VMware Aria Operations Reviews

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.

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.

It's typically used for our interactions with our software engineers, especially when we are configuring or assigning resources to them. It is the way we get the virtual machine to be right-sized. They usually ask for more resources than they need and with this tool I can manage the resources.

There was a system with a Docker cluster that was having really bad issues. A server would go down and the machine would move to another server, in this case a virtual machine, bringing down the whole cluster. Thanks to vROps I was able to closely check the resource usage to spread the load, so instead of having three servers we moved to a more stable solution using eight servers.

vROps has helped to decrease overall downtime by about 20 percent.

In addition, we work here with a five-year budget and we need to have a really good forecast to design solutions because those solutions must last for five years. It's not easy to increase the resources of a solution in the middle of this five-year cycle. So vROps helps a lot in seeing how the load is increasing over time. In that way, I can forecast for more than a two-year period and do so for five years, at least.

The most valuable feature is the ability to check the right-sizing of a machine because that way I can assign the real resources that are needed.

It's also user-friendly. One of the things that I really like are the ready-to-use dashboards. You can get them from a dashboard marketplace where dashboards are contributed by other people. You can use them in your facility without any problem, and some of them are really useful.

The solution also provides proactive monitoring. It's good to have a baseline of how the machine is normally working. After that you can check if it has gone beyond this baseline. If something goes away from this baseline, it usually means you have a problem and you need to fix it.

There is room for improvement when it comes to the integration with Active Directory. Sometimes I need to log in to the application using my Active Directory account, instead of using the regular admin for vRealize Operations. If I want to deploy this tool to more users, I need that.

I used vROps a lot about two years ago and I started with it again about two months ago. I'm the person who designed the whole VMware solution at ALMA Observatory and I support all of it and administer the VMware platform, among other things.

It's quite a stable solution. I have never had a problem with the solution. Every time I want to see something or check something, it's always there.

I have not needed to call VMware for technical support for this solution.

We did not have a previous solution. We only used the typical solution in vCenter for checking performance.

I wouldn't say that vROps replaced a lot of other tools but that's because there aren't too many products that are similar to vROps.

We were already customers for vROps, but at first we were not using a lot. Then we needed to do an upgrade and it was not an easy path to follow. But in terms of the setup and configuration, it was straightforward and much better than the old versions. The last version I used was v4 and, compared to that, it was completely easy.

The deployment, even though I was doing other stuff, took one or two days.

I don't think the solution saves us money, but with it I can better say how the money is spent.

We provide services to our scientists. I can say, "I will provide you with 20 virtual machines, 20 TB of disk, bandwidth, and I know it costs X. The biggest impact is the way I can see where the resources are that we are using. That makes it worth the cost.

The pricing is a little bit expensive.

Licensing is an issue because there are always changes, and by that I mean cost increases. And that's not only for vROps but for VMware, vSphere, and all the products that are involved.

I used Turbonomic a long time ago, but only as a test.

The implementation is easy. You just need to assign resources to install all the virtual machine requirements, but the process is straightforward. My biggest advice is to check the dashboard marketplace because you can find dashboards that are useful to you too. The dashboards are produced by the community. They are free, although some of them need container packs that you need to pay for, or you may need a licensee to use some of them.

Our primary use case of this solution is to monitor the server and desktop environment. We've never had a performance issue.

It has helped our organization because we can keep the metrics within our ratios. In this way, if something jumps out we can be on it right away. It has also helped to reduce troubleshooting time. 

The alerting feature would be the most valuable feature for us. It gathers more metrics. In the latest versions, there are metrics that are being exactly captured with vCenter which are a bit better. Aside for that it provides a historical analysis of metrics over time. 

We did not find this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly compared to other options. We actually ended up paying for something else to use in conjunction with vRealize. 

I would like the ability to edit more stuff in the standard version. The way it is now really limits the usability, especially because the dashboards don't fit everybody. Aside for that, creating reports and views needs to be more intuitive. Right now it's too hard without having had a lot of training. 

It's pretty stable, we've never had any issues with it. 

Their technical support is okay, it could be better. 

The main points that we look at are the costs and ease-of-use. Ease-of-use is the main thing for us because if we can't get the data we need it's not going to be helpful to us. 

We looked at Foglight, vRealize, and Veeam. The main reason we chose vRealize is because it's included in our license. 

I would rate this solution a five. There's a lot of stuff that we'd like to do that we can't. 

I would advise someone considering this solution to take classes and get a lot of information because this solution may look simple but it's a lot harder than it seems.

We use it to obtain an overview of what is happening in our cloud infrastructure, e.g., our utilization, trends, and how long before I need to upgrade my hardware,

It removes the guess work. It gives me real data and analysis in a very user-friendly way that I can show to my management without going deep into numbers. It hides all the complex numbers and visualizes them into very nice, full-looking colors and graphs. So, it makes it easy to use.

Trend analysis: It gives us insights into problems which will happen in future.

It would be nice if it could tell me more about my hardware, if there were any updates on the network that should be deployed, if some firmware needs to be deployed on the server, etc.

The stability is excellent. It has never crashed, so I have no complaints there. It just works forever.

We have a small setup. So far, I haven't tested it on a large networks. However, for our setup, which is a couple of servers, it works fine.

I haven't called the support for this solution.

I was not using a solution previously. We got a recommendation from VMware to try this product, and we loved it.

It is very easy to set up.

As integrators, we deployed it ourselves.

We have seen good ROI results. It has made our lives easier. We have a 100TB storage, and it gives us an overview, including databases, how the storage is being utilized, etc. It makes it very easy to find information out.

I haven't used a competitor's product.

Only VMware was on our list because we were already using all the other VMware solutions, like vSphere, NSX, and vCenter. Therefore, we wanted something to run on top of those products, preferably from VMware, so it could integrate in a better way.

I'm happy with it. It does all what it promises and helps us.

We are a VMware partner and integrator, so we deploy it to a lot of our customers. We love promoting this product to all of our customers.

We use it for proactive and reactive monitoring. 

I just came off a contract where capacity management was a major issue. They hadn't planned for it or made any provisions for it. So, they were looking at the operations teams to sort of do capacity management for them. This project came along, I picked it up, used vROps, and was able to say, "This is what's going on. This is what we are going to have to do. This is what we need to do to be where we want be."

Its ability to resolve an issue from within the application rather than going somewhere else to resolve it.

The dashboard is a single pane of glass for troubleshooting.

I've never had an issue with stability.

It is very easy to scale. However, in the beginning, I picked up an implementation that had been designed wrong from the ground up.

Ideally, somebody using the technical support when I found out the configuration was incorrect.

I still received a lot of help from the support agent who dealt with my case. What he couldn't do was tell me what to do to bring it back into line. However, he told me what it needed to look like, which was very well documented anyway. Though, having someone point you in the right direction can be a good thing.

The initial setup can be complex, but it is not too complex for me. I consider it straightforward.

We are an integrator.

We have seen huge ROI. 

It has certainly reduced troubleshooting, especially when we have less experienced support technicians than engineers looking at it. It guides them as to where to find the solution. Now, I have a lot less junior staff coming up to me asking what has gone wrong because it displays on the dashboard what they can do to resolve it.

In terms of integration, between this product and everything else in the VM product line, it is very easy to just pick this up as opposed to looking elsewhere.

Use it! It makes perfect sense.

It is very intuitive and user-friendly. The solution is a lot more intuitive and user-friendly these days than it was before.

We use it to optimize and scale directory infrastructures from our customers.

Our customers have found the solution to be intuitive and user-friendly in the newest version. It is better than versions 5.0 and 6.0.

• VMware Infrastructure Planner
• VMware Capacity Planner, which provides a capacity planning overview.

We would like the return of the additional partner marketplaces, like DataCore. My customers miss the integration to DataCore.

The stability could be better. We run into issues when the database is temporarily full.

With the newest version, it's user friendly. You can add easily more nodes to on-premise. It's better than 6.0.

Technical support could be better. This has been a problem with many VMware products in the last few years, the support has not been good.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The predictive analysis of the infrastructure helps our customers to reduce downtime and improve capacity planning. Issues are fixed faster with vROps.

Other competitive tools are not as good. The whole stack with VMware is a complete solution to use.

It is easy to use from its deployment architecture to use cases. It is straightforward for customers to use. It's a good product and better than the earlier versions.

I use it for capacity planning and day-to-day metrics for how VMs are running. Most people think their application isn't running fast enough, so you need some numbers or pretty pictures to show them. vROps is a good place to obtain them.

1. You want to be able to plan. You want to budget going forward for what you have and put your hardware in before you can create VMs on it.
2. It is not a technological thing. It's a people management thing. If you have some pictures, numbers, or something that you can show how things are performing, the management will want to see what they're getting for their buck overall. However, individual app owners and business units want to see how their machines are performing, and if they can do better.

The newer version is a lot easier to use than the older version. It's one of the easiest ways to obtain some insight into vCenter.

The latest incarnation of it is intuitive and user-friendly; the previous versions, not so much.

There are some nagging little things. For example, if you want to automate the resizing of machines, you should be able to schedule it, so it happens at two in the morning instead of right now, because if you do it in the middle of a workday that's a big no-no. Who wants to get up at two in the morning to press that button? Automation should be a bit more intuitive.

They got rid of the badges largely. That was good. 

The customization of reports isn't as great as I would like to see it. There are some canned ones. 

The other thing is there should be a way so a business unit can actually login to it. They should be able customize the view as a business unit or application owner better than they can today. vROps gives people too much information. It's creating headaches for management by answering too many questions. We need to give the people the the right amount of information. They should be able to look at their own applications and hardware. They would feel a lot more comfortable with VMware if they could do this, because it gives them a little bit of influence and control, even though we're the ones with the keys to the castle.

It seems to be pretty good.

We don't have that big of an environment that it's on right now. So, I wouldn't be able to talk too much about scalability.

They are pretty good. We used to buy VM, vCenter Support, and ESX Support from HPE, because they were a reseller of it. It wasn't so good. 

So, when we did license renewals, we bought the support from VMware, and it was much better.

There are a lot of third-party monitoring and other tools that you can buy, but we decided to go with VMware's product in that it would be kept up-to-date together with vCenter and ESX, then everything should jive together a lot nicer.

The initial setup was straightforward.

There has been a bit of cost savings in that we could decide to move workloads around a bit better. 

Though not so much for SevOne outages, but for the day-to-day, warnings, critical things, and alerts that come in, you will run out of disc in X amount of time. Therefore, this product is handy to have.

Bundle it in with your license rather than buying it as a separate product. It saves a lot of money that way.