VMware Aria Operations Reviews

From a manager's standpoint it's the dashboards. To be able to quickly and easily see what's going on in our environment, from my perspective. But it's able to find the hot spots and things that are happening in the environment and helps to be more proactive about troubleshooting and getting to the root cause.

As a manager, I'm a big user of dashboards and reporting, so I love vROps. I'm always trying to have them create different dashboards. Even I get in there at times and create my own dashboards and my guys will look in and say, what is that? And I'll say, "I just created this one on my own because I needed to have this other thing. You know, not to bother you guys with that one," and I'll dabble with it. I love the reporting, and it's visual. To be able to set that up on your bulletin board or electronic bulletin board, and have people come by and go, hey what's that all about? And I can tell them, this is where your sessions are, this is what's happening in your environment.

We're just really starting the journey into virtualization work. It's been about two and a half years, so the benefit really has been that my team, and the desktop engineering team as well, can see as they're developing a product what's going on, almost real-time, so they can figure out where we need to do optimization.

Honestly I don't know. It's just really good. Maybe the interface is a little bit archaic. It needs to be updated and again we're on view 6.2, we're not even on 7 yet. So maybe it's changed, but a more modern look and approach.

I'm not sure about exportability of data, and I haven't really toyed with that, I'm not even sure if it exists. Being able to find something and then export the needed data into something that's reusable for the team too. Visually, it looks great but what will you be able to do with it? You have to bring people over to your bulletin board and say look at this thing, or to your device and say look at this thing; versus being able to report out or maybe send out reports. So giving dashboards to people or even giving them periodic reports.

The stability part has probably contributed to what's going on in our environment. We've had a couple of ups and downs with our product, but overall it's good. The ups and downs in our environment are probably based on our configuration more so than the product itself.

We're trying to get it out to our help desk, dashboards for that kind of stuff. We haven't really done that yet but I envision us being able to do that. And then, from the management layer, being able to give people an idea of where their users are, how they're interacting with it, and giving them a dashboard so they can put some validity behind when their users are saying that there's an issue. Is it really an issue or is it a user issue? The biggest thing I see about vROps is it gives you a truth perspective in terms of, as I said, is it a user issue, a training issue, or is it truly a technology issue.

Our technical support is great. We have a TAM so we have a pretty good line in with finding the right technical resources, so it's a really good service.

I was not really hands on in the setup but I was there. I think it was pretty straightforward. Although, my guys are really smart, so what they make look easy may not be as easy as I would think.

VMware did come out for us, they did help us. We have a pretty good relationship with them. But I thought it was pretty straightforward.

No. We invested in the overall package and we got vROps as part of it.

Look for the partnership when choosing a vendor. We're in a pretty tough environment, healthcare, so we have some unique challenges. If things don't happen right, patient care is affected. So they have to be able to partner with us and understand the urgency behind some of the things we're trying to do. As long as they're flexible and can understand where we're coming from, that's fine. We've had some vendors that just don't get it. VMware has been excellent.

Utilize VMware. Let them come and help you. Utilize them to get some kind of canned reports or some kind of templates so you don't have to create them all from scratch.

That's probably the biggest thing: find other peers that have done that and then draw upon what they've already created so you don't have to recreate it.

It gives a broad view of my environment, which I can basically see from one dashboard. My servers, storage, etc. That would be the most important one.

It doesn't. No benefits.

The biggest item that I would want to see is instant capture of data from storage. One second or even less than a one-second period, of capturing data. I think one minute is too long. There are too many things which can happen in one minute on storage devices.

It's stable, in a way. It crashes every eight months and I have to reboot it. And that's about it.

I only have 60 hosts, so I can't really say if it's scalable to a lot of environments.

I haven't used technical support, nor do I have a contact that might be able to help if needed. I'm a self-learner, so I go into the application and learn on my own. It didn't crash in a bad way that I had to call tech support.

I was using vCenter. I thought that vROps would give me benefits and I bought it.

I thought I needed a solution which would allow me and about five other team members to monitor the host, but unfortunately my team members are not monitoring anything so I'm stuck by myself. I know my environment, because I deal with it, so I don't need to monitor socially.

There was another solution that I though was the best because it allowed me to see what I wanted in the storage. But I went with VMware because it was one supplier of everything. I went for simplicity and that's what I paid for.

Straightforward. I did it myself.

Most important when considering vendors is price, that's the first one. And the ability to contact them in a timely fashion.

If you have less than 100 hosts, don't buy it, depending on what the pain in the environment is for you. My pain was storage and I researched storage. And that was my biggest obstacle. It depends on people, on their issues. Sometimes it's a CPU, sometimes the memory. I was going for the storage and, as I said, one minute for me in the storage environment is not enough. It needs to be much quicker.

Analytics, reporting, and visibility into the expansive virtual datacenter. We get a lot of data that normally you wouldn't be able to see without it.

Gives you a single pane of glass for your virtual infrastructure, as far as capacity planning, analytics, and even custom dashboards are available.

It's helped a lot with our capacity planning and it helps a lot with our "what if" scenarios.

I would like to see a larger online library and a more expansive YouTube presence of how-to's. A lot of the stuff you have to look up, to go to multiple third-party sites on how to do it. VirtuallyGhetto.com is a really popular one but it should be one-stop shopping. If I want to know how to do something inside a VMware tool, I should be able to find that inside a VMware community on a VMware website.

It's very stable.

It scales incredibly well. At the initial installation we put "large" because we just didn't know how large it was going to be. But from all the documentation, what we did is big enough to support the most expansive enterprises.

Six out of 10.

First-call resolution is low. You have to call back a lot and get another tech agent who is a little bit more knowledgeable and, unfortunately, at the enterprise we don't have the time to be calling back.

I was using Excel. We switched because I had no idea what was going on in my data center. I couldn't get any key metrics to anyone.

It was very complex. That were a lot of the calls to tech support. A lot of the documentation wasn't accurate or it was outdated. And a lot of dead-ends, so we ended up calling support to get the installation complete.

We had a third-party on site to help us with the installation.

Turbonomic, VMTurbo, and Splunk. But I don't think Splunk does the same thing, so, the first two. We chose VMware because they gave us the best price and because of the enterprise association we already have with them.

When selecting a vendor, stability is one of the big things for us. Also, cost is another big thing. We don't do a lot of bleeding edge companies, we're more conservative so stability is important.

Regarding cost, it's especially important to look at forecasting the cost in the future. The per-socket model's okay but SNS services and solutions or maintenance is what really drives up your budget.

I would suggest going to the VMware website, downloading that 30-day key, and kick the tires on it. Check it out.

And for implementation, bring in a third-party vendor to help your internal team. But allow your internal team to actually do the implementation.

Dashboards. They give a single pane of glass where you can view multiple clients, multiple issues, networking, data stores, etc. Another good tool it has is capacity planning for your host, your costs.

We have large environments, around 55,000 VMs and 5000 to 8000 hosts. So there's a lot of hosts, a lot of clusters, a lot of movement.

During upgrades I'd love to see a single pane of glass showing what the system's actually doing. In our case, we have a UK datacenter. It might take five, six, or seven hours to upgrade the whole environment. All I'm doing is looking at a screen that says "four out of nine steps". I don't know where it's at. I don't know if space is filling up, if I have to run a df-h on the nodes to actually see if something's filling up during that time. I have to read the upgrade log files.

For me, I want to see some kind of metrics there, which I can look and say, "Okay, at this point it's pushing the pack file out to the UK." I don't want to sit there and look at each screen for three hours, and then have to wonder if I should call VMware or not. If I let it sit three more hours, then we're down for six hours, and I could have called three hours ago to fix it. The problem is, I didn't know if there was an issue or not.

Stability is good. It's easy to upgrade, easy to maintain. They made it easier with 6.5. Instead of having to add in an extra data node, or an extra remote collector, to add into the virtual center to pull in metrics, all you do is expand the memory. You start off small, then you start expanding the memory. Therefore, as long as your host can handle the memory you don't have to purchase anything extra.

GSS is pretty good. They're not so key to the actual architecture behind it. They can answer general questions. If you need to escalate, you need to escalate to BCS. In general, GSS does a really good job.

I think they've been using vRealize about five or six years now. I'm not sure what they used before we got monitoring tools.

In this case, it was a company-wide decision. Really we're using vROps for host monitoring, for clustering, and for data store vSAN. We had a use case where we have to work with hospitals, so it can't be down.

I wasn't involved in this.

I have set it up in another site, initially, starting it off with Horizon View.

It was real straightforward. There are lots of guides out there. VMware helps you with it, guides you on how to set everything up. All you're doing is installing a management pack file for the vCenter. Then, to connect to your vCenter you have to have a username, password, and the fully qualified domain name name, and that's it.

Not at this time, because we're partnered with them.

When selecting a vendor be sure to look at reliability, uptime, and make sure that they're available for you. Because we work for hospitals, hospitals can't be down, they can't be down at all, even for a minute or two.

Definitely find a couple of use cases to make sure that vROps is what you need. vROps, can do pretty much everything up to capacity planning. It comes with different licensing levels, Standard, Enterprise, Advanced. Find out what you need, which version and edition.

One of the most valuable ones is being able to see an overview of your environment, and saying this VM is overallocated, in terms of CPUs or memory. If something is stressed, or if something is not stressed, that's one of the good things it can do. The reports: Print any kind of reports or generate them, and send them to somebody if they say my VM is going very slow. 

"We need to add more CPUs," We get a lot of those requests. Then you look at it, and you realize, wait a minute, this VM has 8 CPUs, 32GBs of ram, you probably have it overallocated. That's probably why it's going so slow. You can just do that in vROps with just a few clicks of a button. That's what is pretty cool about it.

It can save the organization money if you're using it right. It'll save you a lot of money. 

Don't overallocate! This means that you don't have to buy many hosts. You can save money that way.

Make sure your environment is scaled correctly. That it can handle whatever specifications are needed in your environment before you go and deploy it.

I would say on the scale of one to 10, probably a seven. 

It all depends on who sets it up, and if they set it up right. I haven't gotten that far in my career to know the correct way to set it up yet. I just know when I got to the place where I work on it now. It was set up, it would break, and you would have to go fix it. Then it would break, and they would have some other guys that knew a bit more about it, and they fixed it. It's been up and running for a few months now without any issue.

That's the thing with it. Many different users can use it, but you also have a learning curve. You have to have the employees, who know what they're doing, be able to teach the employees, who don't know what they're doing, how to use vROps.

We purchased vROps because wanted to see more of our environment.

I was not involved.

The most important thing you research before implementing a product in every company is the cost. You want to get the most bang for your buck. You want to make sure that you get something that's cost effective, too. Also, that it is good and easy to use. At the end of the day, when you bring it to your manager, they need to compare. 

 Other than VMware, I can't think of any others right now.

Do your research. Research it, research all your products which are similar, and see that it fits the mold of your company. If it's cost effective, or if it's going to give you the most bang for your buck.

When selecting a vendor:

1. They should know what they're talking about. 
2. If I don't know what I'm talking about, then I shouldn't fumble them up. 

But the number one thing is that they know what they're talking about and it's easy to use, also its setup is easy. If they can show me how to use it during their presentation and I can explain it to my manager or my boss, then that's one of the most important things.

The most valuable features are:

• the metrics.
• the amount of data that it collects.
• the fact that it doesn't summarize our data over a long period of time.

It helps us to see the root-cause analysis faster when figuring out an issue. We can see some overall performance issues and rectify them at the server level as opposed to the VM level because of the visibility we get.

It gives us baselines and visibility at any given time, i.e., visibility that we just don't find with any other product. Being able to get five minutes worth of data for up to six months is a great feature.

The GUI is very confusing, but the product itself is great.

It's a very stable solution.

It seems like a very scalable solution.

I haven't used the technical support at all.

The setup was very straightforward. The wizard-based install is self-explanatory. It's probably one of the best examples of VMware product installations.

This seemed like the right product. It was integrated with VMware and had the most visibility into the VMware software and stuff that was running on it. We weren't looking at any other solutions.

It is important knowing that the vendor is committed to the product and committed to keeping it updated on the stuff that it's monitoring. It's pretty important that when VMware releases a new version of the infrastructure, vROps will be there and monitor any of those changes.

Definitely give vROps a fair shot. The other products out there aren't as deep. When you're looking for something beyond the high-level 4-5 metrics that would indicate an issue, well, you're not going to get the depth from other products like VM server or whatever. You can get past the GUI and just live in the metrics section and the charts. It's going to give you a lot of value.

The most valuable features are performance troubleshooting and performance monitoring of VM CPU, storage latency, storage throughput, basic uptime, downtime.

A lot of the built-in free stuff that comes with VMware for troubleshooting latency has been valuable. When a VM is responding poorly, you've ruled out the basics – memory, CPU – and you're starting to look at the disk. We'll look at response time on the disk and if we want more details or history, we'll go and bring up vRealize Operations, which reliably catches it.

I don't know. I'm probably not the best person to address this question because I don't use it heavily. We have it installed in several places, but it's not our go-to for a lot of our products, for a lot of what we do. I work for a big organization; lots of different people doing different things.

I'd want it better integrated with the core products, so you don't have to go to a separate site or interface to go and use it.

The interface is a little bit too much, all at once for me. With the colors – green, red, black – if you drill down, it's a little bit confusing to me.

Also, it generates too many false positives. For example, with predictive growth, the predictive trends aren't very valid, realistic.

It's stable. No issues.

It's a pretty big environment. It's had no issues so far.

I have not used technical support for this product.

I think we've previously used Quest Defender and we’ve used SolarWinds.

I haven't seen a compelling reason to switch away from using vROps. We're a relatively large company, so I think it was part of an agreement in which they purchased it. I wasn't involved in the decision or even knew much about it beforehand to pick one versus another.

Upgrading it from vCOPS to version 5 was pretty straightforward. It was pretty easy.

It's probably one of the better ones out there. Just put your time in to researching it and setting it up correctly with the right data.

The most valuable feature is the fact that it understands what is normal for a workload and alerts only if you go outside the given boundary. It knows if a workload spikes at the end of the month, that doesn't mean it has to alert, because if that workload is spiking every time at the end of the month, it knows this is normal for that workload and will not alert. It'll only alert if that spike goes beyond the normal range of that spike.

It has the ability to filter and alert you only when you want to be alerted. It understands the IO profile of the workload. It knows when it has spikes, when it has valleys, in a manner of speaking, and accordingly will alert you.

It's a great troubleshooting tool. If you have enough management packs in it, you can see the entire supply chain all the way from storage to compute. It helps you see where exactly, potentially the problem is happening.

Of the newest features, the workload balancing is something we might use. Currently, the way our clusters are laid out we truly do not have a need for that use case. We are not a good candidate for that use case, but the fact is it might help us when we try to consolidate data centers. It can help us to take two clusters into the data center and perhaps migrate workload between the two. It might be used for a data center migration, the way I look at it.

As far as using the capacity and performance management features to save on storage, I cannot answer to that because we have a different team for storage. They manage the storage, they monitor performance and capacity. We monitor the compute side. We use vROps on a regular basis from a capacity management for the compute side; the built-in features, views, heat maps, and whatever they have are pretty good indicators of when we need to add capacity. It has been pretty reliable from that perspective in the sense that it tells us we have a defined threshold that it takes us x number of days to add capacity. It has been pretty reliable from that perspective.

I haven't yet truly used it for proactive monitoring. It's been reactive, but it helps nail down the issue very quickly, based on a VM, a host, or whatever. Their views are the biggest source of views out there.

I think they need to make the UI a little bit more simplistic. It can be a little overwhelming for people who have never used the tool before. For someone who is using these products, you can find things very easily once you're in the UI, but we tried for our users so that they can go in and look for their stuff in there. If they can make the UI a little bit more simplistic, that would probably be one thing I would ask for.

We are trying to empower the users. They should be able to go in and look for their VMs and do minor-level troubleshooting and similar tasks. The UI is a little cluttered from that perspective. If they can make the UI a little bit easier, similar to Google, it would help a lot.

We run infrastructure. Users have a mindset of different things they look for. For them, if there's a custom dashboard that we could set up with a very simple basic UI, where they can see the obvious things. They could just jump in there and see that dashboard, see where the problems are happening right away, instead of moving all over the place. That's why I haven’t given the product a perfect rating.

If it is designed well, it is quite stable. You need to know how many VMs will be reporting up to it. Based on that, if you stand up the cluster with a sufficient number of nodes; data nodes, management nodes and remote collectors. If you design it accordingly, based on the requirements, it performs really well.

So far it's been working well. We have a pretty big cluster; it's around seven nodes. It has been working just fine.

I have run into issues and the support I have needed was more from a guidance perspective than any big help; just asking them, having an upgrade, what would be the steps? What is the recommended procedure, if any? Is there any good guidance around it? They have been pretty helpful with that.

I haven’t actually had many issues with technical support. Once they kind of laid it out, given the environment, “This is how we would recommend that you do the upgrade.” The upgrade itself takes time just because of the scale of the environment. Beyond that, not much.

I was not involved in the initial set up, but I have been involved since then. The solution was already stood up by another team member of ours. He's no longer there, so I inherited the solution, but I have expanded the cluster and I've incorporated additional BUs that we have all over the U.S. and they're reporting into vROps now.

It's a pretty big product. From our perspective, it does a lot for you. You just need to do your homework and try to understand what you're looking for. It has all the answers in there. It does. You just have to know what you're looking for and know where to go to look for it because it can be a very complex product for a first time user. It can be.