VMware Aria Operations Reviews

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.

My primary use for it is monitoring and making sure that there are no issues anywhere. You have the various content packs that keep track of all of our different products and the various things we're using within the enterprise. It's a good central point for management. The performance has been good.

It has definitely helped us reduce the time to troubleshoot issues.

The most valuable features are the Heat Maps, and the various graphs and reporting features it has.

For the most part, it is intuitive and user-friendly. Sometimes you have to dig around a little bit to find stuff, but that's because of the way that they do the content, more than anything else.

The main concern would be just to make sure that there's some consistency when third-parties are building their various content packs for it. It seems like it's pretty random in terms of what you're going to get. A vendor is going to provide whatever they provide but it's really hit or miss in terms of how good the quality is. In terms of the things that are monitoring the vSsphere components etc., that's all solid, that's all pretty good.

It's stable. I haven't really had any issues with it. I think we have run into a couple of bugs but normally it seems to run okay.

We've been okay as far as the scalability goes. I'm not aware of any issues there.

Technical support is excellent.

In terms of the decision to go with vROps, It was more along the lines of, "Hey, this is out, this is available to you, it's going to improve things for you." It was a no-brainer because you don't want to do things the hard way.

How much more difficult would it have been to troubleshoot something if this solution wasn't there? It's really hard to say. It's a matter of digging into various different places, so I don't necessarily know how much there is an ROI on it. We trust this product, it seems to be a good tool that we make use of, and I wouldn't want to be without it.

I don't know that we really considered anything else in that pure category because, at that time, nothing really compared to it. Everybody had their own little management and monitoring solutions for their little bubbles. But there wasn't this all-inclusive, try to get other vendors to buy in and have one single monitoring solution.

My advice would be, just go ahead and buy it. It's going to be leaps and bounds ahead of doing it the hard way. It puts it all in one place, gives you a little bit of capacity planning, a better idea of what your actual capacity is, versus just looking at the spot values you get right out of VMware at a given point in time. In terms of looking at a VM, you can see how much RAM it is actually using over a period of time versus whatever the user claims: "Oh it's completely out of memory." We can say, "Is it? Is it really? Let's check it out."

I rate it at nine out of 10. It would be a 10 with just a little bit more arm-twisting on the people that are supplying their little add-ins, to make sure that they're of a sufficient quality to match whatever else is in VMware. They need third-party quality control, less so the actual VMware parts.

We primarily use it for monitoring our VDI environment and the performance is okay.

It improves some of the decisions we make. Based on those usage patterns, we can determine when our best maintenance times are and when we need to scale things up or down.

The most valuable feature we get out of it is the actual usage of the virtual desktop:  concurrent logins, when our peaks are, when our low times are. That's our main use of vROps.

Once you find what you're looking for, it is pretty user-friendly. There is just so much information in vROps, the drilling down to find exactly what you are looking for, that's the hard part. But once you find it, it's pretty easy. You can build a dashboard based on whatever information you have found and then, from that dashboard, it's fine.

The one thing that I am always missing is training specific to Horizon. There is no training class you can go to for the Horizon add-on for vROps. I'd like to see specific training for Horizon admins, as opposed to general vSphere admins.

It seems pretty stable. We've had a few issues as we do upgrades of different products, but other than that it's fairly solid.

When we've run into an upgrade of Horizon, or something breaks the agent in the connection servers, then we'll pull in resources. The support is good. They are able to get it resolved. Typically, a problem with vROps is not considered to cause end-users to have downtime or to be a production-down type of thing, so you sometimes have trouble getting somebody right away. But they've been pretty reasonable.

Previously, we weren't doing much monitoring at all. vRealize became our monitoring solution for VDI. The usage metrics were the driving force behind purchasing vROps and setting it up and spending the time to learn it.

The initial setup was pretty easy. It's an appliance so the deployment is quite easy. The documentation is excellent.

It's very valuable for us. We've since upgraded to the Horizon Enterprise suite, so now it's included with that. It was just another reason to go to Enterprise.

We compared a couple of different tools and it really came down to the fact that VMware was giving us a good price for bundling it with our Horizon purchase, at the time. And, at the time, we were doing PCoIP and it was basically the only product that really gave us that insight.

If you're planning to do a Horizon deployment I would definitely recommend vROps. It seems to be the best. In the past, when we were doing PCoIP exclusively, it was the only tool that gave you excellent PCoIP metrics. I assume that that is moving forward as well. For a Horizon deployment, you almost have to have vROps if you want that kind of data.

I rate the solution at eight out of 10. To get it to a 10, I would like to see some training on the Horizon-specific pieces and, somehow, they should make it easier to find those granular things that you're always looking for. You're always running into a situation where you want to use the tool to figure out a problem, but the amount of effort needed to delve into vROps and find the exact metric you're looking for is always so difficult.

We use it for monitoring and maintenance of VMware environments.

It provides easier troubleshooting. Especially on the Horizon side of things, it helps us to troubleshoot if there are CPU issues or memory issues in the environment. It has resulted in shorter times for troubleshooting issues. It's easier to isolate an issue, especially things like bad neighbors. It helps me determine whether a host is having an issue. Suppose I'm troubleshooting a VM that's having an issue. I may actually find out that it's not that VM but it's a set of VMs that are encountering a bad-neighbor situation.

It also helps us determine whether or not we need to expand capacity, add more user licenses, etc. It helps us in capacity planning, in deciding when we need to introduce new hardware.

• Capacity planning
• Project management
• Troubleshooting

It gives us a pane of glass to troubleshoot all our VMware technologies in one place. Also, we haven't gotten into any of the automation yet, but a lot of the automation tools show promise of automating with vROps.

It's also user-friendly. It's a lot easier than the older versions. It has the multiple categories when you log in. It's a lot cleaner and easier to find solutions to what you're looking for.

I would like to see an improvement in the cost features, and by that, I mean the chargeback functions, because my company won't go all the way into vRA for the automation piece. We're looking at different tools for automation. If they could find some way to incorporate that, it's the primary thing that I would look for right now.

Also, I would like to find a tool that is a single pane of glass for everything. The endpoint operations agent doesn't really do much when you install it on an endpoint - for example, on a Windows Server or a Linux server. You don't really get any beneficial information at the OS level from VMware tools. That's something that I would like to see.

The stability is good. There are some issues, at least from my end, when it runs out of space. I don't know that I necessarily get notifications. Some of it is that I don't check the Health tab as often as I should. But it has run out of space once or twice and shut off. When that happens I have to manually add space to it.

Scalability is relatively simple. You just spin up a new appliance and you either add it to an existing vROps manager or you can create a new environment. You can forward statistics. If I have multiple data centers, I can spin up remote nodes and send our information back to our primary one. So the scalability is good.

Technical support has been hit or miss. We're a BCS customer and it's a struggle at times. Sometimes it's difficult to get support on the phone, sometimes it's a lack of resources issue, sometimes they'll still send it to a tier-1 person when it's a tier-3 issue.

We've looked at other solutions but we stick with the vRealize Operations mainly for the usability and the integration with VMware.

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. What would make it a 10 are improved features for the endpoint operations agent and the ability to more easily monitor solutions other than just VMware. We have a mixed environment that includes VMware, some oVirt and KVM, and some other things. The main goal of our management is a single pane of glass, if possible, and that is something that I would like to see.

We use it to identify performance issues and configure compute resources.

Currently, we are setting up automation with compute resources, shutting our servers down, and reallocating them. When we go into our busy season, it will allow us to be hands offs. It will perform everything for us.

This solution has helped to reduce time to troubleshoot issues, improve quality of service to users, and provide costs savings through higher capacity utilization. The system dashboards allow us to drill down into systems and find how they are talking to each other. They allow us to fix issues quickly and easily for the end user.

The most valuable feature is compute.

There is a lot of stuff which is hard to read and understand. I must do a lot of research to understand what is going on with the hardware.

It's good. I haven't had any downtime with it. 

It is easy to upgrade. It takes an hour or more to upgrade, and I am confident after an upgrade that it will be back up and running when I arrive in the morning.

If you want to scale, you must have management packs. For example, you can bring in Blue Medora and have them create the management packs for you.

For the most part, we have all the scalability that we need. We feel confident that we can grow our infrastructure with the product.

When I have used technical support, they were good. I would rate them as an eight out of 10. They have good people. However, sometimes they are slow, and sometimes, they are fast. It depends on whom you get.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

We have seen ROI in performance. It used to be our company was giving out eight CPUs to all servers. That was bad performance-wise. People were seeing slow compute times for their applications.

Take a look at the whole vRealize suite. They all interactive with each other. It can provide you with streamlined automation. It can get your company to where it needs to be.

We use it for looking at the resources on our hosts and for looking at the resources on VM as well.

It allows us to see the VM, our cluster utilization - the cluster level is what I work on the most. We're able to see how much is being utilized, the rate of resource utilization, and when it will actually run out.

The solution is intuitive and user-friendly. The UI is nice, it's really simple to use. Building out reports is very simple.

One of the most valuable features was the cluster modeling, but they took that away. That's why I rated it a seven out of 10. They keep saying that it's going to be back in the next release and that's what we're looking for. We really want that back.

It works great. No problems whatsoever.

Scalability is pretty good too. They keep coming out with new releases. My vROps guy just put in v6.7 about two months ago, now they're coming out with v7.0. They keep coming out pretty fast. That's good, there are new features. But we just put v6.7 in and now we have to do all that same work over again.

I haven't used technical support for vROps. I'm mostly on the core: vCenter and ESXi. I don't open up tickets for vROps.

Overall, it's a great solution. It's really easy to use, really easy to set up, and especially for reporting, it's really good.

We use it for the monitoring and maintenance of the virtual environment. We have about 3,000 VMs. We use it for capacity management. We use it to help applications. We've got it separated out by the applications in each one of the VMs. It really helps to get our infrastructure team visibility into the virtual environment, so that they can troubleshoot issues and detect problems. What we've done is taken it a little further out, deploying it out to give visibility to the application team so that they can see their environment.

It's getting the visibility for all the different layers. From the application team to the infrastructure team, they need visibility into the operation of the environment, and driving that visibility and troubleshooting to what we call "fell fast" – “fell fast” and recover, or back out and recover. Giving us that capability in alerting and mechanisms, which is not there now.

We deployed Vblock 720s, and I’d like vROps to further integrate with them. I know it pulls the data from Vision, but further integration of Vision would be really good.

We have increased our tier 1 environment probably 70 to 80%. There have been very minimal sev 1s over the last two years by deploying this and putting it all in place.

We can scale up and scale out very quickly based on the demand of the business, and it has met those needs. It has not slowed down as we scaled up and out.

We have mission critical support with VMware, so we use those guys constantly.

In 2014, we had two data centers full of physical environments and we, as a company, made a decision to go virtual first. As we started looking at all of our refresh plans and our long-range plan, we saw we had all of the dollars tied up in refreshing the physicals. We started looking at the virtual environment and we partnered up with VCE. We bought two Vblock 720s and then we put ExtremeIO and VMAX on it for storage.

I manage the group that set it up. The grouping by application was pretty complex, but as far as bringing it in and getting the foundation set up, it was fairly simple.

ROI’s very good. Ultimately, based on the business case that we did, we spent 20 million dollars and got 50 million dollars return on investment.

We didn’t really look at any other vendors because we wanted it on a stable tier 1 environment, so VMware is what we made a decision on.

Put your critical workloads on enterprise software.

For our clients, vROps is used for managing their environments, having a single pane of glass, so they can go in and have a view of what's actually going on in their environments. That's especially true when it comes to TCO perspectives. When it comes to the TCO, they get to realize how they can start trimming down VMs that are not working, or cutting down on the resources that those VMs are using. That helps them do better in their environment and to lower their operational costs at the end of the day.

We do have the big enterprises; we've got quite an extensive team that looks after clients. But my clients are SMB clients and are where we see a need for vRealize Operations.

For me and my clients there's a very big benefit from a monitoring perspective. It provides proactive monitoring and helps instantly. It gives you this one dashboard with an overview of everything that you're busy with, within the environment. You can get notifications, on time, to deal with a situation and it also gives you references to what you can do and what you can't do, or what is recommended by VMware. It has links for you to find the resolution to the problem. From that perspective, it's brilliant. I don't think anybody could ever ask for anything over and above that. It's very proactive.

vROps has also enabled us to replace tools. SolarWinds is one.

The capacity planning is one of the most valuable features. That is brilliant. A lot of clients, especially now due to COVID-19, are in a situation where they don't have a lot of money to spend. They're looking at what the best way is to start cutting costs, especially from an IT perspective. A lot of companies look at it from an IT perspective rather than anything else when it comes to business. That's key. 

Also, the integration with Blue Medora is brilliant, especially the way it can let you know if there is a problem in the environment, and various ways to fix the issue.

In addition, for me, it is seamless and easy to get to know. It's quite straightforward and it's a nice product. The user-friendliness is brilliant. At some point you need to just keep kicking and kicking until you get what you really want. But from a user perspective, it's quite straightforward in terms of being able to understand as to what is going on and how to get to specific pages. The first page gives you everything. It highlights everything: your risk, your health, and that kind of stuff, with the dashboard. It is quite easy to use, especially once you've kicked around a little. From there, I don't think you should even encounter an issue.

The integration with vRealize Log Insight is amazing for me. I don't think there's any other monitoring software that I'd choose or sell to a customer. That's especially true now from a vSAN perspective and getting the logging side integrated into the solution. The correspondence and the communication between the two products is great. I would always recommend going down that route.

I've used vROps for about a year.

I have used it a handful of times when it comes to client deployment. But there's time required to get my head in the game with it, because there is a lot when it comes to the product itself. We are going to be installing it in our lab as well, to get more clarity around how it works, especially when it comes to the integration with Blue Medora and those kinds of things.

On a scale of one to 10, I'd say I'm probably a four when it comes to vROps, but I hope that I'll actually get to 10, to be the best in it. It's a very brilliant product. I love it, the way it works, all the functionality. Everything about it is just amazing.

The stability is great. On a scale of one to 10 I would put it at 10.

The scalability is also great. I haven't played with it that extensively but, from my understanding and from what I know, you can scale as much as you need to. As long as you understand the dashboards and how to create them, you should be okay. From that perspective I think it rates quite well.

The initial setup is straightforward. You just download the OBA and—"Bob's your uncle." The installation guide is also very helpful. They give you a step-by-step guide for how to deploy it. If you read the document, you'll be okay from the beginning until the end. You shouldn't have a problem.

If it's just a basic deployment, and if you've already got the OBA, it should only take a good 30 minutes, and that would be a lot. I'm just covering my bases, in case there is anything that may not have been taken into consideration. But plus/minus 30 minutes should be enough to do a basic deployment.

Currently there are five of us in the company who are using the product or who are familiar with the product. From a maintenance perspective, the dashboard does most of the job. One person can have a look at it and there are the rest of the guys on the back-end for support. I don't think it needs 10,000 people looking after the product. The product is an automated, driven process. You just need to look at the dashboard and understand what it says and it should make the job a lot easier. You shouldn't need more than one or two people looking at the product every day.

Overall, the value you get from a vRealize is definitely worth the cost.

vROps is a bit expensive and that's a reason that small clients say, "No, I don't think we need this." From a pricing perspective, it is quite steep. But "expensive" is relative, depending on what you need. Others might say, "It is expensive, but I think we can use it to better our environment." It is quite an expensive product. But if you really require something, you'll do it anyway.

The main difference between vROps and the SolarWinds solution is the integration to the VMware stack in its entirety, and the opportunity to integrate it with different product sets, like Blue Medora. That makes it quite a different solution compared to SolarWinds which, as far as I know, doesn't have that type of integration. Maybe there is something new along those lines with SolarWinds and I just haven't looked at it, but I've never seen those types of integrations when it comes to SolarWinds.

When we speak to clients about it they often say, "I'll think about it." I think the best thing for them to do would be to actually use it, with the 60-day trial. They should play around with the tool and then come back and say, "This is what I can do in the product." That way, they would see what the product is about. I'd rather they experience something than somebody else telling them about it. Clients have access to VMware. They can download the solution from wherever they are and then start playing with it. They need to see what it can do and realize, "Wow, what an amazing tool." They need to see the benefits of the tool. It's the best monitoring tool. It is expensive, but expensive is relative. It's a matter of the client having a play with the tool and realizing what an amazing tool we have.

My clients are quite small so when they do use it, it's when I'm with them. They don't understand what the product does. For me it's a big thing, but for them, it's neither here nor there. They say, "We'll deal with it when we can. We'll look into it whenever we've got the time." It's never the situation where I've come back and my client is saying "Wow, that is brilliant!" They say it's brilliant when I do it but they don't go back and start utilizing the tool. So I don't really always get the feedback that I desire.

One of my colleagues is busy with a deployment at one of our clients and he's also doing the Blue Medora integration. I talk to him on a daily basis just to get an update, and he's amazed at what vRealize can do. From that perspective I think that we're quite happy with the product.