VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We use it to help us optimize our environment and make better use of our resources.

We're new to it, so we're just learning the early steps of how to use the product and how to integrate it into what we do now.

I am here, at VMworld 2018, to learn about the new release, and I'm encouraged with what I'm seeing. Some of the stuff does make it a little easier on some of the other people who would be looking at it, such as managers. We will be able to build some dashboards that show them what they would like to see, that show the cost savings. We want to see the other stuff, where we're saving our resources more.

So far, the scalability has been working out. There's a cost involved in scalability though because you have to purchase the license for each of your hosts to go with it. Then, depending on what we want to do from here, there are more costs involved. If we want to look at the vRA automating stuff, there's another cost involved with that product. So we're in something of an evaluation phase.

We haven't used much technical support yet. We've had a few problems, but I was able to overcome most of them myself, with the KB articles and the like.

We didn't have a previous solution. We purchased it when we got an Enterprise Agreement with VMware. We had to buy some more stuff and this is one of the things we bought.

The initial setup was fairly easy. It's an appliance, so you just build it up and then turn it on.

There is a learning curve because it's a complex program. There is a lot to consume in terms of the metrics inside of it. That's the biggest hurdle: trying to understand all the places to go look.

We do have a competing solution in now. We have Turbonomic. We're looking at it at the same time.

Attend a training class first, before your boss hands it to you and says, "go."

We're new to it, so it's hard for me to rate it well at this time. In the early days, I'd say it's about a seven out of ten. I wouldn't give it anything higher than that until I get more time to play with the knobs and turn the switches and see how it works. It was easy to install, there's a lot of good documentation, and I'm finding a lot of good free training out there, since I'm constrained on purchasing training this year. This is my training budget for this year, the attending of the VMworld 2018 conference.

I love VMworld. I think it's very useful. That's why I'm here, to look at the vROps. I also came to talk to some experts about SQL questions I have, and some other clustering questions as we move forward with some projects. I have found the conference to be very useful this year.

We use it to monitor our entire infrastructure, scaling across everything compute and our Horizon implementation.

The benefit is that we are able to monitor the small things, catch them at the beginning, before they become large things.

The most valuable feature is the metrics, the ability to deep-dive into any issue we may be having from a virtual machine to a data store. Latency is a big thing - it's able to give us that metric pretty swiftly. And with our custom dashboards, it's all readily available.

Going from 6.5.1 to 6.6.1, the UI has increased tremendously. It's user-friendly.

I would like to see more functionality. I would also like to see better support, because the pack that we use, the Horizon, is an additional pack. It's not currently actually built by VMware, it's built by a separate company. When they merge the two, there will be better support in the future.

The stability is great.

The scalability is great. With vRealize Operations Manager, we are able to create remote collection nodes if we feel that it's too intensive for the current deployment. The remote collection nodes allow us to collect more metrics from other sources.

We are currently measuring this solution against other products. We have several different monitoring tools in the environment. We are trying to whittle it down.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor for our company is cost.

We mostly use it for monitoring and making sure that we have all of our systems right-sized. We also use it for digging in, looking at things whenever we have issues, like storage issues, etc. We don't really use it for monitoring network flows.

We're able to monitor a set of hosts all at one time. We can go from monitoring one thing to everything. We get a holistic overview of what's going on.

It gives us a single pane of glass to look at whenever we're trying to troubleshoot issues, so we can go to one place as opposed to multiple places.

One of the things that we've been limited on is that it only monitors one cluster at a time. We're spread out all across the US. It would be nice to monitor multiple clusters from one instance. That would be the main thing we'd like to see.

It seems like it's very stable. No problems.

The scalability is very good.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor is that their product works.

I use vRealize Operations to do integrations with Log Insight, vSAN, NSX, and vCloud Director (vCD).

I have used it to pull recommendations for our data center or cluster and load balancer, then apply them.

It provides variety of management packs. It also supports the latest version of vCD, NSX, and vSAN.

I have found the recommendation tool extremely helpful.

It provides optimization recommendations for data centers, cluster workload migrations, and vSAN.

They should improve the vROps Federation Management Pack, so each customer can create a single pane of glass for multiple sites of vROps.

I did not encounter issues with scalability.

I used GroundWork before switching to vRealize Operations. I had a bad experience with GroundWork's support while doing software integration with its latest version.

vRealize Operations has proved to be a cost effective solution for our big environment.

I checked the integration capability with tools like JIRA and ServiceNow.

I recommend vRealize Operations for bigger work environments. It is a very helpful tool compared to others.

It integrates extremely well with the rest of our products. It ties in with everything that we need to do. It ensures everything that we need to see.

We are solely a VMware house.

It's freed up a lot of our time because we don't have to manually build all of the information that it ensures. For example, with scalability, there are parts in the world which we are going to hold, and there parts of the world which we going to call and it provides you all that information. Therefore, I know exactly where I need to add X, and where I need to take away Y, etc.

Support.

Consolidate features: It's got so many features. I don't think that I want another one in there. It makes it just too hard to use if they added anything else into the solution.

It's a fairly stable product. Other than setup difficulties we've never had any issues with it when it's running its operation.

We don't really scale it at all, because we operate a public cloud. We are a cloud service provider. We have got five or six different deployments all over the world. They all operate individually, so we don't really scale one much.

It's not very good, because it's such a difficult product. I think some of their guys don't even know how use a lot of it because they have to hold a week training for us, so they must have to go through one, two, or three months worth of training just to even know how to use it.

The last technical support couldn't handle our questions any better. I never got really an answer for our last questions and raised it to our Account Manager to get one of the ACs to do it and that was two months ago. I'm still waiting on the answers to the questions.

Another guy and I pretty much set up the solution over here in North America. We have other guys in the UK who set it up there.

The install is extremely easy. The VMware products are designed pretty well to do installs. The actual configuration to ensure you show what you need to show; that's where the difficulties lie.

If you are looking to implement this solution, definitely go to your training course. It's a week long, that's how difficult it is! They've got vSphere, which is VMware's core product and that's a week course. This is just a tiny section compared to that and it's also a week. It just shows you how complex the solution is. You have to do the training. You just have to.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• From my perspective as a tech guy, it's always about support. You need good support from the people that you get it from. It needs to meet all of your functionality.
• You've got your functionality requirements. You need to make sure it meets all of those.
• From the business side of it, price is always a thing. You have to get it signed off by the big boss, but because we are a VMware Partner, it's included in our licensing fees. We don't have to pay a penny for it.

For me, it's the dashboard. When you first go into the application, just getting that quick overview of what's going on and being able to take action without having to dig in and look at things.

For myself, it saves me a lot of time. I'm busy doing several different things so having that quick view into the environment saves a lot of time in my day. It also of streamlines the process so I can drill down and see exactly what's going on. Helps us resolve problems before they occur or more quickly resolve problems.

For what I use it for I can't think of any improvements needed. Except, perhaps, it's a little slow to load when you go in to it. It could be a little bit quicker to drill into.

Stability is great. Never had a problem with it.

Scalability is great as well. Haven't had any issues.

I haven't used it.

No.

But we knew we needed it because we needed to get a better picture of our environment and what was going on, to troubleshoot. We don't have the staff to do it so we try to utilize technology where we can to save on having to hire additional staff.

It was really easy to set up.I set it up myself.

Pricing is good for us. We're non-profit so we get a break on that.

I really look for support, it is extremely important to me. So if there is an issue, how soon are they going to respond? Also, local partners, that's important too. So a strong partner with a strong organization behind them.

Also, look for what's important to you. For us it was the single pane of glass, not another bolt-on vendor to try to have a view into it. It is nice having everything all live right there inside the center.

In terms of preparing for implementation, I didn't think it was too difficult. I don't know if there's a lot of preparation you need to. Maybe just some clean up work on the front end. It's more after it's implemented that you have things to do.

• Alerts
• The insight as to what is going on in the environment.

If there is something wrong with a particular VM, we can see what's going on. It alerts on disk space, memory, etc. to what is going on. Then we also use it for our Horizon View environment. It gives us more details which we can't get on the dashboard from the canned Horizon View Administration consult.

It's mostly from the administrative side for us. It has helped us stay on top of issues in our environment, less downtime, etc.

It is somewhat hard to manage the alerts. Granted, that is probably training on my side. But I would like to actually do more custom alerts for our environment. I know you can do it. It is just hard to intuitively figure it out. You've got to dig into it. It would be nice for VMware to simplify it.

Last six to 12 months.

I haven't had any issues with it.

It's been fine.

We haven't used it.

I was not involved with the initial setup for this organization, but I have set it up in other organizations.

It is really easy to set up. You just deploy the OVA, and it's done. Give them an IP address, point it at your environment, and you're good.

I really like the new version. Better interface.

If you are looking at the solution, I say, "Go for it." It has been good for us.

The most valuable features would be the insight into our operating environment. It lets us see what's going on with our virtual infrastructure, with our virtual machines, with our hardware, with everything.

It makes it easier to manage. It streamlines our operations. We don't have to go digging around a dozen different places to find out performance statistics or performance information. It allows us to more easily rightsize virtual machines.

It never goes down.

Easily scalable.

I haven't used technical support for this solution. I do have a contact within the dealer who is knowledgeable. We just haven't had any issues with it.

No, we didn't really have one beforehand. We just needed performance statistics, to quantify how our VMs are operating, and vROps is a logical solution for that.

It was easy. It was simple. It took an hour to install one of our virtual machines, tied into our vCenter server, and that's it. It's a straightforward product. It's really easy to use.

We upgraded and that was really easy, too. Just a couple of clicks and it goes through.

There weren't any. There's nobody else that can do what it does.

In terms of criteria when selecting a vendor the important criteria are cost, reliability, and reputation. They're the top three. Perhaps community feedback plays a role as well.