VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We use this solution to see what we have inside of the virtual environment. We can see the compute nodes and what issues it has. We can also see the networking, data storage, all the recommendations, the issues, and the compilation as well.

This solution has helped to improve my organization because we use it for reporting when management wants to know what we have in the data center in our virtualization environment. We can just send the reports over the vRealize Operations and it will tell how much we consume in our environment. Also, it can alert us as to what resources we need to buy for the next financial year.

When you open the vRealize Operations, usually it will alert you what the misconfiguration is in your environment and that misconfiguration can cause failures in your environment. It alerts you with more than one type of alert like, blue, red, critical, just a warning, and with a daily solving for issues that prevent a lot of downtime. For example, it will alert you if you have thin provisioning and what's overcommitment in your storage. It will alert you that you are consuming most of the storage and that you will have a coming failure. This helps you to move forward before the downtime happens. 

For the cost saving, it has a feature that will tell if you can provide computer resources to a better machine that isn't being used so you can retrieve back those resources and provide it to another department. It will enable you to efficiently use the resources that you have, more than just wasting the resources of the department. You can retrieve it back, and you will get all of the suggestions from reports in the Operations manager. You will save a lot with it.

The most valuable feature is the feature that alerts you when you have any issues or when you may face any upcoming issues. It can alert you within the day or two days before. It can also help you if you want to scale your environment. It will give you a scalable plan to scale your storage or the compute nodes. You can give it the percentage you want to scale it and it will guide you to have the resources for that.

Usually, we use it for reporting when the management's asking us, without any technical output, they want to know what we have in the data center in our virtualization environment. We can just send the reports over the vRealize Operations, and it will tell how much we consume in our environment.

It is user-friendly. As it's a management product, you usually don't have downtime. It will not impact anything.

They can change the interface for the 6.7 vSphere that would make it more simple and more friendly. I think changing the interface of the operations manager would be good. It's friendly to use right now but it would simplify it more.

It's stable. We don't have any bugs or any issues with it.

VMware always gives us the best support. They are friendly to talk to and they understand the real impact of what's happening. They try to get into the issue as one of your team. They also fit into your working hours to solve your issues. 

We installed it with a partner, Epsilon ITs. It was a very simple installation. We did not request an advanced team. 

We measure ROI by seeing the graph of our investment in the data center for the computer resources, as well on the storage. We see the graph starting to lower because we start reusing the resources that we provide to the other departments. If we have a scale of 30% for every three years, it becomes twenty or fifteen.

I would give this solution a nine. One for the future improvement. 

I would recommend it, and especially if you have a huge environment, it will easily give you a complete view of what's inside and what configuration is in it. 

The primary use case is operations management for our customers, who are looking for more insight into their environments.

Our customer was able to tell their environment was overprovisioning VMs. So, they decommissioned some VMs, which had been created, and also wrote a policy around the creation of VMs. Now, people don't just randomly create VMs and use up all the company's resources.

It helps an organization quickly create test and dev environments for developers to come up with new software and patch tests.

• Its predication ability.
• Its GUI is easy to use, which makes it user-friendly.

Stability is good right from the start. Everything works smoothly. Integration with other systems is good. 

Scalability is very good. For example, there was one VM that we thought would not need a lot of resources, then we had to expand its resources on the fly.

Tech support is amazing. They will walk you through the implementation.

The initial setup is straightforward and intuitive. If you have all the data, networks, IPs, etc., then everything is easy.

The customer also has a chance to migrate some of their physical infrastructure onto the virtual environment.

The real ROI is the amount of savings seen on the infrastructure.

Get the right licensing and increase your licensing as you upgrade and grow. If you get the wrong licensing, it will be expensive, especially if you plan improperly. 

I've tried other solutions in the industry, and vROps is a good product in comparison.

I would definitely recommend the solution.

It is next, next, and next to use. You don't need to have much high tech knowledge. It is very intuitive.

Our primary use case is monitoring and reporting on our VM infrastructure for student-facing applications, classroom-facing applications, and data center infrastructure like AD and DNS.

It has performed really well. I have been using it since whatever it was called before vROps, so I have been using it for a while. It works really well.

It gives us a lot of details about the environment that we normally wouldn't be able to see without using other tools. We get visibility into our infrastructure, a single interface to see storage performance, VM performance, and to find issues in the environment that we wouldn't normally see.

Some of the forecasting features give us a picture of, let's say, in six months I know that my storage will be full, or I'll be out of resources. It gives us a little bit of forecasting. But it's not a tool for us that really shapes how we do stuff or improves functionality, it's just a bonus. In terms of solving some problems, it helps there, but it doesn't make a big difference in the grand scheme of things for us.

The most valuable feature is the reporting, to be able to generate reports. You come in on a Monday and see, "Okay, here are the things it found in the environment, here are the issues it's seeing," and you can go and address them at your leisure. But you get that type of reporting, it's always there.

It's pretty user-friendly. It is very intuitive, the layout is well-built, and the user experience is well-built. You look at the interface and you say, "Oh, I understand what these sections or what these categories of features do." For example, for reporting, there's a tab that says "Reporting." You click on it and there are all your reports. So the user interface is really well-designed to make it intuitive.

One of the features I would like them to bring in is more application monitoring and more visibly into applications. Instead of the actual hardware and the environment, they need to go one step further and bring in application availability and application performance. I don't really care if the hardware's overloaded, as long as the application is performing correctly. That's all the users care about and that's all I really care about.

I've never had any issues with its stability. Even through updates, it's pretty stable.

In the environment I'm using it in currently, scale is not really an issue. In previous environments I was in, it scaled very well across all of the infrastructure. So scalability has never really been an issue for us because it's just a reporting tool.

I don't think I have ever had to use technical support. Customer service through VMware has always been fairly good. We haven't had to use it for this product but, overall, VMware is a pretty good customer service experience.

The setup is pretty easy. It takes 20 minutes and it's up and running. It's pretty straightforward.

It goes back to: "What does it actually do for us?" It's a nice-to-have and it gives us a little bit easier way of predicting when we're going to have issues. Or, if we have issues that no one else notices, a major reporting platform like vROps sees stuff before we know it's an issue. It gives us that heads-up along the lines of, "Hey, you might be having issues or you might be seeing issues in the future. You may not be right now, but here's something to look forward to." That's what it gives us, a bit of heads-up in terms of the way our infrastructure is performing.

Costs could always be lower.

For this environment we're fairly small, so we didn't really look at anything else. In other environments, we compared other products and other companies against vROps. But, for this environment, it's so small, it just made sense. It's easy enough to do, so we just went with vROps.

I rate vROps at eight out of ten. I don't think any platform will ever be a ten because there's always that little bit of room to grow. But they do what they do fairly well. Maybe there are other products that can do it a little bit better, but for the balance of cost, the ease of use, and how well it integrates into our environment, it is a good fit for a lot of places. If you have specific needs it doesn't fill, there may be better options. But for us, in our environment, it just works well.

The most important criterion in selecting a vendor is intuitive interfaces, the ease of management going forward. I don't want my reporting and management platform to be hard to manage. It's not something you should have to look after. It's something that should be looking after your infrastructure, not your having to look after it to look after your infrastructure. The most important thing is a good user experience, something that's very intuitive. If you bring some new person into the environment, you don't want them to take weeks to understand how the tool works and what it does for them.

We use it to monitor our private cloud.

It has improved our organization with respect to allowing us to size our environments correctly. We get metrics about what our stuff is actually using, how we can scope for future projects, where can we save some resources.

It gives us a better look into performance, a better look into right-sizing, a better look at possible issues or, more so, trends.

It can be user-friendly once you get the dashboard set up but it can be complicated to get the information you want, the way you want it.

When you're running reports or trying to gather trends of data it can be slow. Sometimes the translation of what you're thinking of in your head versus the metrics it's presenting might be a little different. For example, you're thinking "time," but it wants to show "percentage" or something of that nature.

Also, if there were an easier way to share dashboards, that would be a big one.

It's pretty solid. We haven't really had any issues; a little slow, but other than that, pretty solid.

It's a small environment, so we really haven't seen scalability with it.

We went with this solution because it was already included in our licensing.

When selecting a vendor one of the biggest things is cost.

I rate this solution at eight out of ten. It would become a ten if it were easier to scale out licensing and easier to use dashboards. Those are is my two top points.

Our primary use case is to automate workflows within the corporate data center and to automate in and out of the cloud, spinning up workloads in both locations. So far, the performance has been great.

It has improved our time to deliver on systems, for development workloads. As we do that with our larger development platforms, they don't have to wait on us, as infrastructure, to spin those up. They can just spin up what they need and get to work.

There is also definitely a cost saving because we don't have to have as many people. A smaller workforce can take care of it in a timely manner.

The most valuable features are the Blueprints and Workflows, to be able to hand the self-service portal out; to get out of the way and let the developers spin up their workloads as they need them.

It is intuitive and user-friendly. As you go through it, with some of the wizards and some of the interfaces that are out there, I think it's fairly easy to step through, even when we're training new employees to work with the product.

I'd like to see the streamlining of more wizards, more tasks that are canned. And it would also be good to see some more features around building the Blueprints, just to make it a little easier.

It has been very stable, no issues.

Scalability: It's as big as we need it to be. We just add in new services, new hosts. It works really well.

I don't know that we have had to use technical support. We did our initial deployment with VMware Professional Services, so we really haven't had to get support on it at all.

We knew we needed to do something different. One of the big complaints from development had always been that they were waiting on us. We talked with our local VMware team about this and started down this road. It took about a year to get it done, but we finally got the buy-in by packaging it with NSX for our security folks - they've got deep pockets. So we were able to get the whole project done.

Our return on investment, again, is a lot on the people front. Instead of having to expand, we just run a leaner workshop and we have the people to do that. So the cost saving has been around not having to pay for additional employees to support our environment.

We looked at Cisco CloudCenter. We looked at it at the same time but we knew that 95 percent of our infrastructure runs VMware today, so we wanted to go with the same kind of ecosystem.

If you're heavily invested in VMware already, go this way. It's going to be a lot better in the long run.

I rate it a nine out of 10. To get to a 10, I would like to see those improvements around the UI and making things a little more user-friendly.

We have heavily invested in VMware technology. We're running vSphere, we're running other products, and obviously, we need visibility into our environment.

VMWare is quite good at following customer needs. We are working closely with our TAM so whenever we've had something that we want out of the product, around capacity planning, for example, they tend to be a good conduit getting our needs into VMware.

Sometimes what a customer sees as a need for improvement could be incorrect sizing or a result of a specific deployment. So usually, the things we want are a more frequent sampling of the various metrics and the like.

In terms of VMware support, VMware has been, to some extent, a victim of its own success. But in general, they've been always very helpful. It's always good to have the TAMs to get the support, even when they're overwhelmed with requests.

We've explored a number of products. We've used SolarWinds and their VMWare add-ons. But to be able to actually see what our infrastructure does, vRealize Operations Manager has been the closest match as part of our Enterprise agreement. We are licensed for the Blue Medora Advanced Suite which is like an add-on to vRealize Operations Manager. That gives us the visibility into our Cisco and HPE equipment. It's a natural choice.

I would recommend this solution to a colleague if they have a VMware shop and need something to provide visibility in their environment.

I would definitely give it around a nine out of 10 because sometimes, in terms of the user experience, people find stuff difficult to use. But obviously, the more dashboards you create that are relevant to you, the better it will be.

In my previous organization, the basic utilization was to monitor our systems, to do a better job than just performance counters were showing within vSphere.

It was a medical institution and we had implemented a solution called Epic. Epic is a big medical system for things like admitting, billing, patient documentation, etc. It's massive. vROps has a plug-in that actually monitors Epic systems.

In my current organization, it has been performing really well. My current job is also medical and we are going to be using it for the same purposes: Not only monitoring hardware, we're also going to be using it to monitor Epic.

vROps not only monitored my vSphere environment, it was actually able to monitor into my Epic environment, to make sure that all of my transactions and all of the ins and outs of that system were working properly. vROps became a focus of how we monitored and managed the system.

It enables me to anticipate our system needs, to be able to know if a host is overloaded, to be able to move things off of it. In my case, it's medical. This is something that could be considered life or death. It's critical that my clinical people have access to the resources that they need to accomplish their jobs. It's a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week job and vROps has really helped us focus in on where the trouble spots are, to be able to alleviate those problems before they even become problems, so it's great.

It has reduced time to troubleshoot issues, improved the quality of service to users, and provided cost savings through higher capacity utilization.

Being able to get the proper performance counters was the biggest deal. If you use the vCenter stuff, it's okay when you get the information out of the performance counters there, but vROps actually gives you more realistic numbers.

Between the previous version and this one, they should keep going with the improvements in how intuitive it is, streamline it more, and keep going with that notion.

If possible, for the medical industry, I would like to see it work with Epic, being able to focus in on Epic during the installation and have it move right into the Epic role. That would be great.

Stability has gotten better over time. In general, we haven't had any downtime.

I've never had to scale it up. What we did was we set up high-availability and we added failover ability to keep it going, to keep it continuously operational. So as far scaling, we haven't had the need to do that.

I can see vROps meeting our needs, going forward, for the next five to 10 years.

It was something that we tried out and then it became our solution. It evolved on us and became something that we could mold to our environment.

In this case, what made us look at it was its involvement with Epic, having that plugin for it. That's what originally got us going. Epic is an investment, it's huge. So to have something that could bring those components to the forefront, to show you if there are any problem spots, was worthwhile.

The latest version of it has been a much easier installation. The previous version I had installed needed a lot of resources, a lot of time to sit and mold it. The new one, not so much. It's been a much easier installation.

We didn't work with VMware to install it. That's how intuitive it is now. You simply download it and install it. There is obviously some molding that needs to happen with it, but the installation on this current version is much more intuitive and much easier than the previous ones. They've definitely made some improvements. It's pretty straightforward.

It's priced competitively.

Epic actually has its own product to monitor itself. It wasn't until vROps revealed that it had this, and we could see how it operated, that it came to the forefront. So we really didn't focus in on anything else.

Work with your VMware TAM, work with your VMware support group to get it installed the first go-round, get used to it. Definitely do a PoC, don't just try to roll it into production. Assess it first.

We use vROPs primarily on our VEI side. It gives us a lot of insight into the session experience that I haven't found in another product. It matches PC over IP latency times, packet loss times; I just haven't been able to find that using another product anywhere.

I think it pretty much covers everything I need. I can monitor my storage performance with it. Obviously my host hardware, my virtual desktops. I know it can do virtual servers if we were licensed for that. We don't have NSX. I'm sure that there are add-ins for NSX for it.

It helps us verify when a customer complains about, or an end user complains about VDI performance. "Is there something going on in the session, network related between the endpoint and the virtual desktop?" Sometimes we are even able to find performance problems or identify network issues before an end user notices it and opens a ticket.

Monitoring our vSAN environment still seems to be touch and go. It doesn't always report correctly on that.

What would be helpful is more intuitive troubleshooting or more intuitive messages. Some of the messages that you see really don't make sense. When you start diving in to them, it gets better, but a lot of times there is still a lot of lack of clarity. For example, where do I go to try to figure out exactly what is causing this? Something a little more solid, maybe even link it to some KBs or that that might be related.

It's been a very stable product. The upgrades are simple, overall. I haven't had any problems that have come out of updates at all or upgrades to it. Very solid.

We are only using it on a VDI environment of about 550 desktops, but I know from reading the guides that it scales out really well.

I have had to contact tech support once or twice. I had a little trouble getting the deployment set up so it would exclude servers, because we aren't licensed to monitor servers with it. Sometimes, certain versions, when you add a feature, pack it in. Sometimes they don't work like you expect them to. But tech support has been great on that and they help get it figured out.

It was deployed when I got there, back in the vCOPS days, and I basically abandoned that installation and did a fresh vROps deployment because we were so far behind it was easier than trying to do the stepped upgrade.

Some of the earlier releases were a bit more complex to get deployed. Newer versions have been really easy. I think I did one other complete redeployment again because we left to get out of scope, and I had a lot fewer questions and a lot fewer issues the second time.

Overall, vROps is a very mature product. It is stable. It's got a lot of features in it and sometimes that's the downside. There is so much power to it it's hard to know how to use it completely.

If you are going to deploy vROps, make sure that you've got time to dedicate to learning it. The deployment is relatively easy. The learning how to leverage all the features of it afterwards can take some time. Leverage educational resources, whether it be through VMware or leveraging a partner if you need to. It is a really good product, it can just be a little overwhelming when you first get a hold of it.

vROps was there before me. When I got there, I was asked if I felt that there was value in keeping it and I said yes, absolutely.

The most important points in vendor selection are

• the vendor's reputation
• how good their products truly are
• how long they've been around
• the features supported
• the capabilities of their product
• how user friendly it is
• the comfort of the interface
• the overall stability of the product.