VMware Aria Operations Reviews

I think for me the most valuable feature is really capacity planning; knowing that I'm using our resources efficiently. We're going through a large hyperconversion project here and we really want to make sure that we are sized appropriately, so that we can build our next solution correctly. You know, save money and utilize hard work the most efficient way.

It has helped speed up performance. It's helped us size our environment appropriately, so that the servers that need the resources can get them. So we're not over-subscribing some and under-subscribing others.

I think we've used it to diagnose some things that might have caused trouble down the road, so it's helped us from there.

We haven't really looked at it from the storage standpoint, we're kind of storage strapped at the moment. As we go into hyperconversion, we're actually really going to start to utilize the tool to come up with a better sizing for that.

It's helped me and the IT department get a better idea of what's going on in the environment. Health checks make sure everything is running the most efficient way possible. It helps us plan for growth, to make sure we're getting the best return for our investment in the underlying hardware.

It’s really stable; haven't had any issues with it.

We're not a gigantic organization so, for us, there's no problem with scalability.

I’ve used technical support some; just to start to get to learn it and get it installed. It's an ongoing learning process for me. It's good. I think it's one of those things you have to take the time and learn it. We're gradually learning it over time.

We decided to invest in this solution because we were so heavily invested in virtualization, and just simply monitoring the virtual machines wasn't enough. We needed a full picture of the environment from the host all the way up through. It gives us a great complete picture.

We did not look at any other vendors at the time. This is the only one we looked at.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was very easy, straightforward to install, get running and start getting data.

I like that it's a single pane of glass with a single vendor, with a supportive VMware. It's really easy; it plugs in easy. There’s less to manage because it's all done through the center.

Support is an important criteria for us when selecting a vendor, as well as stability. That's why we like to partner with VMware, because the support is excellent and the stability is second to none.

A lot of my rating is a reflection of me not knowing the product. As I learn more and more, it becomes more valuable to me. I'd say it's not an everyday staple in our environment now, but it's becoming more and more important.

We use it to monitor performance.

It's been helpful in troubleshooting certain CPU and memory issues. In terms of uptime, it helps us to keep a better eye on our infrastructure, to be proactive before an outage occurs.

I can go back a little bit, a week or a month, look at the history to troubleshoot.

It's also intuitive and user-friendly.

It's pretty user-friendly, but it could always be better as far as the interface goes, clicking around, and having to go back to different screens. The navigation could be better.

The stability has been pretty good.

I have not had to use the technical support.

We used SCOM, Microsoft's Operations Manager, and we still use it in a supplemental way. vROps is a little easier to use, it's easier to get the information.

Figure out what you need, what your requirements are, and see if the product meets that.

Being able to pinpoint performance issues, or just general troubleshooting for the environment, and consolidating everything into one central pane of glass.

We can find problems before they start becoming bigger issues. We have all the info in one area. It's already finding all kind of things we need to do to fix the issues.

Maybe more dashboards or an easier configuration of the dashboards,

Recommendation to anyone implementing and deploying this solution: Review the sizing guidelines, then deploy from that using the best practice guides provided.

Stability is good.

The scalability, for what we have, it's pretty good so far.

For vROps, they are usually pretty good. We usually reach the right person and they are knowledgeable.

We were just using vSphere like built-in monitor before vROps.

We got vROps because we didn't have anything to consolidate all the stats, etc.

When we researched a new solution, these were the features most important to us:

• The interface
• Ease of upgrades
• The value that it adds.

We had an existing setup, but we have upgraded it. The latest version upgrades have been pretty straightforward. Some of the earlier upgrades were a bit more involved.

We did the upgrades.

I don't know if we really considered anything else. I think the first choice was vROps.

If you are considering vROps, do some demos of vROps before considering something else, just because the latest versions are pretty good.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Support
• Ease of use
• Ease of upgrade setup
• Actual value from the actual product.

Being able to get detailed analysis on different applications.

We are able to do additional detailed reports for our customers, in terms of certain spikes in the environment, different loads, etc.

Possibly additional automation.

It's pretty good. 

It's good.

We weren't using anything previously, but we're always looking at new technology, just to see if it might benefit the customer.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward.

Before implementation, review best practice guides. There are a lot of them out there. It will make the process easier.

Hyper-V and Acropolis.

We went with VMware's vROps because the customer selected it.

I would definitely recommend this solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: simplicity, functionality, but mainly simplicity. 

The most valuable feature must be positive planning and the way you can see real-time weekly updates, these are the plus points of this solution. If there is any kind of business constraint going on and the users of the stakeholders are asking for updates such as why it is down, or why is the CPU percentage low or can we have a historical trend., then all of this information you can easily get from the solution. So, we mainly use this solution for getting this data and putting it on paper, such as what is the particular time that something happened or this time the server went down, etc. Hence, it can give you a brief idea of the microscopic data.

There is scope to improve the computing aspect.

It is one of the best stable solutions out there. I have used vCOps prior to vROps so I cannot judge as to how the stability was before and how it is now.

We have Platinum Support so everything is in place, i.e., not only for vROps but for all the solutions that they provide, so their technical support is the best. The team is knowledgeable.

An engineer came to us from their end to help us to install and deploy the solution for us; it was a piece of cake for us.

I will definitely recommend vROps to others.

• It is about being able to keep tabs on your VMware environment as a whole, instead of having to log into your vCenter all day and keeping tabs.
• It's about being able to get alerts for whatever goes wrong with your systems, and what helps in getting around in your vCenter environment.

We have use it to maintain our VMware infrastructure, and for that, it seems to be good.

What we can do is product chain monitoring. We can keep tabs on a certain app which is running. Whatever is wrong just shows up as red, instead of green, then when we know who to talk to. It's an easier way of doing things than logging into vCenter for every little problem, and trying to find out what's wrong.

Maybe a little more flexible in terms of being able to combine monitoring results with results from other products without having to buy stuff from Blue Medora. It used to be that way in the past, but they gave it all to Blue Medora, and they charged everything, "with a fork".

It seems okay. Not much to complain about, since it seems stable enough. We have had a few problems with the stability in the past, when we tried to make it a cluster, but as long as you don't do something like that it works.

The issues we did have were general database corruption issues, and problems getting it to do whatever it was suppose to do. Also, problems getting settings changed, which kept making them stick.

This is not an issue for us yet. We don't have enough VMs to go outside the scaling properties of vROps.

We have used the basic VMware support, and it seems alright.

If you want to monitor something else, besides VMware, use something else. Use it for monitoring VMware, nothing else.

What's valuable to us is that we can create virtual routers and NICs. We setup multiple vROps for virtual routers within our Ericson cluster, as well as multiple NICs. Also, scalability is very good and deployment was relatively easy using templates.

Additionally, deploying vROps allowed us to implement a solution in software that we were unable to achieve using the physical devices.

It was also an advantage that we could stay with one platform and one vendor.

We really benefited by using templates, which made deployment much quicker.

Integration with OpenStack would be a very useful improvement.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

vROps can scale quickly and easily. We have around 20-30 hosts running really large applications.

We used technical support quite a lot. They worked hard to find solutions to our problems and helped us with product updates. But, I think they need to improve.

We were using VMware for a long time, so we just continued with their products.

If you scale out the environment and want to use vROps, this is a tool you should look at.

• Performance bottlenecks and the entire IT infrastructure, on the storage side and the virtualization side. That helps us out a lot.

We are partners of a lot of vendors out there. We also do management services. That helps a lot of our end customers resolve any of their bottlenecks on the storage side or virtualization side or the VM specifically. So that helps us out.

At my previous job, not at this location, vROps helped avoid outages and shorten outage times. It clearly projected what the growth pattern looks like on a specific data store. So it really helped us. If we didn't have that report from vROps, the data store would have probably filled up and would probably have gone down; that would have been a lot more impactful. Luckily, vROps did trigger that alert for us. Then, we were able to act on it. It helped us out in avoiding a big outage, I would say.

It does a really good job of capacity management, as well, because we have automatic reports that we trigger every week. We compare it with the previous week. It does a good job of capturing the capacity management metrics.

The performance management features have also helped. We have taken the recommendations from vROps. We have seen performance go up. Definitely, it helped.

I've heard certain improvement ideas from certain customers. There are certain issues with capturing the information on vSphere application metrics. vROps doesn't clearly capture those metrics. That is what I heard. I still have to play with it. I've not gotten a chance to play with that piece of it, but I've heard from customers about it. If at all, if they could improve that on vROps side, that would be helpful.

It's perfectly stable.

It's scalable. We have done a lot of upgrades and we didn't have any issues moving them around onto a different server as well; no issues.

We have used a lot of technical support for vROps. We have had a lot of custom-built tabs for our vROps environment. Technical support was awesome. We are business critical customers. We are on the BCS support. It's awesome.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. It wasn't a big deal. Just getting it installed, pointing vCenter to it and then monitoring and capturing all the information. It was pretty straightforward. It didn't take us that long.

We have an ELA with VMware, and vROps is part of the ELA.

We were not looking at other vendors to provide a similar solution.

VMware is one of our big partners. That's the reason we go with them.

Just go get it.

I've been using it for a long time. I know the ins and outs about it. I've been happy with it because there's no other solution which can really do end-to-end, that kind of stuff. That's the reason I'm in. This is the only product that's out there that can really do end-to-end monitoring, management, and at the same time, capacity management. That's the simple reason for my perfect rating.