VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Optimization of our virtual environment.

It helps as far as determining virtual machines that are not being properly utilized, if they're over-extended for resources such as CPU and memory. If not, we can then determine if that VM is still used and we can help better optimize our environment. It has helped us to reduce the amount of VM sprawl, VMs that are not necessarily used. We can then reclaim resources such as memory, CPU, and storage.

It has also helped us with troubleshooting key points of our environment. If there are issues that come up, we can dig down to a virtual machine and see if it's having issues and where those issues lie: if it needs more memory, CPU, or if there is a storage issue.

The most valuable feature is being able to optimize our environment so we can better manage it.

It's very easy to use and easy to learn. There's some learning curve, but it's a very small learning curve, something you can easily grasp. VMware has helped us with some educational tools and there are some online tools that you can use as well.

It's very stable. We haven't had any downtime.

I haven't tried it for scalability yet, but I think we're going to get there. From what I've read, it's pretty easy to scale out.

I have not had to use technical support yet. I have just been learning it on my own.

I would say our ROI is tens of thousands. I expect to reduce our footprint in the data center, so we've definitely reclaimed a lot of storage.

Compare the solutions and see which one is going to give you the best bang for your buck, the best functionality, and help your environment.

The most important criteria when working with a vendor are the

• service they provide
• ease of use of the product.

It's not perfect but it's a good solution. It was implemented before I joined the company. I wish I had known more about it, such as: How does it cost-compare to other solutions and how does it compare to solutions like Turbonomic; how does it compare in terms of functionality?

We use vRealize to monitor the health and status of our VMs, all of our hosts, and anything of that nature within our vCenter environment.

It's time-saving because you don't have to go out and research how to rectify that issue. It's right there on the screen, you just follow it.

The solution has also helped improve quality of service to users and provide cost savings through higher capacity utilization. For instance, if there's an issue with a VM running real slow, vRealize will tell you why it's running slow. It will actually post it on the screen with an alert.

It tells us when there's an issue with a particular VM or host. It gives us a remediation in order to fix that problem. For example, if there's a shortage of memory or a shortage of CPU, things of that nature, it tells us how to correct that issue.

You can set up your dashboard and customize it for your environment.

It's user-friendly. It's spelled out in straight, common English. Whether you have an IT background or not, it gives you a link to take you to that particular issue. It shows you how to either increase the memory or increase the CPU.

We haven't had any stability issues with it yet.

We've never had to really scale out. We used a version that came with vCenter 6.5. We just upgraded from 6.0 to 6.5, and now there's another version of vRealize out there. So we're actually looking into that newer version at this point in time. But we're not nervous about it meeting our needs in five years' time.

We're a partner but we feel that they provide us the service that we would want, in general.

We did not have a previous solution. We incorporated vRealize when we deployed our vCenter environment.

Our most important criterion when selecting a vendor is to minimize downtime. As long as it works... It had to be really good for us to be a partner.

The initial setup was straightforward. We had someone from VMware helping set it up.

The ROI is that it saves us a lot of time, it helps us keep our customers up, and there is very little downtime.

It is a biased answer since we are a partner, but VMware is, to us, the top virtualization company. On a scale of one to ten, I give it a 12 because it has never failed us.

vRealize Operations Manager is mostly used for troubleshooting and doing health checks for virtual machines, to make sure that they're running efficiently and that there are no performance problems for the customers' uses.

The performance of the solution is sufficient. It has gotten much better as the program has developed. I know that the new version 7, which was just announced, is supposed to be even better than the last version, and that version was awesome.

It speeds up time for troubleshooting and it gives simple-to-use dashboarding for executives and managers to be able to see what the issues are in an easy way, so they can escalate or question. From an operations side it lets you get to the core of the apple and figure out the problem quickly.

Valuable features include the PowerCLI module and the ability to do scripting, to pull information out, to simplify reporting and troubleshooting. Being able to gather metrics, or to gather information to alert on it, or to be able to present it in a report, is crucial because, even if the interface is fast, we want to be able to do everything faster through automation. The fact that that's being developed more and more is very important.

I would like to see a full RESTful API for everything, and PowerCLI modules that interact with more of the different features. It doesn't have a complete API set and it's not a complete PowerCLI module yet. I'd love to see that developed more, to be able to interact with other applications and automation.

It's stable. I've never really had any issues with it.

If you design your environment with scalability in mind, it works well. Going back and refactoring, adding scaling into the cluster, isn't hard, but it takes a lot of reconfiguration and planning, changing load-balancing and the like.

Technical support is good. We have the highest level of support contract so we are able to get dedicated resources that help in resolving any issues. The Knowledge Base is very up to date for vRealize Operations Manager as well.

The initial setup is complex. There's a lot of planning that goes into it. You could go through the wizard really fast and install it, but to really get a validated and resilient design, it takes a lot of practice in going through and making sure everything is hooked in right.

This has great value. I feel it should be a default for every installation. Having the monitoring and analytics developed by VMware, so that it understands the kernel better than anything else, is really valuable. I'm not really sure how an enterprise could work without it.

Go for it. Be willing to go through some growing pains to get it going, but once it's going it's beautiful. It's worth the effort.

For a new user, it's not intuitive and user-friendly. But once you get the hang of it, it becomes very logical. When you're first sitting and looking at it you can get information out of it, but to really use it and get to the meat of the program, it takes a little bit of learning, a little bit of familiarity.

We are using vROps for checking performance and trends in the future, so we can plan our departments correctly, and make the correct calculation for new hardware, etc., for the future. The solution is performing very well for us.

It's much easier to show problems to users. If someone comes and says, “My server is slow,” I can show them exactly what's happening with the server over time and at that exact moment as well. It's very good.

The solution has helped to reduce time to troubleshoot issues and has definitely helped improve the quality of service to users.

Performance monitoring.

The first impression is that it is not that easy to find everything. But after two or three times, you will find everything you like.

In vROps, I would like to have both automation and monitoring together, not two separate things you have to buy. I want them included in one package, one installation.

Also, there is a good page showing what happens, the performance over time. I would like to have that in a good report, to be able to print it out or to send as a PDF to customers. The page today is very good, but I would like to be able to send this report every week to customers.

The stability is very good. The only problem we have is monitoring of the disk space used by the program.

Scaling is easy.

I have not needed to use tech support. It has run smoothly for the last three years.

We didn't really have anything previously. The only things we had before were SCOM and the normal monitoring tool in vCenter. We needed something else that showed us everything in one picture, that showed what's happening to one server or a cluster, or whatever we needed to look at. We needed one good tool.

We went with vROps because of our good relations with VMware and good pricing.

For me, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor are that the solution is

• easy to use
• easy to integrate with VirtualCenter.

The initial setup was straightforward, very easy.

We bought it because we wanted to have good monitoring. The return on investment is fewer people calling us about performance issues.

On our shorlist, beside vROps, were vFoglight and one other that I don't remember.

Look for ease of use. The first program you should have is one that you find easy to use. Today, vROps is easy to use. Back in the time, the first time we looked at it, it was fairly complicated to set up; the rules, etc. But today it's very easy.

The primary use case for it is monitoring our VMware state and helping with troubleshooting the VMs. In terms of the performance, it works well for what we're using it for. We hope to expand its use in the future.

The Troubleshooting Dashboard helps us see if there is contention on the VM that's causing performance issues or if it's a problem with the resources it has or if it doesn't have enough. It helps lower the troubleshooting time on virtual machines.

The Troubleshooting Dashboard is probably the best feature, the one that gets used the most.

It's getting better from what it used to be, but it still has a pretty steep learning curve. It's not super-intuitive when you first log into it. To find a lot of the information you need, you have to dig through multiple categories, subcategories, panes, and dashboards and widgets. They've been making it better by presenting some of the most commonly used ones more in the forefront. But some of the more advanced stuff is still pretty difficult to find.

The latest version, it has come a long way and I know the next version coming out looks like it's going further. I think they're making great strides there.

It's pretty stable. We haven't had many problems with it going down. If it does, it's mostly that the machine runs out of disk space but, other than that, it's up, it works.

I think it scales well. We have a pretty large environment, several thousand VMs, several hundred hosts. It handles things pretty well.

We did use tech support when we had problems upgrading it, but otherwise I usually just go in and add a disk space. But tech support has always been pretty good.

It reduces man-hour times when trying to troubleshoot machines. As far as return on investment goes, being that it came with the level of licensing we were already getting, we didn't spend extra for it.

I would definitely suggest you use it. It's a really good tool for what we use it for, for troubleshooting machines. The Troubleshooting Dashboard really highlights things pretty well.

I rate vROps a seven out of ten. It might be a ten if they made it a bit more user-friendly, a little bit more intuitive.

Our primary use case is monitoring and reporting on our VM infrastructure for student-facing applications, classroom-facing applications, and data center infrastructure like AD and DNS.

It has performed really well. I have been using it since whatever it was called before vROps, so I have been using it for a while. It works really well.

It gives us a lot of details about the environment that we normally wouldn't be able to see without using other tools. We get visibility into our infrastructure, a single interface to see storage performance, VM performance, and to find issues in the environment that we wouldn't normally see.

Some of the forecasting features give us a picture of, let's say, in six months I know that my storage will be full, or I'll be out of resources. It gives us a little bit of forecasting. But it's not a tool for us that really shapes how we do stuff or improves functionality, it's just a bonus. In terms of solving some problems, it helps there, but it doesn't make a big difference in the grand scheme of things for us.

The most valuable feature is the reporting, to be able to generate reports. You come in on a Monday and see, "Okay, here are the things it found in the environment, here are the issues it's seeing," and you can go and address them at your leisure. But you get that type of reporting, it's always there.

It's pretty user-friendly. It is very intuitive, the layout is well-built, and the user experience is well-built. You look at the interface and you say, "Oh, I understand what these sections or what these categories of features do." For example, for reporting, there's a tab that says "Reporting." You click on it and there are all your reports. So the user interface is really well-designed to make it intuitive.

One of the features I would like them to bring in is more application monitoring and more visibly into applications. Instead of the actual hardware and the environment, they need to go one step further and bring in application availability and application performance. I don't really care if the hardware's overloaded, as long as the application is performing correctly. That's all the users care about and that's all I really care about.

I've never had any issues with its stability. Even through updates, it's pretty stable.

In the environment I'm using it in currently, scale is not really an issue. In previous environments I was in, it scaled very well across all of the infrastructure. So scalability has never really been an issue for us because it's just a reporting tool.

I don't think I have ever had to use technical support. Customer service through VMware has always been fairly good. We haven't had to use it for this product but, overall, VMware is a pretty good customer service experience.

The setup is pretty easy. It takes 20 minutes and it's up and running. It's pretty straightforward.

It goes back to: "What does it actually do for us?" It's a nice-to-have and it gives us a little bit easier way of predicting when we're going to have issues. Or, if we have issues that no one else notices, a major reporting platform like vROps sees stuff before we know it's an issue. It gives us that heads-up along the lines of, "Hey, you might be having issues or you might be seeing issues in the future. You may not be right now, but here's something to look forward to." That's what it gives us, a bit of heads-up in terms of the way our infrastructure is performing.

Costs could always be lower.

For this environment we're fairly small, so we didn't really look at anything else. In other environments, we compared other products and other companies against vROps. But, for this environment, it's so small, it just made sense. It's easy enough to do, so we just went with vROps.

I rate vROps at eight out of ten. I don't think any platform will ever be a ten because there's always that little bit of room to grow. But they do what they do fairly well. Maybe there are other products that can do it a little bit better, but for the balance of cost, the ease of use, and how well it integrates into our environment, it is a good fit for a lot of places. If you have specific needs it doesn't fill, there may be better options. But for us, in our environment, it just works well.

The most important criterion in selecting a vendor is intuitive interfaces, the ease of management going forward. I don't want my reporting and management platform to be hard to manage. It's not something you should have to look after. It's something that should be looking after your infrastructure, not your having to look after it to look after your infrastructure. The most important thing is a good user experience, something that's very intuitive. If you bring some new person into the environment, you don't want them to take weeks to understand how the tool works and what it does for them.

We use it to manage our VDI infrastructure.

It gives the real-time info that we need to diagnose any problems that we have with our VDI infrastructure. With over 18,000 VDIs, it can be a daunting task to manage all that stuff. The solution has helped reduce time to troubleshoot issues, improve quality of service to users, and provide cost savings through higher capacity utilization.

It gives us deep insight into the entire VDI environment, where we have of over 18,000 VDIs. It helps us keep up on uptime, gives us real-time monitoring, tracking, and troubleshooting.

It integrates well with our vCenter. Having that real-time access through vCenter and through vROps is very useful for us.

I'd like to see a little more training, free training on the VMware site; to get some more information within the VMware community. There's quite a bit of stuff out there but getting that access can be daunting sometimes.

We've never had any problems with it, it's always been up, 100 percent of the time. We do have it in a DR situation in case something would happen. But we've never had a problem before.

It's been growing with us. We've been growing at around 5,000 VDIs per year and it's been scaling with us throughout that time.

I walked into the situation with this solution in place. I don't know anything else.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• product availability
• interoperability with our current environment
• ease of use.

We like to have a really nice GUI interface, something that people can be trained on very quickly, especially when we have new staff come in who are not familiar with the product. We like to get them up and running as quickly as possible. For us, having that flexibility is a real game-changer.

We use it to see the actual workloads of the VMs.

The benefits we see from it are the ability to quickly get reports for our bosses, determining the use of the environment, and that it lets us see the remaining capacity. For example, in some clusters where the resources are tight, it's giving us a good idea of what resources we really have left.

The most valuable feature is determining if more resources are needed, at the hypervisor level, based on the workload of the virtual machines that we have in our environment.

The descriptions are not quite as user-friendly as I would like but, for the most, it's part pretty user-friendly.

They could also improve on the badging nomenclature they have for batches in the system, for determining the health of a certain aspect of the system.

It's very stable.

It seems to be very scalable. I haven't scaled it, but we have people, contractors, who work for us who handle that.

We went with this solution because it was part of the user license that we have. It is part of the package deal for the Enterprise solution, so it was in existence before I joined the team.

In general, when selecting a vendor, the most important criterion is stability. If you don't have stability you've got big problems.

I couldn't necessarily say what our ROI is monetarily, but again, it goes back to finding information for reports that our bosses are asking for. For me, the ROI is in finding out what capacity is remaining in the clusters, the ESXi hosts.

I rate vROps at nine out of ten. To get to a ten it goes back to better explaining the badge labeling for batches.

We primarily use it for performance and monitoring and troubleshooting for our virtual infrastructure. We also use it to monitor and troubleshoot our Dell EMC storage arrays.

We have a troubleshooting dashboard that our team uses. If someone complains that a system is slow, they can go there, search for that virtual machine and see if there are any alerts for it. We can start our troubleshooting from that step.

The most valuable feature is the single pane of glass so we can see all our vCenters, all our machines, all our storage arrays. We can see if there are alerts in any of these systems, and follow up on that alert and see if it's impacting just that area or if there is a bigger problem behind it.

It's useful day-to-day. Every day the operations team can go and see if there are any new alerts, and they can monitor the infrastructure through it.

I find it user-friendly. The first stage gives you the overview of all of your infrastructure. It shows you the capacity, how much you have left, how many of your data centers can have more VMs hosted. The tabs are really nice, they're very self-explanatory. You can click them and it will pull out a menu. You don't have to roam around to find things. There are search bars you can use to look for things as well.

The room for improvement is in the definition of the metrics. There are millions of metrics inside the solution, but there is no documentation from VMware for what those exact metrics are. That is a trouble point at times.

We have started to do containers and I would like to see a feature to monitor our container infrastructure. If we can do our monitoring and performance troubleshooting of them through the same tool, that would be a nice-to-have.

It has been stable so far. We have not faced an issue where we had to troubleshoot to keep it up and running.

Scalability is good. Since we have had it for our current infrastructure, we haven't grown so large, so I could not comment how big it can scale.

Customer service is good. I haven't used any ticket systems for this solution, I haven't opened any cases for it, so I don't know about technical support.

We have always used this solution. We wanted something so that we have a total view of our infrastructure and that's why we use this product. We haven't used any other product for that purpose.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• its stability in the market
• how many people are using the product
• what the support structure is like for the product.

Those are the main criteria.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. It's not a ten because there is no clear definition of the metrics. That is something I would like to see.

We use it for capacity planning, troubleshooting, and monitoring of our environment.

The benefits of the solution are stability, uptime, and awareness of what's going on in our environment. By being aware of issues, potentially even before they happen - for example, we'll see trends and metrics that can tell us that there might be a problem coming in this environment; maybe it's 30 days down the road - lets us get in front of them before they're actual issues or cause an outage or impact to the actual business unit.

We're definitely seeing quicker time to resolution on problems. It's yet to be determined what kind of cost savings we're getting from capacity usage. I know that there are some features that are in the product that probably we're not leveraging yet, but they're there and I know that's something we're probably going to be able to leverage soon.

The most valuable feature is the ability to get a view of our entire environment in a single pane of glass. We're a very large company, so going from one interface to another to troubleshoot an issue, or even just to get capacity information, is time-consuming and not efficient. Being able to go to one place and get that information is very helpful.

With the latest version, it's definitely user-friendly. It has come a long way. Originally, I don't think it was, but here with the latest update, probably the last two updates, they've made it more and more user-friendly. They've streamlined it, made it more efficient, and made it more simple.

Any product is going to have room for improvement. As long as they keep innovating and listening to us, I think that's going to help.

One of the big areas that would help us in the future is to focus on using vROps more as a tool to help us respond to these CVEs and security vulnerabilities that are coming in today's world. We're getting CVEs upon CVEs about security vulnerabilities, whether it's a process, or architecture, or VMware bug. It would be nice to be able to have those come into vROps and help us track them across our environment. Once a vulnerability is established, we as a company have to address that vulnerability as fast as possible. It would be nice if we could integrate that into a vROps dashboard, which sees every host and every VM in the environment. If it was able to flag areas: "Hey, these are left to be remediated, these aren't," those kinds of thing would be helpful.

From a scalability perspective, the nice thing about vROps is it's more of a horizontal scale model. As our workloads increase, as our vCenters and different environments grow, vROps is easy to scale to consume that capacity by just adding another node. That can help. It keeps it from getting bogged down from not having enough resources. We can easily add a node in, it takes the additional load, and keeps up with our growth.

We're a BCS (business critical support) customer with VMware, so we already have a higher level of support. The BCS experience is great. They've been helping us with vROps if we have issues or troubles. No complaints there, it has been really good.

We had a lot of homegrown solutions and different products. We have Splunk, we're using Tableau, different reporting services that were based on gathering our own data, power CLI scripts, going out and individually running things against vCenters, pulling them back in, and then dumping them into something centrally that we could view for capacity. But it really was point-in-time, it wasn't real-time, it wasn't something that could even be predictive for us. We would look at it and say, "Well, that looked different last month so let me go look and see why," and then it was a lot more time-consuming to go about that method. It was more of a manual method.

vROps is a tool that gathers that data every five minutes, or whatever the time duration is that you have set for collections. We're more up to the minute, more quick to respond. I think it's a smarter product than homegrown stuff. That's why we moved away from the homegrown stuff.

When looking to select a vendor, they need to be innovative. They really need to not just answer the need but go above and beyond it. And then cost is a big factor as well.

The initial setup was very straightforward. To pull in an OVA, it was very easy to consume it. It was very easy to scale. There wasn't really much trickiness to setting it up. Do your homework, read through documentation, understand how the product is used with the different types of nodes and how they work. But it was very straightforward.

Cost is an issue on vROps. The Standard edition, for an organization our size, is just not useful at all. However, I like the price point of vROps Standard. But as a company, the Advanced is the minimum version that we can use, because we need the customization, we need a lot of the features that Advanced brings. But the price is substantially higher than Standard. 

It's always been a challenge to try to go in to my leadership and say, "Here's what I want." I've always got to go back and super-justify it and it's not an easy win. Whereas, if the pricing were closer to the Standard model, or maybe even a little bit above that, it's an easier conversation with leadership. But because it really feels like more than double the price, I'm not sure the value, double the money, is there, as an easy-sell to my leadership.

vROps is a ten out of ten. It's a really good product, I'm excited about it, I like using it. It's also one of those products that I like engaging with on a daily basis. It's easy to use, it's kind of fun and insightful to look at all your different environments and be able to get the answers you need. Honestly, it makes my leadership happy when they see the stuff that I generate out of it. That's always a plus too.