VMware Aria Operations Reviews

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.

It allows us to view the statistics of our environment in real time. We're able to pull reports and generate other metrics from all the virtual infrastructure.

It's helped us because we're able to take a heartbeat or take a snapshot of the environment at any given time. With all the reporting and analytics built into vROps, we can rightsize the environment. We can reclaim resources. We can do a whole wealth of things that allows us to keep our datacenters running.

I'd like to see more integration with ticketing systems, so tickets can be based off metrics or thresholds that were met.

Lots of coffee and lots of donuts.

Just a thorough plan, which definitely needs to be had in making a deployment like this.

Early on, it was iffy, but the latest releases have been pretty stable.

It scales.

It was great. They were very knowledgeable. They were spot on.

We contacted them several times. We've even had a PSO Engagement where someone who was a specialist for vROps came on site.

Nobody else. Just VM.

I would highly recommend others to take a look at the vROps tool. It will definitely help them manage their infrastructure.

When evaluating vROps, they need to make sure all the plugins are working, and that it's the solution for them. Sometimes people evaluate a lot of products, and it's just an evaluation which really doesn't fit what their business needs are. Having a good understanding of what you're looking for and what you need is the most important part of evaluating a product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Their education
• Their product knowledge
• Ability to get support.

The analytics engine:

• Goes through all the data which we are out to collect and gives us a nice dashboard.
• Gives details about the whole infrastructure.
• Shows how things are working now.

We used to do all the calculations manually. Now everything is done within the analytics engine itself. So, it gives us a very clear vision, or data, about what we need in our infrastructure support applications.

A feature that would definitely help is something that automatically resizes the virtual infrastructure. That is one thing that we would like to see in vROps. It would understand the workloads' requirements and then resize them based upon orchestration and automation rules.

I've never had an issue with it.

I've never had an issue with it.

I have never used it.

No. We need the solution because we have to monitor our environment. So for monitoring the virtual infrastructure, it is the key component.

It is a straightforward architecture, but you can make it complex based upon your architecture. Based upon where and how you want to deploy.

All the architecture is based upon your datacenter layout. It's a pretty straightforward process but you have to consider your layout.

In-house.

The most important criteria is that the solution must understand the overall software, defined as it is in your architecture; not only the hypervisor layer but the VMs run on it, the storage, the computing that will be running, and the network as well.

Research integration with any other portal that you want to monitor along with your hypervisor.

I would highly recommend going forward with this solution.

The most valuable features are performance troubleshooting and performance monitoring of VM CPU, storage latency, storage throughput, basic uptime, downtime.

A lot of the built-in free stuff that comes with VMware for troubleshooting latency has been valuable. When a VM is responding poorly, you've ruled out the basics – memory, CPU – and you're starting to look at the disk. We'll look at response time on the disk and if we want more details or history, we'll go and bring up vRealize Operations, which reliably catches it.

I don't know. I'm probably not the best person to address this question because I don't use it heavily. We have it installed in several places, but it's not our go-to for a lot of our products, for a lot of what we do. I work for a big organization; lots of different people doing different things.

I'd want it better integrated with the core products, so you don't have to go to a separate site or interface to go and use it.

The interface is a little bit too much, all at once for me. With the colors – green, red, black – if you drill down, it's a little bit confusing to me.

Also, it generates too many false positives. For example, with predictive growth, the predictive trends aren't very valid, realistic.

It's stable. No issues.

It's a pretty big environment. It's had no issues so far.

I have not used technical support for this product.

I think we've previously used Quest Defender and we’ve used SolarWinds.

I haven't seen a compelling reason to switch away from using vROps. We're a relatively large company, so I think it was part of an agreement in which they purchased it. I wasn't involved in the decision or even knew much about it beforehand to pick one versus another.

Upgrading it from vCOPS to version 5 was pretty straightforward. It was pretty easy.

It's probably one of the better ones out there. Just put your time in to researching it and setting it up correctly with the right data.

The most valuable feature is the fact that it understands what is normal for a workload and alerts only if you go outside the given boundary. It knows if a workload spikes at the end of the month, that doesn't mean it has to alert, because if that workload is spiking every time at the end of the month, it knows this is normal for that workload and will not alert. It'll only alert if that spike goes beyond the normal range of that spike.

It has the ability to filter and alert you only when you want to be alerted. It understands the IO profile of the workload. It knows when it has spikes, when it has valleys, in a manner of speaking, and accordingly will alert you.

It's a great troubleshooting tool. If you have enough management packs in it, you can see the entire supply chain all the way from storage to compute. It helps you see where exactly, potentially the problem is happening.

Of the newest features, the workload balancing is something we might use. Currently, the way our clusters are laid out we truly do not have a need for that use case. We are not a good candidate for that use case, but the fact is it might help us when we try to consolidate data centers. It can help us to take two clusters into the data center and perhaps migrate workload between the two. It might be used for a data center migration, the way I look at it.

As far as using the capacity and performance management features to save on storage, I cannot answer to that because we have a different team for storage. They manage the storage, they monitor performance and capacity. We monitor the compute side. We use vROps on a regular basis from a capacity management for the compute side; the built-in features, views, heat maps, and whatever they have are pretty good indicators of when we need to add capacity. It has been pretty reliable from that perspective in the sense that it tells us we have a defined threshold that it takes us x number of days to add capacity. It has been pretty reliable from that perspective.

I haven't yet truly used it for proactive monitoring. It's been reactive, but it helps nail down the issue very quickly, based on a VM, a host, or whatever. Their views are the biggest source of views out there.

I think they need to make the UI a little bit more simplistic. It can be a little overwhelming for people who have never used the tool before. For someone who is using these products, you can find things very easily once you're in the UI, but we tried for our users so that they can go in and look for their stuff in there. If they can make the UI a little bit more simplistic, that would probably be one thing I would ask for.

We are trying to empower the users. They should be able to go in and look for their VMs and do minor-level troubleshooting and similar tasks. The UI is a little cluttered from that perspective. If they can make the UI a little bit easier, similar to Google, it would help a lot.

We run infrastructure. Users have a mindset of different things they look for. For them, if there's a custom dashboard that we could set up with a very simple basic UI, where they can see the obvious things. They could just jump in there and see that dashboard, see where the problems are happening right away, instead of moving all over the place. That's why I haven’t given the product a perfect rating.

If it is designed well, it is quite stable. You need to know how many VMs will be reporting up to it. Based on that, if you stand up the cluster with a sufficient number of nodes; data nodes, management nodes and remote collectors. If you design it accordingly, based on the requirements, it performs really well.

So far it's been working well. We have a pretty big cluster; it's around seven nodes. It has been working just fine.

I have run into issues and the support I have needed was more from a guidance perspective than any big help; just asking them, having an upgrade, what would be the steps? What is the recommended procedure, if any? Is there any good guidance around it? They have been pretty helpful with that.

I haven’t actually had many issues with technical support. Once they kind of laid it out, given the environment, “This is how we would recommend that you do the upgrade.” The upgrade itself takes time just because of the scale of the environment. Beyond that, not much.

I was not involved in the initial set up, but I have been involved since then. The solution was already stood up by another team member of ours. He's no longer there, so I inherited the solution, but I have expanded the cluster and I've incorporated additional BUs that we have all over the U.S. and they're reporting into vROps now.

It's a pretty big product. From our perspective, it does a lot for you. You just need to do your homework and try to understand what you're looking for. It has all the answers in there. It does. You just have to know what you're looking for and know where to go to look for it because it can be a very complex product for a first time user. It can be.

The most valuable feature is the ability to get a view into all of my clusters from each one of my data centers at the same time.

It allows us to meet the needs of our customers a little better as far as capacity management. We can keep ahead of the curve of adding new hardware at the cluster side to meet the demand for what the other teams – such as the Windows team and Linux teams – need for their VMs.

The biggest room for improvement that I can see on vROps is for slightly better definitions around the metrics inside of the reporting. For some of that, it's difficult to find any kind of documentation that explains exactly what you're getting out of each particular metric.

I haven't seen any issues with stability at all. It works great.

Once again, I don't see any issues with scalability.

I have not had to use technical support.

We weren't using anything previously. Of course, we had a few talks with our reps at VMware, and they suggested we use it. We looked into it a little bit and it looked like it'd be a good tool for us.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor such as VMware is obviously market space and how popular they are. What everybody else's experience with them are.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I heard it was straightforward for us.

I don't believe we were considering any other solutions at the time.

Definitely give vROps a shot; at least if you can get a PoC to see if it works and if it's the right solution for you.

I think it works good. I'm not as experienced with it as some of the other people on my team, so they might have a few more things they dislike or like more about it. But so far from what I've seen, it works great.

I would have to say the most valuable features are the active monitoring and the integration into Virtual Center; then, just the logging and history. It monitors the health of the system, as well as resources such as CPU, memory, RAM, and disk usage – not only on the data store, but on the OS level, as well.

One of the big benefits was when we were introducing a new solution for the data center and our vendor needed historical data to right-size a solution for us. We were able to pull everything out of Ops Manager and provide that to them, and then they were able to right-size a current-need, as well as future-needs, type solution for us.

The capacity management was key when we just purchased new hardware. We do not necessarily measure its value by what we save but by making sure that what we bought is going to meet today's needs and tomorrow's needs, as well.

After using the Capacity Planner, if you install new hardware, obviously, you're going to notice a big difference, so we have seen cases where performance has improved.

I would like to see some better dashboards, overall dashboards. There are a lot of dashboards – easily more than 20 canned ones – and I’d like to see something that encapsulates everything into an easier interface to look at from a 30,000-foot view.

I would like to see them do something about the complexity of the reporting mechanisms. It's not just for anybody. You've got to get in there and roll up your sleeves. I learned by doing just that: rolling up my sleeves, getting in there, reading documentation and so on.

It's never had an issue with stability.

We're a four-host environment, so we're not a major big environment. We've got about 60 VMs and four hosts. There have been no issues. It has never slowed down.

I have not needed to use technical support, really. It's pretty much, set it and forget it.

I wasn't getting visibility into the operations of the virtual machines. Performance charts are great and whatnot, but I was not able to dive deeper into web server activity, database activity, and so on, without having to buy third-party products.

Because we're such a small shop, trying to minimize the number of vendors is key. Looking out there, sometimes I'm a little hesitant to go outside the box in a sense. That’s one reason why we chose vROps.

I set it up, and it was pretty straightforward. It took about a week, off and on. It wasn't too difficult.

First, ask yourself what you're trying to accomplish. If that's what the product gives you, then go for it.

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.