VMware Aria Operations Reviews

The most valuable features are the ability to look at performance metrics historically, and the capacity planning where we can see waste in our environment. Primarily, that's what we're using it for now. A company as big as us, we tend to over-provision. That's based on application requirements. Sometimes politics can be involved with that. We use vROps right now as a way to show application teams how much their server's working and how little it's working, so we can potentially take that stuff back.

It has helped the company function when we run reports. Every once in a while, we'll get complaints from our end users that an application is slow. The vendor gets on a phone call with us and says, "It’s your VM environment." They'll call us up and say VMware is slow. We use vCOPS to look at the analytical data of those VMs in question. We can show them: If you're having issues at this time, we don't see any CPU usage, we don't see a CPU usage increase, we don't see a memory increase, we don't see it needing more memory, we see low disk activity. We'll show those graphs to them in an email. Once we show them that, they typically back off.

Personally, I’d like to see improvement in its usability. As an IT professional, we're tasked with having to jump between various platforms. A tool like vCOPS, from my experience, requires a little bit of a higher learning curve. I believe they can work on that. For example, with reporting, it does a whole bunch more stuff that we don't even use it for right now. You have to put time in to learn all of that, such as creating the dashboards, all the widgets and so on. It's a high learning curve at first, and difficult to learn. You have to put in a lot of time with it. That could take years for some people at their company.

I would like to have the ability where, for example, you bring up clients into your environment for the first time. There should be an option to have all the alerts go into that. You turn the alerts off in vCenter and have them go through vCOPS. That would be a big help for me, personally.

It's available. However, we run into issues where it gets very slow, where you try to log in, you can't log in; or, if you log in and you search for an item, it doesn't take you to the right window. We've had issues with integration with the web clients; if you search for a VM in the vSphere web client, there should be a link to vCOPS. That link does not work for us right now.

We also had an issue where it just stopped working. The disk filled up, so we had to call VMware support. They had to clear out some temp files or something like that.

I think that's where the slowness, for us, comes in. As we add more VMs and similar items, it seems like it's slower, but at times it could be fast. I don't know if that's another bug.

Our environment is roughly 1,500 virtual machines and across 60-70 hosts. We've experienced that, as time goes by, it seems to be getting slower.

We call technical support whenever it's broken.

For the last issue, it was pretty straightforward. It was a documented issue, so hopefully it's a bug and it gets released in a fix.

Actually, at that time, nothing else existed. We, at the time, really fought to get that in the house.

Initial setup was straightforward; you just import the OVF file. Give it a name, IP, and so on; connect it to vCenter and you're all set.

We did not evaluate any other products.

Always look at the competition first, obviously. That's part of our job. PoC it first. Make an informed decision after that.

We use this solution for creating workflows and managing different clouds. We are system integrators. I'm a project manager. 

This is a very good tool, because we can customize it according to the needs of our customers. It enables automation, and the customization of workflows in a short period of time with the help of our PSOs. It has a user-friendly dashboard. 

I'd like to be able to access some demo sessions to enable a deeper understanding of the product to help our clients because it's quite a complex solution. 

I've been using this solution for five years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable.

We have access to the vendor team who assist with any problems we have and we're happy with the support they provide. 

Positive

The initial setup is quite complex although it's becoming easier with each new version. 

VMware offers a suite of products with many licensing options. 

I think this is a good solution and rate it nine out of 10. 

We monitor workloads with vROps. For example, if a new customer wants our services, we need to know the impact if you put their workloads in our platform, i.e., if this new workload will have any impact on the product or platform. We need to know the increase in percentage relative to CPU, memory, and disk. So, it is important to know how a new project or workload can impact the product or platform.

It can decrease the downtime of a client who recently has experienced performance issues by 10% to 15%. This tool can help you decrease those kinds of circumstances. Downtime is also about the design of the solution and how you put workloads in your infrastructure. If you put in more VMs than your infrastructure can support, you will have a big problem with all your clients. That is the reason that it is very important to check the performance every day of the ESXi host and vCenter from maintenance mode. If you periodically check if you have had a security issue, then you can resolve it as soon as possible from a security perspective.

vROps is selling because we have a lot of customers who need to know their usage of VMs, e.g., is the sizing of our VM good or should I decrease it? Or, in reverse, I need to increase the size of the VMs. All this is about the performance and what VMs resources you can liberate from the platform.

It is a very good tool for day-to-day troubleshooting. For example, if you have CPU-ready VMs, you can build a report of VMs who recently had an issue. It is useful for making decisions and troubleshooting issues. I think it is the most powerful option on the market.

You can schedule reports on the platform that are very useful day-to-day. 

For project management and new clients, the What-If Analysis is very good. You can use it for workloads. When you are adding new workloads to your platform, it helps you avoid impacting your production.

There is another useful tool for undersizing or downsizing VMs, which has more resources than they can handle. 

We have a dashboard for the latency of the datastore on the storage side. For new architectures, we have a vSAN dashboard for latency based on the usage of vSAN, because you need to regularly see the used space.

The newer versions (5, 6, and 7) are more user-friendly. There are tabs upfront where you can see if you need a dashboard, for example. You also have a building option, if you want to build in the infrastructure and how. It is very customizable from that point of view.

It is a very good tool for efficiency. From an ESXi host perspective, you can see the CPU rate on a dashboard. For example, if the relationship is 5:1, then it is a good standard. If you exceed this, you can get into problems with VM performance. If you have a host with a VM inside of a host using the CPU, you can balance that manually. It can also help you move the VMs into clusters. 

The older versions are not user-friendly.

If you have an operations center, you can put a big monitor with its dashboards so you can see what is going on in your platforms. However, there is no real-time. It takes about five minutes to refresh info. It is a good option if you need to see the entire landscape of the solution, e.g., the CPU, memory, and disks. For example, if you have plugins for VxRail, and there is a problem, will you be notified?

They could mix in parts of VMware Skyline into vROps to make it more efficient.

In a previous version, you could click on a cluster to see a lot of information about efficiency, e.g., when you will run out of memory, CPU usage, and RAM in percentages. In newer versions, you see this information in megahertz and kilobytes, not percentage. I don't like this change so much. If you need to present information to your boss or Director of IT, the information would be better with a percentage. Now, you have only a big number and don't know the percentage of use that you are getting from the VMs. I don't know why they changed it, but I liked the percentage version more than getting the numbers for megahertz of memory. Also, kilobytes of memory is a very large number. For a simple view, gigabytes or terabytes is better.

With the What-If Analysis, if you put some information in, and then add another workload, it is not possible to view the two workloads in the What-If Analysis. For example, if you have a customer who wants to up your sizing by 30% more, and then you have another customer tool which needs sizing, how can you leverage resources? If you add these two customers, then your sizing might be 70%, but you only have 30% of your resources free.

I would like to see more information about public cloud plugins with Amazon, Google Cloud, and Azure. This is really important in the future. Companies are moving to public clouds to maintain their workloads since they don't have downtime, which makes for very stable platforms.

In the future, they could add a central administrator for vROps. For example, if you have a large environment from multiple countries, then you need to look at the landscape for performance and forecasting.

I have been using it since 2017.

Version 6.7 is more stable than the previous version. There is no real problem with the purchase of upgrades. So, it is a very stable platform if you get good sizing of the tool. If the VMs do not have the appropriate memory and CPU, then you can probably get performance issues. So, this is important for the tool. From the disk size, it is better to choose the thicker VMDK to maintain a good performance if you had a lot of vCenters.

It is a scalable solution. If you need more vCenters or information, you can simply add VMs onto the cluster. From the vROps cluster, you can get more resources from the VMs. You only need to deploy a new VM for the cluster of vROps, and this automatically moves the workloads. If you put an IP, then the server will recognize this new node from the cluster and the job automatically. So, it has very good scalability.

There are a lot of plugins. For example, I use the vCloud Director plugin for private cloud. We also have VxRail. VMware and Dell EMC work very well together. From the VxRail side, there are plugins that can help show you more information for your platform.

Their support team is very good. They will explain things to you. You are very involved with the problem. I think the Latin America team works out of Costa Rica.

We had some problems with the views in version 6.5. It would show me 110% usage, which doesn't make sense. We opened a case with VMware. I worked with their development team in Bulgaria. We resolved the problem. 

I had a problem with a vROps plugin because we upgraded our vCloud Director. The plugin didn't recognize the upgrade. At that moment, we are doing a workaround for this while they apply a new update from this plugin to resolve this problem.

We had a demo for Tanzu from VMware for vCloud Director. We needed to show a customer how vCloud Director works with Tanzu and the Kubernetes solution. From that demo, we built a solution with VMware that links with vCloud Director as a platform.

VMware Skyline detects a problem in your platform. It has the ability to create a ticket to VMware directly, then you will receive a call from VMware, "Oh, you had this problem." It also monitors security issues.

The initial setup for the demo is very easy. You have 60 days to use the trial version and see what the tool has to offer to you. You only download the URL, then configure some parameters, IP, and sizing. Also, in the wizard, you have an option where you can see VMs with more CPU, memory, and disk. 

The deployment was first a demo version, which was standalone with one VM. Then, we needed to add more vCenters to vROps, so we needed to add more VMs. Finally, we had three VMs to maintain the database of vROps.

We started with a demo version to see what the tool has to offer our organization in regards to the VM's efficiency and health. This is very common for our company. They ask you, "What if you put more workload in our infrastructure? How will this impact a new workload in our environment?"

You have two options to deploy VMs. 

1. You have thin space. If you use VMs, then there is space to increase. However, if you decide to choose VMs with thin space, probably for an SQL database, there is no other good option from a performance perspective.
2. You have thick space. For example, you have a disk of 100 GB, and you say, "All" in the first deployment.

The billing is complicated because every country has a different option. Here in Chile, we don't pay for this kind of service with the Chilean pesos. We use another currency. In the future, I think vROps needs to work with governments for a native solution.

It is useful for determining whether to make decisions. Also, for our troubleshooting issues, it is the most powerful option in the market.

vROps provides a good native solution if you are using multiple VMware tools.

The design and what you sell to customers will impact your infrastructure.

There is a new version, but I haven't used it yet.

I would rate this solution as an eight out of 10.

Our primary use case of this solution is to monitor our systems and capacity planning. It has been performing great. It's a little bit of a beast to run sometimes, a lot of knobs and dials, but it runs well.

The biggest benefit to us is that it shows us where our pain points are; where we need more storage, where we need more network or bandwidth, where we need more CPU or more memory. We know where our problems are before they happen.

It has helped reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot issues and has improved the quality of service to our users. 

The most valuable feature would be the capacity planning. I can see where we're at as far as usage on our data stores, our CPU and memory. It lets us know where we need to grow. 

We haven't found it to be intuitive or user-friendly. We're on version 6.0, it's gotten better since but there's a lot of things we have to do under the hood to make it work how we want it to work. It doesn't work out of the box very well until it's been fine-tuned.

I would like to see a better interface, something that's more intuitive, one dashboard that shows everything I want to see on. The dashboards that come with it are focused on certain things that aren't the big picture. I'd like a dashboard that does everything faster and also a faster web interface.

It's very stable. It's a beast to get configured but once it's been configured it's easy to use. We don't have any downtime from the product itself. The initial configuration is quite painful. 

It scales very well. It's designed for huge operations, so when it's used for a small company, it's not quite suited for their needs. It takes a lot of time to figure out and to make it work for your needs which is why it's precarious.

Their technical support has been very good to work with. They help us get to where we need to go pretty fast. They're very knowledgeable. 

We bought some tools from vCenter. We had to go through all the logs yourself, all the metrics ourselves. It tied into our UCS system that we had attached to our UCS, Hitachi system, and vCenter system. We could all the stuff in one pane of glass, which is nice, but it was one of those things that we had to do a lot under the covers to make things work for us.

The criteria that we look for when we evaluate a solution are functionality, price, and feature set. 

The initial setup was complex. There's no wizard to install it. We have to read a lot of documents then there's a whole other guideline to install the next part. There are a lot of steps. The documentation was great but there's a lot of pages, around three to four hundred pages of documentation. 

I did most of the installation myself but called support when I needed help. 

We have seen ROI with this solution but it's hard to monitor. 

We looked at ManageEngine and SolarWinds. We chose vROps because we're a large company and they gave us a good price cut. Also because the feature set looked good from the demos. 

I would rate this solution a seven because it's complex. The new versions are a lot better.

If you're considering vROps I would tell you do first do your homework. Make sure that you're ready and that it's going to fit your needs. Make sure there are full-time employees to manage it because it's not something that you just set up and go. It's got to have someone to babysit it and maintain it. Somebody needs to take care of the many different dashboards and functionalities. 

Our primary use case is for the developers to test code. Our customer care uses it to troubleshoot customers' issues. We also have a training business unit and they use it to deploy classes for customers to train. We've been using it for four years and it has been performing well. It does the functions that we need it to. We do have some issues from time to time. We're looking for more maturity out of the product but it's getting better with every release.

It has increased the speed of VM deployment. A normal server request would come in, it could take anywhere from three to four days to deploy and now within 15 minutes they can click and have something up and running. IT support for developers is nice as well because they are able to manage the environment themselves.

The self-service feature is one of the most valuable features for us. It gives the end-users the ability to deploy their own machines and so the administrators are hands off at that point.

We have found it to be intuitive and user-friendly. It requires minimal training to get them up and running to start deploying and accessing machines. 

I would like to see them update the format of the catalog in a different way. There's no option in a lot of the contents for the virtual machine blueprints to change the view.

Stability does go down from time to time. We have had some issues with the appliances sometimes and we have to do reboots in the middle of the day which affects the ability for them to deploy. Now, there's no downtime for existing stuff that already deployed, but it does keep them from deploying at that time.

Scalability is nice. We have it deployed in a highly available environment and scalability is nice because we just add another ESX host and we are able to increase the capacity there.

Their technical support is helpful. Sometimes they can take a little while to get back to us. 

We were using a lab manager before that and that was decommissioned so this was the next solution for what we needed. We needed to have a self-service environment for our developers, customer care, the ability to deploy machines, destroy machines, complete the entire VM life cycle and it does.

The initial setup was very complex. We've been using it for a while now and realized that it's pretty logical. Upgrades are pretty straightforward. We had a lot of problems originally deploying it, between some certificate issues, but we had an engagement with VMware so they were able to help us get a poof of concept environment set up as well which was helpful.

The deployment can be complex so I would advise someone looking into this solution to engage professional services to set up a proof of concept environment and to evaluate it. 

I rated this solution an eight because we've had issues with the stability and the appliances. Other than that, it's a solid product. It does exactly what we need it to do and we're happy with it. 

We use it to gain more insight into our environment, with a simple, easy-to-use interface. We are a small team looking after a very large environment and without it we would be lost on a day-to-day basis.

The insight that we get from all our vSAN clusters is probably our biggest use case, and where we get the most use out of it.

We're a pretty lean team. Like most organizations, our training budgets are tight. Without an intuitive product like vROps, we wouldn't be able to get the insight that we do into our environment on a day-to-day basis.

The integration with the rest of the vSphere product suite is the most valuable feature, as we are a big vSAN user. It is fully back integrated into the vSphere Web Client, and we're getting all vSAN analytics that we need.

Stability has been bombproof, as far as we are concerned. We have never had any issues with it.

We have in excess of about 2000 hosts and had no issues from a scale point of view.

We have not used the technical support.

We weren't using anything else previously. It was the case that we were missing a monitoring solution, and this solution was the obvious fit because of the integration with everything that we already had in place.

The initial setup is straightforward. The installation process takes you through in a simple, easy to deploy manner. We were had everything up and running within the space of a day. Then, we have just evoled the product ever since.

We deployed it ourselves.

Our budgets are always tight. We would like to have more features at lower licensing levels for easier access to them.

From a hardware point of view, we looked at SolarWinds. They have a good offering, but the integration is lacking from our point of view. We needed something that would just work without having to put time and effort into it.

I personally have used some of the other solutions in this space. I've found that you tend to have to put more manpower into getting them up and running. This is what drew us to vROps.

Don't knock it because it's a vendor-specific solution. It does do what it says on the tin and helps us on a day-to-day basis.

Our primary use case for this solution is to troubleshoot workloads. 

We have effectively reduced a lot of our memory and we love the Idle VMs. We can scale back the over-provisioning of systems based on actual facts and metrics. We've really been able to tidy up the over-provisioning. 

The charts, form, and metrics that you can visually display out to other sites that IT can't, and the visibility are the features that we have found most valuable. 

We do not find this solution to be user-friendly. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done and a lot of work has to go into getting the graphs right. It's not a "plug and play" type of thing. You really have to put in a lot of work. You always have to be aware of what's going on within the machines. It needs to be improved from end-to-end. 

I would like to see more visibility into the machine's working and an easier way to find out what the workings are. There are agents but they're tricky. I would like to see something more agent-less. 

I have rated this solution an eight because it's at an excellent level but it's still lacking on the end-to-end side. It has gotten better, visually, but it's still not quite there. It's clunky looking and they could have done a lot better with the interface. 

There are problems with stability. 

Scalability is getting better. It needs to be resized and it's not that easy. 

I recently used technical support to do an upgrade. They did excellent work.

I have a contact at VMware who I spoke to about software issues and he pointed us to this solution. We used RVTools many years ago but we needed something more enterprise. 

The initial setup was complex. 

This solution is expensive. Businesses don't see the true value of it, whereas IT operations do, which makes it a hard sell. 

IT sees a lot of benefit from this solution, mainly regarding troubleshooting, identifying issues, and retrospective trouble-shooting. It offers a timeline in which you can go in and see how the machine was behaving. It identifies deep issues at high levels. 

I would tell someone looking into this solution that you need high-level tools. You can't be relying on the free tools or on vCenter free questions. You need a step up to aggregate that information. I would look at all of the available solutions. 

We use it to optimize and scale directory infrastructures from our customers.

Our customers have found the solution to be intuitive and user-friendly in the newest version. It is better than versions 5.0 and 6.0.

• VMware Infrastructure Planner
• VMware Capacity Planner, which provides a capacity planning overview.

We would like the return of the additional partner marketplaces, like DataCore. My customers miss the integration to DataCore.

The stability could be better. We run into issues when the database is temporarily full.

With the newest version, it's user friendly. You can add easily more nodes to on-premise. It's better than 6.0.

Technical support could be better. This has been a problem with many VMware products in the last few years, the support has not been good.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The predictive analysis of the infrastructure helps our customers to reduce downtime and improve capacity planning. Issues are fixed faster with vROps.

Other competitive tools are not as good. The whole stack with VMware is a complete solution to use.

It is easy to use from its deployment architecture to use cases. It is straightforward for customers to use. It's a good product and better than the earlier versions.