VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We initially rolled vROps out for environment health and for the ability to look at the abilities to stabilize the environment. We've actually been able to take advantage of it also with resource reclamation which was a big selling point for leadership. 

The sandbox is a good example of how this product has improved my organization. We had our development team asking for more resources. With vROps, we were able to go in and show them specifically that they weren't consuming these resources. We needed to be able to take these back but during peak times the resources can be given back automatically by the system, in a proactive manner without causing any kind of downtime or any kind of an issue with loss of work.

The resource reclamation is the most valuable feature. We've had issues with our sandbox environment, and reclaiming these resources. Since, it's become a major selling factor in expanding the environment and expanding the client base for vROps.

I have found this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. Every version that has come out has been better than the last. I am extremely happy with the product.

So far, we've managed to build what we were missing, and that's what one of the nice features with our product. The flexibility with it that was missing in previous versions, is now the ability to go in and define the base variables of our environment so that we can tweak it as we need to, take back what we need to, and give what we need to. 

With our environment right now, stability is the one sticking point. There hasn't been a great deal of handholding in between the different versions, so we've run into problems with there being what I would call "more than just the average change between versions" and it's caused a loss of data for us in the past. 

This solution is most definitely scalable. We've already gone back to the drawing board and specifically designed it from the ground up to be scalable with the size of our environment moving forward.

Technical support has also been a pain point for us. We've had mixed support issues in the past with vROps on stability issues with downtime. Overall, it's gotten better but there still could be some improvement on the GSS side with that.

Having too many monitoring tools is a typical IT problem and the advantage with this solution was that this was giving us the ability not only to check the health of the environment and give operations team a heads up dashboard in order to see the health of the environment, but also have the options for resource reclamation which was a major selling point.

One of the issues that we've had in between the versions is that the set up for it has gotten a little bit more difficult. It doesn't always tell you right away that you'll need to do something different with this version versus a past version which has become an issue. It's now something that we're aware of. From what I've been hearing today, the new setup should be relatively simple in comparison.

We implemented this completely from the ground up, all the way back to one of the older versions. We've used it for the last several years, going through and learning each new version of the product. 

We've had a demonstrable increase in value directly related to the actions of the product.

We also looked at VMTurbo and there were a few other ones for resource reclamation but as soon as we found out that vROps in the newer versions was able to be a little bit more robust, it was the clear selling point.

I would rate this solution an eight. 

We are branching into NSX. This solution was purchased with NSX to give us more insight into our environment. We're looking to do a lot more microsegmentation and figure out what the workflows are or what the data flow is between applications and between hardware so that we can minimize bottlenecks, get a better idea of performance issues, and be able to really lock down what we're doing for security. We're also looking to make sure that our microsegmentation is set up correctly and that we don't have data leakage in places that we don't want.

The most valuable feature would be the ability to plug into the data feeds that we have and pull information from physical hardware as well as the virtual layer. The best feature is the visualization of what's going on, so we can take a very quick look and see if there are any issues that stand out.

In terms of being intuitive and user-friendly, this solution is getting better. When we first installed it they had upgraded a few times, and just the overall layout is better and easier to manage. It's easy to learn, so once you get in there and start looking around, it is fairly intuitive to figure out what you want to do.

As they're able to add in more vendors for hardware to be able to pull information from different firewalls, switches, or other vendors, I would like to see where we can get more of a complete view of what's going on in the network. That would make this solution better.

It's a virtual appliance and it's been rock solid since we installed it. We've had no issues with stability.

We don't have a huge network and a huge environment, so I don't see us having to grow it too much in the future. If we do, I don't think it will be a problem.

Technical support has been good so far. All of our VMware support has been really good and it's easy to get our questions answered. We have a technical account manager as well through VMware which helps. If we need first line support for things and additional help, he will get answers for us faster. It's been great.

We weren't previously using another solution. Other than just general NetFlow products, nothing really shows the visualization of the network flow like what we're seeing with Network Insight.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. There were instructions for it that were easy to follow. There's video tutorials and things like that online, so it was fairly easy to set up. We didn't need any support to get it installed.

We haven't really seen ROI yet. We haven't been using it that long and we're still building out our NSX environment. The visualization of what we're doing and what it provides is a good place to go and see so we don't have to use multiple tools. It consolidates multiple things into one so that makes my staff and the network team's job easier.

I have seen the demos and what it can provide is fantastic. It more than makes it worth it to use the product. I would rate it between a nine to ten.

Our primary use case is to make sure we're getting the best value out of our on-prem hardware in terms of matching against vendor specifications to actual operation and performance.

This solution has improved my organization because we have it mainly based on our production units. We'll have about 400 guests running through it, across around 40 nodes and it just helps us to lower balance, see where the pinch points are and really keep us 24/7.

The most valuable feature is the insight into how our infrastructure is actually working and the kind of performance that when users say there is an issue, it gives some insight into finding out what's going wrong with it. It's because we have it mainly based on our production units.

I absolutely think this solution is intuitive and user-friendly. My team spun it up, we've got it through our ELA agreement and it was up and working in a matter of hours.

I would like to see them get a holistic view of the organization, not just focusing on the server and the state that it's running on but to widen that out from the end user all the way through. It's a key critical part but actually, it needs to bring outside of that, then to the networking elements and the inter-dependencies that are in hospital solutions.

This solution is a hundred percent reliable. I suppose it's only as reliable as our own infrastructure that it sits on but it is absolutely stable. We've had no outages from spinning this up and it's monitoring our upstate daily.

Scalability is a little bit unknown as we move into the cloud technologies because this is all about on-prem. From what I am seeing around the show today it's the next generation if it's got a place to help us with our infrastructure. 

Their technical support is absolutely fantastic. They are either a click away or a phone call away and are really responsive.

We were using the technology and it was just burning up too much physical resource, so having this gives that reassurance factor that we can size things appropriately. Investing was a very straightforward process.

The initial setup was extremely straightforward; download the product, install the product, put a key on it, add the host to it. Absolutely very straightforward.

We are not particularly measuring ROI but in terms of the level of investment that we've made into our infrastructure, we've probably got an extra 12 to 18 months worth out of what we purchased three years ago.

We didn't look into other options. We very much get to where VMware house is part of our strategy, it was just a natural fit into our infrastructure.

I would rate this solution a seven or an eight. We are starting to see the benefits and we are starting to use its recommendations and starting to tweak it down. We still need somebody to look at this data, analyze it, and make decisions. Once some of the automation orchestration goes in, then it will move up again up to a nine or something like that.

Optimization and reclamation.

It's been very successful. Before, we didn't know, as an organization, where some of the VMs or platforms were. Now, it's unified our organization to troubleshoot.

So far, since we upgraded the product, over the course of a quarter, I've reclaimed in our team, over 2,500 CPUs. That's a significant amount of CPUs, and we're still continuing. And using the DRS automation field and other features, we're seeing a lot of success as far as load-balancing, and we can also forecast some of the trends that we have in our organizations with the product.

Regarding the time to troubleshoot issues, on average, a NOC user or operations could spend at least 15 minutes just finding that VM or the issue. The solution is saving an average user, like myself as a consumer, about 40 percent. We have the issue, we have the problem. Before, we were spending an additional 40 percent just trying to find where the issue was.

As far as cost savings go, we're seeing significant growth as an organization, and we're also seeing the cost savings in the reclamation. Right now, we're being challenged regarding our growth, and we have to find capacity, and using the product sufficed a lot to not (have to) purchase other new products.

Gives a glass pane for our organization, it makes it very simple to give operations a simplified go-to product to find a VM, for example.

It's absolutely very intuitive. For example, we have a big environment. A simple case, for example, is, we get a request when there's an issue with a virtual machine, or the organization is (asking), "Where does that machine live? Does it live in which data center?" Now, they just plug it in on the search field and it gives them all the simple information: data center, the host, location.

One way the solution could be improved, in my opinion: management packs, more native management packs with API.

Compared to other versions, this version has by far, in my opinion, exceeded expectations.

Scalability is very simple and very efficient, as a product.

Technical support is always better every year, and so far it's actually all the new features that VMware has for technical support. One of the features is that it's very simple to just plug in your issue and you get a response. But I notice that the response time is more efficient than in previous years.

When I started at the organization, we had other, existing competitors, and we also had vROps, but it wasn't fully scaled-out for our organization. But I saw the value just based on my experience.

vROps was definitely on the top list, then we had VMTurbo (Turbonomic) and there's another product called Runecast. We have higher-tier products like Scalar but it's not really an operation type.

Pick something very simple and very intuitive and very efficient for operations. As an engineer, just basically simplify. It's a simplified product and vROps is the product that I would highly suggest and recommend.

In terms of how the product itself has improved, the first one I've seen is the UI, the dashboard, and the intuitiveness of the product, how it works with the web browser, it's very efficient and fast. That's one of the improvements I've seen.

Right now, I strongly feel the product is a solid eight. I haven't got the exposure to the vROps products, I would give it a ten, but the way I feel right now once I feel that it's a solid ten I'll give it.

We use vROps to manage our on-site private cloud as well as our public cloud out in OVH. It allows us to perform trending and analysis on all of our workloads to make sure that they're running as efficiently as possible.

It has saved us quite a bit of money by making those workloads run more efficiently and it has allowed us to recover a lot of wasted resources.

The most valuable feature is the ability to right-size a workload, based on historical data for that workload.

It also allows us to "sanity-check" the entire infrastructure by getting monthly reports on how everything is performing and where we can make improvements. That's all done automatically, without any administrator involvement.

One issue that I had last year, they've already added. They've put some chargeback functionality into it, which they didn't have before. That was very useful for us.

It's a very complex product. It has gotten better over the years, but they still have some work to do. It still requires a lot of time, and some training, to get accustomed to it.

Moving forward, I would like to see some tighter integration with the vSphere Web Client, just so that I don't have to open multiple windows and jump back and forth. We're currently running vSphere 6.7 and there is a lot tighter integration between vROps and vSphere, but it can always be better.

I have no problems with the stability. It's always been pretty solid.

I haven't really had any need to scale beyond what we've always had. The last two versions of it, we've gone with the integrated, high-availability built into the product, and that was a welcome change for us. It's even better now not having to have any kind of load-balancer in front of it, so it's very nice.

I did add a couple of remote nodes. I think when we first started using it, that wasn't even possible, so it was nice having that capability. That did help us scale. If our company were to grow, probably through acquisition, which we seem to do a lot, it would be very easy for us to scale the solution.

For this product, we have not used technical support in a long time. Probably some four years ago was the last time we used it, which speaks to the stability. We haven't had any problems recently.

When I started with my current company, seven years ago, they were using another solution and it was terrible. It didn't give us any of the planning, the change management, any of that stuff that was built into the vROps. To be honest, vROps didn't even exist back then so they pretty much did what they had to do. 

When vROps was offered, it still took us a while to get familiar enough with it to adopt it and, ever since then, we've been happy with what we've been given. 

In terms of actually selecting a vendor, my opinion on what is important has just changed. Our storage vendor is just getting bought out after a period of uncertainty, so I would have to say longevity, first of all; stability. We need to know that they're going to be around tomorrow. Also, somebody that continuously innovates. I did a press release almost 10 years ago for VMware and one of the statements that I made then still holds true. I said, "VMware gives me things that I didn't know I needed, and now I can't live without." I still think that that's the way to judge whether or not they're still giving me what I think they should.

They're constantly giving me things, features that maybe somebody else is asking for. A lot of times, they are things I had never considered before and then I look at them and I say "I have to have that". If I don't look at your product and say, "I have to have that," then I probably won't buy your product because I hate going to ask for money.

The setup is pretty straightforward now. It used to be much more involved and a not very intuitive deployment at all, but now it's really nice.

There are other providers out there that will give a similar experience to vROps, but we're comfortable with it. We were being pressured to look at these other things because one of our acquisitions used one of them. They wanted us to come to an agreement on what was best and we didn't like what they were using, so we stuck with vROps. Now they're with vROps, and lucky for them.

You'd want the ease of use to be the primary draw to the product. Somebody who is evaluating vROps - when I didn't know anything about it and I was looking at it for the first time - it is very daunting. It's very complex and very confusing and especially, back then, there wasn't really any good training. I would tell a colleague not to try to do it alone. It's worth the effort, but you need to get help, either from your TAM or from somebody else, a colleague of yours who uses the product. Get some guidance because it's a very difficult product to get into and master on your own.

As good as it is, it's not perfect so I would have to rate it a nine out of 10. I would love to see something that I could turn over to a junior administrator who hasn't had my level of involvement with the product and say, "Here you go," and have it be, from a certain perspective, clear enough and intuitive enough for him to at least start getting some information out of it.

Like I said, it's a very complex product and you can get a lot of stuff out of it and I like that, for myself, but it's hard getting other people involved with it when it takes so long to figure out what's going on. I think that the engineers who created it are on the same page as me. As soon as it opens up, I see a wealth of information. But it's very daunting to somebody who is new to the product.

Our primary use case for the solution is troubleshooting and performance monitoring.

It has allowed us to identify problems sooner and helps us with problems and issues.

The troubleshooting and performance monitoring features are valuable.

Administration and growth can be improved. For instance, if we're a large organization, the metrics continue to get collected in this environment and continually fill up, so we need to expand the cluster. Hence, more resources are always required.

We have been using the solution for five years and are currently using version 8.62.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable to a degree. The problem is that it goes back to the solution or management packs. The more you collect, the larger you need to expand the environment. Approximately 12 to 24 people are using it in the organization.

We previously used Densify.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We implemented it through a vendor team. Two to three people are required for deployment.

We have seen a return on investment.

I do not have information on the licensing costs.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. The solution is good, but administration and growth can be improved.

We use vRealize Operations Manager primarily for capacity management within our environment. To understand the capacity that we're using for vSAN storage, for compute and CPU capacity within our virtualization environment.

vROps is, by its nature, a very complex product. We have seen a lot of improvements around the usability of the product. With each subsequent version, the product is becoming much more user friendly. It's much faster to get up to the speed on the product, to become familiar with it, and to use the built-in dashboards. Especially, the included dashboards around the vSAN Management Pack, that are now integrated into the product, and are available to use immediately upon installation, without any additional configuration.

Those are areas that the product has been improving drastically, and we are working with VMware as a reference customer, and as design partner, based on our experience, to help continue improving the product.

vROps is stable, it's a mature product. We're using the latest release, which is 6.6.1

vROps is extremely scalable. It can size from a small, to a medium, to a large environment. There are options to have HA enabled or disabled, so the product scales extremely well.

VMware has a number of support options related to vROps. It's supported as standard production support. It's also supported out of VCS and MCS support. We are a VCS business-critical support customer, and we have had a good support relationship with the product.

With newer versions of vROps, VMware has improved the setup experience drastically. The new versions of the product install very quickly, very cleanly. Adding additional nodes to the environment is very fast, very easy to do.

For us, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor are that we look for a company that's going to support our business cases, that has an established track record of stability, and performance. Someone that's going to stand behind us and support us as we utilize their product. Those things are extremely important as we're evaluating whether to make a purchase.

I rate vRealize Operations as a nine out of 10 today. There are still some areas to improve around the initial user experience. But, the product has improved significantly with the more recent releases.

Our primary use case for the product is to to look at all of our infrastructure and provide stats to our performance team for most of our applications. We integrate with vSphere and have a fairly large vSan, which we rely on vRealize Operations to keep on top of to let us know if there are disk failures, alerts, or system health issues. This is pretty much the day-to-day triaging problems of vRealize Operations. 

It has been performing very well. We've been a vRealize shop for about five years. There were early kinks in the some of the virtual appliances as we rolled them out, but for the last year and a half, it has been rock solid.

It has enhanced our ability to troubleshoot and effectively manage our solutions to understand what clusters are having issues and diagnose those programs right away, so we can be proactive. We are now proactive, which we weren't before. We achieve this through vRealize.

We're catching problems earlier. The troubleshooting which goes into it is proactive. One thing I did recently was right-size all my clusters. I did that through vCOPS within a couple hours. I was able to move workloads around to different clusters and optimize my whole environment, which was across about 300 ESX hosts. So, it's very powerful.

We pay attention to disk snapshots which are in the overhead on SAN data stores that we have. They have the ability to collapse different virtual machines to different data stores and do a lot of cleanup. Without that visibility, we would probably have a lot more wasted space and more money that would have been out the door.

One of the things that we had to rollout in the last year and a half is compliance. The product has done a great job of ensuring all of our virtual infrastructure is compliant, and we have met all our regulatory compliance, which has been a huge help. 

There is rich dashboarding, which has the ability to customize dashboards. It has gotten better with the versions. I have assigned it to some co-ops who learned it within a few weeks and have dashboarding almost right away. It's very intuitive platform. 

Working with vendors more to suck more pieces in via the infrastructure and do that for zero cost, if we could. While not always based on VMware, if we want to add something in like Microsoft SCOM data, we have to go out and buy it, or certain widgets we have to buy. The more pieces we can receive for free and have everything cooked into vCOPS to give us a single pane of glass (for zero or minimal cost), this would benefit us.

We don't have any downtime for our vRealize app. It's definitely helped out with the stability of our platforms. 

It's very flexible and scalable. Adding things in has become a lot easier along with utilizing some of the capacity analysis features. If I have a project to add in resourcing, I can go to vCOPS, and do an analysis. I can put it through its workflow, then it tells me what to add and it's usually pretty accurate.

From time and time again, there's little tweaks you got to make to the vRealize platform. The technical support has been excellent. 

I haven't had any problems. Usually within an hour or so, we have diagnosed the problem and have a solution that we either need to implement or implement right away. 

I was involved in the initial setup a long time ago. 

Now, the lifecycle product has provided some things which are very easy to roll out within the vRealize suite. It is just check things out and roll it out, then it sort of monitors the application. This has greatly enhanced our ability to roll out vCOPS quickly and augment it too.

The ability to not have to buy as much hardware. I can look across all my clusters and spread the resourcing out. I can see where I have some low and high points, then not have to go out and buy a whole bunch of blades which I don't need. It has helped us in our capacity analysis and purchasing. 

We looked at Turbonomic. It was expensive because of their ability to learn your environment. We already owned a piece of the vROPs suite, the compliance manager, so we sort of fell into the suite. We thought we can go out and buy Turbonomic, which will cost us so much money or we get the enterprise product because we already have the compliance manager piece, which is what we did, and never looked back. 

It's an excellent solution compared to others. When I first looked at a Turbonomic was a few years ago, they had a few more features than what vCOPS was doing at the time. I gave that feedback and all those features are now in the product. Therefore, there's not much of a comparison today.

• Dig into your requirements.
• Put a list together.
• Then, start taking a look at vCOPS, because it's a great product. It most likely will fit your requirements. 

I would highly recommend the product to anybody who is out there. It has saved us a lot of money.

I would give it a nine out of ten. It's an excellent product, but there's always room for improvement. I never give anything a ten.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We usually put together a list of requirements about what we are looking for within the product. One was the extensibility; the ability to kind of have a single pane of glass. This has been one thing which benefited us with vCOPS, as we can snap in almost any other vendor's hardware, whether it be UCS, Dell, or Cisco switches. This was a big requirement for us.