VMware Aria Operations Reviews

I know that it's got some capabilities that we're not using at this time, but the one that comes to mind is the ability for us to see how our VDI environment was performing for some classrooms, so that we knew what kind of resources we needed to allocate better to our VDI pools for our students to get good experience in that classroom.

It's taken the questioning out of what's going on. You're not pointing fingers anymore at software or hardware for no reason. You're actually able to dig into the troubleshooting and see the trends, to see the analysis overtime. You can say, "Well, this is when it started. Before that date, everything seemed fine." Or, "Well, this was when we had more students online, it looks like we need to reallocate some resources." It's taken a lot of the guesswork out. It's allowed us to be more proactive instead of reactive, which is nice.

From a personal perspective, I would like it made clearer what options are available in the suite that the customer is not using. I know that I'm not using all of the capabilities for our environment, so being able to know where I could improve, or gather more data from - easily, in the interface - would be a big help. Without than I just have to go through tech support or read more of the documentation, dig in to get it out. If the system itself actually said, "Here are other options" that were easily visible, that would help people actually use the power of the product.

We haven't had any problems with it. It's been a great product. When we need to go to the portal, the portal's there. If we need to pull the data out, it's there. We haven't had any issues accessing the system, keeping the system up and running, and setting the system up overall was really simple. I'd say it's a rock solid system.

It scaled out really well, the first time that we needed it to. We had vROps in our regular computer infrastructure, and then we needed to scale it out so that we could bring our VDI environment in. We did that very easily. We stood up another collection node, tied that into our VDI system, and then added that into the main cluster, and it was just straightforward and streamlined. It definitely scales out as needed.

We have not had to use tech support for vROps.

It was straightforward. It was easy. It's a powerful product. It gives us a lot of data. It took a little bit of time to get through some of it, to understand what features we needed to turn on, but that's more of a, "How do we tune it for our environment" issue and not a product-setup issue. Once you understand what you needed to do to set up the product, it's fairly straightforward. The documentation's fairly good, but the interface itself is also pretty self-explanatory.

We decided to use it because we're licensed for it. There wasn't a larger discussion around it.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are communication, availability, and the ability to really understand your needs as an organization. Can they put aside some of the business talk and really understand your organization and the solutions that you may need? Whether they're able to work with a higher education institution, in our case, was also important. Those are some of the biggest considerations for us.

There's no solution that's absolutely perfect. It's great for a trend analysis and a growth tool, if you want to do growth projections and things like that. Using it for what it's intended for, it's perfect. Does it give you all of the goodies that you might want in a monitoring software? No, but that's not really what it was designed.

If you have the license for it, install it. Put it together, even if it's in a test environment. Let it gather some data for a couple weeks, and then look at what data has been collected, what it says about your environment. You might be surprised by what it's telling you. You might be able to see some things that you can improve on, or it may just reinforce that your environment is tuned really well. Again, if you're licensed for it, I'd say install it and use it.

The ability to gain insight into what your computing and storage resources are doing. More towards:

• Forecasting
• Time left until you get to capacity
• Capacity planning
• Hardware life cycling, etc.

When you have that capability so you don't have to stick your finger in the air and try to figure out how much capacity you have left based on some best guess. Takes the guess work out of it. Creates a uniform process.

A lot of around having parts of dashboards that need to be refreshed, then you don't refresh the entire dashboard. There's a lot of stuff around usability and reporting.

Their reporting library needs to improve.

Read the documentation first before trying to deploy solution.

The stability of solution's good. There've been some improvements in the last couple of versions, but it's been overall pretty stable.

Scalability is good. We don't have a very large environment, but a large environment around 5,000 VMs and it scales pretty good.

As far as making sure that the environment is operational, they are good. But, a lot of it has to do with customer porting and getting useful data out of it. Every company's different as to what they want to pull out of vROps. So, I guess in 6.6, which we just upgraded to right before I came here, they've done a lot more in the way of having a greater database of reports available. So, that's good. I haven't really dived in too far into it yet.

We have not used a different solution before.

I did the implementation of it and did it on my own. It was pretty straight forward.

We didn't really look at anyone else.

We decided on it just because vROps really ties into vCenter. There really wasn't any additional consideration for anybody else.

The foundation of our virtual infrastructure is VMware.

You have to look at your current solution, then see if it provides you with what you want it to provide you. As long as VMware is staying on top of development and addressing customer's concerns, and it's doing what you want it to do. It doesn't make a lot of sense to go to another solution.

My big thing is, with VMware, if they have a native product that handles a function, that's the first place you should look as opposed to a third-party. When you have third-party vendors sprawl, it leads into a lot of unnecessary complications in your environment.

Expanded insight into the actual workload in the environment, so we can plan and coordinate resources accordingly.

It gave us a broader insight into what was really going on, in a more manageable fashion.

The next release is already looking pretty good. We're one behind, 6.5; 6.6 is already out. They're already addressing it: continued enhancements regarding usability, user interface.

Stability is good.

Scalability is good.

Very good. I've only used them once, though, just to expand the database. But I reached the right person, and they were knowledgeable.

Fairly straightforward, straightforward as any anything.

In-house.

We were always looking to be better at what we do, so it was this or outside third-party products. We had a decent rapport with VMware already, and didn't feel like we needed to look outside to other solutions.

It's an extension of our vSphere environment.

Look for support, accessibility, vendor's direction, and vision supporting the kind of things you need to do on an enterprise basis.

I'd use this product. I would definitely direct people this way.

The most valuable features are the custom dashboard, the management pack, reports, and policy.

vROps propose some scheduled reports on the resource consumption for each VM.

The policy and some few metrics are not very clear. More explanations would be great.

I have been using this product for 2 years.

I haven’t had any issues with stability.

I haven’t had any issues with scalability.

Technical support was excellent.

We used vCOPS, but vROps is the new version of vCOPS. vROPS has more scalability and more features.

The initial setup was very simple. Tuning it is harder.

It’s better to buy vROps as part of the vRealize Suite package or vCloud Suite.

We evaluated VMTurbo and Foglight.

The design is very important for flows and rules. It is better if you have good vSphere skills.

The reporting feature is most valuable to me for capacity management. For example, I can produce a report that tells me how much data store I have or how much compute I have. This is critical system information that tells me what’s going on.

Also, vROps can estimate how long the current environment will be sufficient before expansion is necessary. For example, vROps can indicate that the current setup will suffice for six more months or two more months. If it’s two more months, I know I need to start provisioning new resources now.

I can monitor performance with vROps as well. One thing I like is that I can group resources together, like tier-one apps and put them in a group. Then, I can easily monitor their performance. I couldn't do that in vCenter unless I created a folder.

Storage is very hard to keep track of, so the reporting has really benefitted us.

The troubleshooting features have also been very beneficial. When I see a problem, I can drill down to the network level to see what is happening on that machine.

I would like to see the automation perform a bit smoother. For example, if the data store usage is high, you must move the VMs on that data store to another data store. But, I have to program that common action myself. I would like to see common actions come pre-configured.

Also, I would like to see the login site reintegrated with vROps. It used to be a free portal, but now we have to pay for it.

We have not had any problems with stability. Although we did have one crash, it was easy to rebuild.

I did not use technical support, because the one error we had was an unusual appliance error.

We didn’t use any previous solutions because we have been using VMware and wanted the benefit of using a single vendor.

We didn't evaluate any other products.

I suggest using VMware with vROps.

vROps is integrated with vRealize and VMware solutions, which helps us to get the best operation-level understanding across the environment; we get all the utilization reports.

By using vROps, you can actually automate your tasks, integrate it with vRO workflows, and amazing results can come up.

We have also used the integrations with DRS using the Site Recovery Manager, which are quite good. If anything happens at one site, another site immediately takes over; you can do that using vROps.

We have improved our understanding in terms of writing PoCs, and providing concrete examples of how vROps and vRA can get into the environment.

It should have some connectors in terms of showcasing third-party vendor's functionalities. For example, if some third-party storage that has been connected to the environment, this solution should actually be used instead of some third-party monitoring solution. This solution should work across the environment on its own, instead of relying on some trigger-pointed third party location and then acting it on it.

It should have some more functionality in terms of getting some more third-party vendor application-level integration.

The majority of VMware products are very stable, and I'm very happy with vROps.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

For PoCs, we have set it up for a cluster of five servers to showcase the scalability of VMware products.

I have used technical support, because the VMware solutions guidelines are quite complete and amazing.

I previously used a lot of freeware monitoring tools like Cacti, Nagios, and Ganglia.
We felt that we needed to invest in paying for a solution because it's amazing. The integration with the VMware family is amazing.

Initial setup is 9/10; it was nearly flawless. Some minor configuration services were complex; how you connect it out across, or how you actually connect two different services.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

I mainly use vROps for dashboards in our main IT screens to monitor the environment and track information.

vROps' best feature is the easy integration with the environment.

In the next release, vROps should add integration with Apache OpenStack.

I've been using vROps for three to four years.

vROps is pretty stable.

vROps' technical support is pretty good.

vROps is easy to set up, deploy, and start using, with no need to spend time doing custom things.

I used an in-house team.

I completely recommend vROps to other users as it will make their lives much easier, and I would rate it nine out of ten.