VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Being able to see everything that is happening in our infrastructure. There are a lot of problems that we didn't see, but now that we are using vROps we are able to act proactively. It's been a great help for us.

We have way fewer problems than we had before. We had a lot of VMs with low disk space, a lot of VMs that were quitting and the OS was crashing, and we couldn't see these issues. We had to wait for the end user to complain and then react. Now we are able to act before the problem happens.

I think the dev ops for Horizon need improvement.

We haven't had any kind of problems with the tool so far, it's been very stable.

We haven't had time to scale out yet, we have just implemented it.

I have not used technical support for this tool.

We used the previous version of vROps, it was under a different name that I don't remember. They ended support and the tool stopped functioning and we had nothing to monitor.

I was not involved, a partner of mine did it. But for him it was really easy, he didn't have any trouble, did it all by himself.

We didn't consider anything else because we have a big contract and a license for pretty much everything VMware offers, so it was just a matter of using the tools we bought.

When looking at vendors, cost is the number one factor but, of course, the product has to function.

I would definitely say give it a try. It's growing incrementally better, it's really user friendly, the user interface is easy to manage.

For the vRealize solution that we are using, the most valuable feature that we find is the dashboard feature. It gives you a single overall idea in regards to how your infection is looking and if there are any problems, it can tell you in advance, i.e., based on whatever calculations it does.

In addition to that, we are really about to start the automation capabilities for vROps where it can increase or decrease the resources depending on the need.

Just the automation part of it is very important for us. Hypothetically, for example, if there is a machine that needs more resources and you have set that with the automation policy. It will, then, provide the resource to that machine; you don't need to worry about the fact that you are present there to do it manually. So, it's a wonderful feature that can help to increase the productivity and efficiency of the environment without you actually being there and monitoring it.

I haven't touched all the features that it offers as of date. If they can make the automation a little easier because we have tried a couple of things and have realized that you have to go through a lot of scripts and adapters for its configuration. So, if it can be a little easier, that'll be better.

It is a stable solution. It works, i.e., what it is supposed to do, it does that.

We are not a very big shop but we are expanding. However, as per what we have read about it, the vRealize solution is extremely scalable. We haven't tried it yet, but we believe in the VMware products, so if they say it will be scalable, then it should be scalable.

It was a business requirement and the user requirement, so that is why we decided to invest in this solution.

Previously, we were not using any similar solution. However, for the last seven to eight years, we have been using VMware products.

The basic factors that are crucial to us while selecting a vendor are that the product has to be cloud-ready, it can be scaled if we need to scale it and that it has to be secure.

I would advise you to go with it. vRealize is all about monitoring and automating things. So, if you are getting what you want, then it's a great solution. We have tried it, we are still using it and plan to use it so you should go for it.

The monitoring capability, the predictive failures and the predictive features such you need these many more servers or you need this much more storage is really what I mostly use it for.

Since I'm a consultant, so I mostly do the implementation. When I use the product, it's after the initial install or as we're ramping up or moving the VMs into the environment and seeing how all the hardware/resources are being effective. We use vRealize to basically plan out where we need to scale.

It allows us to give more efficiency to our clients. Instead of having to oversell hardware, we can scale it. For example, we can say let's start with this block, give it six months and see what vRealize tells us about our pattern of the data usage.

It does eat up a lot of the CPU cycles, I will say that this is actually a general complaint about a lot of the VMware software that I use. I love VMware, but one of my complaints is that a lot of the application servers such as vCenter, vRealize, the operations manager, etc. eat up a lot of the CPU cycles and memory cycles, especially if you have any kind of large database. I would like to see some more optimization there.

I'm sure that other people have a laundry list of the improvements. Since I'm a consultant/an implementation/immigration guy, I think it does what I need it to do. I use it for its predictive analysis basically.

Stability is very good.

The scalability is amazing.

I thought the setup was straightforward. However, someone else was trying to do it before me, and they thought it was complex.

We did not receive any in-house support.

Reputation, support, and overall visibility are important criteria for us while selecting a vendor.

We looked at other solutions namely VMware, Veeam and Tintri.

The reason as to why I chose VMware is because I've used every other major virtualization platform and their support as well as community is by far the best.

Definitely use it, especially if you need to carry out predictive analytics.

For knowing how to scale your environment, I think it's a priceless tool.

Make sure you've got enough room and resources for the installation.

Monitoring, capacity management and the whole holistic view of our virtualization infrastructure were the key features for us.

First, we were using a different virtualization platform with zero monitoring and now, we have moved over to a virtualization site with vROps, so it's pretty good; it does what it says. It has been very helpful for us in terms of the roll out of VMware.

It has tremendously improved the way our organization functions. As I mentioned earlier, we had zero insight previously to the whole virtual platform, however, now with vROps and the analytics that it provides, we probably have insight in to what's happening with Harperizer stack and virtual machines so it's very helpful. Capacity management was a different problem altogether, but with vROps capacity management and predictive analysis, it's pretty helpful; it's really helpful.

Frankly, the predictive DRS was one such feature that needs improvement and proactive HA was another. I think we need more integration points between the IT Center to the Service Point which I don't think is a straightforward exercise. I think they also need to focus on the IT SNMP so that the integration is more seamless.

The navigation tool reporting and the way we create reports could also improve. We're good engineers, so I don't think that should be a problem, at least not for us. We have great dashboards and the reporting structure is pretty good.

It's pretty stable. We just broke down and we're in the process of migrating to VMware and so far, it has been stable. With VMware's PSE, I think we have a good design out there to support/sustain based on the requirements.

Again, it has scaled to meet all the requirements. Definitely, with the help of VMware, it has scaled to support all the data center, including the robots.

I would probably give the technical support team an 8/10 rating.

There is room for improvement probably in terms of the support that we received per se. I think we want to ensure that our engineers have access to the best VMware engineers. We don't want the level one teams and try to do the same stuff that we know our engineers are capable of doing. I think we need more streamline in terms of acknowledging the customer's impact and ensuring that it's translated properly within VMware, so that we have the right engineer from day zero.

We have been with the vCloud Suite and the whole product family. As I mentioned, monitoring was the very key factor for us and towards the success of this project. Hence, vROps was the perfect choice with VMware to have vROps as a monitoring tool.

Previously, it was all in-house developed scripts, then SCOM, partially one of the virtual machines; but other than that no other solution, otherwise a stack.

Cooperation from the vendor is what we look for while selecting a vendor. We need to ensure that the vendor understands our agenda, our goals, and then, works hand-in-hand with us, so as to ensure we need our timelines, then we can go to the market and are up and running. We don't need to beat around the bush with VMware and they have done a pretty good job with that.

The setup was straightforward. There were certain bits which were complex partly due to the way we do things. But again, with VMware's support and guidance, I think our roll out was pretty smooth and we hit all the targets in terms of our project turning; so, it was green all the way through.

I would definitely advise others to have a look at vROps. It's definitely good. The analytics engine is very powerful and the management feature is pretty good. Also, if you have other portfolios like VRA, VRB, it seamlessly operates with the VMware component. I would definitely recommend it.

The reclaimable capacity feature. It makes it easy to go and find over-provisioned VMs and then reclaim that capacity for use in other areas.

We get better use out of our hosts.

I can't think of any, really. We've run into a some small issues with our storage, but I don't believe it's because of the storage. It's because of some issues we have in a couple of our datacenters.

Seems okay. Just stand up data collectors or remote data collectors as you need them.

I have not contacted technical support but I do have a VM team contact. They're knowledgeable and would be able to answer my questions, for sure.

Well, we ran into an issue with the version we were running, and we found that that issue had been resolved in the newest revision. We found out through our EMC partner which is on the project.

I installed it. It was fairly easy. We just upgraded and the user interface is much better.

We have a team that is contracted to work on our project.

Dell, EMC.

In our case, all our hardware is Dell, our storage is EMC and our software is VMware, so it's a one point of contact for all of our support.

Definitely take a look at Operations Manager. It seems to fit really well within the environment.

The capacity information is the most valuable feature of vROps. It shows that you're using too many resources on VMs, and you can reclaim some resources. It provides that kind of insight so that we right-size and not over-provision VMs. For example, if someone says that they think they need eight CPUs, we can show them that they don’t; that they only need two. It’s beneficial in that way. That’s starting to happen more and more.

I also appreciate the health monitors. When we get the alerts and so on, we can very quickly see what the problem is. Sometimes it's kind of difficult to get that information directly from vSphere itself, so it enables us to get it quicker. We're fortunate in our environment; we bought vSphere Enterprise Plus and vROps comes with it. We didn't have to buy it separately.

We're not very mature with our vROps installation, but we are trying to learn more and more about it, and use it more and more. One thing I wasn't aware of: I didn’t know you could monitor external things, such as Brocade switches or something like that. I didn't know that was a possibility with vROps.

Feature-wise, I don't know that I'm looking for any more features. What I would need more help with is establishing the correct baselines and that's something that's very subjective, based on each individual company. From my perspective, that's something I could use some help with; making sure I get the baseline set correctly. If you just take the out-of-the-box settings and an alert goes off because you have a certain disk latency, is that really a problem? Is that the correct level for your organization? The out-of-the-box settings might not be the best for your environment. I would think each organization would need to develop its own baseline, and that can be the trickiest part. Sometimes, you need a little guidance with that. You kind of have an idea of what is bad, but sometimes it needs to be a little more tight. Maybe they could offer a questionnaire or some sheet that I can go through that will help me establish what might be the current baselines for me. Something like that.

I'd also like to see a mobile interface. I don't know if later versions offer it, because we're on 5.5. I guess some of their guys are working on it, so it very well could be in later versions, but a mobile interface is something I can see as being beneficial.

It is absolutely stable; no issues whatsoever.

It scales really, really well. When we did it, we just installed it and it started doing the analysis. It's pretty much, set it and forget it. We need to adjust our baselines and similar items, but it's scaled really well for us. We have about 320 VMs. We're not doing any VDI or anything like that, so it's just our service infrastructure and I would say we're about 80% virtualized.

When we started using vROps, we had around 200 VMs. We’re now at around 320 VMs and haven’t had to change anything in vROps to accommodate that 60% increase in our virtual footprint. vROps simply began monitoring the additional VMs and reported on them as expected.

There are default baselines out of the box that VMware recommends for typical environments, but it’s probably a good idea to have those baselines adjusted for your particular environment, so that you get what you need and weed out what you don’t need.

We don't have to call very often for VMware support.

The biggest problem we had was with licensing, figuring out purchasing and those kind of logistical issues; not technical issues.

I did not previously use a different solution. The reason I initially wanted to look at it was to gain more insight into alerts, performance, and that type of information. As I’ve mentioned, it's kind of difficult to get that directly out of vSphere sometimes. I wanted to see what vROps would give me and it's very useful.

Initial setup very straightforward: install the virtual application, and let it start monitoring. Getting the web interface and all that set up wasn't that difficult. There's plenty of documentation out there on it. It took a couple of days, on and off. While I was working on it, I would get pulled off on something else, so it took a couple of days.

As I’ve mentioned, it was included with our Enterprise Plus, so it was a no-brainer.

vROps is definitely something you would want to look at because of the tight integration with vSphere. I don't know whether I would want to look at another product to do this type of information gathering and alerting. I've had some of my engineers look at some other solutions. They come back, share what they found, show it to me and I think, I don't know why we need to look at that. We have vROps and it works a lot better than that.

Do yourself a favor and look at vROps.

Right now, we've been creating a lot of custom dashboards for the application teams, so they can see all their application and server performance. We've been trying to do a lot of the integration with their management packs, so you can basically try and see everything from end to end.

It improves the resolution time for troubleshooting, but we also can predictably see issues as they start to happen so we can jump on it before it really becomes a problem for the end users.

Even though I'm not sure how often they're finding issues – I don't really deal with that too much because I'm not in the operations side – I know that one guy that we've been using heavily for a VDI environment now, and they've been able to track down a lot of problems as they start.

They haven't started using many of the new features for version six, but it's one of the things they're looking at, trying to mess with.

We do not have any use cases where we avoided outages or reduced outage time. We're not using it for any actual alerting; it's just the dashboard and troubleshooting really.

We do use it for capacity management. Well, I was when I was doing the job; I was using it for capacity management. There were a lot of cases where we could save on storage but, because of political reasons, we weren't allowed to reclaim a lot of the space that was being wasted. It was a good tool to show that waste was happening. We weren't doing any VM provisioning on the array side, but because of vROps, we were able to prove that we have a lot of waste here; we needed to start VM provisioning somewhere. They got that implemented on the array side.

We'll see improvement in the phase when we're trying to get more people to use the tool. As a VMware admin, I find it useful for capacity planning. That's the big one for me. We're trying to get our transition more on the engineering side, so I don't really use it as much now. We're trying to get the operations team to kind of embrace it a little bit more.

This is a difficult area to address because I'm not using it much anymore. I don't know. A lot of the big areas for improvement, they've already addressed with six; the ability to integrate with vRealize Orchestrator, adding some automation to it.

Some of the thresholds and what not are a little tricky to set up, and that's where we're struggling right now; our operations team isn't really managing those properly. Right now, I don't even know if they have a process to set up the thresholds anymore. Basically, they are just relying on the out-of-the-box setup. Every time they come to me and say, "We've got these alerts that are red," I say, "Did you actually validate that it's a problem?" Nine times out of ten, it's not. It's just out of the norm, and they don't really understand that.

With version six, stability is really good. We're really enjoying six. Five was stable. Six is a lot easier to use. That's the big one.

Scalability is really good, especially with the new model in six. Five was okay. It wasn't too bad, but you're limited to a couple of VMs. Now, you can just add new VMs.

I actually haven't had to use technical support. A couple of the other guys have, and it seems to be really good.

We were using Foglight a long time ago. I barely touched it, but I remember it being just a giant pain to manage. It's hard to configure. To me, it seemed kind of convoluted.

Actually, both five and six were pretty easy to setup initially.

You have to play with the thresholds and make sure they meet your needs. If you see something red, don't freak out because it could just be an abnormal spike from 10% to 20%.

The most valuable feature is its ability to monitor the trends and accurately make predictions about when and where and how and what you need to buy to, first of all, get ahead of your sprawling growth. Also, at the same time, you can keep that sprawl under control because you are able to see easily that the sprawl is happening and where it's happening, who's doing it and how. It gives you the tools and the information you need to be able to bring it all together, and keep the sprawl from happening.

Previously, I was with a managed service provider and it would have been awesome if we had been able to do it as a managed service for people with multitenancy. I kind of hacked it into Log Insight; I wasn't really able to do it with vRealize Operations Manager, but that would be really big for us; would have been really big for us when I was doing that.

In my current deployment, container monitoring is an area with room for improvement: Docker, Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesos, whatever it's going to be, whatever anybody's going to use; just being able to monitor the Linux container ecosystem, resource utilization, contention, etc.

I've deployed vROps as far back as when it was vCOPS, which is like two-ish years ago, thereabouts. We've used it for a variety of different things from Horizon 7, specifically Horizon 7 monitoring, to VSAN, and all kinds of mostly VMware products, mostly in a virtual space.

I don't thing I've ever had one crash on me before.

I've never really scaled it a whole lot; three to four hundred VMs was the max I've ever used it for, so I can't really address that.

I love VMware support, when I can get them on the phone. That's the one thing, the one rub, is that I always have a very difficult time getting through the auto-dialer service. I have business continuity service, and even now, I still have so much trouble just getting someone on the phone. Once they get on the phone, they either breeze through the problem or they've identified a bug and they get it fixed. Just the management layer is the problem I have.

The initial setup itself is not complex. It's not something that I would consider complex. However, the time it takes until it is useful is very long and it's something that I've seen people take issue with. They want their information, they want to use their new toy, and they want to do it now, and they don't really care about the other stuff. They don't care that you need more data, that you can't just make predictions off of a day's worth of data, because that has no idea what you're actually doing.

You need to stick with it. You're not going to see immediate return on value. You have to trust the product and you have listen to it. You can't think that you know more than it, because it definitely knows more than you do. Whether it's making intelligent decisions, you have to evaluate what it's recommending, but they're utilizing information from across thousands of customers, so trusting the product is very important.