would be nice to have a 10,000 foot view of what vRealize actually means.

It's a very stable solution. It's very easy to install, too. We installed the appliance, gave it an IP address, fired it up, and were up and running in a couple hours.

I can't really comment on the scalability. We only have a few 100 VMs. We have two datacenters and three vCenter clusters, and it's doing a perfectly, good job of monitoring all that stuff.

I haven't called for tech support on this particular product. I do have issues with tech support, sometimes, asking for the entire download of configurations and logs, when I think I'm calling with a relatively simple question. It would be nice to have a more efficient way to get your ticket started towards escalation. A common problem with a lot of vendors.

The initial setup of operations was very simple. All I had to do was fire up the appliance, then give it the credentials of our stuff.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

vSphere and VMware, of course, is a foundation technology that's been great for dozens of years. What we look for is the advanced features, for example, we just adopted vSAN. It was great. I went from zero to half a petabyte in just a few hours after we got the server setup.

We also look for advice on more advanced products, which are not the base vSphere, by looking to our integrators and our buyers for help. They have been very effective at providing us the information that we need.

It gives us good information when there's an issue of where to pinpoint the source of the issue within the virtual infrastructure.

A lot of the stuff we need assistance with is trying to get us help on our internal process of actually implementing stuff. So the right sizing of VMs and things like that. If there was some way in which it could identify the amount of resources in use, and scale them up and down on the fly, that would be fantastic.

No, it's very stable. It's part of the VMR Stack, so it's protected by all the core VMR features, like HA, vMotion, and DRS. You can put SRM on it.

You can put it on the whole VM infrastructure. Anywhere your VMs are, you have vROps that can act on that space.

They're knowledgeable. Sometimes, you have through the first level to get to the next level of engineering. Once you get past that, they're very knowledgeable with the products, usually able to help us in a short amount of time.

We also have someone on site to help us with the more advanced stuff on an ongoing basis as well, in addition to our TAM who can help escalate stuff and find the right answers.

It's fairly straightforward.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Everything is important.

• Reputation is certainly good for us, being a bank.
• The relationship is huge.
• We have to partner with someone that we trust, who we think is going to do a good job for us, and responds to the issues that we have.

vROps has been able to cut down our time to be able to find our problems, if we have something arise in our infrastructure. We have certainly found anomalies, and it has alerted us to those anomalies and where we can find the problems, thus getting our meantime realized solution down. We've also been able to rightsize our VMs because of vROps. It's able to tell you if you're over-provisioning VMs and reduces memory, if it's not being used, and these sorts of things, so we're rightsizing our VMs.

It also gives you predictive timelines for when you're gonna run out of capacity in your resources, so you may plan accordingly for all of your resource planning.

• Probably in the configuration of it.
• Configuring the different types of alerts.
• Maybe streamlining the process a little more.
• Make it a little more user-friendly, possibly.
• It's a little difficult to configure, maybe.

It is a stable solution. Upgrades have been smooth. We haven't had any problems there, but a little bit of time configuring it. Although, I noticed in their latest release (6.2), it's much cleaner. It seems a little easier to configure, manage, and navigate.

It's not a scale-out architecture, but definitely as much infrastructure as we throw at it, it's able to monitor it. If your infrastructure grows, or even into the Cloud, they have plugins that can monitor VMs, AWS, and Azure.

The support is VMware, and it's good support, as you'd expect.

It's fairly straightforward. There was initially, when I set it up, a version 5, and it had a little bit of different components that you had to configure and put together. I believe it's a little easier these days.

It's a very good product. It's really given us a lot of insight.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The partnerships with other vendors and integration with other products that we have, therefore their reputation in that, and their support.

It has a lot of great reporting features in it that help us scale with our products, and to scale with different things that we're trying to work on, on a day to day workload. It's a great tool to analyze those type of things for us.

Honestly, I think it's pretty good right where it's at. It could always add more features. But for right now, it's got more than what we know how to run. It's just a great product.

Very stable. It's something I check every morning when I come in. It just runs. It has a lot of great features for a lot of our applications where we're trying to figure out what's going on with them in the background.

It scales great. It basically watches an application and tells us where we might have too much CPU, or not enough memory. It helps us fine tune things pretty nice.

It's awesome. I mean, we get help if we need anything, but a lot of times you don't even have to do anything, because the product just runs.

It's pretty straightforward. We didn't have any trouble setting it up.

It's a good product. It definitely helps troubleshooting, and helps you find things a lot faster than just trying to dig for a needle in a haystack. It's definitely a reliable product, and it's definitely helped us save a lot of time.

The value from vROps, from a traditional sense that we had, is the visibility into the back-end, to know when we are having issues with VMs before it actually becomes an end user issue. Especially with hard drives, making sure we extend those out, memory and CPU utilization, as well as overloading host.

I would like to see a free offering. Cost is always a factor in any sort of line. Obviously, the value added is there and it's worth it.

The automation piece could be done simpler.

REST APIs: more REST API calls. It seems like all of the technologies are facilitating those calls back and forth. The more we can get inside vROps, the easier it's going to be to integrate other product lines with it as well.

It's very stable. We've had no issues with it that I can be aware of; even through the upgrade process everything has been very clean.

It will scale, we've seen that as we've ramped up, we've had a 30% increase year-over-year over the last five years. We've never had any issue with the VMware or vROps installations at any of them. As a matter of fact, we only see increased usage and availability with it.

Tech support has been very good. Quite honestly, sometimes they're better than we are. As opposed to getting back to them, they almost hassle us to make sure that they're getting the information. They want to make sure that they get the solution in hand and they close those tickets. It seems that we don't move as timely as they do lots of times.

It's fairly straightforward, obviously, with their initial installation. The more you become an automated system, the more you really delve into the dynamics of vROps, it can become more complicated, but no more so than any other product line. I feel like it's the easiest of any product line to get through. Obviously, there's intricacies with any of this technology.

In terms of the most important criteria when selecting a vendor, I feel like you have to look at it all. You have equal shares.

I work in an industry that is a very secure environment, and you have to have the long-term stability there. One thing that we're asking all vendors that we're looking at their product lines is, "Are you viable five, 10, 20 years from now?" We don't have that three-year turnover rate that a lot of other industries have. We want to make sure that whoever we partner with is going to be there, to support us for the long haul. We don't want it to be purchased and gobbled up, in an environment that is today.

We know that VMware isn't going to be. It is a very well-maintained product line throughout its life expectancy and will continue to be.

As I said, I would probably give it a 10, or greater if I could, if it had more of those REST APIs. They open it up a little bit more to integration with, honestly, the competition, as well as some of the newer technologies that are coming out. I feel they'll have to, and they'll mature in that respect over the next year to two years, but I wish we had a little bit more today.

The ability to monitor our trending and growth in our environment. It gives us an idea of when we're running out of capacity, how quick our growth is occurring, where it's occurring.

Knowing our environment, being able to properly size and prepare for what the future holds.

Maybe to get a little bit more granular with storage and i-apps.

Also, some of the configuration settings are a little bit overwhelming to try and understand all of the implications and ramifications of what they do, so something not quite too intense to configure initially.

We have no problems with it.

So far it's met our environment very well.

So far I've only had to use it one time and they were very helpful. We did have some storage issues with it. They resolved it within probably one or two phone calls, so I was very happy.

We didn't have very good visibility in our environment at all. The standard C# and web client just wasn't giving us the visibility we needed. vROps did that very well.

Very straightforward.

In choosing a vendor, obviously we have to look at their ability to answer all of our questions, make sure that their solution is in fact going to meet our needs and their tech support later on.

It was real simple, and once you get involved with it, it's just a matter of getting some hands on time and playing with it.

We're running a couple of different flavors of vRealize Operations. vRealize Operations gives us the ability and the insight to be able to see what our VMs are actually doing.

• Who's the hungriest?
• Have we got any runaways?
• Have we got any noisy neighbors?

We can address those things. We can separate our test from our production, and make sure our production workloads are getting the launch share of the resources.

I think some of the improvements should be to the adapters, and the adapters which are available to customers. I know there's a lot in the marketplace, but we're looking for more, because we are a pretty large-scale company throughout the State of Louisiana. We've got a lot of different products, and we're looking for a lot of visibility from those other products that we have inside of vRealize Operations.

vROps has gone through a maturation process, and we've grown along with it. We've come to appreciate the things which are offered.

It is a very stable product.

It's quite scalable. We're adding additional vCenters at different regions to a single instance of our vRealize Operations for our virtual server management.

vROps tech support is super. Any issue that we've had, even in a how-to perspective, they've been able to assist us. We've had some things happen late at night or early in the morning where we've needed to open a preemptive service request, for an upgrade, support for a module, or a plugin that we needed to do, and they've been right there for us.

The vRealize Operations setup, installation, and configurations are pretty straightforward. We, as a customer, actually did two of our environments ourselves. We used an implementation service for the first. Then, we used that as a blueprint and a pattern to deploy our other two environments.

It's great from a scalability perspective, and it gives us all of the metrics that we need. Our configuration, or dashboard configuration, and deployment are quite easy.

We use vRealize Operations Manager primarily for capacity management within our environment. To understand the capacity that we're using for vSAN storage, for compute and CPU capacity within our virtualization environment.

vROps is, by its nature, a very complex product. We have seen a lot of improvements around the usability of the product. With each subsequent version, the product is becoming much more user friendly. It's much faster to get up to the speed on the product, to become familiar with it, and to use the built-in dashboards. Especially, the included dashboards around the vSAN Management Pack, that are now integrated into the product, and are available to use immediately upon installation, without any additional configuration.

Those are areas that the product has been improving drastically, and we are working with VMware as a reference customer, and as design partner, based on our experience, to help continue improving the product.

vROps is stable, it's a mature product. We're using the latest release, which is 6.6.1

vROps is extremely scalable. It can size from a small, to a medium, to a large environment. There are options to have HA enabled or disabled, so the product scales extremely well.

VMware has a number of support options related to vROps. It's supported as standard production support. It's also supported out of VCS and MCS support. We are a VCS business-critical support customer, and we have had a good support relationship with the product.

With newer versions of vROps, VMware has improved the setup experience drastically. The new versions of the product install very quickly, very cleanly. Adding additional nodes to the environment is very fast, very easy to do.

For us, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor are that we look for a company that's going to support our business cases, that has an established track record of stability, and performance. Someone that's going to stand behind us and support us as we utilize their product. Those things are extremely important as we're evaluating whether to make a purchase.

I rate vRealize Operations as a nine out of 10 today. There are still some areas to improve around the initial user experience. But, the product has improved significantly with the more recent releases.