VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Optimization of our virtual environment.

It helps as far as determining virtual machines that are not being properly utilized, if they're over-extended for resources such as CPU and memory. If not, we can then determine if that VM is still used and we can help better optimize our environment. It has helped us to reduce the amount of VM sprawl, VMs that are not necessarily used. We can then reclaim resources such as memory, CPU, and storage.

It has also helped us with troubleshooting key points of our environment. If there are issues that come up, we can dig down to a virtual machine and see if it's having issues and where those issues lie: if it needs more memory, CPU, or if there is a storage issue.

The most valuable feature is being able to optimize our environment so we can better manage it.

It's very easy to use and easy to learn. There's some learning curve, but it's a very small learning curve, something you can easily grasp. VMware has helped us with some educational tools and there are some online tools that you can use as well.

It's very stable. We haven't had any downtime.

I haven't tried it for scalability yet, but I think we're going to get there. From what I've read, it's pretty easy to scale out.

I have not had to use technical support yet. I have just been learning it on my own.

I would say our ROI is tens of thousands. I expect to reduce our footprint in the data center, so we've definitely reclaimed a lot of storage.

Compare the solutions and see which one is going to give you the best bang for your buck, the best functionality, and help your environment.

The most important criteria when working with a vendor are the

• service they provide
• ease of use of the product.

It's not perfect but it's a good solution. It was implemented before I joined the company. I wish I had known more about it, such as: How does it cost-compare to other solutions and how does it compare to solutions like Turbonomic; how does it compare in terms of functionality?

I use it on a daily basis to make sure that the VMs are up and running and that there aren't any issues with any of them. If there are, then it tells me exactly where to go to fix them.

It gives me more insight on issues like: Do we need to add more hardware to the clusters; when disks are low, to add more disk space. It's a preventive type of maintenance.

It has also immensely reduced the time to troubleshoot issues. It has improved the quality of service to users because it prevents downtime. And it lets me know how many VMs I can actually run on each individual host, which helps with cost savings through higher capacity utilization.

The most valuable feature is knowing whether or not you have issues with your hosts and VMs. There are other features where you can have it automatically adjusts things. I don't have it set to that level because I like to control things myself. That's a nice option but I'm just not at that point yet to let it control things.

It points out all kinds of issues that you might be having, whether or not your environment is actually running smoothly, too.

In terms of user-friendliness, there are a lot of areas that take a lot of time to research and figure out what the information is actually telling me, so that I know how to better use the product and troubleshoot issues that I see. It would be nice if they could fine-tune the user interface a little bit.

I haven't had any issues with stability at all. It works as expected.

I don't have a whole lot of hosts running that vROps actually monitors. I think we're up to 40 now but that's not a whole lot compared to what other people tell me what they run. It's working as expected.

I have not used technical support for vRealize Operations Manager yet. But I use it for the hosts. I need help with some of the things that Operations Manager identifies.

vROps actually came with the license package that we bought. Once I knew we owned it I just downloaded it and installed it.

The setup was pretty easy. It was an appliance, you just follow the bouncing ball, get it installed.

Because it helps me troubleshoot issues quickly, it saves a lot of time. If I didn't have it, it would probably take me a few days to troubleshoot the issues, versus a single pane telling me I've got an issue with this VM and pointing directly to what the problem is. It saves a lot of staff time.

My advice would be to purchase the product because it definitely helps troubleshoot issues in probably one-tenth of the time that it would take without it. It's something I wouldn't live without, at this point.

We mainly we do a lot of reporting, trending reporting, with vROps, monitoring on a day-to-day basis.

The biggest improvement it has brought to our organization is the way we do our utilization trending reporting. One of the biggest challenges we had, when we deployed to our call centers, was that we never had that visibility in terms of trending reporting. How does the environment work? How do we look at resource utilization, memory, CPU? How do we look at round-trip latency when our users are connected to our VM? It has given us more insight into how we run our entire environment.

Also, being able to see a problem prior to the end-user experiencing it allows us to resolve it prior to it impacting the end-user.

Finally, it has helped us to reduce our troubleshooting time and improve quality of service. We've definitely come a long way. With every new release - we just recently moved over to Horizon 7.4 - vROps has really helped us monitor the environment, troubleshoot, and see how it's performing.

I like the monitoring aspect. One of the biggest things in our environment is being able to see what the entire vCenter environment looks like. The health status, being able to determine when we're having issues with resources, utilization, memory, or CPU.

It is also very user-friendly. We have gotten to the level where we're utilizing dashboards that we're able to customize for our needs, as opposed to their being out-of-the-box dashboards. So it's very intuitive.

One thing I mentioned when speaking with the engineers is that we'd like to get more granular reporting. We'd like to see more real-time reporting on the application-process level. Right now, we don't get that. For example, if I have a VM that's spiking up on memory or CPU, I can't really drill down to the application level and say, "Hey, I have IE that's spiking due to the user's streaming of video and that's affecting their entire session." vROps doesn't do that. The engineers tell me there are a couple of other tools that we will be able to utilize. But hopefully, that is something that could be packaged together, contained within vROps, as opposed to having us to go to a third-party.

We use VMware support all the time. It's very good. We have a TAM who is very engaged. We typically get very good response from the support team. We can call them, we can go online, we can submit the request, and everything is done.

The initial setup was really straightforward. One of the biggest things that our TAM did was make it a simple process. 

The biggest piece of advice is definitely to learn your environment, know your metrics and, prior to implementing, have a baseline of where you'd like to be. That way, when you implement it, it's easier to measure based on your metrics, as opposed to trying and figure it out later on.

I rate vROps a 10 out of 10. We've definitely seen the advantages of utilizing vROps. There's tons of stuff that we're not really utilizing through vROps that I think would help an environment.

Realizing the capacity trends feature gives us the time to predict the requirements in terms of the resource availability as well as the trends. You can plan your capacity requirements well in advance. It will also help you to budget for the future quarters or future years. It has been a nice tool for us, mainly in terms of the application/performance troubleshooting and the server resources.

Definitely, it has helped us a lot in terms of being proactive. Without vROps, we would have been in a situation where we know that there is an issue, but don't know where to go from there. So, I think it has helped us a lot.

Whenever we knew there were issues, we did a capacity analysis and a capacity trend for every quarter of the year. This helped us to understand the issues proactively.

Probably, there needs to be some sort of improvement in terms of the costing. Also, if they can integrate the VMware's IT Business Management (ITBM) module with vROps that could help us a better.

When you are being very proactive, it definitely helps you to stabilize your environment. So, I think, the stability is good.

Referring back to being proactive, it helps us to scale up the resources much prior to us actually facing any issue or much prior to meeting any dead ends. It is a scalable tool.

We actually installed a vRealize as part of a discussion we were exposed to vROps. That is when we started analyzing, did a PoC and then we replaced our existing management tool with vROps.

I will definitely be referring this solution to others.

You should weigh the pros and cons; I am sure that VMware will provide PoCs as and when required.

The ability to project our workload and determine what kind of hardware needs we have into the future.

For example, we recently made a large purchase of servers and blades, and the solution told us exactly how many we needed to get through in X amount of time.

It has made it much easier to approve purchases.

We are upgrading the solution now, so we would like the alerting piece to be a little bit easier in the next version.

Some of the metrics of their recordings are a little confusing and hard to figure out (what exactly what they're telling you).

We started our PoC with the solution a year ago (June) and went live with it in September 2016.

It's very stable.

Right now, it scales up well beyond where we're at and where I think we would ever be.

Whenever I need help, I contact my local SE (sales engineer). He is very knowledgeable. When he can't answer me, he gets other guys who can assist.

At the time, we did not have anything besides vCenter, so we were looking for a new solution because we really didn't have anything which could tell us what our workloads were doing to our hosts or provide us with anything else we really needed to know.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was very easy. I had assistance from our SE and our sales rep on a call, and we set it up as a PoC. Then, we just roll out that PoC and licensed it after.

VMware and VMturbo.

We were already heavily into VMware. We looked at other operations and the projection planning and we went with VMware. The projection planning and budgeting wallets are a major piece and there are only once a year. The VM Operations Manager gave us more the rest of the year than the other solution did.

It's a very good product. You can't go wrong.

The UI is great, and it's fairly intuitive to use.

Being able to use the automation side of it is the most valuable feature of this solution that we have found so far.

We're using it for our cloud solution, which we didn't have before. So, it has enabled us to do more than we could in our enterprise environment.

Right now, we're evaluating vROPS version 6., i.e, on the VSAN side, so hopefully, the solution/features that we are looking for are being offered in the future releases that were done this week.

We are looking for more features from the dashboard point of view, i.e., being able to have a little more visibility as to what's going on at the back-end. I think based on what I saw in the conference, there are dashboard capabilities being available, and a lot of the other modules are tied better together. From our point of view, that will be a better improvement.

The solution is fairly stable. I haven't seen many issues yet, but we're still in the beginning stage of utilizing it, so we have not expanded it as a global solution.

The scalability aspect is yet to be seen because as I have mentioned, we haven't scaled it to the global level yet and we're a global company.

I am really satisfied with the technical support. We were always reaching the right person and they were knowledgeable; if not they tend to get us the right person.

Due to the demand of the business, we invested in this solution.

Mainly, the most important criteria while selecting a vendor is that if the product is fitting the requirements. Of course, the budget comes in to play and the relationship with the vendors that we've had are also important factors while selecting a vendor. We've been using VMware for as far as I've been with the company, so we have a really good relationship them.

Right now, my team is involved in the upgrade process. It is in the middle, i.e., neither simple nor complex. From the process point of view of the workflows, we found it a little complex. At the same time, we don't have the expertise, so we are really dependent on VMware to do a lot of the operation, provide their expertise on the technical side of it, so that's why we find it a little complex at the moment.

VMware sent an in-house team.

We looked at other solutions namely Microsoft, IBM and then, VMware. The reason why we ended up choosing this solution as it offered us a better overall solution to what we were looking for.

We're still learning about this solution.

You should really have a detailed definition of what you're looking for, from the requirements point of view and match that up with how/what vROPS is offering. Overall, VM Solutions are tying to your requirements better.

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.

Capacity planning is the most valuable feature, as far as the storage is concerned, your servers are concerned, your ESX environment is concerned; when you need to add more ESX hosts.

It tells you if you have oversubscribed any of the VMs, if you're giving them more memory than they actually need, which is bad for the VM. You have to run that report and it shows you what the VM is actually using. If you have oversubscribed it, you can bring that number down; you can reduce the memory or the CPU.

Another good thing is when a customer asks you about an application running slow, you can go in and give them a snapshot that might show that the application is using only 20% of the memory, only 10% of the space; there's no issue with the resources as far as the server's concerned.

Clean up the dashboard; I need all the information right there, a high-level overview of everything. In the newer version, it's better. In the previous version, it wasn't.

I'm in the process of getting the latest version deployed. Right now, it's just gathering all the data. I still have to learn the product. I am not fully aware of the features that have been added in version 6. We’ve already purchased and deployed it; we’re waiting on professional services to come in and help us.

It has been stable

It offers flexibility; you can scale your environment any time.

It has not gotten slow at all. We have enough capacity on our ESX hosts to accommodate our workloads.

We use technical support a lot. It's good but they don't offer critical support for certain products. For example, we are using a product called VDP, vSphere Data Protection, to back up our VMs. We’re moving away from that; it's not reliable at all. It's like a free product.

For our operations manager, initial setup is complex, so you can't just have someone who just deploys ESX hosts. You have to research it and then move forward. Or, it has to be configured properly upfront before you move forward.

If you're running a VM, it's necessary that you get the Operations Manager. You can use third-party tools, but the data won't be that accurate, as far as monitoring using a native tool versus a third party.