VMware Aria Operations Reviews

This solution is mainly used for the orchestration of servers and for obtaining reports such as utilization reports or load reports.

In decision making, it is very useful to have a nice dashboard. We have also integrated with QlikView, which is an analytic tool.

vRealize has a very nice dashboard.

It integrates well with other products such as those from Oracle.

It would be good to have more detailed reports and more details on the dashboard.

I've been using it for five years.

It is a very stable product.

It is scalable as well. Our system administrators and data center administrators use this product.

VMware provides 24/7 online support, and I would give them a ten out of ten.

The initial setup is very easy because VMware provides 24/7 online support to us. Everything is much easier for us, because of their support.

The deployment took about one to two days. You would need one or two people, such as IT managers, for deployment and maintenance.

We used a third party team for the deployment.

We have licenses on a three year basis. Licensing costs are much higher, but given the stability of the solution, it is a reasonable price.

It's a stable product and is recognized worldwide. It is much more expensive than other products, but it is stable. Therefore, I would rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.

I use the solution in my company for the virtualization purpose. Basically, the server virtualization is the main purpose. Other purposes are for the cloud part, which is the private cloud. My company has a local telco customer in Pakistan who works on public cloud infrastructure, and they also have VMware Cloud Director product deployed in their environment.

The most valuable feature of the solution revolves around vRealize Operations, which is a good tool. The product is highly reliable, and it is easy to deploy and manage.

There are some challenges with the tool right now after Broadcom's acquisition.

The major challenges associated with the product stem from the fact that after Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, all partners are no longer VMware partners. One has to reapply for Broadcom's partnership, which is a very time-consuming process. Broadcom seems to be confused since it does not have the exact partner strategies that a product needs to have in place. Broadcom does not provide a good pricing mechanism, and it also has some other issues in areas like distribution. Previously, VMware used to use Aptec, an Ingram Micro company. Broadcom has some issues with Aptec, so currently, it does not have a deal with Aptec, and everything is messed up. Broadcom does not have a proper distribution mechanism, so we have delays in getting codes and all that. After so many reminders, once we get the codes, things are still very time-consuming, and the prices are still not good. My colleagues who work with VMware products were opening support cases on VMware's portal, which has now become Broadcom's portal, which does not have enough information like VMware's portal. Although Broadcom has been trying to integrate all of it with its own portal while also attempting the existing VMware portal with the Broadcom portal, the migration does not seem to be successful. Broadcom has missed out on a lot of data, which means that previous service tickets that were generated under VMware won't have any records. You cannot use a learning mechanism from existing information, which makes it a time-consuming process. We have to go back to the existing information from VMware to figure out what the solution is for a problem. With the acquisition of Vmware by Broadcom, we have to do all things from scratch, and all such things are very painful, and customers, partners, and our company feel troubled. Everyone is trying to see how to get rid of the vendor. We are just trying to find an alternate product.

The pricing mechanism is not available here. There are some distribution issues, and there is not enough information on the portal. The migration process from VMware to Broadcom actually messes up a lot of data.

I believe that the scalability area of the product has scope for improvement, and I say this based on the feedback received from my team.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for ten years or more. My company has a partnership with VMware. My company is a customer of VMware.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

I don't think that the product has any mechanism in the area of analytics.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

The product's initial setup phase was easy.

The time required to deploy the product is something that varies from one customer's environment to another customer's environment or site. I can say that the product is not a single table that can cure everything.

The solution is easy to maintain.

For a small environment, only one person is required to maintain the product. If the size of the cluster is big, then a few people are required to maintain the product.

I have experienced an ROI from the use of the solution, but the prices are still not much economical.

If one is low price and ten is high price, I rate the product price a ten.

I don't think that the product has any mechanism in the area of analytics.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

I use VMware Aria Operations for logs in my company. I just use it to manage the logs and to see what is happening in the security logs. VMware vCenter is used to deploy virtual machines.

I specifically use the tool for logging and looking over the various traffic flows happening within VMware. It is easy to track and see what is happening where, and it can easily figure out solutions if there are any problems inside VMware's access management tools.

As VMware is moving to Broadcom, I feel the support is becoming really bad. There are some areas VMware needs to look into, specifically regarding the connectivity provided by the tool. My company has been facing the aforementioned problem with Aria Operations, and I think it has been more than two months now, and still VMware hasn't found any patches for it. My company is not able to figure out what exactly the problem is with the tool. I am not sure if there is some problem because of the movements. I think that in terms of where the customer experience lies, I feel I have had a bad experience for two or three months, and it keeps on happening, which is impacting my production. I am not sure if VMware is able to find a solution with the product I use or if there is some other problem. There are some current issues with the support provided by Broadcom, making it an area where improvements are required.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for three years. I am a customer of the product.

The stability of the product is something that depends on how much work a user has with the tool. If you have a very good experience with the tool, then you can do things in a very good procedure. The tool's initial deployment went well with the support from VMware. VMware's support is really good, but because of Broadcom there are some problems. Initially, the new product's implementation and deployment went well with the support from the solution.

Scalability is easy in VMware Aria Operations. The only things you need to manage are the backups and how much expansion you want with the tool. If you take a product from Microsoft or VMware, both work really well for an initial three or four years. Adding something new would mean taking a different approach, and that would depend upon the company's expansion.

My company uses just one function of the product, which is specific to our environment. There might be some other functionalities in the product that might help with certain enhancements in the area of logs, but we don't have the exact scenarios for which we can use the tool's certain functionalities.

If I specifically talk about VMware's support, then the support offered is very good, especially if I don't consider VMware's integration with Broadcom. I rate the tool's support a nine out of ten. I am not sure if I can comment on Broadcom's support services since it is still in the initial stages.

Positive

VMware vCenter is used to deploy virtual machines.

VMware solutions are easy to install. There are some available steps to install the tool and if we follow the steps, I think it is a good solution to work with for anyone.

The tool doesn't take much time to deploy. I am not sure of the time required to deploy the product because our company uses the solution for a specific function, so I believe that it might also have some other functions. The functions my company uses for logs are very easy to deploy since, just after connecting the solution, it starts getting all the logs.

It is an easy solution to use, and you need to invest in it only one time by looking at your personal usage and expansion plans. Getting a machine and everything within the solutions and bringing in the tool where you have some availability shortage need to be done only once, after which you can expand it instead of buying a fresh machine for A certain period of time, which can be an expensive affair. A product starts from the day you create a machine in the cloud solution. The solution also provides users with some features and facilities that are specific to the licensing models you have from the tool. Considering how much and what type of licenses you have, the cost might be reduced. For expansion purposes, you don't need to think about new tools because you already have the solution you purchased from VMware. With whatever expansion scope is available in the tool, it is easy to expand the solution to a few more servers. If you are going with other solutions for expansion purposes apart from VMware, then there is a cost involved. The tool is easy to use, but from the cost perspective, there might be a huge difference between other tools and VMware. You have to invest less in cloud solutions because you pay as you work with the tool. You can deploy one machine and then deploy another machine tomorrow. With VMware, you need to invest just once, after which expansion options are already available in it.

If we talk about the cloud solutions that are available in the market, I think that instead of collaborating with VMware and Microsoft or with some other solutions, VMware should focus on providing good cloud solutions. VMware should not take advantage of any other products in the market to provide the cloud version of its products since its pricing might change. For people who don't want to move away from VMware, it can be a pricey product. If you compare the prices of VMware and the cloud solutions along with the components that you may use, I feel that it may be costly.

There is no specific maintenance required for the product, and usually you get an advance notice if something like that is required. It is up to the user to schedule the maintenance as per their timeline.

I have not specifically faced any challenges in managing the solution in our virtual environment. Earlier, there were some problems with the tool.

If the product is able to fulfill your requirements, then I would say that VMware is a good product for you.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

We use VMware Aria Operations for the provisioning of the servers.

The solution gives suggestions regarding whether resources are underutilized or overutilized. It can also do automatic rescheduling like we do in the cloud. The solution's predictive analysis helps us in our future planning for procurement of the server, provisioning of the server, and capacity planning.

The solution’s pricing could be improved.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for a couple of years.

VMware Aria Operations is a stable solution.

VMware Aria Operations is a scalable solution. More than 10,000 users are using the solution, and we have plans to increase the usage.

The solution’s technical support is good.

The solution is easy to deploy and doesn't require much effort. The solution's documentation helped us to do the installation and configuration.

We implemented the solution through an in-house team. For deployment, we consider doing some certifications, which is the best place to keep some items, whether on-premises or on the cloud, the cost, and compliance. After that, we make a plan and then do the deployment.

The solution is slightly expensive.

VMware Aria Operations is deployed on the cloud in our organization. If users have a valid case, they should go for the solution. Users need to pay more if they go for the premium support.

The solution's integration with other tools is good. Sometimes, we need to connect the solution with different tools, and all the tools are easily integrable.

Overall, I rate VMware Aria Operations ten out of ten.

Our clients use VROps to monitor their virtual machine performance, create reports, do capacity planning, and do project planning. We also use the tenant-student app for billing purposes.

I've found the reporting and analytics features to be the most valuable. 

The latest release of VMware Aria Operations has some great new automation features, but I think the pricing could be improved. It's quite expensive, especially for the entire VM workload.

In future releases, I would like to see VMware Aria Operations integrate with Ansible. I understand that VMware has their own orchestration and automation product, but I think it would be valuable to be able to integrate with Ansible as well. This would give users the flexibility to choose the best tool for the job, without having to invest in two separate products.

I have been using VROps for about eight years.

It is a very stable solution. But it requires a lot of knowledge to manage. For example, if you are collecting a lot of data for analysis, the virtual appliance drive spaces can fill up. In this case, you need engineers who know how to expand those spaces. The procedure is simple: you just add a new VMDK and start the appliance. The appliance will automatically expand the drives with the NVMe and stuff. However, the problem is that you need engineers who know how to manage and clear up the logs and ensure that they are sent as a stop.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten.  I did have some scalability issues when working with the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) stack. For example, if I deployed one instance and needed to scale out to a second instance, I would sometimes run into problems. 

VROps is most suitable for enterprise-level companies.

The initial setup process is fairly simple, especially if you are only setting up a standalone instance. However, if you are setting up a multi-tenant or multi-cluster environment, the setup process can take longer.

Our clients have hosted it on cloud as well as on-premises. 

The licensing is quite expensive for our company. I would probably give it a rating of seven out of ten, where one being expensive and ten being affordable.

I've used both VMware Aria Operations and Veeam ONE.

If I need to troubleshoot a problem, I would use VMware Aria Operations. If I need to get a complete overview of my environment and generate reports, I would use Veeam ONE.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. There is only one area of improvement for me.

Primarily, we use VMware Aria Operations for monitoring VMware and the cloud. We also need to report on physical servers.

We are not currently using the solution to the extent of what it can do. But we are moving in that direction. We are in the process of getting an integration to our ServiceNow instance, which will replace a lot of small tools used for monitoring.

The ease of installation and configuration is the most valuable feature, especially for VMware and the cloud. The solution is almost one click, and we get our workload.

Adding some intelligence to VMware Aria Operations, such as event correlation, and some level of AI apps will improve the solution, similar to what we see with the more advanced monitoring solutions that we don't currently have.

I have been using the solution for almost four years.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for the solution is troubleshooting and performance monitoring.

It has allowed us to identify problems sooner and helps us with problems and issues.

The troubleshooting and performance monitoring features are valuable.

Administration and growth can be improved. For instance, if we're a large organization, the metrics continue to get collected in this environment and continually fill up, so we need to expand the cluster. Hence, more resources are always required.

We have been using the solution for five years and are currently using version 8.62.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable to a degree. The problem is that it goes back to the solution or management packs. The more you collect, the larger you need to expand the environment. Approximately 12 to 24 people are using it in the organization.

We previously used Densify.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We implemented it through a vendor team. Two to three people are required for deployment.

We have seen a return on investment.

I do not have information on the licensing costs.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. The solution is good, but administration and growth can be improved.

We were using VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) for analyzing virtual machines and using it by host. We didn't use the solution for costing or optimization around costing. We used it predominantly for troubleshooting.

What I like most about VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is how it integrates into the vCenter. You'll get a similar hierarchical view of your host, your VMs, your resource pools, etc. I also like the granularity, particularly the fact that you could go pretty deep into the metrics and data retention as well. You could go far back several months to try and plot performance trends, eventually leading up to an issue or post-incident management.

I also like the plugins in VMware vRealize Operations (vROps). I find the plugins good, especially because you could plug those into Dell. For example, there was a way to visualize how your Dell infrastructure is performing. You could build dashboards, even custom dashboards for your operational teams. You could take a look at what was going on and also look into people doing incident management, troubleshooting, etc. You could customize your experience with VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), and I found that good as well.

I also like the UI of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) because it's nice and very, very fresh.

In terms of what could be improved or added to VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), from my experience, it needs more work in the ITSM space because my company never used it as an IT service management tool.

I've used VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) for about three years, and I've used it for the past twelve months.

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is a stable solution. My company didn't have any issues with it in terms of outages, or severity in terms of the issue. From time to time, the solution would act up, but that was down to underlying issues on from my company's side, not from the VMware side. Overall, it's a stable product.

In terms of scaling VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), it's challenging, especially with all of the data you're putting into the solution, so you do need a lot of infrastructure to sustain a pretty big VMware estate, especially if you're looking at the tens of thousands of virtual machines sending data.

Scalability could still be improved in some ways, or you need to think about how to reduce the amount of data that gets sent to VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) that you don't necessarily need or use.

The technical support for VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), or VMware in general, has been good from my experience. Usually the response time is good. The team gets back to you within a reasonable time frame. The technical support team always asks for logs before carrying out an investigation. Sometimes, you want to expedite solutions to your issues or to get somebody on an issue fairly quickly, but you still have to collect logs, zip those up, and then send those to VMware, and that can take time.

I can't remember exactly, but there was a way to send in logs ahead of time to a VMware engineer through VMware Skyline, so the engineer wouldn't need to collect logs as a pre-requisite before starting the investigations. Other than the log expectation, VMware has good support overall.

The setup for VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) was easy. After getting used to it, setting it up was easy enough. It also became easy to navigate and use. How the solution was set up was that it was connected to the vCenter, then the adapters were set up, then you get the data to synchronize across that, and that's okay.

In terms of the pricing for VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), I can't remember exactly how much it costs, but it was included in the VMware vSphere enterprise plus licensing package my company paid for.

I've mostly used VMware vRealize Operations (vROps).

My rating for VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is seven out of ten.

My advice to others who want to start using VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is to use its full capability. It doesn't just do analytics and cost optimizations. It can do a whole lot more. You should use it in depth and try to integrate it into other IT processes. For example, my company only used a third of the full capability of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) over the time I was on the team. I would recommend it to anyone, specifically to explore what it can do and then work out how it can benefit you. People should also pay attention to scale as well, because the bigger your estate, the more instances you will need to sustain that scale. Just pay attention to upgrading VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) as well because that's also a journey to upgrade instances, in particular maintenance and lifecycle management.

My previous company had a partnership with VMware. It had an enterprise license agreement, which means it was getting different services and different products from VMware.

We use it to run virtual machines where we host our applications, web servers, machine servers, and even database servers, then we have segregation where we even have used it both for tests, and on production virtual machines.

We can easily take backups by integrating with other third-party tools, we are able to take backups and restore them very easily. We can spin up virtual machines almost at the speed of thought.

One of the main features is it's very easy to use. 

It's very intuitive. You go on the web browser and when you log onto the application interface, you can easily see almost anything you need to.

The homepage dashboard shows you your CPU, the memory, and your network utilization, just at a glance. Even when you go to individual virtual machines, you're able to see the same report at a glance, I think that's very helpful.  

You can also have templates that have all the necessary audit compliance, probably at the direct patch level, and then deploy whenever you need it. I think it's a very powerful tool that a business needs for its everyday running.

We have been using VMware for more than seven years.

It is very stable - we always want to watch for stability and, in most cases, we have found that whenever there are vulnerabilities that have been identified they either come up with a workaround or a solution within a short time.

Today we still use virtual machines, but it helps us to scale for when we are ready to move towards consumerized applications. 

It's flexible so you can add more hosts; of course, this is subject to licensing.

Customer support is very helpful, very responsive, and most times, very knowledgeable. If the support doesn't know something, sometimes they will tell you that they'll get back to you, which is awesome because they usually do.

Positive

We switched to VMware because it's easier to manage and easier to run and scale with virtual machines.

The initial setup was fast. I downloaded the standard version from a virtual environment. I had a workstation on my laptop and that was where I tried it out. Ease of setup is awesome. In the production environment, as long as you adhere to the minimum hardware requirement, you won't have an issue.

It was implemented in-house, by a team of four, in conjunction with local support.

The only thing is, we're on Essentials Plus. There are some things we want to do that that particular version of the license will not allow, so we would need to upgrade to a higher one.

We had looked at other OEMs and partner OEMs, but none had as good reviews as this solution.

For the initial set up, you have to meet the minimum hardware requirement to avoid issues.

I would advise others to start using this because they will not regret it. I would rate this solution and eight out of ten.

We use this product for monitoring, to verify what is and isn't broken within the cloud environment.

The monitoring and verification functionalities were the most useful features.

I was pleasantly surprised that vROps has a plugin for Kubernetes, so it works quite well with that, which was useful for one of our customers.   

The solution also works very well with VMware, but not so well with Hyper-V, and compatibility with KVM was very poor. It also didn't have certain abilities that we liked, like being able to run in a bare-metal environment. 

Monitoring is useful but if the solution can't automate or function without my input, it's a waste of my time. That's where I found out there are some issues with this product, there are elements that are not as intuitive as they could or should be. 
My problem is that I think it stays static too long, it doesn't continue to look at the changes.
I would like to see better remediation, automation, and better connection with specific security pieces. I'm not talking about firewalls. Firewalls are beginning to lose favor in a lot of the environments that I deal with. I need products that give me a zero-trust architecture, and this solution still doesn't provide that. 

We have been using the solution for a little over six years. 

We didn't really have any issues with the stability once we got used to the way changes are rolled out. We had to add security, as the security of the solution isn't sufficient for our needs. 

I think it scales fairly well. We were able to run it around the world which helped tremendously.

The quality of the customer support varied. Sometimes we would get junior staff and our own team knew more about the solution than them. Then we would get escalated and connected with someone who really knew what they were talking about, and they were very good.

The initial setup has gotten a lot better over time. The last one we did, we were able to talk to Google, Azure, and AWS altogether.
Cloud foundation software helped a lot during setup with remediation, prevention, and troubleshooting. It had not always been that way.

I would say vROps gives us 30% faster throughput, faster return on investment or better return on investment, so I consider it a good investment. It's at least 30% if not more, so I'm positive about that.

I would give the solution a three out of five, with one being cheap and five being expensive. There are some elements of the pricing that are good, and some areas where I feel like I'm being charged for something the product can't provide yet.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

If you're going to go full VMware, then the compatibility is there. If you're going to have multiple, different versions of systems, then you could run into some issues. There are other products out there depending on the size of your environment.
We were at the top. We were originally using AWS, which I still don't like because they charge you for everything. I used the multi-cloud and that caused some issues. We carry out a lot of testing, so we look at how well the solution performs with Google, Azure, and AWS. It seems to work better in AWS than most other providers, the problem was that I was trying to make it work with so many different versions.