VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We use it for the monitoring and maintenance of the virtual environment. We have about 3,000 VMs. We use it for capacity management. We use it to help applications. We've got it separated out by the applications in each one of the VMs. It really helps to get our infrastructure team visibility into the virtual environment, so that they can troubleshoot issues and detect problems. What we've done is taken it a little further out, deploying it out to give visibility to the application team so that they can see their environment.

It's getting the visibility for all the different layers. From the application team to the infrastructure team, they need visibility into the operation of the environment, and driving that visibility and troubleshooting to what we call "fell fast" – “fell fast” and recover, or back out and recover. Giving us that capability in alerting and mechanisms, which is not there now.

We deployed Vblock 720s, and I’d like vROps to further integrate with them. I know it pulls the data from Vision, but further integration of Vision would be really good.

We have increased our tier 1 environment probably 70 to 80%. There have been very minimal sev 1s over the last two years by deploying this and putting it all in place.

We can scale up and scale out very quickly based on the demand of the business, and it has met those needs. It has not slowed down as we scaled up and out.

We have mission critical support with VMware, so we use those guys constantly.

In 2014, we had two data centers full of physical environments and we, as a company, made a decision to go virtual first. As we started looking at all of our refresh plans and our long-range plan, we saw we had all of the dollars tied up in refreshing the physicals. We started looking at the virtual environment and we partnered up with VCE. We bought two Vblock 720s and then we put ExtremeIO and VMAX on it for storage.

I manage the group that set it up. The grouping by application was pretty complex, but as far as bringing it in and getting the foundation set up, it was fairly simple.

ROI’s very good. Ultimately, based on the business case that we did, we spent 20 million dollars and got 50 million dollars return on investment.

We didn’t really look at any other vendors because we wanted it on a stable tier 1 environment, so VMware is what we made a decision on.

Put your critical workloads on enterprise software.

Our primary use case of this solution is mostly monitoring and the capacity for tracking. The organization I work for has lots of different data centers. Our team is responsible for monitoring how much capacity is left. 

It has improved our organization because it allows for a bit more transparency regarding consumption and it also helps us plan ahead. 

The integrated metrics are the most valuable feature. 

We don't find this solution to be user-friendly. If you want to use integrated features then it is quite easy, but if you want to use it for a specific metrics model or monitor then it starts becoming more complicated. If you want to create different networks then it's quite complex. 

The stability is working. 

The initial setup was quite straightforward. It was quite simple. To get benefits you have to dig deeper. 

We deployed this solution in-house. 

I rated this solution an eight because it's a good product but it's a bit complicated. I'm rating it based on my expectations of this kind of product. Once you install it you can expect it to help predict issues. In order to understand all of these metrics, you have to delve and dig into them yourself. If you don't know where you're looking for a problem and need it to be more specific then you have to customize it on your own.

I would advise somebody looking into this product that you have to know exactly what you're looking to get; what kind of metrics and what they involve. It is quite expensive and if you just implement it just because you can then you won't get any benefit from it. You have to think through and plan ahead. You have to understand what the issues are that you want to solve with this solution. Otherwise, this solution is a waste of money. 

We primarily use it for performance and monitoring and troubleshooting for our virtual infrastructure. We also use it to monitor and troubleshoot our Dell EMC storage arrays.

We have a troubleshooting dashboard that our team uses. If someone complains that a system is slow, they can go there, search for that virtual machine and see if there are any alerts for it. We can start our troubleshooting from that step.

The most valuable feature is the single pane of glass so we can see all our vCenters, all our machines, all our storage arrays. We can see if there are alerts in any of these systems, and follow up on that alert and see if it's impacting just that area or if there is a bigger problem behind it.

It's useful day-to-day. Every day the operations team can go and see if there are any new alerts, and they can monitor the infrastructure through it.

I find it user-friendly. The first stage gives you the overview of all of your infrastructure. It shows you the capacity, how much you have left, how many of your data centers can have more VMs hosted. The tabs are really nice, they're very self-explanatory. You can click them and it will pull out a menu. You don't have to roam around to find things. There are search bars you can use to look for things as well.

The room for improvement is in the definition of the metrics. There are millions of metrics inside the solution, but there is no documentation from VMware for what those exact metrics are. That is a trouble point at times.

We have started to do containers and I would like to see a feature to monitor our container infrastructure. If we can do our monitoring and performance troubleshooting of them through the same tool, that would be a nice-to-have.

It has been stable so far. We have not faced an issue where we had to troubleshoot to keep it up and running.

Scalability is good. Since we have had it for our current infrastructure, we haven't grown so large, so I could not comment how big it can scale.

Customer service is good. I haven't used any ticket systems for this solution, I haven't opened any cases for it, so I don't know about technical support.

We have always used this solution. We wanted something so that we have a total view of our infrastructure and that's why we use this product. We haven't used any other product for that purpose.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• its stability in the market
• how many people are using the product
• what the support structure is like for the product.

Those are the main criteria.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. It's not a ten because there is no clear definition of the metrics. That is something I would like to see.

We use it as a monitoring tool for our environment, it alerts us on the VM performance, capacity utilization. We also use a bit of the trending tool that it has.

It automatically alerts us to issues so we can spend time on troubleshooting other things, or even in innovation. We're not having to dig as deep into the internal environment each day.

It's proactive and alerts us on things before they could potentially become a bigger problem. We don't have to be handling problems reactively. It lets us keep our eyes and ears on other things.

One of my biggest complaints is that I wish there was a better, consolidated dashboard on the landing page when you first log in. You have to fine tune it and customize it a bit more than I'd like. I don't know if it's hard for them to determine what people generally want to see on a home dashboard screen, but it could be improved.

It works.

I guess that the scalability is fine. We haven't run into any issues with it.

We have reached out to VMware tech support on particular issues with vROps. The support has been fine.

We had actually tried a few of the third-party VM monitoring solutions and we figured that since we already had the licensing and had paid for this product, we would start using it instead. We found that it actually accomplished what we needed out of a monitoring product.

We tried Veeam ONE and one other whose name I can't recall.

Among the most important criteria when selecting a vendor is money, that is definitely a big factor; but also their dependability or their reputation. We need to know that the product is going to do what we're looking for it to do. We're a small shop, so we have a lot of work to go around. We want the product to do what they say it will do.

We use it for for monitoring VMs.

With the vRealize Operations Manager, it gives an idea of what the VMs are using: storage, compute, etc.

It helps us save money by having less computers, less to manage, and less to worry about if we know exactly what the application is using.

We've been more efficient, so we don't have to spend as much time doing operations and maintenance type work.

If it was cheaper, we wouldn't be sad! We'd prefer if it cost less money to maintain or purchase.

I haven't had any issues yet. It's pretty stable.

Very scalable. Very easy to setup. It's what do we want to do with it because it's so capable, we're just scratching the surface with it right now.

Very good and knowledgeable. When we call and have an issue, they resolve it pretty quickly. We always reach the right person.

We weren't using anything. We had the native Windows monitoring tools, which were in each individual Virtual Machine. We didn't have anything to monitor virtual infrastructure. It made sense since we ran VMware that we would look to use a VMware product.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward.

We didn't really look at others. We just went with this because it made sense.

Plan ahead. Know exactly what it is you want to monitor. There's a lot of things you can report on. It can be a little overwhelming. So, have a plan.

It makes sense to go with VMware. They know better than probably any other vendor what exactly goes on with their Virtual Machines.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: If we already have solutions by that same vendor in-house. That's usually a better way to go, because we don't have to do as much research, then there's the cost. We usually get a better cost if it's just adding onto a part of what we already have instead of buying a new solution outright.

The reporting is the product’s most valuable feature. It's for customers; they want to show some sort of reporting to their superior, and you can have those easy-to-read meters. You can find out easily where the problem is.

Also, you don't have to be an expert, you can just read the meters. If they're red, you have some problems; if they're yellow, you have to pay some attention; and if they're green, you're good. It’s user friendly.

I also like the indicators.

It kind of limits the finger pointing. If you have some problems in the virtualized environment, and it's not clear which area has the problem. We might have said something like, "Okay, network guys take a look, and then server guys, and storage guys." The individual departments would then say something like, "I don't have any problem, it's probably another department."

The product is really quite solid. For example, I think the UI is okay. It is easy to read. It's intuitive; you don't have to know all the technical stuff. When you drill down, you have to really know some stuff. I’d like it to be easier to drill down.

I also would like to see integration with BMC.

Actually, I don't think we had any problem with stability, ever. If you set it up correctly, you likely won't have any problem.

I think scalability is quite good. We have a couple hundred of VMs.

We have not really used technical support in terms of vROps, but more on the other things, such as ESX. They were very helpful.

Initial setup is quite straightforward, but you do have to find out some things. There is the step-by-step process, but it’s not just clicking Next and OK. You have to set-up some things. If you’re using virtual appliances, you have to know what to do in those appliances.

For virtual environments, I have not compared it with products from other vendors. I think it's better to go with vROps because they have some bundles. Who knows virtual infrastructure with VMware vSphere better than vROps?

Go with vROops, because it's easy to use.

The most valuable feature is probably the analysis, the capacity remaining, what is going on inside of the clusters and with the virtual machines, so you can see the capacity planning. You can tell if something needs CPU, you can tell if it needs memory, and whether it's based on actual demand. I personally like that feature very much. I'm responsible for making sure we have capacity.

It's definitely improved the way that we buy hardware, for sure. Before, you just see a cluster look strange; we didn't know. The differences between allocation and demand has really helped us be much more efficient in the way we buy hardware and how we run our clusters.

vROps has definitely helped us avoid outages, in the sense of not overloading our clusters, and running them into the ground. We just really started setting up the alerting and going through that. We found we had some data stores that kept running out of space, and no one was really keeping an eye on that. We had the native VMware monitoring, but that was just going to some person's mailbox. We set that up. That's been pretty good so far. Mostly, I feel like we're just scratching the surface of what this tool does.

It has also been a huge help with capacity management and with performance management. We've just implemented some of the automation. We have things set up so that if a VM is screaming for CPU capacity, or memory capacity, it is automatically added in. That, so far, has been great. We're still testing it out, but it's going to be great, I think.

It hasn’t helped us save that much on storage. We eat storage like nobody's business. Storage is one reason why I recently attended VMworld. I wanted to look a lot into the virtual SAN features.

I would like it to be a little bit easier to do some things to make dashboards, or it might just be my ignorance of the product. I feel like I know a lot, but there's so much more. I would like more wizards to be able to do some of the simpler things, and to try and make it speed up. I'm looking forward to it. We're going to start installing some of the plug-ins and doing some other monitoring. I would like this tool to take over all of our monitoring. We have SiteScope, we have Nagios; we have all of these things.

Another thing I would like is the ability to see inside Linux guest OS without Attunity or something like that, or the ingenuity that you need to have with that.

The stability's good. I find it to be a little chuggish sometimes; it can be very slow. Other than that, we've never had a problem with it being unstable or going down. It just gets really slow sometimes.

We haven't really tried to scale yet. We might not be using it in the best way. We have a bunch of vCenters; so a bunch of different vROps instances. Instead of scaling out, we tend to build new data centers, but so far, it seems like it's a powerful tool.

We don't use technical support for it. We use our TAM at times to tell us how to do things, because you really need a college degree to run vROps. So far, we haven't had to open any support at all for vROps, specifically. Lots for VMware, but not vROps.

We were just using the native tools that come with VMware; basically, the reports in there. We looked at some other solutions. Honestly, vROps used to be something else, and I found that to be a crappy monitoring tool, but when we started implementing this, when they came out with the modern day version of vROps, it was just great. I think it came in one of our deals, so we implemented it. We said, “Oh hey, this is awesome.”

Setting up the infrastructure behind it was a little bit challenging, trying to figure out what we needed for horsepower. It wasn't overly complex to set up. Again, we had a TAM at the time, and he was great. He just worked with us through the whole thing. The implementation of it went really well.

There was another vendor on our short list, but I don't remember their name. I had someone come in and do a demo of some kind of VMware monitoring tool.

When selecting a vendor like VMware, my most important criteria is going to be, how good is the support? Obviously, cost comes into play. We strongly consider what the Gartner Group says; where the vendor appears in the Magic Quadrant; where they are in the market.

Definitely take a look at it. Go to training, for sure.

I find it to be a very powerful tool. There's a lot of information. I like the way that it's set up. I like the little videos that are inside, so when you're trying to figure out what you're doing. It's very easy to try and navigate. There's a lot to learn, but I feel like it's not overwhelming. You can take a piece at a time, and build on it. It's a great tool so far.

I would say the operational management piece for policy management and remediation as well as the predictive analytics and smart alerts. This can come in real handy in an environment that is constantly changing whether you are taking resources out or putting them in. Also the trending analytics you get from the performance monitoring as well as the capacity management features for planning and better optimization for the overall IT Infrastructure.

I would say for the short term and initial benefit of installing the software is capacity management which is something that immediately returns valuable data. Your ability once installed to see your entire virtual computer environment and what resources are over or under allocated such as vCPU, memory and storage. This can provide large savings in hardware purchases as well as allow you to recapture those resources and re-purpose them. The more long term benefits are felt in the policy management and the automated/guided remediation that can be setup to help analyze and resolve operational bottlenecks.

I would say the reporting side could be more flexible as well as including more information, maybe adding additional graphics and charts to better summarize the data it captures for operational review.

I've used it for over four years. We have integrated Operations Manager into the various layers of our IT infrastructure both virtual and physical. This assisted us in proactively monitoring as well as performing the analyzation and automated remediation of operational resources with in our dedicated and shared service environments. It also gave us the ability to provide high level operational reports to the companies senior management.

No pretty straight forward deployment via OVA wizard roll-out to get the x2 appliances up and running on the network. From there, it's just a matter of configuring the remainder of the software to talk to your IT infrastructure via the ops manager web console interface. This includes adding your Virtual and Physical hardware that you want to include for monitoring and analytics.

Not at all. The product itself is very stable and since its appliances are virtual DRS and vmotion can be configured to create an HA hosted environment. Outages in this configuration are very few and far between.

This product is designed to scale and assists you in planning with your infrastructure, including computing demand and growth. It's designed to guide you through the various areas of infrastructure operations and makes adding new virtual and/or physical hardware to the Ops Manager core console very easy and scheduled. Adding a vCenter or a piece of physical hardware is as simple as entering in an IP address and username/password. Since all environments are sized different you should establish a Ratio for vCOPS to manage, for example, so many virtual or physical components.

VMware’s customer services is one of the best in the market and they also provide TAM services full or part time that can help any company implement their cloud software suites successfully.

VMware's engineers are very knowledgeable about their products and can handle infrastructures with the complexity of an enterprise level service provider right down to the small to mid-range dedicated IT foot prints.

We used quite a few different solutions to get the same feature sets that this one product offers. We switched in order to consolidate into one solution that could support all of the features we needed as well as reduce our overall capitol spend on multiple software brands and service contracts.

Very straightforward even in a multi-networked environment which is what you tend to find from service providers. The install itself is wizard driven and asks you for the information needed to configure the software step by step.

We did the install via an in-house team which included myself and a network engineer. That’s all it took to get the project planned out and implemented successfully.

The ROI for us is a reduced overall software and support costs by consolidating our monitoring and analytic tool set from many products to one. This reduced the operation software capital expense required to provide monitoring and analytic services for a managed solution.

Licensing for vCOPs comes in two models, Per Processor with unlimited VM’s and/or Per Virtual Machine or Physical Server in 25 VM packs (one pack = 25 VM’s). A cost analysis should be done to determine which model your company operations best fits.

Yes but it was software previously installed and vCOPs was used as a replacement.

I would say that the above score is based on the level of licensing which you use within your Infrastructure. I use the Advanced edition which is designed more for use in a enterprise level environments. This will look at both the virtual and physical sides of Infrastructure Operations which includes Predictive Analytics, Policy Management, Automated and guided remediation as well as customizable dashboards and reports. On the performance monitoring and analytics advanced can examine your vSphere performance and Health beyond what the standard vCenter monitoring tools has to offer, it can provide SAN storage analytics, application discovery and dependency mapping, OS Monitoring (Windows, Linux, Solaris, etc for both Physical and Virtual servers). Advanced also includes additional features for configuration and compliance management for vSphere Harding. Last but not least there is some additional Extensibility with 3rd party management packs for server, storage and network monitoring tools. Some example of packs are Brocade SAN Analytics, EMC Storage Analytics, NetApp Storage, Oracle OEM, SAP Hana, HP OneView, Microsoft Hyper-V.

If your virtualized infrastructure is primarily VMware and you are having issues with monitoring, analyzing and planning from an operational perspective this is the software to use. It will save you time and money in various areas of your IT infrastructures operations