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it_user746718 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Admin at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Video Review
Real User
Facilitates monitoring growth in our environment and where it's occurring

What is most valuable?

The ability to monitor our trending and growth in our environment. It gives us an idea of when we're running out of capacity, how quick our growth is occurring, where it's occurring.

Knowing our environment, being able to properly size and prepare for what the future holds.

What needs improvement?

Maybe to get a little bit more granular with storage and i-apps.

Also, some of the configuration settings are a little bit overwhelming to try and understand all of the implications and ramifications of what they do, so something not quite too intense to configure initially.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We have no problems with it.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

So far it's met our environment very well.

Buyer's Guide
VMware Aria Operations
March 2025
Learn what your peers think about VMware Aria Operations. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2025.
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How are customer service and support?

So far I've only had to use it one time and they were very helpful. We did have some storage issues with it. They resolved it within probably one or two phone calls, so I was very happy.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We didn't have very good visibility in our environment at all. The standard C# and web client just wasn't giving us the visibility we needed. vROps did that very well.

How was the initial setup?

Very straightforward.

What other advice do I have?

In choosing a vendor, obviously we have to look at their ability to answer all of our questions, make sure that their solution is in fact going to meet our needs and their tech support later on.

It was real simple, and once you get involved with it, it's just a matter of getting some hands on time and playing with it.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user730128 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager it at Tech elecon
Consultant
​It enables to me to do a deep dive and get insights into my infrastructure

What is most valuable?

I can get insights into my infrastructure. Along with the VMware software, it offers me infrastructure consolidation. And I can get a predictive input on what is going where and how my infrastructure is working.

How has it helped my organization?

It enables to me to do a deep dive and get insights into my infrastructure. When I have predictive input on what is going on in my datacenter, it saves me lots of time and lots of cost as well.

What needs improvement?

The dashboard which provides the information; if it could be like Salesforce, that kind of dashboard. Because what I end up having to do a lot of drill downs into each and every inventory to detect the issues. So if I could have all the issues on one dashboard and the rest in another one it would make my life easier.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used as vROps now for the last five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is absolutely stable. I haven't had any issues to date.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is also good because nowadays datacenters are not that simple. It's always scalable up and down and sideways.

How are customer service and technical support?

I have not used it to date.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No we did not. We went with it because it would give me the insight into the datacenter. It was the ultimate solution. And since we are using the VMware environment, it was a must have.

How was the initial setup?

It was straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

We did it ourselves.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Dell, EMC, and one other. Among the most important criteria in choosing a vendor are their technology roadmap as well as the productivity.

What other advice do I have?

When you look at the VMware infrastructure and software piece, they're more or less offering what vROps is offering you right now. It is comparable to any other third-party solution for the VMware. So it's always better to go with the best one.

To prepare for implementation, first and foremost you need to make sure that you inventory all the hardware and the stakes. And it's important that everything is on the same version. Multiple versions will make your life more complex because all the versions are in additional dashboards. It's not like a motherboard version and then a dashboard. Each version has different dashboards.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
VMware Aria Operations
March 2025
Learn what your peers think about VMware Aria Operations. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2025.
849,190 professionals have used our research since 2012.
it_user730398 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Manager at a energy/utilities company with 201-500 employees
Vendor
Gives us alerts and risks we might not have been aware of

What is most valuable?

Tells us about alerts and risk that we might not know about. The Help feature's probably the best, that's what we look at all the time. Go in and look, if something's red we're jumping on it.

How has it helped my organization?

We weren't aware of these alerts beforehand. So, if there was an application slow-down, latency, nobody knew if it was the server, the application or what. Now we can actually point to it and eliminate the server as the problem and look for the application as the issue.

What needs improvement?

I don't know if there's a way to e-mail alerts from it. We always have to go look into it. We have other monitoring solutions that will e-mail our whole team, or text them if there's a critical alert. I don't know if vRealize has that capability, because I know we're not getting alerts from it. We just go and look every morning.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Fabulous. We haven't had any issue with it yet

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I don't know if this is relevant. I guess it's scalable. For us, we haven't really needed to use scalability or it hasn't had to scale in our case, I guess.

How are customer service and technical support?

Maybe one of my systems guys has used technical support once. I think he called about an issue, but I have not.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

When we got here, there weren't any solutions monitoring our systems. We're a new team in the last couple years, and we knew we needed something to monitor what's going on. One of our vendors introduced us to this and it was a great tool. We actually went to a class all about vRealize. We ended up purchasing the solution a few months later, so it was great.

How was the initial setup?

I wasn't involved in this, the systems guy was.

I know our predecessors went through a whole rip and repair, new hardware as well as software, and they eliminated a lot of servers they didn't need. It's a big project. You have to go through and see what you have in the company and probably eliminate a lot.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Peer. We don't have them yet. We're doing a PoC with them, but the people that I've dealt with, their customer service is great.

What other advice do I have?

I would say customer service is important. It's one of the higher things in terms of priority. My systems guys would say the product itself is most important - what it does. But I think customer service is key. If you can't get service when you have a problem, it's not even worth having the product.

VMware has been solid. Stable. I say hands down, VMware. There are other solutions out there, but VMware works.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user730149 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Center Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Its reporting allows me to look into how everything is running in our environment although the overall UI could be better

What is most valuable?

The reporting:

  • Being able to look into how everything is running.
  • How our equipment is running.
  • What's going on in the overall environment.

How has it helped my organization?

Expressed to management when we're overseeing commitment and when we need more hardware. It helps us to determine that.

What needs improvement?

Easier management and it should be more user-friendly. When you look at it, and you see a lot of badges, you think, "Oh my god, that looks terrible." But it's really not, they just need to make it easier to read, a better UI.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It seems like a pretty stable product. We do have occasions where we have to reboot some of the appliances, but that's normal operations.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Seems to be fairly able to easily balance it out across datacenters and environments, although we've remained pretty static in terms of scaling.

How is customer service and technical support?

Tech support is always good. They always work well. There are Irish guys, those are our late night calls and I don't really want to be on those.

How was the initial setup?

I wasn't involved in the setup.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

For us, they have to be on our approved list to begin with. There are a lot of legal ramifications for us.

They always do a comparison of different tools, whether it's DMC or if it's for different solutions. We have two or three different vendors we can go to. Personally, I'd prefer to stay with the VMware stuff.

What other advice do I have?

VMware does a really good job of integrating all of their tools together, whereas you get some third parties where they kind of haphazardly integrate in, and they may or may not stay well-integrated. Or, they have difficulty getting integrated. You have to a lot API calls, WMI, and that kind of stuff.

Make sure initially you set it up properly. Don't try taking shortcuts.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user683244 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Virtualization Engineer at a wholesaler/distributor with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Helps with troubleshooting times by proving it's not a virtualization issue

What is most valuable?

The performance graphing, and being able to dig in if there are any issues with a particular VM alerting.

How has it helped my organization?

It helps with troubleshooting times, or at least proves to somebody it's not a virtualization issue. Shows what's going on inside the VMs and the environment as a whole.

I don't know if this really helps us with anything stability-wise. It can uncover some things that we may not have known, and it will bubble them up to the surface.

What needs improvement?

I definitely would like to see the development of dashboards not requiringe a PhD. There's so much data in there. There's so many knobs and things you can turn, that's all great and all, but just to get the basic data that I think is usable, and to build an easy to use dashboard, could be simplified. More of a drag and drop type model, without having to dig into things for correlations.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution itself has been very stable. Upgrades are easy, and it's been real stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We haven't scaled it since we deployed it from the initial sizing other than adding disc space to it, but to add extra collector nodes, or whatever. Simple.

How is customer service and technical support?

Not for vROps.

How was the initial setup?

I was not involved.

What other advice do I have?

It's not always the easiest product to work around in, and build (meaningful) dashboards. I think the UI has improved greatly over the years, but I think there's definitely room for improvements to make it overall easier to manage the product without having to be a specialist in the product.

Do your due diligence. Evaluate all of the products, and make sure what you're buying is going to meet your needs and criteria. Whatever that may be.

Things to look out for:

  • Definitely functionality
  • Ease of use
  • Scalability
  • Cost value


Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user509061 - PeerSpot reviewer
Virtualization Engineer at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees
Vendor
It gives us alerts on almost anything happening at the guest OS level. The documentation wasn't as intuitive as I thought it would be.

What is most valuable?

The alerts are the most valuable feature of the product. We run terminal servers and I like the granular ability of it getting into the guest OS. It gives us alerts for the hard drive, how is it on space, or pretty much anything happening at the guest level. It gives us a single pane of glass.

How has it helped my organization?

We use it a lot for capacity planning. Like I’ve mentioned, we do terminal servers. What we've been doing lately is giving it a metric that shows how many more VM's can we fit on that particular host. It's been great for that, and told us, with the research that's available, we can fit 10 more VMs on that host. From a capacity planning view, it's been great.

It has definitely helped us avoid outages with our internal servers. We've been having an issue with temporary profiles filing up the hard drives, and early on, before we really had the monitoring, that terminal server would just go down. Now at least we have something that says we have 10% hard drive space left on this particular machine; we get the alert in vROps, and we are able to get to it before it goes down.

It has not been helpful from a capacity planning point, but we have done a lot with the oversized reports, tuning some VMs. We were able to pull back vCPUs, memory and storage. We can reclaim some of that space that was being wasted on oversized machines. I guess that's capacity planning to some degree, but tuning is more what we use it for.

We also haven't really used the performance management features too much.

What needs improvement?

Even though the set up was kind of straightforward, getting the lay of the land was at times kind of confusing; I don't know if that's an indictment on me or the software. There was documentation readily available, it just wasn't as intuitive as I thought it would be, straight out the box.

Other than that, I don't really know about specific areas with room for improvement because at this point, we are just scratching the surface of what it does, because we are a smaller shop. We just had a merger, so at the top of the year, we're going to be onloading, onboarding a lot of DRs and scaling pretty quickly. Then I'll be able to really take it for a test drive.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability-wise, I haven't had any issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Because we are still a smaller shop, we haven't really had to scale it. Pretty soon, we probably will, because we are going to add some VMware Horizon for our VDI and NSX. I'm pretty sure we're going to have to scale it.

How are customer service and technical support?

I haven't used technical support for vROps.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We weren't previously using anything. Just having a central measurement point was light years ahead of trying to go into each one, or setting up different types of software that have monitoring. It was just easier doing it with vROps.

How was the initial setup?

Initial setup was actually pretty straightforward. I pretty much launched the VM, went into the web query and set it up from there; set up all the sensors, took you through a wizard. That was pretty much it. I didn't have to read about any customization.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options. We actually bought vSphere with vROps, so we never even looked at anything else.

What other advice do I have?

Definitely go with it, if you're looking for a centralized management point, as far as being able to monitor everything, without having to manually go in and get sizing reports for VMs. It even reports on networking issues.

I'm waiting to see when we go into VDI and NSX; I think we'll really open it up then with a lot more monitoring options.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor like VMware is pretty much support. We've had some vendors where it's not that the product’s bad, but when it does go south, the support hasn't been there. We definitely research, whether it's going online, looking at message boards, just kind of getting a feel for what other customers’ expectations are, if the vendor is meeting them or not. That's one of the things that we are really big on, the support perspective.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user509085 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Center Manager at WSSC (Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission)
Vendor
It tells me when I need to add more ESX hosts. And if we have oversubscribed any of the VMs.

Valuable Features

Capacity planning is the most valuable feature, as far as the storage is concerned, your servers are concerned, your ESX environment is concerned; when you need to add more ESX hosts.

It tells you if you have oversubscribed any of the VMs, if you're giving them more memory than they actually need, which is bad for the VM. You have to run that report and it shows you what the VM is actually using. If you have oversubscribed it, you can bring that number down; you can reduce the memory or the CPU.

Another good thing is when a customer asks you about an application running slow, you can go in and give them a snapshot that might show that the application is using only 20% of the memory, only 10% of the space; there's no issue with the resources as far as the server's concerned.

Room for Improvement

Clean up the dashboard; I need all the information right there, a high-level overview of everything. In the newer version, it's better. In the previous version, it wasn't.

Use of Solution

I'm in the process of getting the latest version deployed. Right now, it's just gathering all the data. I still have to learn the product. I am not fully aware of the features that have been added in version 6. We’ve already purchased and deployed it; we’re waiting on professional services to come in and help us.

Stability Issues

It has been stable

Scalability Issues

It offers flexibility; you can scale your environment any time.

It has not gotten slow at all. We have enough capacity on our ESX hosts to accommodate our workloads.

Customer Service and Technical Support

We use technical support a lot. It's good but they don't offer critical support for certain products. For example, we are using a product called VDP, vSphere Data Protection, to back up our VMs. We’re moving away from that; it's not reliable at all. It's like a free product.

Initial Setup

For our operations manager, initial setup is complex, so you can't just have someone who just deploys ESX hosts. You have to research it and then move forward. Or, it has to be configured properly upfront before you move forward.

Other Advice

If you're running a VM, it's necessary that you get the Operations Manager. You can use third-party tools, but the data won't be that accurate, as far as monitoring using a native tool versus a third party.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user509094 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Systems Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
It drills down on the performance metrics. Support's been good, even with our tough issues.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature has definitely been the ability to drill down on the performance metrics, to troubleshoot issues that arise.

What needs improvement?

Some of the areas that we have run into issues with are the upgrades, sometimes. We've had a few issues with that and had to work with support with that before.

I think managing the size, the sizing of the actually product itself can be improved. Several times, we had to go back and reevaluate how we had sized the environment.

The only other thing would be to make it easier for our end users to consume the data. Sometimes we've had to do a lot to try to customize dashboards; we spent a lot of time on that. If they develop ways to make that a little bit easier, so we can make it a little simpler for our users.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using vROps for about three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It has been consistently stable. As I’ve mentioned, the only issues we've had are some upgrades, really.

How are customer service and technical support?

The support has generally been pretty good with that. We've had some tough issues, so it's been pretty good. They managed to resolve them. We've got one that's in the queue right now, but they are working with us on it. It has to do with tagging.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Even though we became more virtualized, we were using traditional products such as HP OpenView and so on; we really weren't getting the full picture. We knew we needed something that was more hypervisor aware. It’s made a huge difference.

It really became mandatory as we started virtualizing things such as SQL Server and Oracle, because we really had spent a lot of time troubleshooting them.

How was the initial setup?

There's some complexity to the initial setup, to do it right. We did have an engagement with VMware, for them to actually install it, because we knew there was some complexity to it.

What other advice do I have?

It's a good solution. A warning: You probably need to make sure you can give it the proper amount of attention and time. You're just not going to throw it out there, hit the wizard and just walk away and say "Well, it's done." You're not going to be fair to the product or to yourself if you don't do that.

My personal requirements for a vendor are:

  • Obviously, integration with our current tools, with the hypervisor and so on, which helps VMware a lot.
  • Ease of maintenance, so far as updates and so on. I don't really want to spend a whole lot of time on that. Actually, vROps performs properly. We've had products before that just didn't perform very well. When that happens, the users just won't use it. It's very important.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free VMware Aria Operations Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: March 2025
Buyer's Guide
Download our free VMware Aria Operations Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.