VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Why vRealize is the most valuable for us, for my company, is that we use it to measure and monitor the environment.

We're saving resources, because we are monitoring them. We know where they go and how the capacity is spent, thus we are saving.

The dashboard is too complicated. Those badges that they give you as a rating badge are too hard to understand what they mean. This is something that they need to figure out.

Three years.

No issues. So far, so good. We are happy with it.

So far from our environment, it is okay.

We haven't used it yet.

I have a contact in VMware. Every time that I call VMware, they help as I expect, though they are not that easy to reach compared to say, Cisco support.

We used to use SolarWinds and the support was not great.

VMware has been much better.

I was involved in the setup. It was straightforward.

It was just that the dashboard is a little hard to understand at the beginning, but after you get used to it, you're fine.

In-house. They were were helpful.

We went straight from SolarWinds to VMware.

We chose VMware because of its time on the market, the company's reputation, and the support.

I mostly use VMware products. They integrate well together. I also participate on VMTN, the VMware community online.

We invested in this solution because monitoring was really important for us.

I would definitely recommend this solution.

The predictive analytics and reporting.

It's been able to reduce our over-provisioning, help with ease of reporting, and billing.

Extendable API, for programming.

Had zero problems with stability.

Easy, very easy.

Very good. I've had no problems with support.

No.

It was intermediate. You had to understand exactly what you were deploying, so you could actually click all the right buttons.

Looking at vendor selection, you want reputability, and make sure that they have a good background and history of support.

The most important areas to research before making your decision are price and scalability of the solution.

This is the whole package, it has everything that you need.

It gives you really good insight into what's going on with the overall environment, with VMs, and we can see what's going on with the storage, etc.

I'm able to find problems quicker than before. And when there are issues with the operating system on the guest, or even the application on the guest OS, if they believe that it's the host or the back end, I can show them where the problem really lies, that it's not the back end. I've used that a couple of times.

Also, there's some capacity planning and stuff like that built in. That's another issue, where people have asked for more resources and I've been able to show them that they aren't using the resources that we're giving them.

We're using the standard version, not the advanced. I think some of the features that I'm interested in are in the advanced and we just haven't gone to that yet.

I'd like to be able to do more customization. With the standard, I have to use out-of-the-box reports, dashboards, etc. With advanced, you can do more customization.

I haven't had any issues with it. We've upgraded it one time and that went very well.

We're not really growing out too much right now. I haven't really encountered the scalability issue yet, but I'm assuming that would work well too.

For vROps I have not used it. I haven't had to call them for anything. Again, everything has been running great, I haven't had any problem with it. We obviously call VMware for other issues but not for vROps.

The biggest issue that I have is that if it's not an urgent issue I don't get contacted back very quickly. So a lot of times, we'll end up solving issues ourselves, when they're not critical "down, down" issues. That is my big issue with VM support. Otherwise, they are giving us great support and help us out a lot.

We just weren't getting enough information just from the basic charts and things like that. I looked into other options and vROps just seemed like the best fit for us.

I like to stick with companies that work very closely with me, or even products that are owned by VMware because then I feel that the synchronization between the main VMware products and those other items works well. I don't have any issues with them.

I helped, but I was not the main person.

Complex. I think it takes a lot of insight into the product. You have to spend a lot of time preparing for it. And if you do that, then you'll see that things go pretty seamlessly.

When looking at vendors, support is important. We like to have good support. And then I would say ease of setup and ease of use. The more complex, the less interested we are.

Regarding vROps I would say to a colleague, "Totally do it." I think it would benefit your organization. You get a lot of good insight into what's going on very quickly and the cost of vROps is totally worth it.

For me, it's the dashboard. When you first go into the application, just getting that quick overview of what's going on and being able to take action without having to dig in and look at things.

For myself, it saves me a lot of time. I'm busy doing several different things so having that quick view into the environment saves a lot of time in my day. It also of streamlines the process so I can drill down and see exactly what's going on. Helps us resolve problems before they occur or more quickly resolve problems.

For what I use it for I can't think of any improvements needed. Except, perhaps, it's a little slow to load when you go in to it. It could be a little bit quicker to drill into.

Stability is great. Never had a problem with it.

Scalability is great as well. Haven't had any issues.

I haven't used it.

No.

But we knew we needed it because we needed to get a better picture of our environment and what was going on, to troubleshoot. We don't have the staff to do it so we try to utilize technology where we can to save on having to hire additional staff.

It was really easy to set up.I set it up myself.

Pricing is good for us. We're non-profit so we get a break on that.

I really look for support, it is extremely important to me. So if there is an issue, how soon are they going to respond? Also, local partners, that's important too. So a strong partner with a strong organization behind them.

Also, look for what's important to you. For us it was the single pane of glass, not another bolt-on vendor to try to have a view into it. It is nice having everything all live right there inside the center.

In terms of preparing for implementation, I didn't think it was too difficult. I don't know if there's a lot of preparation you need to. Maybe just some clean up work on the front end. It's more after it's implemented that you have things to do.

The vRealize Operations Manager gives you complete insight of the VMware environment. You can check the bottleneck in the environment and it can directly tell you what needs to be fixed. What I really like about vROps is the dashboard. It's completely insightful, very clean, simple, and even for those who don't really manage the environment, it wouldn't be difficult for them to understand by looking the dashboard what's wrong and how it needs to be fixed. That's what I like about vROps.

It's the ability to forecast. It would tell you what is overprovisioned, therefore you can accordingly fix it, which helps you save on your costs. If you are over-provisioning the VMs, you're adding more memory and storage, or CPU sources, which are going to waste. With this solution, we can actually keep them on track which helps save costs, which is good for the company.

With a little more smoothness to the application, as it can lag a bit at times. Although, I don't really find too many negatives with it.

For the next release, I would like to see the HA feature (should already be in the next release).

It's quite stable. I haven't tried the HA feature, which has recently been added, but I never had any problems with vROps.

It's quite scalable. We have instances for different vCenters running, so I think it is quite scalable.

I have used it once. Something broke while I was working and I had no idea what it was, so I call up the support guys. They were quite helpful and able to fix the problem.

We always had problems in understanding issues related to resources. So our temp, he suggested vROps and that's when we invested in it.

For this company, I was involved in the initial setup. It was mostly straightforward.

Even if you Google it, you will find the implementation steps. I didn't have any problems doing the installation. I think if you're a virtualization administrator, you should be able to manage.

CDW.

We chose VMware because they are the technology leader in virtualization. We have been using it for years now.

vROps is something that most companies should be using, because you never quite know where you're actually wasting a resource until you start using vROps.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They should be able to keep us informed (the most important aspect) on upcoming technology trends, the new releases, and new features.

From a manager's standpoint it's the dashboards. To be able to quickly and easily see what's going on in our environment, from my perspective. But it's able to find the hot spots and things that are happening in the environment and helps to be more proactive about troubleshooting and getting to the root cause.

As a manager, I'm a big user of dashboards and reporting, so I love vROps. I'm always trying to have them create different dashboards. Even I get in there at times and create my own dashboards and my guys will look in and say, what is that? And I'll say, "I just created this one on my own because I needed to have this other thing. You know, not to bother you guys with that one," and I'll dabble with it. I love the reporting, and it's visual. To be able to set that up on your bulletin board or electronic bulletin board, and have people come by and go, hey what's that all about? And I can tell them, this is where your sessions are, this is what's happening in your environment.

We're just really starting the journey into virtualization work. It's been about two and a half years, so the benefit really has been that my team, and the desktop engineering team as well, can see as they're developing a product what's going on, almost real-time, so they can figure out where we need to do optimization.

Honestly I don't know. It's just really good. Maybe the interface is a little bit archaic. It needs to be updated and again we're on view 6.2, we're not even on 7 yet. So maybe it's changed, but a more modern look and approach.

I'm not sure about exportability of data, and I haven't really toyed with that, I'm not even sure if it exists. Being able to find something and then export the needed data into something that's reusable for the team too. Visually, it looks great but what will you be able to do with it? You have to bring people over to your bulletin board and say look at this thing, or to your device and say look at this thing; versus being able to report out or maybe send out reports. So giving dashboards to people or even giving them periodic reports.

The stability part has probably contributed to what's going on in our environment. We've had a couple of ups and downs with our product, but overall it's good. The ups and downs in our environment are probably based on our configuration more so than the product itself.

We're trying to get it out to our help desk, dashboards for that kind of stuff. We haven't really done that yet but I envision us being able to do that. And then, from the management layer, being able to give people an idea of where their users are, how they're interacting with it, and giving them a dashboard so they can put some validity behind when their users are saying that there's an issue. Is it really an issue or is it a user issue? The biggest thing I see about vROps is it gives you a truth perspective in terms of, as I said, is it a user issue, a training issue, or is it truly a technology issue.

Our technical support is great. We have a TAM so we have a pretty good line in with finding the right technical resources, so it's a really good service.

I was not really hands on in the setup but I was there. I think it was pretty straightforward. Although, my guys are really smart, so what they make look easy may not be as easy as I would think.

VMware did come out for us, they did help us. We have a pretty good relationship with them. But I thought it was pretty straightforward.

No. We invested in the overall package and we got vROps as part of it.

Look for the partnership when choosing a vendor. We're in a pretty tough environment, healthcare, so we have some unique challenges. If things don't happen right, patient care is affected. So they have to be able to partner with us and understand the urgency behind some of the things we're trying to do. As long as they're flexible and can understand where we're coming from, that's fine. We've had some vendors that just don't get it. VMware has been excellent.

Utilize VMware. Let them come and help you. Utilize them to get some kind of canned reports or some kind of templates so you don't have to create them all from scratch.

That's probably the biggest thing: find other peers that have done that and then draw upon what they've already created so you don't have to recreate it.

The whole feature set, to be honest. Monitoring and, for me, the performance analysis.

It helps us to create better reports of historical analysis, of performance data, and do better capacity planning.

More stable upgrades, if that's a feature. Had some problems so far. Also, more reliable failure detection and more realistic out-of-the-box simplicity.

Quite good.

Could be better, to be honest.

It was okay. I'm not always able to get to the right person. It takes a while. Once I do reach the right person they are usually knowledgeable.

I stumbled into VMware and never got out, to be honest. It's been cool technology for multiple years.

It was straightforward.

We are the partner so we implement.

Nutanix, Rubrik, Cohesity.

When choosing a vendor the most important criteria are experience, maturity and, probably, documentation.

I would advise you get training because it's not so easy to start with and not get lost in vROps. Also, have everything ready the partner tells you to have and have straight expectations about what a solution does and does not do.

It gives a broad view of my environment, which I can basically see from one dashboard. My servers, storage, etc. That would be the most important one.

It doesn't. No benefits.

The biggest item that I would want to see is instant capture of data from storage. One second or even less than a one-second period, of capturing data. I think one minute is too long. There are too many things which can happen in one minute on storage devices.

It's stable, in a way. It crashes every eight months and I have to reboot it. And that's about it.

I only have 60 hosts, so I can't really say if it's scalable to a lot of environments.

I haven't used technical support, nor do I have a contact that might be able to help if needed. I'm a self-learner, so I go into the application and learn on my own. It didn't crash in a bad way that I had to call tech support.

I was using vCenter. I thought that vROps would give me benefits and I bought it.

I thought I needed a solution which would allow me and about five other team members to monitor the host, but unfortunately my team members are not monitoring anything so I'm stuck by myself. I know my environment, because I deal with it, so I don't need to monitor socially.

There was another solution that I though was the best because it allowed me to see what I wanted in the storage. But I went with VMware because it was one supplier of everything. I went for simplicity and that's what I paid for.

Straightforward. I did it myself.

Most important when considering vendors is price, that's the first one. And the ability to contact them in a timely fashion.

If you have less than 100 hosts, don't buy it, depending on what the pain in the environment is for you. My pain was storage and I researched storage. And that was my biggest obstacle. It depends on people, on their issues. Sometimes it's a CPU, sometimes the memory. I was going for the storage and, as I said, one minute for me in the storage environment is not enough. It needs to be much quicker.