VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We mainly we do a lot of reporting, trending reporting, with vROps, monitoring on a day-to-day basis.

The biggest improvement it has brought to our organization is the way we do our utilization trending reporting. One of the biggest challenges we had, when we deployed to our call centers, was that we never had that visibility in terms of trending reporting. How does the environment work? How do we look at resource utilization, memory, CPU? How do we look at round-trip latency when our users are connected to our VM? It has given us more insight into how we run our entire environment.

Also, being able to see a problem prior to the end-user experiencing it allows us to resolve it prior to it impacting the end-user.

Finally, it has helped us to reduce our troubleshooting time and improve quality of service. We've definitely come a long way. With every new release - we just recently moved over to Horizon 7.4 - vROps has really helped us monitor the environment, troubleshoot, and see how it's performing.

I like the monitoring aspect. One of the biggest things in our environment is being able to see what the entire vCenter environment looks like. The health status, being able to determine when we're having issues with resources, utilization, memory, or CPU.

It is also very user-friendly. We have gotten to the level where we're utilizing dashboards that we're able to customize for our needs, as opposed to their being out-of-the-box dashboards. So it's very intuitive.

One thing I mentioned when speaking with the engineers is that we'd like to get more granular reporting. We'd like to see more real-time reporting on the application-process level. Right now, we don't get that. For example, if I have a VM that's spiking up on memory or CPU, I can't really drill down to the application level and say, "Hey, I have IE that's spiking due to the user's streaming of video and that's affecting their entire session." vROps doesn't do that. The engineers tell me there are a couple of other tools that we will be able to utilize. But hopefully, that is something that could be packaged together, contained within vROps, as opposed to having us to go to a third-party.

We use VMware support all the time. It's very good. We have a TAM who is very engaged. We typically get very good response from the support team. We can call them, we can go online, we can submit the request, and everything is done.

The initial setup was really straightforward. One of the biggest things that our TAM did was make it a simple process. 

The biggest piece of advice is definitely to learn your environment, know your metrics and, prior to implementing, have a baseline of where you'd like to be. That way, when you implement it, it's easier to measure based on your metrics, as opposed to trying and figure it out later on.

I rate vROps a 10 out of 10. We've definitely seen the advantages of utilizing vROps. There's tons of stuff that we're not really utilizing through vROps that I think would help an environment.

vROps has been able to cut down our time to be able to find our problems, if we have something arise in our infrastructure. We have certainly found anomalies, and it has alerted us to those anomalies and where we can find the problems, thus getting our meantime realized solution down. We've also been able to rightsize our VMs because of vROps. It's able to tell you if you're over-provisioning VMs and reduces memory, if it's not being used, and these sorts of things, so we're rightsizing our VMs.

It also gives you predictive timelines for when you're gonna run out of capacity in your resources, so you may plan accordingly for all of your resource planning.

• Probably in the configuration of it.
• Configuring the different types of alerts.
• Maybe streamlining the process a little more.
• Make it a little more user-friendly, possibly.
• It's a little difficult to configure, maybe.

It is a stable solution. Upgrades have been smooth. We haven't had any problems there, but a little bit of time configuring it. Although, I noticed in their latest release (6.2), it's much cleaner. It seems a little easier to configure, manage, and navigate.

It's not a scale-out architecture, but definitely as much infrastructure as we throw at it, it's able to monitor it. If your infrastructure grows, or even into the Cloud, they have plugins that can monitor VMs, AWS, and Azure.

The support is VMware, and it's good support, as you'd expect.

It's fairly straightforward. There was initially, when I set it up, a version 5, and it had a little bit of different components that you had to configure and put together. I believe it's a little easier these days.

It's a very good product. It's really given us a lot of insight.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The partnerships with other vendors and integration with other products that we have, therefore their reputation in that, and their support.

The key for us is visibility into the infrastructure, both at the application layer and with performance of historical trends. Thus, the ability to drop in and see when an application has changed, what's gone wrong, and getting them to focus on a quick remediation.

Quick remediation of problems.

They could improve their consistency in execution.

I would like to see these additional features in the next release:

• Deeper dive analytics
• Better licensing models.

No issues. It's been good.

No issues so far.

We have contacted technical support in the past. They are very good. We do have a TAM resource on-site, which definitely gives us an in when we are having problems.

We weren't using anything previously for virtualization. We invested in this solution because we needed to stay ahead of our competition and landscape. It was the obvious choice for consolidating our datacenters and simplifying the infrastructure.

It seemed fairly straightforward, but I have very complex engineers.

IBM, PureSoftware, and Dell EMC.

Advice for anyone looking at VM solutions:

• Stay abreast of the changing technology, because it is moving fast. Simple is better for time to market.
• Do some PoCs and train your engineers.
• Research total cost of ownership, deployment time, and the complexity of their applications.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Reliability
• Peer reviews
• Technical support
• Their willingness to work with us.

The ability to take a look inside my environment and tell me, not only how I'm using my resources, but also to help me better plan and reallocate resources or plan for increasing the amount of the resources that I may need.

It allows us to do future capacity planning. It also has the ability to go in and do some health monitoring and some preventive type maintenance without us having to get involved with the use of the Python strip. So it actually frees up additional resources on our team with the use of the automated scripts. We don't have to do certain tasks based on certain triggers and alarms that happen inside, that it actually catches inside of vROps.

Right now, it pretty much handles itself so it's hard to say. I can't really speak to anything that I would want to change in it right now. One of my operation guys might have a different aspect take on it.

I won't give VMware a 10 out of 10 because we don't want them to stop innovating.

The only thing I would say, and it has nothing to do with the product, it has more to do with the releases. If we could get the release of the reports when we do our assessments to also coincide with the release of the next product. That might be a little something that we could do. For example, 6.5 is out with the list of canned reports. 6.6 comes out but we have to wait on the reports for that. It's minor but it would be nice to have. That would kick it up to a 9.2 out of 10.

It's solid. I love it. It's a great product. No issues. Everything from the install to the actual day-to-day operational aspects of it. It's been really good.

We have two datacenters. One in Pleasanton, California another one in Fremont, California. We had no issues with the sizing of our vROps and, in fact, we have it monitoring and doing maintenance at both our datacenters.

We really haven't had too many issues so I can't speak to the tech support piece of it.

No, we didn't have anything. We needed something to tell us how we were using our resources. We needed to make a purchase but we wanted to make sure that we made the purchase in the right way and sized the right way. We looked at some other tools, but vROps just made more sense because it's VMware and that's our infrastructure.

For us, the most important vendor criteria are availability, knowledge, as well as how solid their product is and their reputation. And make sure that they've been around for a while.

It was pretty straightforward. We downloaded the appliance, installed it, and it was really pretty painless. One thing that we did do, we consulted our VMware TAM to assist us with the initial setup, and understanding which reports we wanted to see and that type of customization.

If you're looking to size your physical hardware or you're looking to rightsize your virtual infrastructure, then definitely take a look at vROps. It's a great tool for it. One of the easiest on the market to use and it'll provide you with a lot of good information.

Out-of-the-box integration and monitoring capabilities on vSphere are the most valuable features.

The out-of-the-box integration with vSphere platform is valuable. Upon initial configuration, you connect the vROps appliance to communicate with your vCenters. You receive a detailed view of your entire vSphere estate managed by those vCenter servers. This is automatically built up within vCenter.

This effectively uses data mining and analytics on the vCenter databases to provide you with initial health, risk, and efficiency views of your estate. This provides lots of valuable information of the operational well-being of your virtual data center for a relatively small amount of work.

I’ve designed and deployed vROps on many customer sites as a part of their core virtualized data center solution and based on their feedback. This is a dashboard providing a single pane of glass view for health, risk and efficiency views for the whole vSphere estate. This makes it easier to keep on top of reactive support requirements

Advanced customization of the product is somewhat complicated, though understandably, that’s due to its flexibility.

The UI could be redesigned to make this easier. Multi-tenancy configuration, especially when integrated with vCloud Director, definitely needs more improvement to be used effectively.

We have used this solution, including previous versions, for over two years.

The previous versions with dual appliances had some stability issues. Since the move to a single appliance, it has been pretty solid.

There have been no scalability issues. Especially with Version 6.2, scale out architecture is pretty good and has been more than sufficient for most of my customers.

We used a previous solution. We switched because vROps is naturally more integrated to vSphere and other VMware products.

It is a simple appliance deployment and a simple one-off configuration for a standalone setup. It takes slightly more effort to scale out deployment configurations.

Start small with standard/advanced or a vSOM bundle. Once you are happy, upgrade to enterprise which is where you get the true benefits of being able to monitor everything.

Always use professional services assistance from either VMware or your resellers with the configuration. It is important to get the configuration correct. Initial deployment and native vCenter/vSphere integration is straightforward enough that users are encouraged to do it themselves.

We were trying to create a virtual routing setup with a cluster of Ericsson equipment. We were setting up vApps for that and multiple NICs were used to route the traffic within the cluster. We tried for a year and there were a lot of tickets with VMware regarding that. It was an ongoing struggle, but we could not make it happen until we used vROps.

Deployment was pretty quick. Once you start up your templates, it was pretty quick to deploy. That was the biggest advantage. Otherwise, this takes many days.

I think they can look into some features that they're missing, like OpenStack. This is there, but not in the vApps. We were trying to get that from them, but we could not.

Overall, our project was kind of average, but we were trying something totally different than what our current product was able to do. So we looked at some features of vApps and what our software can do. We were trying to hook that up.

You can scale them quickly and easily. We had around 20-30 hosts containing all these vApps and they were really huge. We were trying to create a PoC for one of our departments. It's kind of an ongoing process.

We did call technical support quite a lot. They tried many solutions to resolve issues and create product updates. I think they're going to get better.

We were using VMware for a long time so we just kept going. It was easier to have one platform and one vendor.

Advice I would give depends on what you're really trying to do. If you're really scaling out the environment and vApps, this is a tool you can look into doing that.

For me, the most valuable feature definitely is being able to see VM over- and under-provisioning quickly and easily: "Hey, this VM has 8 CPU's; it really only needs 2."; being able to go back to the business unit and tell them that, "Hey, we can save money by reducing this."

I like the improvement it did make, it looks like with 6. We just upgraded to 6 recently. It looks like it's a lot more integrated. I noticed when we first upgraded, you go to a VM and right there is the badge of the health of the VM and similar features. I guess it's more tightly integrated because I know that before, it was a different tab, so I like that.

I have been using it on and off for probably the past five years.

I think it has been consistently stable as long as I’ve been using it. Maybe initially, when I first started using it four or five years ago, it might not have been as stable, but I think it's gotten better over time. Of course, having it in the vApp obviously helps.

I've upgraded it probably a couple times in the past two years. It's real simple. Nothing to it.

Our environment's only probably about 600 VMs, so it handles that fine. I guess I don't really know past that.

I don't know if I've ever contacted technical support for vROps specifically. Honestly, I don't think it's as good as it used to be. I think it's gone downhill a little bit. I think it's one of those things where I guess at most bigger companies, you want to try to get past the level-one person. I feel like I know a little bit about it and a lot of times some of that time is spent with that level-one person when maybe it can go up a little higher.

I will say it is still a lot better than EMC support.

I think initial setup is real straightforward, because with the vApp, you just deploy it; you basically plug in your vCenter information, create a user for it, and go. It's pretty simple and it starts just collecting the data. That's only 15, 30 minutes. While it takes about a month to start getting valuable data about oversized and undersized VMs in the environment, you just set it up and let it do its thing.

The company where I was before didn't have anything and then we started with vRA’s Ops. When I arrived at the company I'm at now, they were a user of VMTurbo. I think the initial reason they went with that was probably cost. At that point, I don't think VMware was pushing operations manager as aggressively as third-party companies I guess.

I recommend it because, as I’ve mentioned, I think it's a good product. It's valuable. I guess the only thing is, like with everything at VMware, they have the different licensing structures. Look at whether you can use some of the features such as, I think, Chargeback.

I think it's definitely valuable. If you have a small environment, maybe not, but for any environment over 8 or 10 hosts, I think it's definitely worth taking a look at because you could save some money.

In comparison to the other management suite that we tried, StrataCloud (which started out as Reflex), vROps has a very quick heads-up display that is nicely concise on what's going on in the environment. It shows the overall health of the environment with weather maps, and it quickly drills down - seems to be - a bit deeper than the other products that I've tried. Not so much fluff, more tech talk.

In terms of what we found the most useful, we were having storage problems and instead of, where StrataCloud points you to another map that goes one level deeper, vROps is very concise; it'll give you the HBA number, the LUN, and exactly what it's seeing. It was latency in our case.

Another benefit is the kind of manager-based mapping it can do and the layout; they love that kind of stuff.

We have another management platform installed in another one of our clusters, for a different department. When we get help ticket calls and I have to use that other platform, it seems to take me forever to actually drill down to what the problem is. vROps is faster. vROps just drills down to the nitty-gritty and if you're a tech, it tells you what you need to see. The important information.

We have nothing documented, but when we first put in vROps, we were having storage latency problems and we weren't sure where it was coming from. We weren't even sure it was a storage latency problem and immediately after installing vROps, it narrowed the issue down right to the VM store and the iSCSI adapters that were causing us our problems.

It also helped us with performance management: virtual CPUs, under-sizing and over-sizing, and the RAM.

Personally, from what I've seen, I think what I'd like to do is get the inside log added to it now for an even deeper drill down into what's going on in the environment. Based on what I saw at VMworld, I think I might be missing stuff. I don't know if I have any proof of that. With vROps, you're not seeing small faulted events unless you drill down deeply. With the VM login site added to it, it's going to tell me everything: initial events and it builds very nice graphs of events and the amount of events that occur over time to customizable periods.

I think I’d like it to be easier to see that type of information, based on what I saw in a lab at VMworld. I really didn't know I was missing anything, and I might not be, but based on the lab, I think that we are not getting full visibility right now without that.

Also, I think it should be cheaper, especially at an enterprise level. If it could be cheaper, that would be great.

I've had no issues with stability.

I don't know; we've never had to grow it out beyond the initial install, so I don't know if I can speak to that either.

We have 600 VDIs; that's one install, and then we have probably about 300 and so servers.

We've used our SE as technical support, and he's really good. He knows the product and whenever we were having trouble, he was able to help us out. It was more with the install; haven't had a lot of trouble since the install.

We started with nothing and then we bought another product, StrataCloud, because we were aware it was taking way too long and we just didn't know what was going on. You get the ticket call saying things are slow and without a product like that, where do you start? I think initially the investment was in StrataCloud because vROps was just too expensive.

We got into it because it was included in our licensing level with VDI. As soon as we installed VDI, it just quickly showed us a ton of problems we were having we didn't even know about. After seeing it there now this year, what I'd like to do is push back, see if I could get the product we're using out and invest on this one on the other side - on our production server side also.

We had some initial setup issues; I think there was some kind of a shim driver we had to install, if I'm remembering correctly. We had some issues with that shim driver initially. He did it remotely; he called in and we got over it quickly, the initial problems.
The full install was a few hours.

We had a request for proposals on management suites and the winner of that RFP was the StrataCloud suite. At that time, we had 6 or 7 competing products come in (all of their names escape me right now). They were all demo’d and we chose the one we were on based on a number of different areas, but I think the biggest one was price.

Price wasn't the most important part to me; it was important to the people buying, the end financial guy. To the technicians, we all wanted the best technical product.
I don't know if that is vROps, but right now it seems to me to be the best one.

For me, from what I've seen, just go with the vendor’s monitoring product. It seems to be that they always know the product best. If you go for somebody else, I think for the most part you might not be seeing the information presented the same way.