VMware Aria Operations Reviews

It's valuable because it helps us look at our performance statistics for our environment.

Where the product could improve would be the UI. They just changed the UI on it in this last version, but they could always expand on that, make it a little bit more in depth.

Very stable product, no downtime.

It's very scalable and it will meet our needs going forward.

The tech support is good. I haven't actually had to call tech support on the product as of yet.

We were previously using SolarWinds and we switched to this because it's made by VMware and it works better with VMware than our SolarWinds solution did.

It's simple to deploy, it's an appliance. You just go into your vCenter and deploy it and it's up and going pretty much. You go in and you put in your information for your vCenters, it goes out and collects the data and you're off and going.

I rate it an eight out of 10, because there's always room for improvement, but overall I'm very happy with it.

vRealize Operations enables us to do a lot more looking at the data. Basically, it enables us to look at the information coming in from vCenter, vSphere. We fully integrate it in our end user computing side. So Horizon, plug it into our Horizon data.

For vRealize, in the state that we use it in, for our Horizon end points, there's probably a little bit more data that they could have available for Horizon than they do today. I think it's more vCenter focused. Their integration with Horizon probably could be a little bit better.

It's a stable solution. It's still growing. It's got room to grow, I would say. There are a lot of things they could do to make it better. I think they're pretty open to that feedback, and allowing us to expand it more.

It's highly scalable.

Tech support's really good. Anytime we've had any issues whatsoever, any of our engineers, or whoever we contact, is pretty available within a few hours of our posting a problem to support.

Setup's a little complex at first. But once you actually know what you're doing, and when you're setting up some of the other nodes - besides the primary one - the collectors and everything, it tends to go a little bit better.

From my standpoint, when selecting a vendor, we look at support, their customer service, what is their responsiveness to any of the problems we have. Scalability, "ease-ability" in the product. Is the solution fully integrated into what we need it to do?

I rate it a seven right now just because it's a little bit complex in its setup. But, I think, like I said, as they improve it, get a little bit better, then it'll make it easier to use.

We use vROPs primarily on our VEI side. It gives us a lot of insight into the session experience that I haven't found in another product. It matches PC over IP latency times, packet loss times; I just haven't been able to find that using another product anywhere.

I think it pretty much covers everything I need. I can monitor my storage performance with it. Obviously my host hardware, my virtual desktops. I know it can do virtual servers if we were licensed for that. We don't have NSX. I'm sure that there are add-ins for NSX for it.

It helps us verify when a customer complains about, or an end user complains about VDI performance. "Is there something going on in the session, network related between the endpoint and the virtual desktop?" Sometimes we are even able to find performance problems or identify network issues before an end user notices it and opens a ticket.

Monitoring our vSAN environment still seems to be touch and go. It doesn't always report correctly on that.

What would be helpful is more intuitive troubleshooting or more intuitive messages. Some of the messages that you see really don't make sense. When you start diving in to them, it gets better, but a lot of times there is still a lot of lack of clarity. For example, where do I go to try to figure out exactly what is causing this? Something a little more solid, maybe even link it to some KBs or that that might be related.

It's been a very stable product. The upgrades are simple, overall. I haven't had any problems that have come out of updates at all or upgrades to it. Very solid.

We are only using it on a VDI environment of about 550 desktops, but I know from reading the guides that it scales out really well.

I have had to contact tech support once or twice. I had a little trouble getting the deployment set up so it would exclude servers, because we aren't licensed to monitor servers with it. Sometimes, certain versions, when you add a feature, pack it in. Sometimes they don't work like you expect them to. But tech support has been great on that and they help get it figured out.

It was deployed when I got there, back in the vCOPS days, and I basically abandoned that installation and did a fresh vROps deployment because we were so far behind it was easier than trying to do the stepped upgrade.

Some of the earlier releases were a bit more complex to get deployed. Newer versions have been really easy. I think I did one other complete redeployment again because we left to get out of scope, and I had a lot fewer questions and a lot fewer issues the second time.

Overall, vROps is a very mature product. It is stable. It's got a lot of features in it and sometimes that's the downside. There is so much power to it it's hard to know how to use it completely.

If you are going to deploy vROps, make sure that you've got time to dedicate to learning it. The deployment is relatively easy. The learning how to leverage all the features of it afterwards can take some time. Leverage educational resources, whether it be through VMware or leveraging a partner if you need to. It is a really good product, it can just be a little overwhelming when you first get a hold of it.

vROps was there before me. When I got there, I was asked if I felt that there was value in keeping it and I said yes, absolutely.

The most important points in vendor selection are

• the vendor's reputation
• how good their products truly are
• how long they've been around
• the features supported
• the capabilities of their product
• how user friendly it is
• the comfort of the interface
• the overall stability of the product.

Single pane of glass for metrics. This helps us see if we have issues with network storage, compute.

It's enabled us to more quickly troubleshoot end user problems.

Being able to take and work off activity between it and other products.

Being an all-inclusive appliance, it's been very stable for us.

We haven't had to scale.

I haven't used it for vROps.

We've spent far too much time troubleshooting datacenter issues and once we implemented vROps we were able to save a lot of time.

I was involved and it was very straightforward.

No.

Looking for vendors, the most important thing to consider is their support.

Capacity management.

We were able to downsize workloads and our hardware.

It really helps with stability. Overall, it is a stable product.

It's been great, but we have a small department.

Very good.

It was very easy. They installed it using the vROps Wizard.

I think it's a good product.

Most important criteria when selecting a new vendor:

• Overall support for the product
• Response to support tickets
• Product features
• New feature roll-outs

Being able to see everything that is happening in our infrastructure. There are a lot of problems that we didn't see, but now that we are using vROps we are able to act proactively. It's been a great help for us.

We have way fewer problems than we had before. We had a lot of VMs with low disk space, a lot of VMs that were quitting and the OS was crashing, and we couldn't see these issues. We had to wait for the end user to complain and then react. Now we are able to act before the problem happens.

I think the dev ops for Horizon need improvement.

We haven't had any kind of problems with the tool so far, it's been very stable.

We haven't had time to scale out yet, we have just implemented it.

I have not used technical support for this tool.

We used the previous version of vROps, it was under a different name that I don't remember. They ended support and the tool stopped functioning and we had nothing to monitor.

I was not involved, a partner of mine did it. But for him it was really easy, he didn't have any trouble, did it all by himself.

We didn't consider anything else because we have a big contract and a license for pretty much everything VMware offers, so it was just a matter of using the tools we bought.

When looking at vendors, cost is the number one factor but, of course, the product has to function.

I would definitely say give it a try. It's growing incrementally better, it's really user friendly, the user interface is easy to manage.

Doing the rightsizing of the VMs themselves, telling me whether to add more memory or take away some.

Rightsizing reduces expenses.

In terms of rightsizing the VMs, I'd like to actually see vROps do that for me but currently it doesn't. I'd like to be able to schedule it for a certain time and date.

Seems to be pretty stable.

We haven't had any issues with it.

I've used technical support, and it's great.

We weren't previously using anything else. We went with vROps after our TAM and our SE suggested it would be good for our environment.

I was not involved in it.

No.

When considering vendors, the most important issue is support.

Also, be patient. It collects a lot of information

Being able to gather up the different application servers into groups and then I can give access by application types, and they can see the same things we can see.

Being able to tie in the other packages with storage and networking and being able to see, across the board, some of the analytics we can pull out.

There may be some features I haven't found yet; there are a lot of things in there. Perhaps some tighter integration with the upgrade manager would be helpful.

I also have some questions about the storage utilization and the expenses with that.

It is pretty stable but I do have some questions about the storage.

Ours is a pretty small installation, but I do have some colleagues in larger installations, so I think it has good scalability.

Not on vROps. I did ask some questions of TAM about storage utilization but I haven't had answers yet.

No, we weren't using something for this. We just used what came through our system.

Straightforward, I did it myself.

The most important thing when looking at vendors is long term support, that they don't just drop the product.

I would advise you put it in, try it out, put it through its paces.