VMware Aria Operations Reviews

The company I work for is Sureskills. We're a consultancy based company. We have multiple customers that we sell a lot of virtual products to. We don't just deal with that. We deal with a lot of Microsoft, Stack, and Dell EMC products as well, but we do an awful lot of VMware based products. 

Our primary use case is two-fold. From one perspective it gives the local on-site IT people some ability to see what's happening with their virtual state and let them know if there's any issues or problems that may be starting to come to the surface. Secondly, from our perspective, because we provide support to these companies, it allows us to quickly see from a number of different reasons why there would be issues from this. It's useful from both sides.

The most valuable features would be that it gives us a breakdown on the ESX host and then the virtual machines themselves. Also, with some of the add-ons that they provide with vROps you can start to see if there are any issues with things like Exchange Infrastructure or SQL add-ons, etc. It's useful to get from the hardware perspective to the virtual machine down to the actual application that's running on those VMs themselves.

I do find this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. You could set vROps up in an hour and start to get some statistics from it. It's a very simple tool to use.

I would like to see improvement from the application layer. They have add-ons for SQL and Exchange. It would be nice to see some additional application support being developed further down the line.

We haven't seen any downtime. From our perspective, we haven't seen any issues with vROps in itself. It's simple to install. It's very easy to operate, so from our perspective, we would see it as a natural add-on to anything in terms of the virtual infrastructure.

Even if you're a small to medium size business and you have 50 virtual machines or if you're a large company with several thousand virtual machines, the solution works across the board for all.

Their technical support is outstanding. We would deal with VMware on a fairly regular basis for our customers, and possibly because a lot of the support is based in Ireland, we would have a fairly good relationship with them and they're very good at getting back to us very quickly.

The initial setup was very straightforward. From the web interface, you can literally just go straight into actually installing vROps with very little previous knowledge required to get it up and running.

I'm not sure about return on investment per se, but certainly in terms of being able to troubleshoot and identify issues quickly and in a timely manner which further down the line may have caused an issue with the production infrastructure. It's intuitive from that perspective, that it allows us to deal with issues before they become a problem and that could cause an issue down the road which would potentially impact on costs for our customer.

They compare reasonably well to alternative solutions. There are several products that are out there that would manage a virtual infrastructure for customers, but we perceive it to be the best of the existing range of products in that area.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We use it for analytics and metrics of the system. We've had it installed for about a year but have really been using it just within the last month. We're still discovering the power behind it and what it can do for us.

It has helped to reduce time to troubleshoot issues and improved quality of service. As far as showing us where the problems are, what's useful is that it gives us suggested solutions to fix them, so that's helpful.

The most valuable features are the health tree and the alerts that tell us what's going on from a glance at the dashboard.

It's definitely stable.

It's scalable. We can add the Management Packs which have helped us. For example, we've added UCS Management Packs and that's been helpful.

We used technical support on a problem we were having when we did an upgrade, and when we had an issue with the integration of Log Insight. Technical support was great.

Definitely utilize any training resources you can find so you understand the product's power and what it can do. Trying to figure it out on your own is not so easy.

It's mostly user-friendly and intuitive. They're improving their dashboards which makes it a lot easier. Sometimes, drilling down and trying to find the exact thing you're looking for can prove challenging at first, but it's getting better.

Regarding cost savings through higher capacity utilization, we haven't seen that so much, but we're running pretty lean. It even tells us that now, so we didn't have a lot of capacity over-use.

I think it's a good product. I'm sure there's room for improvement: integration with some of the other things. I can't really say it's the best product that I've ever seen, but it's doing what we need it to do right now.

The primary use case for our organization is forecasting and troubleshooting.

For our organization, the ability to go back historically and see the data that accumulates in there, that's really the best thing for us.

In addition, the solution has helped to reduce time to troubleshoot issues and improved the quality of service to users.

There are many valuable features. The top feature is historical trending analysis and future workload predictions. There's a workload forecaster/predictor model in there and it's very helpful for capacity planning.

I sure don't find the solution to be intuitive or user-friendly. It takes a lot of time to get familiar with the interface. You've got to spend a lot of time poking around there, it's not very user-friendly. There have been improvements over the versions but, even still, there is a pretty steep learning curve for the product, in my opinion. In the latest and greatest version, there has been quite a bit of a step up from the last version, as far as the user interface goes. They are making improvements. So that's positive.

It's solid, there's no problem with stability at all.

It seems to scale pretty largely. You do have to add some nodes to it to make it scale, but that's not that big of a deal, so it's pretty easy as far as scalability goes.

We have not needed to use technical support for this product.

We didn't have a previous solution. We needed something to fill that gap.

When selecting a vendor, what's important for us is whether or not they can fill the need. That's top of the list, and behind that would be support.

The initial setup was not complex at all, it was pretty straightforward. Just deploy.

Give it a chance. They have a demo, you can fire it up and actually use it in your environment. That's the best way. That's what everyone wants to see, the product with their data. That's pretty standard but they offer it, and that's the best way to look at it.

I rate the product at eight out of ten because of the need that it fills, it's very specific. I don't know of any other products that fill that need to the same extent.

Optimization of our virtual environment.

It helps as far as determining virtual machines that are not being properly utilized, if they're over-extended for resources such as CPU and memory. If not, we can then determine if that VM is still used and we can help better optimize our environment. It has helped us to reduce the amount of VM sprawl, VMs that are not necessarily used. We can then reclaim resources such as memory, CPU, and storage.

It has also helped us with troubleshooting key points of our environment. If there are issues that come up, we can dig down to a virtual machine and see if it's having issues and where those issues lie: if it needs more memory, CPU, or if there is a storage issue.

The most valuable feature is being able to optimize our environment so we can better manage it.

It's very easy to use and easy to learn. There's some learning curve, but it's a very small learning curve, something you can easily grasp. VMware has helped us with some educational tools and there are some online tools that you can use as well.

It's very stable. We haven't had any downtime.

I haven't tried it for scalability yet, but I think we're going to get there. From what I've read, it's pretty easy to scale out.

I have not had to use technical support yet. I have just been learning it on my own.

I would say our ROI is tens of thousands. I expect to reduce our footprint in the data center, so we've definitely reclaimed a lot of storage.

Compare the solutions and see which one is going to give you the best bang for your buck, the best functionality, and help your environment.

The most important criteria when working with a vendor are the

• service they provide
• ease of use of the product.

It's not perfect but it's a good solution. It was implemented before I joined the company. I wish I had known more about it, such as: How does it cost-compare to other solutions and how does it compare to solutions like Turbonomic; how does it compare in terms of functionality?

Our primary use is to go back and review CPU utilization over a time period, and to reclaim resources from VMs that have been deployed.

It has improved our organization by going back and looking at, say, how cores have been allocated. For instance, if we have a web system that is only licensed for two cores or four cores, going back and reviewing, seeing if somebody made a change to that system, and what date and time they made that change, is helpful.

The most valuable feature is being able to go back and pull resources from people who have over-allocated resources, on their request for service.

I also like being able to hand out the link to hit that web GUI. I can give it to my web guys, the security guys, and let them look at what their actual servers are doing.

I would like to see improvements in managing within a single cluster - managing DRS a lot better as far as utilization of each host goes, within a single cluster. That would make it comparable to VMTurbo (Turbonomic). That has that feature where you can also manage it within a single cluster, move workloads around to balance out the hosts.

It's very stable. I haven't had any issues whatsoever with it.

It's pretty scalable. For our environment, it's able to handle everything we have.

We had VMTurbo (Turbonomic) at first. Then vRealize Ops came out and we decide to give it a try. Since it was VMware product, it had more insight into the VMs. It was easy to upgrade to it. vROps was something we were able to roll in when we did our upgrades on contracts.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We use it as a monitoring tool for our environment, it alerts us on the VM performance, capacity utilization. We also use a bit of the trending tool that it has.

It automatically alerts us to issues so we can spend time on troubleshooting other things, or even in innovation. We're not having to dig as deep into the internal environment each day.

It's proactive and alerts us on things before they could potentially become a bigger problem. We don't have to be handling problems reactively. It lets us keep our eyes and ears on other things.

One of my biggest complaints is that I wish there was a better, consolidated dashboard on the landing page when you first log in. You have to fine tune it and customize it a bit more than I'd like. I don't know if it's hard for them to determine what people generally want to see on a home dashboard screen, but it could be improved.

It works.

I guess that the scalability is fine. We haven't run into any issues with it.

We have reached out to VMware tech support on particular issues with vROps. The support has been fine.

We had actually tried a few of the third-party VM monitoring solutions and we figured that since we already had the licensing and had paid for this product, we would start using it instead. We found that it actually accomplished what we needed out of a monitoring product.

We tried Veeam ONE and one other whose name I can't recall.

Among the most important criteria when selecting a vendor is money, that is definitely a big factor; but also their dependability or their reputation. We need to know that the product is going to do what we're looking for it to do. We're a small shop, so we have a lot of work to go around. We want the product to do what they say it will do.

A central dashboard for evaluating the health of our whole vCenter environment. We also have some Blue Medora plugins which extend that functionality to Cisco UCS and NetApp. Therefore, I can turn this dashboard over to my boss, my coworkers, or the whole team, and they can login and see the clusters at a glance without having to go login everywhere and grubble for statistics.

It does exactly what it's supposed to do. It gives all your coworkers, management, and users a dashboard that gives the current state of the entire vSphere ecosystem, which is very nice to have.

We have an Enterprise Plus license, so there's a long list of stuff that you get with the Enterprise Plus license, and I'd like to see a better integration of all the vRealize components. For example, I was trying to give vRealize Orchestrator a try, and I kept looking at the documentation for vRealize Automation, not knowing that they were completely different products. So, I installed vRealize Orchestrator. Then I went out and asked the expert session, and he talked me into installing vRealize Automation/vRealize Operations. It would be nice to have a 10,000 foot view of what vRealize actually means.

It's a very stable solution. It's very easy to install, too. We installed the appliance, gave it an IP address, fired it up, and were up and running in a couple hours.

I can't really comment on the scalability. We only have a few 100 VMs. We have two datacenters and three vCenter clusters, and it's doing a perfectly, good job of monitoring all that stuff.

I haven't called for tech support on this particular product. I do have issues with tech support, sometimes, asking for the entire download of configurations and logs, when I think I'm calling with a relatively simple question. It would be nice to have a more efficient way to get your ticket started towards escalation. A common problem with a lot of vendors.

The initial setup of operations was very simple. All I had to do was fire up the appliance, then give it the credentials of our stuff.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

vSphere and VMware, of course, is a foundation technology that's been great for dozens of years. What we look for is the advanced features, for example, we just adopted vSAN. It was great. I went from zero to half a petabyte in just a few hours after we got the server setup.

We also look for advice on more advanced products, which are not the base vSphere, by looking to our integrators and our buyers for help. They have been very effective at providing us the information that we need.

Being able to see everything that is happening in our infrastructure. There are a lot of problems that we didn't see, but now that we are using vROps we are able to act proactively. It's been a great help for us.

We have way fewer problems than we had before. We had a lot of VMs with low disk space, a lot of VMs that were quitting and the OS was crashing, and we couldn't see these issues. We had to wait for the end user to complain and then react. Now we are able to act before the problem happens.

I think the dev ops for Horizon need improvement.

We haven't had any kind of problems with the tool so far, it's been very stable.

We haven't had time to scale out yet, we have just implemented it.

I have not used technical support for this tool.

We used the previous version of vROps, it was under a different name that I don't remember. They ended support and the tool stopped functioning and we had nothing to monitor.

I was not involved, a partner of mine did it. But for him it was really easy, he didn't have any trouble, did it all by himself.

We didn't consider anything else because we have a big contract and a license for pretty much everything VMware offers, so it was just a matter of using the tools we bought.

When looking at vendors, cost is the number one factor but, of course, the product has to function.

I would definitely say give it a try. It's growing incrementally better, it's really user friendly, the user interface is easy to manage.