VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Being able to use the automation side of it is the most valuable feature of this solution that we have found so far.

We're using it for our cloud solution, which we didn't have before. So, it has enabled us to do more than we could in our enterprise environment.

Right now, we're evaluating vROPS version 6., i.e, on the VSAN side, so hopefully, the solution/features that we are looking for are being offered in the future releases that were done this week.

We are looking for more features from the dashboard point of view, i.e., being able to have a little more visibility as to what's going on at the back-end. I think based on what I saw in the conference, there are dashboard capabilities being available, and a lot of the other modules are tied better together. From our point of view, that will be a better improvement.

The solution is fairly stable. I haven't seen many issues yet, but we're still in the beginning stage of utilizing it, so we have not expanded it as a global solution.

The scalability aspect is yet to be seen because as I have mentioned, we haven't scaled it to the global level yet and we're a global company.

I am really satisfied with the technical support. We were always reaching the right person and they were knowledgeable; if not they tend to get us the right person.

Due to the demand of the business, we invested in this solution.

Mainly, the most important criteria while selecting a vendor is that if the product is fitting the requirements. Of course, the budget comes in to play and the relationship with the vendors that we've had are also important factors while selecting a vendor. We've been using VMware for as far as I've been with the company, so we have a really good relationship them.

Right now, my team is involved in the upgrade process. It is in the middle, i.e., neither simple nor complex. From the process point of view of the workflows, we found it a little complex. At the same time, we don't have the expertise, so we are really dependent on VMware to do a lot of the operation, provide their expertise on the technical side of it, so that's why we find it a little complex at the moment.

VMware sent an in-house team.

We looked at other solutions namely Microsoft, IBM and then, VMware. The reason why we ended up choosing this solution as it offered us a better overall solution to what we were looking for.

We're still learning about this solution.

You should really have a detailed definition of what you're looking for, from the requirements point of view and match that up with how/what vROPS is offering. Overall, VM Solutions are tying to your requirements better.

For vRealize Operations, we use it a lot for capacity planning and our VDI environment.

It improves our ability to provision and acquire hardware when we run out of capacity for our VDI environment.

More data, at least in the VMware, for their Blast Extreme protocol that they use now.

Stability of vROps is good. We have no issues with it.

We haven't had a problem with scalability for vROps. No issues.

We haven't used technical support.

We weren't using something previously.

We needed the feature set that vRealize Operations had. It was already included in the horizon licensing that we purchased.

I was involved in the initial setup. Part of the initial purchase was to have VMware come on site to help install vRealize. An in-house team was sent too.

Just VMware.

Have VMware come onsite to help with the install and knowledge transfer. Also, make sure to research all the different features to use with vRealize Operations.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Ease of use in the product you are looking to use.

Just being able to go back in real-time, look up the performance metrics and forecast growth, i.e., if you have a large incoming demand are the most valuable features.

This solution makes it easier to do reporting and trends that are especially allocated from a research standpoint, we can narrow it down and reclaim some wasted space.

There should be a better database control, so that we are able to manage it a bit better.

Stability is good.

As long as you plan for the scalability ahead of time, you'll be fine.

We had a need and it was one of those solutions that we entertained; it just worked out. Initially, we were using general vCenter metrics and monitoring, but this is much more in-depth.

As long as the product is solid, that's really what we look for while selecting our vendor.

The setup was a little complex because of our part, i.e., where it's going our network and how our network is set up, so it was a little challenging.

I believe we had an SMA from VMware.

It's already provided by VMware, there are no additional APIs to plug in, so just plan ahead of time, simply plan, plan, plan. You should prepare for the solution's orientation with PoC and testing.

I know that it's got some capabilities that we're not using at this time, but the one that comes to mind is the ability for us to see how our VDI environment was performing for some classrooms, so that we knew what kind of resources we needed to allocate better to our VDI pools for our students to get good experience in that classroom.

It's taken the questioning out of what's going on. You're not pointing fingers anymore at software or hardware for no reason. You're actually able to dig into the troubleshooting and see the trends, to see the analysis overtime. You can say, "Well, this is when it started. Before that date, everything seemed fine." Or, "Well, this was when we had more students online, it looks like we need to reallocate some resources." It's taken a lot of the guesswork out. It's allowed us to be more proactive instead of reactive, which is nice.

From a personal perspective, I would like it made clearer what options are available in the suite that the customer is not using. I know that I'm not using all of the capabilities for our environment, so being able to know where I could improve, or gather more data from - easily, in the interface - would be a big help. Without than I just have to go through tech support or read more of the documentation, dig in to get it out. If the system itself actually said, "Here are other options" that were easily visible, that would help people actually use the power of the product.

We haven't had any problems with it. It's been a great product. When we need to go to the portal, the portal's there. If we need to pull the data out, it's there. We haven't had any issues accessing the system, keeping the system up and running, and setting the system up overall was really simple. I'd say it's a rock solid system.

It scaled out really well, the first time that we needed it to. We had vROps in our regular computer infrastructure, and then we needed to scale it out so that we could bring our VDI environment in. We did that very easily. We stood up another collection node, tied that into our VDI system, and then added that into the main cluster, and it was just straightforward and streamlined. It definitely scales out as needed.

We have not had to use tech support for vROps.

It was straightforward. It was easy. It's a powerful product. It gives us a lot of data. It took a little bit of time to get through some of it, to understand what features we needed to turn on, but that's more of a, "How do we tune it for our environment" issue and not a product-setup issue. Once you understand what you needed to do to set up the product, it's fairly straightforward. The documentation's fairly good, but the interface itself is also pretty self-explanatory.

We decided to use it because we're licensed for it. There wasn't a larger discussion around it.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are communication, availability, and the ability to really understand your needs as an organization. Can they put aside some of the business talk and really understand your organization and the solutions that you may need? Whether they're able to work with a higher education institution, in our case, was also important. Those are some of the biggest considerations for us.

There's no solution that's absolutely perfect. It's great for a trend analysis and a growth tool, if you want to do growth projections and things like that. Using it for what it's intended for, it's perfect. Does it give you all of the goodies that you might want in a monitoring software? No, but that's not really what it was designed.

If you have the license for it, install it. Put it together, even if it's in a test environment. Let it gather some data for a couple weeks, and then look at what data has been collected, what it says about your environment. You might be surprised by what it's telling you. You might be able to see some things that you can improve on, or it may just reinforce that your environment is tuned really well. Again, if you're licensed for it, I'd say install it and use it.

We use it for for monitoring VMs.

With the vRealize Operations Manager, it gives an idea of what the VMs are using: storage, compute, etc.

It helps us save money by having less computers, less to manage, and less to worry about if we know exactly what the application is using.

We've been more efficient, so we don't have to spend as much time doing operations and maintenance type work.

If it was cheaper, we wouldn't be sad! We'd prefer if it cost less money to maintain or purchase.

I haven't had any issues yet. It's pretty stable.

Very scalable. Very easy to setup. It's what do we want to do with it because it's so capable, we're just scratching the surface with it right now.

Very good and knowledgeable. When we call and have an issue, they resolve it pretty quickly. We always reach the right person.

We weren't using anything. We had the native Windows monitoring tools, which were in each individual Virtual Machine. We didn't have anything to monitor virtual infrastructure. It made sense since we ran VMware that we would look to use a VMware product.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward.

We didn't really look at others. We just went with this because it made sense.

Plan ahead. Know exactly what it is you want to monitor. There's a lot of things you can report on. It can be a little overwhelming. So, have a plan.

It makes sense to go with VMware. They know better than probably any other vendor what exactly goes on with their Virtual Machines.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: If we already have solutions by that same vendor in-house. That's usually a better way to go, because we don't have to do as much research, then there's the cost. We usually get a better cost if it's just adding onto a part of what we already have instead of buying a new solution outright.

It gives us the ability to look into problems which are happening within the environment. This helps us to mitigate those problems more quickly. Then, if we see an alert from vCenter, and have to go and search for stuff, we have the ability to see where the issue is coming from, also what other systems or other components could be affected.

It's sped up the ability to track all this stuff as well as mitigated the issues that have come up during an importation. After an importation, if someone changes stuff; we see that stuff in there.

I'd like to see more ease of creating dashboards. It seems that creating dashboards is more difficult than it probably could be; more of a wizard type of feel for creating dashboards for every single department.

In our environment, we have people who we don't want to see everything. We want them to see what they need to see, not everything else. It seems harder to create that. It's not like a GUI, where you can say, "I want this stuff in here, and this is what I want them to see."

When you see everything, you end up having way too much information. It's overload if you don't know what you're looking for. It would be helpful to be able to give management just enough for them to look at, or the SAN people, and not have to see every little thing.

We have had problems, but I think it was more from the original implementation, not necessarily the product itself. We found that people are adding a lot of plugins that we weren't using. They were taking a whole list of plugins and popping them into place, even though they weren't being used, which then sucked the life out of the product and made it, at some point, unusable. We removed the ones that we didn't need, and left the other ones in there, and it seems to work fine. It's doing everything we need it to do. It's alerting us to problems, and it's helping us fix those problems pretty regularly.

It seems to scale pretty well for us. Other places I've worked, they had problems with scalability only because of the way they implemented it originally. For us, it seems to be working just fine for that purpose.

The first version we had in the environment, the problem was we seemed to have kept it longer than it should have, and it seemed that the technicians didn't have the knowledge about the old stuff. But after we upgraded, they seemed to be able to help us with any problems we had.

We were using things like Syslog and other products. They really didn't give you the direct information, "This is what the problem is," or "This is having a problem and these are the things that it could be affecting the product." Down the chain, it could be affecting the host, or it could be affecting the VMs. This is what vROps really gives you, the ability to see and to drill into what's going on in with all the components. Syslog and other components like that, they just told you the symptom, "This is happening," but not necessarily what else could the problem.

I'm not sure which ones they looked at because that was before my time, but they did look at a lot of vendors. I believe one of them was WhatsUp Gold, but that was more of just a product the system pinged. It went down because you can no longer ping it, so that wasn't really good for us.

We were trying to follow the validated design, which is part of VMware, and we needed some way of monitoring, which is one of the biggest problems.

We can't allow vCenter to do all the monitoring, to alert us. It doesn't give us enough information. There are a lot of products out there, and we just figured we'd use what they have in place, because it integrates much better than some of the others. I don't know about now, but originally the other ones didn't really integrate as well, with all the components including NSX and vSphere (and all the components underneath that), so that's why we decided to go with this.

The important things to look for are name recognition, reliability, and support. It's important that the support people have the knowledge to support the environment. Documentation and education, because you don't want to always be calling support for every little thing.

Test it out, put the demo in, or create a proof of concept.

Its centralized management. We have a large environment, and it's very difficult to try to stay proactive in it instead of being reactive.

It give us the real-time capability to see and measure CPU utilization, memory usage, consumption rates, and capacity management.

I would like to see more integration with the login site and different tools. I don't have the understanding of how to take that input and feed it right back into vROps to achieve the right reporting and alert notifications. More tutorials and training would be useful.

I think it's stable. We don't have any issues.

It seems to be scalable. We're medium-size, but I think it's there.

Good. They're very responsive.

No, just the older version. We were already licensed for it because we're a VMware customer. We were too reactive, so we needed to install it to get ahead of our issues and problems.

Pretty straightforward. There were some questions regarding rightsizing when setting it up, but overall it was good.

No.

When looking at vendors, it's important to look at technical support and responsiveness.

It allows us to view the statistics of our environment in real time. We're able to pull reports and generate other metrics from all the virtual infrastructure.

It's helped us because we're able to take a heartbeat or take a snapshot of the environment at any given time. With all the reporting and analytics built into vROps, we can rightsize the environment. We can reclaim resources. We can do a whole wealth of things that allows us to keep our datacenters running.

I'd like to see more integration with ticketing systems, so tickets can be based off metrics or thresholds that were met.

Lots of coffee and lots of donuts.

Just a thorough plan, which definitely needs to be had in making a deployment like this.

Early on, it was iffy, but the latest releases have been pretty stable.

It scales.

It was great. They were very knowledgeable. They were spot on.

We contacted them several times. We've even had a PSO Engagement where someone who was a specialist for vROps came on site.

Nobody else. Just VM.

I would highly recommend others to take a look at the vROps tool. It will definitely help them manage their infrastructure.

When evaluating vROps, they need to make sure all the plugins are working, and that it's the solution for them. Sometimes people evaluate a lot of products, and it's just an evaluation which really doesn't fit what their business needs are. Having a good understanding of what you're looking for and what you need is the most important part of evaluating a product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Their education
• Their product knowledge
• Ability to get support.