VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We use it for analytics, graphs, etc. We use it for some reports, but not too many.

It has helped us with analyzing storage issues, such as looking at the break down per VM, IOPS, storage wait times, CPU Ready, etc.

It's helped us troubleshoot some issues.

The built-in dashboards for troubleshooting are nice.

We have had no concerns with stability.

It is part of the vRealize Suite, so we tried it out.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is an OVA deployment, connect to the virtual center, and add some plugins. Then, you're done.

We don't take advantage of the cost savings features that it has.

We have another competing product that we use to do the same thing. We use it as well. So, we have two things doing the same thing. Some things we like about it, and some things we don't.

We're also using SCOM with Veeam together. I don't think we will move away from Veeam and it will not replace SCOM. 

Install it and give it a shot. Know that it's not so easy to configure or learn. You need to invest some time to get to know the product, but it can be very helpful.

In some places, it is easy to use, and in other places, not so much. The prebuilt dashboards are easy to use, but if you want to create your own, it is not so easy. It is the same for reports.

• Quick troubleshooting: If the VMs are performing poorly or the multi-tier application has multiple hooks in multiple places, it's easy to troubleshoot that kind of thing. It shows when data stores are getting full, and we can take action based on that. People want reports as to how many VMs are in a particular cluster, for example.
• Forecasting
• Trending
• Analytics

With the VM sprawl at my company, we found a lot of overprovision. With vROps, we had a script that ran, and that would automatically, based on vROps’ recommendations, size it in properly. We gained a lot of CPUs back from that exercise.

It just helps us better use resources; better troubleshooting; quick troubleshooting. It saves time.

We also use the capacity management feature to save resources, which found a lot of VDI desktops were overprovisioned. For example, if we needed one vCPU and 2 GB RAM and they already had four vCPUs and 4 GB RAM. So that's how we saved a lot of resources.

With the performance management feature, things sped up dramatically. We freed up so much resources that could be used by other desktops as well. So that let us spread out the infrastructure a lot more.

I need some simplicity in the products. The products are great. There's a 101 million metrics that you can use, but it needs to be a little bit more simple. People need to be able to create dashboards much more easily.

There are too many metrics to choose from, and the people don't know what to choose. It's very difficult to accurately pick the right thing. If someone asks for a report right away, you can't do it because you have to know exactly which metric you want to use.

I'm experienced with this part of the product, so I know a little bit more but, for example, the BAU teams and the help desk teams don't know as much as I do. Hence, the problem.

I think it's pretty stable. I like it.

We had a little bit of slowness; just the size of the deployment. It hooks into about 30,000 VMs under the hosts. It was running on shared discs and then, after that, we deployed some all-flash arrays, and then we moved it everything to all-flash. And then the problems were a lot better.

Technical support is okay; it could have been better. When I contacted them, they initially assigned a lower-level technician. The problem was not simple and it had be dealt with by someone more technical.

I did not previously use a different solution. This was the only thing. We needed something that could help us troubleshoot quicker, help us focus a lot better. We find that vROps exactly fit the bill.

Initial setup was straightforward, and I found that the upgrades were quite simple. They took a couple of days, maybe three days.

I recommend it. I highly recommend that you check it out. It's just amazing. VMware is an amazing product. It gives you great insight into how your infrastructure's doing. There are thousands of reports that you can run. It gives you data inside of how your infrastructure is doing. So I highly recommend it.

Capacity planning: Seeing where the hot spots are in our enterprise and where we're running out of computing resource capacity and what we need to address at a glance.

It's helped us be more proactive rather than reactive.

I also use it for performance management. We've used it a lot of times to justify to other teams that own VMs whether or not their VMs are oversized or right-sized. We've been able to reclaim capacity by using data from vROps, so that's been very helpful. Being able to reclaim capacity means you can run more efficiently.

It might have indirectly helped us avoid outages through making sure that we have capacity.

They could look at some of their competitors and take some lessons there on, for example, having vROps be a little bit more interactive with your vCenter and actually apply changes for you, and be more proactive in utilizing the resources that you have.

It's really good at monitoring, but it's not fantastic at helping you resolve issues. It sometimes seems overly complicated to figure out what's wrong. If you're troubleshooting a problem, it can get pretty complicated to figure out where to go, where to look, and give you that information easily.

It's very stable. I haven't had it go down unexpectedly or anything.

I haven't had any problem with scalability. We're not a huge shop. I have about 1,000 VMs and about 80 hosts, and it, I'm sure, can handle a lot more than that.

I have used technical support. I actually have a case open as I’m giving this review. It's unresolved, after about a week and a half, so it’s not great. I think they released some modules for vROps that don't quite work right. There's some particular cases for the SQL plug-in. It's not working as advertised and they're trying to figure it out.

We were using SolarWinds, which was a pretty good product. vROps got kind of bundled with another VMware solution, so the price was right. You need something to monitor your enterprise. You can't be looking into every cluster and every vCenter that you have; then you have stuff everywhere. Centralized monitoring was really why we switched.

It was a pretty simple setup. It just takes a while to gather useful information out of it. They even say it's about 30 days before you can actually really do anything with the information coming out of it.

VMTurbo was on our short list at the time.

When selecting a vendor like VMware, the most important criteria is whether it works.

• Capacity planner
• Analysis reports
• Health check
• Dashboard (Default and customized one’s)

Best tool for capacity planning and analyzing the existing infrastructure in VMware.

By scheduling the reports on a weekly basis on under-utilized machines and over-utilized machines and analyzing them to provide the best resource. We can then balance them to improve the benefits of the resources and plan for the integration of more VM’s into the existing infrastructure.

• Resource management
• Capacity planning

For the last three years.

No, it's a very simple installation with OFV available from VMware.

No, it’s got a very smooth with functionality.

No.

10/10 as we analyze the infrastructure and present it to our customers to improve the use of resources.

10/10, whenever we have faced any issue with this product VMware have given us good support.

No, I have learned about this product in one of the forums. I thought to use this product to utilize in my environment as it is the best resource analysis and utilization tool.

It’s very straightforward as the installation is done via OFV provided by VMware or easily available for download from VMware site.

In-house implementation.

Good product.

We just need to purchase licenses from VMware and this depends on how many VM’s we need to monitor via this product; else the setup is freely available at VMware site.

No, as I thought this is a good tool as heard in a VMware forum.

Best tool for Capacity Planning and getting the best use of resources.

My primary use case is for monitoring mostly.

The most effective feature is the reporting tool, especially for PMS reporting at the end of the month, focusing on underutilized or overutilized resources.

It could be more proactive. Even though it's not originally designed as a monitoring tool, it could be adapted to provide monitoring functionalities.

I have been using the solution for more than five years.

I don't have major issues with stability. Occasionally it fills up the logs. Otherwise, it's fine.

The solution is quite scalable.

My experience with VMware Aria Operations support is always good.

Positive

I used to use Avamar, but it's been quite a time. I'm not using packaged systems at the moment.

The setup is quite easy. I would rate it a seven out of ten.

If a company has a business case and use for it, they should definitely go for it.

I'd rate the solution ten out often.

We can manage the virtual environment of our organization with the help of the solution.

They keep improving and updating their apps over time. In each new version, we get lots of good features; thus, I don't have any concerns.

They should include an integration feature through which we can connect to different vendors by installing a small plugin.

We have been using the solution for more than five years. Also, I have been using it for 16-17 years, personally.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable product. We have a couple of 100 users using the solution in our organization. 

We are using VMware as it is a known product that helps to manage companies' virtual environments. Consumers are accustomed to using VMware, and it's a very old product as well. That's the main reason we are using it.

I recommend others use the solution and rate it as a nine.

The most valuable features of the solution are the effectiveness of hardware availability and flexibility.

The deployment of the solution can be improved by making it less complex.

The licensing cost is high and needs to be reduced.

I have been using the solution for 20 years.

VMware Aria Operations is a great product that is very stable.

The solution is scalable and we currently have 800 people using VMware Aria Operations.

I previously used other solutions and switched to VMware Aria Operations because of its functionality.

The initial setup of this solution is complex and takes a couple of weeks to deploy in our environment. We require six administrators for the deployment and maintenance.

The implementation was completed through a vendor.

The solution requires an annual license which is very expensive.

Before choosing VMware Aria Operations I evaluated other solutions. 

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

I would recommend the solution to others.

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.