VMware Aria Operations Reviews

1. There is the VMware environment for our operations.
2. We have another instance running for the VDI environment.

It allows me to automate a lot of tasks. Because in a college, we have many different operations going. We need to automate as much as possible. Generally, vROps does a good job.

The automation brings insight into how we will grow. I can look at it, then make my recommendations on what equipment we need to do for the next fiscal year.

• The automation is the most valuable feature.
• The UI is pretty easy to understand.
• It gives me insight into the environment.
  

• The learning curve is pretty steep, but support help decipher it for us.
• It could use more integration with the hardware.
• A reporting engine would be good, where the database could dump into something like Splunk integration, so we could write our own reports. That would be better.

It's completely stable. There's no problem with it.

Scalability is good.

We had a product called StrataCloud for years, which was good, but very complicated. It turned off the team. They wouldn't even bother looking at it, so we discontinued it.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. I had a few questions for support, but it was relatively easy.

It has helped me optimize certain VMs and made them more efficient.

The optimization is a huge return on investment alone.

Do it. Just start off small. Add one vCenter, then add the rest as you go.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Straightforward use; I don't want complex. 
• Reliability. 
• If it snaps into something, the better. Because our team is very small for our environment. The fewer consoles that we need to know (or access), the better.

One of the key things is the ability to integrate data from other sources. That's always a huge issue. I'll give an example: We've got an issue in an Oracle database. We go to the Oracle database team to get data from the Oracle management tools. We go to the virtualization to ensure the data there. The last layer's a whole other thing. vROps brings them all together. Any tool that does that is a useful tool.

Also, the data retention is better compared to what vCenter does by default. vCenter keeps data for only a short window of time, so if it's an hour after a problem manifests, you're out of luck. vROps makes a copy of all the data from vCenter; it keeps its own copy and it can maintain it longer because it's not an actively used database that's trying to manage the system. It's just a copy for reference purposes.

One of the things we're going to look at is experimenting with the integration with DRS. In fact, I attended a session at a conference on that. We're looking at integrating it with our Citrix XenApp environments; we currently have somewhat of a gap on that reporting there as well. That's 2 areas we definitely are looking at using it for.

We have had major outages that we would have caught in advance had vROps been in place.

With both capacity management and performance management, we expect to gain. The outages I mentioned were capacity or performance related. They were in areas of capacity that we could not see with our current tool set without a lot of digging around, which are very easily accessible with vROps.

You can always improve the type of data you can merge in, but there's nothing that we're missing at the moment from it. I'm sure as we dig deeper into it, we'll start finding room for improvement.

The reporting can always be improved. The problem is that no one does reporting well, because no one can know what your company needs out of the tool. I'm sure refinements with the reporting would be great. I'm sure they'll be refining it with every version, but it's not something that's inherent to them; it's an inherent problem with any tool that's trying to report data. I've found no tools that report data the way you need it to be reported.

We’ve been using it for a couple of months now; we've been experimenting. Previous versions were not as strong. The last version before this one was when they started to actually make the tool particularly useful, and then the latest version's even better.

Stability is much better than it used to be. They went to a distributed model, so it's stable and you can expand and grow with it.

Early versions did not use a completely balanced distributed model. As the number of items being collected grew, performance could not be scaled easily by adding additional servers to the vROps infrastructure. The newer versions handle this much better and allow for performance to be maintained at high numbers of items being collected.

You can now expand outwards horizontally, which you think they would've done initially, but you know... If you have an instance, you can build it taller with more CPU and memory, or you can build multiple instances. You can build instances out in remote sites to collect data there. It's a scalable solution now, which it was not completely before.

I don't know what their limits are, but it's certainly scalable enough to accommodate our needs.

It does not get slow; that's why the model's much better.

We haven't used technical support for scaling it yet, but I'm sure we will.

We decided to invest in this type of solution because of gaps in our current reporting. There are certain constraints we're running into in the environment that we cannot attack easily with any other tool.

We currently use a lot of other tools. We use TeamQuest. We use Cirba. We use CA; both their standard monitoring tool and their application performance monitoring tools. Even with all those, there's certain nuances within virtualization that they can't easily capture. We'd either have to automate scripts for ourselves to pull the data and then use something else to do it, or we can use vROps, which is why we're installing it.

The most important criteria when we select apps and vendors is our experience working with VMware and the ability to take data from multiple sources, which a lot of tools cannot easily do.

I’m involved mostly with the engineering of how we're going to use it. Most of their products are really easy to install.

We've looked at VMTurbo and we've talked with the other vendors that I’ve mentioned we use, to see if there are ways of doing what we want to do within their goals.

There's been mass improvements; if they've looked at it previously, like a few years ago, I would look at it again. We looked at it a few years ago, decided it wasn't for us, but it's useful. Particularly if you're dealing with a large-scale enterprise, there are gaps in all the other toying that are hard to get at without this tool because this tool has much more direct access to the right areas of vCenter. You can use the API to get at anything, but VMware knows what to pull better because it's their product.

We were yet to fully deploy it as it should be. We've yet to fully implement it. Mainly because we have almost the entire HP OpenView suite, so that's been saving our life for right now, but we've noticed the benefits. We've noticed the night-and-day difference from monitoring everything from the hypervisor into the VM as opposed to from the VM's point of view out, without the machine knowing that it's really virtualized, that it’s sharing resources. It believes it is in a physical environment and it owns direct access to the CPU and memory, but it doesn’t: it’s virtual, it’s sharing it and it's pretend. vROps takes that into account because it all goes through the API for VMware.

Definitely, the first win for us was being able to see a CPU wait time where people were still building VMs as if they were building virtual servers, requesting too many CPUs. Not enough memory and they were really shooting themselves in the foot because you can have as many CPUs as you want, but if you're not really using them all, you're sitting there waiting for those virtual slots to fill up before it actually goes to the physical CPU. So you're adding so much overhead.

There were a couple of application teams that were able to take the constructive criticism, per se, and brought down how many virtual CPUs they had and they noticed a huge performance gain. Being able to do that for the environment was a quick win for us.

When you migrate from vCOPS to vROps, it has this awesome API where it grabs all the data, everything you've collected, and it puts it into vROps and you don't really lose that much. Everything you've already collected gets moved over and copied over and you're good to go. However, if you are on vROps and you're migrating to a major version of vROps or a new architecture design – like we're trying to do because we're trying to size it correctly – it doesn't go from vROps to vROps. I believe they had mentioned they were going to do that in the later version, or try to, but that would be my biggest request, because we need to build it out correctly and then migrate all that data we've already collected for so many years.

Aside from that, I would say getting around, creating your own custom super-metrics and all of that: It might not be that it needs to be easier to do, but maybe more well-documented.

Definitely reporting is nice and maybe they could develop an easier UI to do your own custom reports. We're still using all of the out-of-the-box reports, which are great. They've helped us hit that 70% of requirements, but it would be nice to have a nicer UI. Hopefully something like HTML that I can just drag and drop and just play around as opposed to the current UI that I have, which is like a popup; you have to know the metric name, and then somehow click over and get the metric. You really have to know how they're doing it and what they call their metrics and what they call the groups of their metrics and all that to know how to do the report right.

We actually got it back when it was vCOPS 5.2, so I would say we’ve been using it for about three years.

Unfortunately, it has not been a consistently stable solution, because we've never fully deployed it as it's supposed to be. If you go through their sizing guide, we need I believe three virtual appliances tiered and we're currently on one virtual appliance. We have to reboot it often and it's just because it's not sized correctly. That's on us. We haven't had the time. We haven't had the resources. It is a big appliance, one of the bigger appliances that we own, but it's mainly because of what we're monitoring. We're monitoring so many VMs, so many data stores, so many network paths, and all that goes into, I believe, VMware’s equation for how it should be sized.

I believe it will meet the company's needs going forward once we size it correctly. Definitely its internal high availability is very simple to configure. We haven't looked at the disaster recovery for it. Unfortunately, we haven't given it the love that it needs to get it up to the way it's supposed to be, but I believe it will meet the company's needs.

Technical support is excellent; never had an issue with support with VMware.

Try it out. Yeah. Just spin up.

We have access to the software. I don't know how easy it is for somebody else that doesn't have an account with VMware or doesn't have an existing contract with VMware, to get the software, but for me, my solution, for everything that I have questions about, spin it out. They're all virtuals; why not? Worst-case scenario, you erase it. Move on to the next one.

The product is valuable - when we start virtualizing everything, specifically in the compute stack – for looking at the health of the ecosystem. It is very difficult to pinpoint your challenges in terms of performance. It also helps understand where your issues lie. vROps actually demystifies that for you, drilling deep into the infrastructure beyond what vCenter Server gives you. It puts together real metrics that make sense to you. For example, if we look at the metrics inside a vCenter Server, we can look independently at, for example, CPU utilization, processor, networking, but it's not tied together to give you a holistic view of the health of your environment. vROps actually does that for you, and then makes recommendations.

The other thing I love about the product is that, with other products like vRA and Orchestrater, we can actually send that information to an automation platform for self-healing and for mediation. That makes it very, very powerful.

For example, we can actually proactively monitor and anticipate server sprawl, or capacity depletion. We can actually see that coming before it arrives. We can head off issues such as saturation of resources in any particular host, aberrant behavior of applications. We can actually see those issues coming, head them off and manage more proactively, as opposed to reactively.

For example, we have people that have unfettered access to the vSphere environment. They just spin up servers at will, without really any regard for how that's going to have an impact on resources. vROps will give you a health batch, and you can start seeing problems develop before they arrive. It gives you an opportunity to anticipate a problem before it happens, address it and then remediate it before it actually becomes an issue in production.

The main concern, the main dropper right now was capacity planning, capacity management and heading it off.

Storage tends to be something that's always in high demand at our company. We really use this product to get a better forecast of organic growth and new organization. When you're going to look towards your budgeting for future years, you have to have something that's going to provide some type of a benchmark for you in terms of what you need to acquire for that next fiscal year.

One of the things about vROps is that, it's very robust. If you want to set up a notification, it's very, to me, involved. If they can streamline some of that through orchestration into what you’re trying to do with setting up alerts and things of that nature, in groups and policies, and tie those things together in a more seamless manner. I think that would be helpful.

There are multiple elements that need to be set up for a purpose, by contrast. I'll compare it to the installation of a vRA; when you set up vRA, it steps you through everything sequentially, like a workflow. If they can put a workflow into vROps for the types of things that you want to set up for policies, triggering and monitoring, I think that'd be very helpful; as opposed to clicking out of one pane, clicking into another pane, referencing what you just set up in a previous pane, those types of things.

Think about if, when you're setting up your triggers and your alerts, it could be something sequential, like through a wizard, or something of that nature. To help you walk through, take you right to the next screen that you need to go to. You don't click out of one area and then back in.

We’re not yet using any of the new features in version 6; that’s what I'd like to get to.

I think it's very, very stable. When it first came out, I did have some concerns with it. When it first came out, I can understand, as a maiden voyage, that there were some opportunities for improvement. I think VMware has worked very hard, as they typically will do, to remediate those issues. The only issues I had in the beginning was, the amount of information and tuning it required for the information to make sense to the typical admin. It really wasn't there, maturity-wise. I think they've done that now. The health batches now really do make sense to someone who has tuned the environment, or make sure that the application is tuned to their environment.

I think it's incredibly scalable.

We have a small environment. In our production environment we have 60 hosts and only, maybe, 500 VMs. I've not had an opportunity to use it in massive scale but for us, it's been something that we've been able to use.

I haven't used technical support; I haven't had the need to.

We previously the SolarWinds virtualization manager. The way in which it's licensed, the way in which it provides dashboarding is very, very complicated to use. The information is not easily consumable; it's just not easy digestible. We found that we had licensed versions of it sitting out for years without actually using it, because it just wasn't helpful for us.

I love the fact the vROps is tightly integrated with the other VMware families; purpose-built for running on vSphere. It's purpose built from the ground up by VMware architects and engineers who understand their other products and how they're bringing it to the family. For example, I'm looking to use vROps today to coalesce with vR Orchestrator, so that we could do some of the software mediation types of things through messaging to the vRO platform.

vROps is very, very straightforward to stand up. I would say, much more straightforward than some of the previous iterations. That's one of the other things I appreciate about the products VMware is bringing to market. They're making their products easier to deploy.

We looked at VMTurbo, now re-branded as Turbonomic. It didn't bring anything new to the fold for us. The way in which it's licensed is really, I think, a little bit outrageous. I just think VMware continues to do a stellar job in how they put together solutions that are purpose built and threaded together to work as an entire ecosystem.

Give it a chance, put it in a honey pot. I come from a consulting background, so a lot of companies tend to throw something directly into production. They don't actually have the opportunity to spend the time to learn the product first. That gives the product a negative connotation because it doesn't give them the results that they're looking for.

Apply the appropriate principles of project management during your pilot, your proof of concept, proof of technology. Then, pilot it, and then have a clear understanding of what it is, the scope and scale that you're trying to get out of the product. Then tailor your installation for that. I think that'll be something that'll have a higher chance of success.

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.

Our primary use case is to monitor the performance of the virtual machines as opposed to monitoring the performance of the OS. We'll monitor OS and stop at the OS, whereas vROps will pick up what's going on underneath. If the datastore is having a problem, it will bubble up to the VM and show us that.

It has allowed me to give the developers insight into what's actually happening underneath the covers. They used to only be able to see their app and now, they can see underneath. We've also given them access to see into the OS and we've given them a full stack view of how their application is performing.

It has helped to reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot issues and has improves quality of service to our users. 

The most valuable feature for us is the one that allows us to take over the DRS within vCenter and does it more intelligently. 

We have found it to be intuitive and user-friendly. 

I would like to go back in history on the performance data and blank out some of that performance data so that it isn't used in calculations. For instance, if an application goes wild and uses up all the resources, I don't want that to be understood as that VM needs more resources.

Stability is fine. The only issue I've had with it was an issue that I myself caused. 

We're not big enough to warrant scalability. 

Their technical support is good. They found the problem quickly. Support gets back to us quickly. When you raise a support call they don't get back to you with a candy email, they actually get back to you and help. 

The initial setup was very easy. 

We looked into a competitor but it was way too expensive. The fact that vROps came as part and parcel of the vRA enterprise gave us a huge win on the cost. 

I would rate this solution an eight. 

Primary use case for vRealize Operations is from an optimization standpoint. We're actually getting analytics from our VMs for over-provisioned VMs, under-provisioned VMs, and making the adjustments accordingly, per the recommendation from Operations.

One of the benefits for our organization, in particular, was the optimization piece where, historically, our virtual environment has always been over-provisioned. We've always tried to go from a physical to virtual, one-for-one. Now, with vRealize Operations, we're actually proving to the company that we're utilizing the virtual infrastructure to its fullest capability, but actually scaling back instead of adding more resources.

From a troubleshooting standpoint, beforehand it took us a lot of time to actually go into esxtop, pull the actual raw data that was happening from a storage level, a network level, a CPU/VCPU and memory level. But having all of these resources at our fingertips, from a graphical user interface, we can pinpoint the pitfall very easily. And it is very user-friendly, with the red, green, yellow "what's wrong." And getting the right teams involved faster has helped us the most with vRealize Operations.

Most valuable feature is the dashboards that we can customize per-user that logs into them. If we need to make a dashboard that's very high-level for our executive to see how our virtual environment's handling things, we can do that. Or, if we need to deep-dive technically, we can do that for our engineers. They really need to see the important stats that make our virtual environment work the most efficiently.

The solution is very user-friendly. From an installation standpoint, it only takes about half a day to a day to implement. Integration with vCenter is very seamless, starts collecting data, almost immediately once you make those connections, getting real-time data within the first 24 to 48 hours. User friendliness is very easy.

A lot of feedback that we're getting from some of our engineers who are actually using Operations today is that the graphics are very low-key. When it comes to red, yellow, green, yes, "Skittles Theory," but when it actually comes down to what's optimized and what's not optimized, it's very rudimentary. If they could actually make nicer pie charts or graphics involved in it, it would make it a lot easier to read the data on a higher level, rather than actually having to dive down and know specifically what you're looking at.

It's extremely stable. Since we implemented it, we haven't had a restart or reboot that wasn't for a maintenance period, and we've been up ever since, collecting data.

Scalability is very easy. Once you implement a new vCenter, it's pretty much just make the connection to the new vCenter and it automatically starts collecting data from all the VMs in that new vCenter. Clusters, DRS recommendations, HA recommendations, everything's at your fingertips and it's very easy to upscale, per your environment, for the growth of your company.

We didn't have a solution at the get-go. Once we implemented this, we actually saw the grand scheme, or a higher level, from top-down, of our whole virtualized environment, that we weren't getting before without really deep-diving into the underlying hypervisor level. That's really what we've been using it for.

We learned that we had the licensing for it, I downloaded the file, and just ran with it. It was very straightforward, just downloaded the file from the internet, uploaded into vCenter, ran it, IP address, log on to the web console and go.

We had a little bit of Hyper-V, but normally, mostly VMware.

If you're running VMware, implement vRealize Operations as soon as possible.

I would rate the solution and eight out of ten. The only reason why (it's not a ten) is because of that graphical interface (issue) that I just described.

Our primary use case is to automate workflows within the corporate data center and to automate in and out of the cloud, spinning up workloads in both locations. So far, the performance has been great.

It has improved our time to deliver on systems, for development workloads. As we do that with our larger development platforms, they don't have to wait on us, as infrastructure, to spin those up. They can just spin up what they need and get to work.

There is also definitely a cost saving because we don't have to have as many people. A smaller workforce can take care of it in a timely manner.

The most valuable features are the Blueprints and Workflows, to be able to hand the self-service portal out; to get out of the way and let the developers spin up their workloads as they need them.

It is intuitive and user-friendly. As you go through it, with some of the wizards and some of the interfaces that are out there, I think it's fairly easy to step through, even when we're training new employees to work with the product.

I'd like to see the streamlining of more wizards, more tasks that are canned. And it would also be good to see some more features around building the Blueprints, just to make it a little easier.

It has been very stable, no issues.

Scalability: It's as big as we need it to be. We just add in new services, new hosts. It works really well.

I don't know that we have had to use technical support. We did our initial deployment with VMware Professional Services, so we really haven't had to get support on it at all.

We knew we needed to do something different. One of the big complaints from development had always been that they were waiting on us. We talked with our local VMware team about this and started down this road. It took about a year to get it done, but we finally got the buy-in by packaging it with NSX for our security folks - they've got deep pockets. So we were able to get the whole project done.

Our return on investment, again, is a lot on the people front. Instead of having to expand, we just run a leaner workshop and we have the people to do that. So the cost saving has been around not having to pay for additional employees to support our environment.

We looked at Cisco CloudCenter. We looked at it at the same time but we knew that 95 percent of our infrastructure runs VMware today, so we wanted to go with the same kind of ecosystem.

If you're heavily invested in VMware already, go this way. It's going to be a lot better in the long run.

I rate it a nine out of 10. To get to a 10, I would like to see those improvements around the UI and making things a little more user-friendly.