VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Our primary use case of this solution is for the capacity planning and also for the monitoring.  It has helped us get a clear view of the infrastructure. We spoke to people from VMware and realized this was the right solution for us. 

It has helped our organization because now we have been able to reclaim about 40 percent of our infrastructure resources.

It has also helped us reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot issues. It helps us pinpoint the locations of the program which allows us to reduce the time it takes to figure out a solution. 

The dashboard is a valuable feature for us as well as the personalized reports. Our management doesn't really care about the incident, rather they care about the reporting so it's a good tool for us.

At first, it was not so user-friendly because there was so much information that we were lost. Now, we can use it very powerfully. After we played with it for a few months it became easier to use.

Stability is very good. 

It's very scalable. It has many capabilities. We only use around 30 or 40 percent of the tools, we still have to evolve with it. 

Their technical support is good. We haven't had too much use for them. 

We are public services, so we talk to all the companies that want to work with us. Sometimes we can have more than ten companies that we work with so we just talk to them and we consider different factors like budget and from there come up with the right solution. 

The initial setup is not complex because we had a team help us and they helped with the beginning of the installation. Around one hour after we could already start seeing what we could do with it.

We implemented in-house. 

I would rate this solution an eight because we don't know how to maximize all of the features. Once we do, maybe it'll go up to a nine.

I would advise someone looking into this or a similar solution to first analyze your infrastructure. Take a look at what you need and then directly focus on your objective. This way you can maximize the solution.

We're currently using it for reporting, mainly to see where we're over-committed or under-committed on resources. Right now we're still in the process of going through it on a daily basis, to see where it's going to help us improve things.

It gives us a new layer that we weren't using before to tell us when we don't have our resources in the right spot. This report or this monitor will tell us where we're over-committed, under-committed.

The most valuable feature is the fact that it does tell you about resources. The reports are great. They give you great insight into what's going on in your VMware environment

It's also very much user-friendly and intuitive.

If I had used it a little bit more I would have a bit more feedback on additional features, but right now I'm just trying to digest all that information. It's great at providing information but to the point where it can be overwhelming sometimes. The reports are a little bit too much if you don't set them right. You just keep getting report, after report, after report.

I haven't seen any issue with stability.

We had an older version that I didn't even know about. We've had a lot of turnover in our business on the network side in the last year or so. Somebody had installed it before, another network engineer, and we didn't even know it was there. We had a new network engineer come in and say, "Hey this is a great product, why don't we install it?" We came to find out we had it, but it was an older version.

We didn't invest in a new solution, we found it was part of our license already. It was something like, "Hey, we've got it, why aren't we using this kind of thing?"

We're way too early with it to consider ROI.

If you're not using it, certainly go out and get it. And if it's part of your licensing, certainly install it, because it really is a great product.

I need to use it more to see what I can do with it. There are additional features, which would require additional licenses, and we'd have to make the case for that. But it's certainly a great product.

We use vRealize to monitor the health and status of our VMs, all of our hosts, and anything of that nature within our vCenter environment.

It's time-saving because you don't have to go out and research how to rectify that issue. It's right there on the screen, you just follow it.

The solution has also helped improve quality of service to users and provide cost savings through higher capacity utilization. For instance, if there's an issue with a VM running real slow, vRealize will tell you why it's running slow. It will actually post it on the screen with an alert.

It tells us when there's an issue with a particular VM or host. It gives us a remediation in order to fix that problem. For example, if there's a shortage of memory or a shortage of CPU, things of that nature, it tells us how to correct that issue.

You can set up your dashboard and customize it for your environment.

It's user-friendly. It's spelled out in straight, common English. Whether you have an IT background or not, it gives you a link to take you to that particular issue. It shows you how to either increase the memory or increase the CPU.

We haven't had any stability issues with it yet.

We've never had to really scale out. We used a version that came with vCenter 6.5. We just upgraded from 6.0 to 6.5, and now there's another version of vRealize out there. So we're actually looking into that newer version at this point in time. But we're not nervous about it meeting our needs in five years' time.

We're a partner but we feel that they provide us the service that we would want, in general.

We did not have a previous solution. We incorporated vRealize when we deployed our vCenter environment.

Our most important criterion when selecting a vendor is to minimize downtime. As long as it works... It had to be really good for us to be a partner.

The initial setup was straightforward. We had someone from VMware helping set it up.

The ROI is that it saves us a lot of time, it helps us keep our customers up, and there is very little downtime.

It is a biased answer since we are a partner, but VMware is, to us, the top virtualization company. On a scale of one to ten, I give it a 12 because it has never failed us.

I use it for monitoring and DRS automation.

It gives me metrics that I can share with the rest of my team. I can say, "Look, this server is performing poorly." Even down into the Windows Servers, which are my primary bread and butter, it gives me visibility into situations such as when they're running out of storage and I need to expand the drives. It gives that top-level visibility to get in and fix a lot of problems.

It helps us provide better quality of service. I'm still not going to it first for troubleshooting. I'm going to it and discovering things that I need to troubleshoot.

The visibility of the whole stack, everything all in one plane. 

One thing I don't like is that all the scales are self-referencing. So when I get a "one," is that one out of ten, one out of a hundred? I don't know. So I can say these servers are performing ten times better than that server but I don't know where the scale goes.

Also, the first "20 percent" of it is user-friendly, that quick, "fix this." The first level is easy, but to really dig down and get more information out of it, it gets beyond the scope of time that I have to put into it. A lot of it is that it indicates: "And there is a problem," and not all of those problems are autofix. And that's where I get stuck: "Oh there's a problem." It doesn't always give me the information to go fix it.

It has been rock solid.

I'm a small fish, so I'm not going to outgrow it any time soon.

I had some issues getting things set up in the beginning. I don't know what I did differently but somewhere in there it just clicked and it worked.

Most of my infrastructure is Windows, but Hyper-V isn't in the same class as VMware. It still feels like the new kid on the block. I've literally been using VMware since '99, product one. And being here, 20 years later, it's just VMware, it's there, it's what you use.

I don't know how to move past where I am. I feel like I'm only scratching the top 20 percent.

When looking to work with a vendor, I look for one that is knowledgeable, that understands my problems and the way I work, and that will be there when I need help.

It moves our projects faster. We also use it for alarms.

It is user-friendly and intuitive. The mix of analytics and automatization is good.

It has reduced time, troubleshooting issues, and improved the quality of our service. When I need to increase CPUs and VMs, it speeds up operations management.

• It's a great tool for monitoring and tracking data of our entire environment.
• It projects costs and growth of VMs.
• The UI on the latest release is cool.

I would like to see more features, especially in the way of Flash to HTML5.

We have had no issues with stability.

We have been able to scale.

Technical support has been helpful when we contacted them.

It is simple: Deploy WVF file, put in an IP address, and go live.

We got vROps because it was integrated in the platform.

We will be implementing NSX next month.

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.

The ability to look into our environment to see what is going on is the most valuable feature. The ability of the dashboard to drill down and see all the way down to the process as to what is going on, In case if we have troubles.

We're just rolling it out now, so it hasn't really done much for us.

We have implemented it, probably, a month or two ago.

We work in a fairly big office. It cut out on us once, so we had to remove the connector and redeploy it. But, we didn't lose any data, so that was good.

I didn't choose this solution, it was pre-chosen for me. We're not investing in a new solution.

Whilst selecting a vendor, we look at how helpful their service help desks are. I've had experiences where they only do break/fix, so that's of no value to me. So, if we're trying to deploy another solution then I look for factors such as completeness of their solution and timeliness of their updates.

We have our own team which is quite knowledgeable. So, I'll be probably upgrading to the latest version soon.

This solution seems to be good. I've used vCOPS in the past, so it's certainly better than that.

Before investing in this product, you should talk to a lot of people and get a demo.

It gives you really good insight into what's going on with the overall environment, with VMs, and we can see what's going on with the storage, etc.

I'm able to find problems quicker than before. And when there are issues with the operating system on the guest, or even the application on the guest OS, if they believe that it's the host or the back end, I can show them where the problem really lies, that it's not the back end. I've used that a couple of times.

Also, there's some capacity planning and stuff like that built in. That's another issue, where people have asked for more resources and I've been able to show them that they aren't using the resources that we're giving them.

We're using the standard version, not the advanced. I think some of the features that I'm interested in are in the advanced and we just haven't gone to that yet.

I'd like to be able to do more customization. With the standard, I have to use out-of-the-box reports, dashboards, etc. With advanced, you can do more customization.

I haven't had any issues with it. We've upgraded it one time and that went very well.

We're not really growing out too much right now. I haven't really encountered the scalability issue yet, but I'm assuming that would work well too.

For vROps I have not used it. I haven't had to call them for anything. Again, everything has been running great, I haven't had any problem with it. We obviously call VMware for other issues but not for vROps.

The biggest issue that I have is that if it's not an urgent issue I don't get contacted back very quickly. So a lot of times, we'll end up solving issues ourselves, when they're not critical "down, down" issues. That is my big issue with VM support. Otherwise, they are giving us great support and help us out a lot.

We just weren't getting enough information just from the basic charts and things like that. I looked into other options and vROps just seemed like the best fit for us.

I like to stick with companies that work very closely with me, or even products that are owned by VMware because then I feel that the synchronization between the main VMware products and those other items works well. I don't have any issues with them.

I helped, but I was not the main person.

Complex. I think it takes a lot of insight into the product. You have to spend a lot of time preparing for it. And if you do that, then you'll see that things go pretty seamlessly.

When looking at vendors, support is important. We like to have good support. And then I would say ease of setup and ease of use. The more complex, the less interested we are.

Regarding vROps I would say to a colleague, "Totally do it." I think it would benefit your organization. You get a lot of good insight into what's going on very quickly and the cost of vROps is totally worth it.