VMware Aria Operations Reviews

• It's become a lot simpler.
• We've started using views a lot more.
• The plugins for managing the virtual desktops, specifically the PC-over-IP and the latency.

Often times, an end user complains why something's slow, and you can immediately look at the dashboard and see exactly why. You have green, yellow or red, and you’ll see that latency's high, or you have some storage latency, as well, that is going to cause some slowness that the users are complaining about.

Most companies are trying to do a lot more with less. So, instead of being proactive, they're being reactive. There are pieces in vROps that allow them to become more proactive. There's some automation into fixing and remediating that are built into the product.

Often times, we hand this off to the customer so I can't give any specifics on whether vROps has helped avoid outages or shortened outage time. I haven't seen anyone actually save on storage. A lot of people use it for trending analysis; they don't usually move workloads around and actually show savings. As far as performance management is concerned, I have not really seen things speed up.

I would like to see more automation in terms of the remediation, instead of it just being a monitoring tool. Obviously, you don't want it to be causing issues in your environment and maybe you turn on features as you get more comfortable, but if it's just there to monitor, what's the point? You could use other tools, but if you're trying to do more with less and you're spending a lot of money on rightsizing this and deploying it correctly, it'd be better if I'd actually get something more than just a nice dashboard.

One of the bugs right now is, we've had some issues with single sign-ons; it's a known issue. It seemed like a pretty easy one.

The stability of the product has gotten a lot better recently. It's a nice dashboard tool for management, but the actual admins aren't using it on a day-to-day basis. When they do log in, something's locked out and they have to restart the services. They've had some issues, but it's become a lot better. We're still seeing it here and there.

Technical support has actually been pretty good. Obviously, pretty much for any company, tier one support is going to be what it is, but if you give them the information they need, I've actually seen some people who know the product really well.

Then the deployment of it is not as simple as it should be sometimes. To do it correctly, it's very complex. When you do it right, it becomes a very useful tool but if you don't do it right, it just becomes another nagging monitoring tool. One of the hardest parts is rightsizing it. There are tools out there to do that. Each environment is unique and it's not as simple as some of the competitive products out there. If you don't tune it, you're going to see a ton of red.

We've seen some customers deploy things for remote offices and they know that they're going to have some kind of slowness in the product. Instead of fixing itself, the baseline's there and it's not as intelligent as it should be.

I know Turbonomic is one that comes up all the time. A lot of times, for monitoring, we ask companies what they're currently using: Are they using SolarWinds or are they using something else, and how can we help them?

The most valuable feature of the product is the ability to watch performance indicators inside of the VM, as well as the indicators outside of VM. It's basically a very deep monitoring tool that gives lots of insight.

It's given us the ability to optimize our ability to allocate resources correctly instead of overallocating. Most vendors shoot for the moon when they give you the recommendations. vROps says, "No. You don't need that. You can get away with less." In the long run, our hardware and software costs are reduced.

We use it for capacity management; that's one of the biggest uses is capacity management. I would say we probably have saved 10-15 percent on storage.

With performance management, while we have not necessarily seen speed improvements due to vROps, in general, we have seen better performance. Again, it gives us the ability to say, "No, you're not making use of this set of resources being CPU memory; I'm going to cut this machine down. It makes the whole system better because now that's available for something that actually does need it."

I would add a capability to easily add new policies. For example, the 6.0 product comes with the vSphere 5.5 hardening guide. I have been digging for months now trying to figure out how to add the 6.0 version of the hardening guide. It looks like I have to write my own policy to do so. That's going to be a pain. That's a very large policy to write, so that would be a policy writer instead of the way they got it. I guess that would be one of the biggest things.

I would just like to see a similar policy be made for the 6.x hardening guide as a prepackaged policy also. The 5.5 guides are quite extensive and the policy is also very detailed and comprehensive.

Starting from scratch to build a policy to reflect the 6.0 guide would be very time consuming. Starting with the 5.5 policy and modifying it would be equally as so. While I am doing just that, because of my regular responsibilities, it is a "side" project that gets attention when I have a few cycles to spare for it, which is not much.

Having a prebuilt policy that is to the current hardening guide would be a great convenience.

It's very stable, once you get to learn it; it is a very complex product.

Scalability’s there. I feel like I could take this up to 1,000 VMs, easily.

I use technical support all the time. :) I rate them 7 or 8 out of 10.

I inherited it. When I came to the job, it was already there. It was basically there, and they said, "Can you get this thing running?" :)

The initial setup was very straightforward. Basically, unpack it, turn it on, and tell it where to start looking. The follow on and ongoing setup is still a bit complex; as I’ve mentioned, it's a very deep product. The more you figure out what you're doing with it, the more you discover what you can do with it; it's an ongoing cycle. It could very easily be a dedicated job for one or two people.

Look very strongly at vROps. Some of the other solutions that I'm aware of – such as VMTurbo - will offer things like automatic shifting of resources, etc. That's, in my opinion, not necessarily the best idea.

I gave it four stars because it is very, very complex. Again, I get the feeling that to use it properly, you almost need a dedicated person for vROps. That being said, it's a great tool.

When selecting a vendor like VMware, my most important criteria are reliability, service, and reputation. There are other virtualization companies out there; I'm not impressed with any of them except VMware.

I guess the faults, the alerts, are the most valuable feature; being able to see what could become a problem when I'm running out of virtual machine capacity, and definitely the faults, as far as whether there any issues with the VM storage, any performance issues. I mostly use it for CPU contention, memory contention, as well as latency, obviously; to correlate latency between data stores and virtual machine latency, virtual machine disk latency as well.

I have a dashboard now; I set up dashboards for the help desk team. They are able to look at the dashboard and see right away if there's a VM issue, or whether it’s an actual guest OS issue or an application issue. I think that's the easiest. That's the best feature that I've gotten out of it, as far as the organization is concerned. They are able to understand the information they're seeing.

I was able to sell some custom dashboards to the community. I was able to download some of the dashboards that they have and it's like a help desk central type of a dashboard, where you can drill down to the VM that you're having issues with, and it'll tell you right there and then if there's memory, CPU or a storage contention problem. That's the easiest thing to go by.

I would like to see better built-in policies, so when you deploy an environment, you are able to apply policies that are more realistic for a production environment. That would definitely be a nice release.

They do have some policies now centered around a production environment; maybe easier to make exceptions with where, if you have an alert, you can say, "Don't worry about it. It's an exception. Don't notify me again about this issue.", instead of having it come back up again after a few months. That would be nice.

Once I figure I know this is not a real issue, maybe I can flag something saying, "This is something I know about. You don't need to notify me again about this." Or maybe say "This can be an exception to this rule.", without needing to change the whole policy around, just for that one VM. Maybe there is a way of doing that, I don't know, but I haven't figured it out.

I've had no issues with stability, to be honest; it's worked really well.

We only have two sites on which we use it, so we have two of the servers deployed. So far, for our needs, the scale is fine. It's a web-driven menu just like the web client, so it's kind of sluggish sometimes when I'm down in to certain menus, but overall it's not so bad.

I have not used technical support since this release. I have used it in the past when it used to be called vCloud Operations. When it was vCOps, that's when I had more issues with it. I had to call technical support. But now that it's vROps, no, I've had no issues.

It’s the first-use solution I've used for VMware.

I was the one to set it up. The new setup environment's pretty straightforward. Setting up the alerts, definitions and actions were kind of tricky because there's a lot of false positives. A lot of things it alerts you on are not really problems, so you have to go in and tweak the policies around to see the actual real issues. Sometimes the notifications can be too aggressive, where it notifies you of almost every little thing that can possibly be wrong but in reality, it's not an issue. That tweaking does take a while to get figured out. It's an ongoing process. I'm still doing it to this day. It takes a while.

Maybe after the fact, we looked at VMTurbo a little bit, but that was already after I'd purchased vROps. So it wasn't very realistic as far as going after that product. We also have Veeam Availability Suite, which comprised the same functionality as well. That's because of the way we purchased Veeam for our backup environment. The Availability Suite just came with the backup environment. The vendor gave it to us that way. We don't really use it too much. It seems like Veeam is a nice product as well.

Definitely look into your other products, along with vROps as well. We were short on time, so we made a decision when we should have probably researched more. See what's out there. See how well it compares to other products. I'm sure there are other products that'll do just as well. That would be my number one recommendation. Try to do a PoC with multiple products.

See what fits best for your environment, and what fits best for your staff as well. If you have a dedicated VMware guy, maybe vROps is great. Or maybe, if you need that level of trainability, vROps is great. If you want something right out of the box that just works and just tells you the high-level information and the kind of nuts and bolts of what's wrong with your environment, without having to do too much modifications or tweaking, then maybe something out there is maybe better.

The automation is the most valuable feature; the whole automation and building a VM from scratch, all the way to the VM and life cycle the VM.

We can build a VM faster. From the same business unit, we can deploy VM in less time than we were doing it before.

There's some improvements that they can do as far as make it more user-friendly and get away from Java.

It's not that easy to understand and I found even at VMware, it is really hard to get someone that can answer some of the questions we have as far as the product.
I think they released a new solution recently, so I need to go back and see what's new on it but I’ve already seen some things that got fixed as far as going from one version to another. For example, there's more integration with vRA now.

Stability’s good; no problems at all.

Scalability is great.

I have not really used technical support.

We were doing a lot of scripting, and that doesn't scale to the way we wanted it to, so that's why we're going to use vRA.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor like VMware is that it will support Unix and Windows at the same time; VMware was more user-friendly with Unix machines; it comes with certain versions and flavors of Unix.

The initial setup was easy, but what came after that was complex, due to the fact that we needed to have multiple modules.

We’re thinking of Microsoft Azure Stack. It's not out on the market yet, but we're waiting on that.

Is it worth the money? That would be the question.

The actual capacity management piece of it is really, really nice. Being able to do scenarios in there, where you can see the output if you introduce new hosts or new VMs; you can see where you're going to be at capacity-wise. It shows you where you're going to fall short, if it's going to be memory or CPU.

There's a lot of power, way more than I've ever come close to touching. At first, it's a little overwhelming because there's so much to it. Once you get past the initial scare of, "Oh, my gosh, there's a lot of stuff to know in here," you realize how powerful it is from a reporting perspective.

The management packs are really pretty handy. We use Hitachi storage and there are management packs available for that. Not a whole lot of companies do that for Hitachi.

It lets you know where your hot spots and trouble spots are so you are being proactive instead of reactive.

You can start to see there's a particular badge for anomalies where you would look, "Okay, why is this machine doing this? Why am I getting dropped packets on a particular machine?" Then you're able to start digging and look a little more in depth into, "Okay, let's figure out what could be causing this. Do I have something wrong with the network, the NIC, things like that."

I think the interface itself could use a little cleanup. With some of the really cool parts of the interface, I’d say something like, "This is great information, how do I get it to a report that looks exactly like what I'm seeing." That was difficult. There was really no way to get some of the snapshots that you're seeing on the screen through the interfaces directly into a report.

Especially with the capacity management, when you're looking at it, there are some really cool windows and other things. Then, when you actually go through the reports and you start looking at the capacity management reports, what you get printed out isn't quite in the same format. It would be nice if there was some way to get directly when you see something exactly the way you want to see it, get that into a report.

I'm sure there's so much there already that I haven't even touched. For example, integration with Horizon, which we kind of toyed around with a little bit. It seems like there could be a little bit better, tighter integration with Horizon; something that maybe didn't require external agents or things like that.

It seems pretty solid.

I noticed initially that it seemed like it was laggy, but honestly, I think you just really need to size it properly for your environment and give it enough resources to have.

Not that we did a whole lot with scaling it out, but it looks like it has the capabilities to do so.

We introduced it as a PoC; we had 400 BMs.

I have not used technical support.

We previously used Foglight. I think the future of Foglight is kind of up in the air.

We looked at Foglight Enterprise, which I think is basically a complete rewrite from Dell when they acquired Quest. There were some things that were really nice about it and then other things of that product that weren't even as good as the existing Foglight products. That's kind of what led us down the vROps road. It's a VMware product, so obviously integration with VMware products is best. There's literally a management pack available for anything and everything. In a UCS environment, there are management packs for UCS.

There are some choices with initial setup. The most difficult thing was to figure out how to go back and change those initial choices that you made because they might have not been great. When you're looking at it and going through that initial setup, there are a couple of questions – whether you're allowing memory over-allocation and CPU over-allocation. If you picked a choice and it's not giving you the results you want, you then have to figure out how to go back and adjust it.

Spend some really good time with it. If you can, get an expert to help you through a PoC. I think what we did, we did on our own; there are a lot of gaps in there. So having somebody who's a professional go through that PoC and possibly even initial deployment would be a good way to go.

Our primary use of it is for loading purposes, whether it be for memory or CPU loading, how much storage consumption. There's a large paradigm shift that everybody's had at this organization, going from physical to virtual. They all think, "The software says I need 16 GB RAMs, I need 16 GB RAMs when it's virtualized." When in reality they really don't. We've started things off and it's been really difficult for people to adjust to that, because we start off with 4 GB, which is our standard VM size. We'll use vCOps to see if it's actually being stressed from a memory or a CPU standpoint, if it needs more CPU or more memory. In most cases, we show that it's not; when we go back, we find out there was either a badly written query, maybe it's I/O bound or something, or network bound, those kinds of things. It's helped us to keep the sprawl from happening.

I think it streamlines the tech side of things, where people are doing the troubleshooting. We've got three tier levels. It didn't help the tier 1 folks too much because they don't have access to it. But the tier 2 folks, they do, they use it as a tool to see if indeed there's something wrong or if it's a specific application as opposed to the virtual machine. Things along that nature. It definitely helps from a troubleshooting standpoint.

There are some features that we would like it to monitor outside of the virtual world. For example, networking and appliances. I know that there are some adapters that you can add that will help with that, but it doesn't give you that full picture of the organization. It's hard to bridge across multiple domains and things of that nature.

I think what's missing is what we haven't deployed yet, things such as Infrastructure Navigator, which goes by a different name now. Part of the reason I attended VMworld 2016 is to bone up on the newer vROps, actually the entire vRealize Suite; see how best we can migrate them over.

I think a single pane of glass for everything would be most useful to me.
I think it would be nice if, when you actually found an issue somewhere, by clicking you can actually go in and fix the issue. I think that probably happens on later versions, I know our version we don't have that capability.

We've had stability issues with the underlying PostgreSQL database; it's very chatty, it fills the logs up, it fills the drives up. We have to go in and shut it down, resize the database drives. It would be nice to be able to do that on the fly, as opposed to having to shut the system down and use manual Linux tools to expand the partition sizes and stuff.

I can't really address scalability because we deployed it for what we wanted already. We're not going to grow. Scalability I don't think is an issue for us. We deployed it for what we wanted. It's not something we've addressed.

I have used technical support a couple of times. They were helpful. They pointed me to the issues, the database issue I mentioned elsewhere.

We didn't have anything that was monitoring the virtual infrastructure.

Initial set up was straightforward. We follow the PDFs that you get from VMware; pretty straightforward.

We looked at SolarWinds and we looked at a Veeam product.

vROps fit better. It just fit better for what we were doing. The other ones didn't. You had to install agents on all of the VMs. We didn't just want to do that.

Plan it out, because a lot of IT guys want to bring it up, install it, see what's going on, and then they realize, "I need to build it this way now, instead of that way." Do the research ahead of time, plan it out and size it properly from the outside.

The most valuable feature is the single pane of glass to see everything in your infrastructure and know when you're running low on resources, and things are over-provisioned and under-provisioned and so on. Whereas, without it, you are relying on scripting and other things like that. From that perspective, it has been a big help.

The biggest issue we have with it, honestly, is the interface, it's very unintuitive. To really know how to get the most out of it, you almost need a course; it's very complicated. While we think we know a lot about it, I bet you there is stuff that we haven't tapped in to yet. I think they could have made the interface a little bit more intuitive for the user to be able to understand things without having to go to a course.

I took a lot of points off my rating because vROps is not intuitive; because that to me is huge. I have a lot of stuff to manage and I don't want to have to figure out every one to the nth degree. I shouldn't be expected to be a next-level expert on this particular product just to be able to get basic functionality out of it; that's what I feel like the issue is with this one.

We have been using it for a couple of years. We used it back when it was vCOPS, two years ago.

It hasn’t been consistently stable. We've had a couple of glitchy issues with it; nothing major, but it hasn't been 100% easy to live with. I don't know why that is; maybe because it's a newer product. It just seems like it’s not as mature as it could be.

We haven't had to scale it, so I guess I can't really address that, as we haven't gone down that road.

I have found VMware support to be somewhat lacking. It's hit or miss. Sometimes we'll get somebody who really knows what they're talking about and they'll be able to resolve our issue really quickly; other times they keep requesting log files until we're blue in the face and they never come back with anything, after we provide all of this data to them. It's hit or miss; I feel like it depends who you get on that day. It's been spotty to be honest.

When I’m deciding on a vendor, I really like to work with companies that are accessible; you call a support line, you're not hassled with, "Give me this license number," and we'll send you on to the next guy. I want to call up and get somebody on the phone and talk to them, the first person I talk to. VMware has sometimes been like that for us and then sometimes not. That's what I look for. I look for responsiveness, communication. I don't want to be only communicating over email; I like to talk to people. It seems like in the technical support industry that is become less and less favored as a communication mechanism; it's more email and so on.

Honestly, we saw it on the VMware website and it caught our interest. We hadn't necessarily been looking for it because we had done a lot of scripting for our monitoring and that kind of work. We downloaded it, tried it out and said, "Hey this thing’s actually pretty useful." That's that.

Take a class. I think there are videos we watched online, where people were going through some features and so on. If you try to just understand it right out of the box without reading a lot or going online and looking at something like that, you might have some troubles with it. But I definitely think it's good to have; it's certainly better than not having a solution in that area.

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.