VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We use vROPs primarily on our VEI side. It gives us a lot of insight into the session experience that I haven't found in another product. It matches PC over IP latency times, packet loss times; I just haven't been able to find that using another product anywhere.

I think it pretty much covers everything I need. I can monitor my storage performance with it. Obviously my host hardware, my virtual desktops. I know it can do virtual servers if we were licensed for that. We don't have NSX. I'm sure that there are add-ins for NSX for it.

It helps us verify when a customer complains about, or an end user complains about VDI performance. "Is there something going on in the session, network related between the endpoint and the virtual desktop?" Sometimes we are even able to find performance problems or identify network issues before an end user notices it and opens a ticket.

Monitoring our vSAN environment still seems to be touch and go. It doesn't always report correctly on that.

What would be helpful is more intuitive troubleshooting or more intuitive messages. Some of the messages that you see really don't make sense. When you start diving in to them, it gets better, but a lot of times there is still a lot of lack of clarity. For example, where do I go to try to figure out exactly what is causing this? Something a little more solid, maybe even link it to some KBs or that that might be related.

It's been a very stable product. The upgrades are simple, overall. I haven't had any problems that have come out of updates at all or upgrades to it. Very solid.

We are only using it on a VDI environment of about 550 desktops, but I know from reading the guides that it scales out really well.

I have had to contact tech support once or twice. I had a little trouble getting the deployment set up so it would exclude servers, because we aren't licensed to monitor servers with it. Sometimes, certain versions, when you add a feature, pack it in. Sometimes they don't work like you expect them to. But tech support has been great on that and they help get it figured out.

It was deployed when I got there, back in the vCOPS days, and I basically abandoned that installation and did a fresh vROps deployment because we were so far behind it was easier than trying to do the stepped upgrade.

Some of the earlier releases were a bit more complex to get deployed. Newer versions have been really easy. I think I did one other complete redeployment again because we left to get out of scope, and I had a lot fewer questions and a lot fewer issues the second time.

Overall, vROps is a very mature product. It is stable. It's got a lot of features in it and sometimes that's the downside. There is so much power to it it's hard to know how to use it completely.

If you are going to deploy vROps, make sure that you've got time to dedicate to learning it. The deployment is relatively easy. The learning how to leverage all the features of it afterwards can take some time. Leverage educational resources, whether it be through VMware or leveraging a partner if you need to. It is a really good product, it can just be a little overwhelming when you first get a hold of it.

vROps was there before me. When I got there, I was asked if I felt that there was value in keeping it and I said yes, absolutely.

The most important points in vendor selection are

• the vendor's reputation
• how good their products truly are
• how long they've been around
• the features supported
• the capabilities of their product
• how user friendly it is
• the comfort of the interface
• the overall stability of the product.

• Ability to predict the need for harder resources.
• An alerting system for ongoing things not caught by other monitoring tools, which we have in place.

It needs more than the current attention it receives from management, then it will have more value, but it's good even now. It gives us good visibility on what we have.

Adding and configuring add-ons is not straightforward.

Additional features that I would like to see for the next release: Simplify the PAC files. When you download something for your vendor, for your particular solution outside of VMware, or even with the view client, the view PAC file is quite a pain to configure right.

It is stable.

It is scalable. We haven't needed to scale up. It's working great for us so far.

They are great. We have used them a few times to clarify how their update process works. But now that we know the process, it is very easy.

When we need them, we just dial the queue.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Just follow the documentation.

The cost is a major factor here. The VMware solution is much more expensive than all others.

Turbonomic.

We chose VMware because we have all the other VMware products.

If you are looking at this solution, research its ease of use and integration with other products. These days, also look at the login side.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: a good relationship at the beginning.

It gives a broad view of my environment, which I can basically see from one dashboard. My servers, storage, etc. That would be the most important one.

It doesn't. No benefits.

The biggest item that I would want to see is instant capture of data from storage. One second or even less than a one-second period, of capturing data. I think one minute is too long. There are too many things which can happen in one minute on storage devices.

It's stable, in a way. It crashes every eight months and I have to reboot it. And that's about it.

I only have 60 hosts, so I can't really say if it's scalable to a lot of environments.

I haven't used technical support, nor do I have a contact that might be able to help if needed. I'm a self-learner, so I go into the application and learn on my own. It didn't crash in a bad way that I had to call tech support.

I was using vCenter. I thought that vROps would give me benefits and I bought it.

I thought I needed a solution which would allow me and about five other team members to monitor the host, but unfortunately my team members are not monitoring anything so I'm stuck by myself. I know my environment, because I deal with it, so I don't need to monitor socially.

There was another solution that I though was the best because it allowed me to see what I wanted in the storage. But I went with VMware because it was one supplier of everything. I went for simplicity and that's what I paid for.

Straightforward. I did it myself.

Most important when considering vendors is price, that's the first one. And the ability to contact them in a timely fashion.

If you have less than 100 hosts, don't buy it, depending on what the pain in the environment is for you. My pain was storage and I researched storage. And that was my biggest obstacle. It depends on people, on their issues. Sometimes it's a CPU, sometimes the memory. I was going for the storage and, as I said, one minute for me in the storage environment is not enough. It needs to be much quicker.

vROps allows us to quickly get an overview of what's going on in the environment, without even having to know too much. So from the low-end to the high-end individual, everyone can get something out of it. Obviously the better you are at it, the more you can truly drill down and find something invaluable. But even the service desk people that we have can look at it in the morning and say, "Okay, the environment is good or bad." Or they might see things in there before the customers do. So it's just a very quick and easy way to see what's going on.

How tightly integrates with the VM world. There's a lot of nice solution packs so we use Horizon, vSAN. They get integrated into the solution packs initially but then they get integrated with the product over time, and we get this better end to end view. Obviously we use VDI with vSAN to also get the end to end view, the protocol down to the storage and everything in between. So it's really clever.

I'd like to see some sort of better integration with vSphere. I couldn't get into the account setup, so it would be nice to set up an account somewhere which connects to vSphere. It would be nice if that was more streamlined. It would be something like, "Here's my vCenter, here's my admin credentials, create me an account, do the right delegation for me." Essentially it would automate the setup a bit further. I had to create roles, create accounts, and that sort of repetitive work that whoever has to deploy vROps will do.

I've never had a trouble with it. Once it's been set up it's been really "set-and-forget" from a management point of view.

My environment is probably, in the big picture, fairly small. We have one server that easily covers our environment. I do not consider vROps resource-heavy at all.

I think I had to use them only during set up because we were getting a lot of false positives. And that was a known issue then. When we first set up the environment and we were saying, "Are these... we don't believe we're seeing that but vROps says we're seeing that." Once that was all squared away it was fixed in a later version. Just bad timing, I guess.

We got it resolved quite quickly, so really no issues with tech support from that point of view. It was understood this was an issue on VMware side, and it was knocked out of the park. They knew what they were doing.

We went with it because it was recommended to me by a colleague who had already deployed it. He showed me what he gets out of it, and I could see the benefit in it for us as well. So the switch came internally to us.

I did the deployment at my site. It's very straightforward. It's deploying an appliance and just connecting it to your vSphere environment. You need to let it sit for a bit, to make sure it gets baselines for everything, but it was really easy. Took me more than about a day or two to get it fully running and to get everything connected that I wanted to get connected.

I had the offer of a team but I did not accept it at the time. I wasn't sure how much I would use the product.

Microsoft, and that's really about it.

When selecting a vendor to go with, it goes down to total cost of ownership pretty quickly. The product has to work, it's got to be reliable, and obviously it's got to provide benefits that are worth whatever investment in, time, money, licenses, you have to make.

Every solution we add to the environment adds complexity to the environment, so it's now under the product we advocated to use or maintain. You can only have so many products in your environment before there's just too much information so you need to keep it simple, to a certain extent.

Set it up and test it. It's really not hard to do. One day, two days, depending on how complex your environment is, and then just let it sit. It will pull in a lot of information, and you can see very quickly if it's telling you things you need to know.

There are some nice VMware session videos on it. Also read up. There's plenty of guides online. Really, it's not a complex thing to implement.

We can check the capacity management, then tell customers their usage on the machine compared to what they're asking for and right-size the VM's based off that information. This is valuable because we are overcapacity in their environments, by far.

This improves organizations through monitoring, and showing customers the data that their BEAM is not actually using what it is saying that it is.

The UI needs to be made more user-friendly.

It's been pretty stable.

Scale is pretty low. We're a big environment.

I have not used technical support for vROps.

If you are looking at vROps, take your time researching it. Make sure you get with vROps. Make sure you do all the recommended settings and don't rush it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor (for our company):

• Discount prices
• If they can handle the scale of our business, because we are a large scale.
• The support behind it. That we can access it 24/7.

Big things. Scale is the biggest, usually because handling our scale is hard.

• 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 features are historic trending and showing outliers; being able to determine if something is operating differently than it has normally operated in the last six months or even the last week.

We don't use it as much as I'd like, mostly because it's a little too heavy for what we have time to do with. vROps works best when somebody has it open 24 hours a day, is sitting in front of it, actively monitoring the heat maps and everything that's going on, and has the time to adjust all of the policies, so that when your operation is normal, you don't have any alerts going on, and you don't have any heat maps going on. I don't have anywhere near that kind of time. I'm the administrator of not only our global vSphere environment, the 500 servers that operate in there, and all of our storage infrastructure that supports our MetroCluster. Actually trying to spend hours and hours defining policies to get others to shut off that I don't care about, is very cumbersome.

It already has so many features that I can't utilize, it's difficult for me to determine what’s missing.

For me, the biggest area is out-of-the-box ease of administration. There are a lot of features that are turned on constantly and a lot of metrics that they use that, instead of asking you what you'd like your baseline to be, there are assumptions that are made about what good baselines are. Then, you have to go back and change all of those baselines so that it works for your organization. It would be nicer for me if the process interviewed you when you first bring it up about what kind of metrics you'd like to see in the different clusters in your environment so that that first day when you turn it on, you're not flagged as 90% of your stuff is out of compliance.

We just went through the implementation of vROps 6.2. We were coming off of an older version. I've been working on it as much as I can for about the last three weeks, and we still have some 150-odd active alerts that I'm going to have to go write policies to shut those off. That's sort of the complication. There's nothing broken in our environment; these are not problem machines. It's just metrics that fall outside of what the vROps team thought would be optimal for our environment.

I'd certainly like to be able to get more than I'm getting out of it. It's not a limitation of what it can do, it's just a limitation of the cumbersomeness of the management. My company is mid-range-sized and there are huge companies that have multiple people that actually just work on vROps. That's not, I would think, the majority of vROps customers. I suspect there are more of us, more mid-range-sized companies. It's a valuable tool, but it does require a ton of administration for the size of the IT org that we have.

I have been using it for about four years now.

Historically, it's been pretty stable. The biggest complication I have with stability is the fact that the management packs are written by a third-party organization and they don't necessarily interact well with all of the different versions of vROps. We have Storage Analytics from EMC as one of our plugins, but vROps only supports very specific versions of Storage Analytics for very specific versions of VPLEX hardware. Those very specific plugins can only be run on very specific versions of vROps. What actually determines the version of vROps we're running is the firmware revision running on our VPLEX. It's sort of the tail wagging the dog; I can't upgrade because then I couldn’t monitor my VPLEX. That's been very frustrating, as far as, "I'd like to upgrade and do this and do that and get this feature in, but I can't, because my VPLEX hardware code is too old."

I haven't talked very much to the vROps support team at all. I've only had, I think, one open case, and I resolved that before they got back to me. He was very nice when I talked to him, but I haven't really overly utilized support.

We've used a lot of different products for a lot of different parts of what it does. We mostly used vCenter monitoring and vCenter alerts prior to using vROps.

I didn't do the original vCOPS installation.

I did do the 6.2 installation. The actual out-of-the-box installation's not terribly difficult. Some of the certificate pieces for getting that plugged in is a little more cumbersome than I'd like, but that's a global thing with VMware in general; the certificate management is not where it needs to be.

It's not something that out of the box you just throw in and is going to give you a good return on investment. You really are going to have to use it and have somebody managing it to get your money back.

Make sure that you have sufficient resources to manage vROps before you actually pay for it. It's a very expensive product in the mid-range for what you get for the cost; you're going to pay a significant amount. You need to make sure that you're willing to dedicate the resources to that from a salary perspective. You're going to have to hire a person that helps manage this, or get some resources or free up some resources to really help do that, or you're going to waste your capital expenditure on vROps.

Capacity management is probably the most valuable feature that made me want to bring it in. There was a lot of overprovisioned infrastructure before I came in. That was the main goal: being able to have evidence for when issues are not the infrastructure's fault, when there are application issues. There was a big issue with a financial management application that they were just certain they didn't have enough CPU and memory. We were able to demonstrate that, no, here's what it's using exactly, so what is going on is that the software is poorly written. vROps helped rectify those situations.

There's room for improvement; it's really good. Again, it's very powerful, but it's difficult to harness that power, and there's a lot of room for improvement there. They could improve the licensing and the expense, too.

In a vROps session at a recent conference, I heard they're trying to make it a little simpler, because when you first install it, it's very overwhelming. It's one of those products that's very, very powerful, but getting to a place where you can harness that power, there's a pretty steep learning curve. Doing custom dashboards and making things look simpler are not easy to do, compared to some other products. At my previous employer, we used VM1, which is a competitor, and I know there are other competitors such as VMTurbo; there are all kinds of other ones that do it. I guess those other solutions went more towards the ease-of-use side and less towards the power; the getting-into-everything side.

I've been with my current company for just over two years. About a year in, I campaigned to bring vROps in, so I have been probably using it for just over a year now.

It is a consistent, stable solution. Although it's not really a stability issue, we had one issue when we upgraded from vCOPS to vROps and tried to run it in parallel. It wasn't really clear about how you would go about doing that, so we ended up having to reinstall vROps completely, and had to start over. It takes 30 days to get to where you have good information coming out of it, so we had to start that over again. That wasn't necessarily the product's fault as much as the documentation's fault.

We're fairly small from an infrastructure standpoint, so I just have the one appliance. I don't have any remote collectors or anything running. I have one vROps appliance monitoring vCenters; one has about 400 VMs, the other one probably only has about 20 VMs that run all the time. It's our DR site, and there are some production workloads that run there all the time.

I'm one of those guys that'll never call technical support, so unless we have a major issue, I'd rather figure things out for myself. And my company tends to buy the lowest level of support. I don't usually call.

We did call them one time for vROps, which was the issue I’ve mentioned about the database becoming corrupted because of the way we had done the migration. They just said, "Can't do it that way."

Initial setup is really easy, especially with the appliance. You just deploy the appliance, and point it at vCenter. I had one issue that was a little bit non-intuitive as far as setup, which was the ability to pull in vSphere tags. If you want to pull in tags, you have to give it more permission than what you would do for a normal vROps appliance.

It is complex when you first set it up. It depends on how quickly you want to be able to get good and actionable information out of it. Obviously, there are things that are in it that are actionable from the start, but it's probably a subset of what you're actually looking for. If you do want to have custom dashboards and items like that quickly, you need to have a professional services organization, whether that's VMware themselves or a vendor that's familiar with vROps, just because of that learning curve.

There aren’t a lot of – at least there haven’t been – good resources for vROps. I don't know what it is about vROps, because for just about everything else in VMware, you can find lots of information. It's hard to find specific information on how to do things. Maybe I just haven't found the right places, but it seems to me that it's harder to find information – walkthroughs and things like that – on vROps than it is for some of the other products.