VMware Aria Operations Reviews

It gives complete visibility in the form of cache nodes and the health of all our virtual machines, clusters at all levels. And it gives deeper insight into a particular element of the health of the company, each of the virtual machines, storage. It gives a single point of reference to have a complete view and monitoring of the infrastructure layer, at all levels.

You can categorize what kind of alerts you want to get into, what is the performance of a typical virtual machine.

It gives us complete insights.

It gives proactive alerts and it can really be useful when it comes to capacity planning. It easily monitors utilization, it helps optimize infrastructure as well, based on the capacity and the real-time utilization. It's a complete product that provides multiple benefits to the organization.

One of the expectations would be to have third-party integrations, plug-ins like with Lumidor.

Also, alerting any potential violations in performance monitoring.

Version by version it comes out with a lot of enhancements.

When it comes to scalability, I think we haven't reached that threshold.

They are knowledgeable.

No, not at all.

When selecting a vendor it's important to look at the product roadmap; the underlying platform is VMware anyway. They go hand in hand when it comes to monitoring the infrastructure.

I would definitely suggest evaluating vROps. It's particularly valuable for anybody who is on the VMware platform.

We use vROps a lot to do trouble shooting, especially in terms of performance. Also, it helps to utilize our resources, because we can help if the machine is oversized or if it's undersized.

We've gone from having no insight (into the type of resources which we're using) to a lot of insight. This provides a lot of different reports as to how to keep our business running efficiently.

Possibility getting the additional features onto physical boxes in the next release.

It's stable. It doesn't crash.

We like the scalability of the product so far.

We're using another professional services group for this.

We invested in this solution because them management team asked, "Why are you spending this much money on hardware when you're not using it?"

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

We have 11 different pieces of the VMR environment. We had to go through and upgrade them all getting everything done in the right order.

The product is useful and it helps, especially going into a conversation with other IT staff and management.

Wireless Operations Manager allows us to troubleshoot any issues proactively, so that's really good with the solution that we have.

As I noted above, we are able to proactively look at if there would be any potential issues, plus planning on the demand and supply.

I'm a very core systems admin guy, so what I would like to look at, when I see DRS migrations, it would be interesting to see why it really migrated. We have a dozen SATA as of today, but it would be really interesting to see what is the metric that Wireless Operations Manager used to initiate re-motions.

Stability is pretty good.

No. Scalability is good.

I haven't used it for wireless operations. Not yet.

We use vROps. Apart from that we were using couple of other tools but I don't want to give their names.

I wasn't involved.

When choosing a vendor we look at what pain points we have today and then we look if any vendor can kind of satisfy or fulfill all the pain points. vROps was one of them we looked into

I would suggest if you pain points that we had, then go with vROps.

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.