VMware Aria Operations Reviews

The primary use case is that we are transforming our customer's physical and virtual infrastructure, who are afraid of anything that can happen in a virtual environment. Our job is to make a sort of private cloud, not to sell virtual machines, but to host the workload.

The main point of installing, deploying, and troubleshooting with vRealize Operations is to provide visual dashboards to ensure that the entire workload is functioning properly. Because we sell our infrastructure to clients, they need to be able to operate it. Therefore, they must have the visibility, even if they don't know how the system works from the inside.

We have to be stable to provide high availability because it's a high value market. Therefore, we have to ensure everything works all the time.

It is intuitive and user-friendly.

We are looking to optimize all the parts. For example, vCenter can be fully deployed automatically, which is not the case with vROps. We can click some next buttons to integrate vCenter and would like these type of features for vROps, if possible.

It is stable.

The technical support is good and helpful. 

The initial setup is easy.

We bought the server from a third-party. 

The first thing that we did was ask VMware what type of hardware we should buy. They helped us by providing insight in which type of server to buy, then they helped us by providing the support to integrate the solution.

We chose VMware and its solution because it was the most easily supportable. We know some of their consultants and our people know the products.

Use VMware to support the solution. Don't go at it alone.

We use it to monitor our private cloud.

It has improved our organization with respect to allowing us to size our environments correctly. We get metrics about what our stuff is actually using, how we can scope for future projects, where can we save some resources.

It gives us a better look into performance, a better look into right-sizing, a better look at possible issues or, more so, trends.

It can be user-friendly once you get the dashboard set up but it can be complicated to get the information you want, the way you want it.

When you're running reports or trying to gather trends of data it can be slow. Sometimes the translation of what you're thinking of in your head versus the metrics it's presenting might be a little different. For example, you're thinking "time," but it wants to show "percentage" or something of that nature.

Also, if there were an easier way to share dashboards, that would be a big one.

It's pretty solid. We haven't really had any issues; a little slow, but other than that, pretty solid.

It's a small environment, so we really haven't seen scalability with it.

We went with this solution because it was already included in our licensing.

When selecting a vendor one of the biggest things is cost.

I rate this solution at eight out of ten. It would become a ten if it were easier to scale out licensing and easier to use dashboards. Those are is my two top points.

I use it on a daily basis to make sure that the VMs are up and running and that there aren't any issues with any of them. If there are, then it tells me exactly where to go to fix them.

It gives me more insight on issues like: Do we need to add more hardware to the clusters; when disks are low, to add more disk space. It's a preventive type of maintenance.

It has also immensely reduced the time to troubleshoot issues. It has improved the quality of service to users because it prevents downtime. And it lets me know how many VMs I can actually run on each individual host, which helps with cost savings through higher capacity utilization.

The most valuable feature is knowing whether or not you have issues with your hosts and VMs. There are other features where you can have it automatically adjusts things. I don't have it set to that level because I like to control things myself. That's a nice option but I'm just not at that point yet to let it control things.

It points out all kinds of issues that you might be having, whether or not your environment is actually running smoothly, too.

In terms of user-friendliness, there are a lot of areas that take a lot of time to research and figure out what the information is actually telling me, so that I know how to better use the product and troubleshoot issues that I see. It would be nice if they could fine-tune the user interface a little bit.

I haven't had any issues with stability at all. It works as expected.

I don't have a whole lot of hosts running that vROps actually monitors. I think we're up to 40 now but that's not a whole lot compared to what other people tell me what they run. It's working as expected.

I have not used technical support for vRealize Operations Manager yet. But I use it for the hosts. I need help with some of the things that Operations Manager identifies.

vROps actually came with the license package that we bought. Once I knew we owned it I just downloaded it and installed it.

The setup was pretty easy. It was an appliance, you just follow the bouncing ball, get it installed.

Because it helps me troubleshoot issues quickly, it saves a lot of time. If I didn't have it, it would probably take me a few days to troubleshoot the issues, versus a single pane telling me I've got an issue with this VM and pointing directly to what the problem is. It saves a lot of staff time.

My advice would be to purchase the product because it definitely helps troubleshoot issues in probably one-tenth of the time that it would take without it. It's something I wouldn't live without, at this point.

We have heavily invested in VMware technology. We're running vSphere, we're running other products, and obviously, we need visibility into our environment.

VMWare is quite good at following customer needs. We are working closely with our TAM so whenever we've had something that we want out of the product, around capacity planning, for example, they tend to be a good conduit getting our needs into VMware.

Sometimes what a customer sees as a need for improvement could be incorrect sizing or a result of a specific deployment. So usually, the things we want are a more frequent sampling of the various metrics and the like.

In terms of VMware support, VMware has been, to some extent, a victim of its own success. But in general, they've been always very helpful. It's always good to have the TAMs to get the support, even when they're overwhelmed with requests.

We've explored a number of products. We've used SolarWinds and their VMWare add-ons. But to be able to actually see what our infrastructure does, vRealize Operations Manager has been the closest match as part of our Enterprise agreement. We are licensed for the Blue Medora Advanced Suite which is like an add-on to vRealize Operations Manager. That gives us the visibility into our Cisco and HPE equipment. It's a natural choice.

I would recommend this solution to a colleague if they have a VMware shop and need something to provide visibility in their environment.

I would definitely give it around a nine out of 10 because sometimes, in terms of the user experience, people find stuff difficult to use. But obviously, the more dashboards you create that are relevant to you, the better it will be.

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.

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.

I think the best thing I like about vROps is that all the information is in vCenter’s database, but most customers won't take the time to mine the data in vCenter. vROps presents that data in an easy-to-consume format. You don't have to dig in to all the numbers as to why something needs to change or why you might have to improve performance.

It's huge in the performance management arena because it has the ability to really show us that we are over-provisioning a lot of the virtual machines to the point where they're hurting themselves; too many virtual processors, too much memory. The virtual machines can actually be built smaller and perform better.

vROps has the ability to provide insight, fully look at and monitor your environment, and give you recommendations on optimization, efficiency, and risk management.

For instance, let's say that I have a virtual machine that appears to be starving for memory. vROps has the ability to monitor that virtual machine in real time, and give you a recommendation on how to make that virtual machine perform better. Possibly by, say, moving it to another host.

For troubleshooting, it can also be pretty cool, and give you an idea if you're having issues, say, at storage level. Let's say latency has gone too high on one of my LUNs; it has the ability to monitor that by working with SIOC. and some other products on the hypervisor. Also, it has the ability to look at troubleshooting from a performance standpoint; troubleshooting between networking devices.

We have also used capacity management to definitely save on the compute side.

Given that I help others learn how to use the product, in most cases, even with the default dashboards that come with the product, most customers get a wealth of information. Then you couple that with the ability to customize those dashboards for their specific environment. One of the things I've always enjoyed is that we've been teaching and preaching for years on the training side: Right-size your virtual machines to get the best ROIs. The efficiency badge in vROps will tell you exactly how many virtual processors you can reclaim, and how much memory you can reclaim. It's not just an administrator saying, "Hey your virtual machine could be smaller." It's the product actually telling you that you could get a lot more out of your environment.

I would probably like to see better recommendations. I think sometimes the recommendations for performance optimizations tend to be a little too simplistic. The recommendations could be a little bit more in depth, as to why you need to do this or that.

For instance, in a performance optimization, it might say you just need to move this virtual machine from here to here. If you really look at the virtual machine’s overall performance, moving it might be a way to fix it, but resizing the virtual machine might by a better recommendation. Or moving it to another data store might be a better recommendation. I think the recommendations could be a little more tightened up and probably a little bit more in depth.

Also, one of the things I like about vROps is the ability to add the additional adapters to monitor other kinds of products, whether it's NSX, or storage, or even physical hardware to a degree; cloud-based environments. I'd like to see more on that front, to continue developing those additional adapters, those additional third-party add-ons. For example, working with Palo Alto Networks, working with some of our additional storage vendors. There are some good adapters out there, for sure, but there's new stuff coming out all the time.

Finally, I think its ability to interact with vRealize Automation could be enhanced.

We've been teaching on it now for four or five years now.

So far, stability's been pretty good. I can't think of anything off the top of my head where we've had any issues.

Scaling is pretty good, especially when you have the ability to put nodes in remote offices to grab the information then pull it over for it to be crunched. From a scalability standpoint, pretty good.

I personally have not used technical support.

The initial setup is actually quite easy because you just go through the wizard and you deploy your different nodes: your master and your slave secondary, and then your data nodes. It's pretty easy to deploy these days, and then they've got different versions. They've got a version that will run on Red Hat; I've got one customer that uses that. I've got most of my customers using the Windows version.

Definitely get training on it. Of course I represent that, but it's a very complex product. Out of the box, you can get a lot out of it, but there's so much more customization available with vROps. If you'll take the time, you'll get much more out of the product, but it usually requires a bit of training. It's probably taken me a good part of the year to understand a lot of the ins and outs to the product.

Reporting is product’s the most valuable feature: VM reporting, ESX reporting, trends, seeing where processes could be improved, seeing where resources could be reclaimed; basically, managing and balancing the vCenters. For what I do, most of the things I monitor are VMs. Application owners at times will have problems with their applications running on the VM and they want to see trends such as when are peak times when their resources are being used, such as CP use or memory, IOs and information like that. I could easily give them feedback - run a customized report - and say, "These are your peak hours, peak times."

It gives you a quicker view into the organization, instead of having to go through manual steps to figure that out; it's right there in front of you. We have app owners that use information. Most of the users currently are other IT folks in a virtualization environment.

The application monitoring helps us avoid outages. For example, we set up an application and we monitored it. Then, once the application started using a lot of resources, we're able to realize that we needed to add more resources to this application to avoid any outage.

Capacity management is awesome, too.

Maybe improve the user interface, immediate access to data, and make it easier to get reports, from the application owner's perspective, not for me. I can go in and I can manipulate the data and get what I want. I'm just thinking from the application owner's perspective. They want a quick report to monitor; see a group of VMs and see the process over time. Something like that.

It has been stable; that's good. I haven't had any issues with it. Like I mentioned, even though I do use it, I'm not the main person who manages it.

It's scalable. Right now, I think we have 10 vCenters all over the place. From my perspective, it has not slowed down.

I have not used technical support.

At my previous job, we used VMTurbo. I was looking into vROps on my own. I actually came across it and I saw that it was cool, so I decided to invest in it because of how it was integrated with the virtualized environment.

At my previous job, I started to set up vROps, but then I left. When I arrived at my current job, it was already configured and everything.

It's a great product. It offers a lot of great benefits. It's something that they should definitely look into.