VMware Aria Operations Reviews

For the vRealize solution that we are using, the most valuable feature that we find is the dashboard feature. It gives you a single overall idea in regards to how your infection is looking and if there are any problems, it can tell you in advance, i.e., based on whatever calculations it does.

In addition to that, we are really about to start the automation capabilities for vROps where it can increase or decrease the resources depending on the need.

Just the automation part of it is very important for us. Hypothetically, for example, if there is a machine that needs more resources and you have set that with the automation policy. It will, then, provide the resource to that machine; you don't need to worry about the fact that you are present there to do it manually. So, it's a wonderful feature that can help to increase the productivity and efficiency of the environment without you actually being there and monitoring it.

I haven't touched all the features that it offers as of date. If they can make the automation a little easier because we have tried a couple of things and have realized that you have to go through a lot of scripts and adapters for its configuration. So, if it can be a little easier, that'll be better.

It is a stable solution. It works, i.e., what it is supposed to do, it does that.

We are not a very big shop but we are expanding. However, as per what we have read about it, the vRealize solution is extremely scalable. We haven't tried it yet, but we believe in the VMware products, so if they say it will be scalable, then it should be scalable.

It was a business requirement and the user requirement, so that is why we decided to invest in this solution.

Previously, we were not using any similar solution. However, for the last seven to eight years, we have been using VMware products.

The basic factors that are crucial to us while selecting a vendor are that the product has to be cloud-ready, it can be scaled if we need to scale it and that it has to be secure.

I would advise you to go with it. vRealize is all about monitoring and automating things. So, if you are getting what you want, then it's a great solution. We have tried it, we are still using it and plan to use it so you should go for it.

The monitoring capability, the predictive failures and the predictive features such you need these many more servers or you need this much more storage is really what I mostly use it for.

Since I'm a consultant, so I mostly do the implementation. When I use the product, it's after the initial install or as we're ramping up or moving the VMs into the environment and seeing how all the hardware/resources are being effective. We use vRealize to basically plan out where we need to scale.

It allows us to give more efficiency to our clients. Instead of having to oversell hardware, we can scale it. For example, we can say let's start with this block, give it six months and see what vRealize tells us about our pattern of the data usage.

It does eat up a lot of the CPU cycles, I will say that this is actually a general complaint about a lot of the VMware software that I use. I love VMware, but one of my complaints is that a lot of the application servers such as vCenter, vRealize, the operations manager, etc. eat up a lot of the CPU cycles and memory cycles, especially if you have any kind of large database. I would like to see some more optimization there.

I'm sure that other people have a laundry list of the improvements. Since I'm a consultant/an implementation/immigration guy, I think it does what I need it to do. I use it for its predictive analysis basically.

Stability is very good.

The scalability is amazing.

I thought the setup was straightforward. However, someone else was trying to do it before me, and they thought it was complex.

We did not receive any in-house support.

Reputation, support, and overall visibility are important criteria for us while selecting a vendor.

We looked at other solutions namely VMware, Veeam and Tintri.

The reason as to why I chose VMware is because I've used every other major virtualization platform and their support as well as community is by far the best.

Definitely use it, especially if you need to carry out predictive analytics.

For knowing how to scale your environment, I think it's a priceless tool.

Make sure you've got enough room and resources for the installation.

The historical performance monitoring and the ability to introduce it.

It's good, because it's about being able to scale. To know if we're going to hit our limits, as far as scale, and also when we need to buy more hardware.

Better artificial intelligence (AI) as far as its ability to give suggestions over precise mediums and those types of things.

It has been good so far.

It has been good so far.

I have not used it yet.

Fogbyte.

We needed a solution, or a better solution, versus very non-standardized solutions on that scale.

Was not involved.

If interested in the product, try to prearrange a training as quickly as you can. Get a lot of training. It's a big product.

Main criteria for selecting a vendor:

• Full scalability
• Price
• Vendor relationship.

We use the product for quite a few purposes.

Two of the main reasons why:

1. We wanted a tool where we could actually see what's happening within the vSphere environment, as well a give us the ability to plan for future growth. So, a planning tool that we use for planning, but also for notifications of events which are actually happening in the environment.
2. To minimize downtime, as well as be in a position to plan for future growth.

It is very important to us to be able to see exactly what's going on in the environment on one screen. Go to the dashboard, you actually see hotspots, you highlight your hotspots, and drill right down.

We are in a better position from an IT point of view. We can actually show management our plan based on growth, whatever growth they're looking for within the environment, as well as be proactive. In other words, when systems are down, this tool actually gives us that ability.

I would say it's slow. The version we have right now is pretty robust in the sense that after you've installed it, and it's been running for awhile - it has to run for at least thirty days or longer. Then, it really gives you back meaningful data.

What would I like to see enhanced? The only thing I don't like is I've actually had to set it up twice from the ground up. That can be annoying. But, other than that the data it's providing is very useful to us.

We set it up twice because we had major releases and we upgraded the vSphere environment. Quite a few releases and we didn't follow through with that part of the product, so it was behind. Therefore, to catch up, it was more advisable for us to start over.

You can change versions of vSphere, but you'll also need to upgrade your product. There were a few times where we actually had to start all over collecting more data. It's one of those tools where it needs to be running for a while. It collects a lot of the analytics before you can actually start using the information it's providing you. There were a few times where we had to start over. We just couldn't do an upgrade and take the data forward.

It is very stable. We've been through quite a few generations of it, and it's been very stable.

Scalability in the sense that we're a small shop. So, scalability in the sense that it serves our purpose.

They are knowledgable and very supportive. You are always reaching the right person.

No, we weren't using anything before. We were looking for something.

It was very straightforward. Right out of the box you install it and you let it run for 30 days, and it starts giving you back data.

We did the setup.

Not at the time of the purchase. Other vendors came once our product became GA.

We did not look at any of them, since we had already purchased.

We spoke to quite a few other vendors that actually had other products with similar functions of dashboard very similar, or dashboards that were suppose to be better, and they gave you much more analytics of the data. But again we stuck with this product, and the reason why we stuck with it, it gave us what we were looking for. There are some other products that are more proactive, but we decided not to take that approach.

Take a good look at it. It integrates well with the vSphere environment. There are other products that do integrate well, and supposedly give you much more granular detail than this product does. I don't know. It's just a matter of preference, I'd say. It depends on how grand you want to go and how aggressive you want to go in your approach to fixing issues within your environment.

I would look at all the products and see exactly how grand you wanna get and how much information you're looking for, then make the decision. Right out the box, you install it, once it's set up, it's already collecting data, and that was as much setup as we needed.

Integration is very important, support, and also there wasn't any product on the market at the time that worked directly with vSphere. We were one of the early adopters of vSphere. Once our product came out, I wanted, from the start, what it's doing now. In other words, it was a good choice.

We spoke to quite a few other vendors that actually had other products with similar functions of dashboard very similar, or dashboards that were suppose to be better, and they gave you much more analytics of the data. But again we stuck with this product, and the reason why we stuck with it, it gave us what we were looking for. There are some other products that are more proactive, but we decided not to take that approach.

The most valuable features of the product are probably the monitoring and the dashboarding; for me, just from a management perspective, the dashboarding. It shows information for everything from, operational-wise, a lot of our daily tasks, things that were manual that you'd have to go and look at in the dashboard. They don't have to manually go in and do it; vROps flags it. They can just look at the dashboard each time. For us, it's really about the performance metrics; a lot of operational, tactical things. Being the manager, I don't have to look at it every day.

The other piece that I use is the projections, being able to see when I'm going to run out of resources, features like that. We use it a lot for resource planning, around where we're going to be next month. Every other week, I look at it and I can see where we're at on utilization of the environment and then use that for load balancing and similar tasks.

It gives me the information that I need when I need it. It's that easy.

It has helped us avoid outages or reduced outage time. Everything we're doing is proactive. If we weren't using our dashboards for management, being able to see where the issues are ahead of time, there’d be outages.

Even though I can't put a number on it, it saves us a ton of time with capacity management. We actually use that part of it.

Regarding performance management, I don't think it really helps us speeding up. It helps us avoid bottlenecks and things of that nature.

I'd like to see more granular reporting; the ability to simplify the reporting and being able to create the reports. There's a lot there, but when you dive down in there, I’d like to be able to break it out different ways. It’s been a challenge being able to train my folks to be able to get me the information that I want, so they can build those reports out.

The reports are usable, readable for the most part, but it's difficult to get my guys to be able to build the reports correctly, based on what I'm looking for. It seems like my requirements and the data mart can only go so far.

As far as the UI – for me, personally, accessing it because I don’t access it a lot – I feel like the usability could be a little bit better. They could streamline that a little bit better.

I've never seen a problem with it. We had one issue during an upgrade. We went with a clean upgrade. We had to run both environments for a little while, but outside of that, it's stable. It works. We’ve run into a couple of bugs here and there, but VMware is pretty responsive in getting them fixed. The bugs were with the reporting; when you're getting down to certain metrics within the data, to tweak it the way you want it. A lot of times they didn't think about, that's the way we'd want it. Items like that. How granular you get the data.

I’ve never had a problem with scalability.

My team uses technical support on a regular basis. I've always had a good experience with VMware technical support. No issues.

We used to use Foglight for that and we didn't like that. It was difficult to maintain and it was buggy.

My team did everything from ground up. Initial setup had medium complexity. It's not intuitive initially, so you have to go through a level of training to be able to get where you want to go.

Make sure you get training. Do the proper training. You need to have your folks trained to be able to manage it on an on-going question.

The capacity planning is probably the biggest thing that I use and then I guess the monitoring alerting system and performance troubleshooting. Those are the top three.

It helps with troubleshooting the performance of different systems when customers complain or they say there's an issue. It helps us to narrow down and drill into seeing what's the root cause of the issue. It kind of gets in a good vicinity of that.

It has not helped us save on storage at all, and it has not helped us avoid outages, yet.

It's helped me plan capacity so that I'm always ahead of the curve. I'm actually deploying out systems and not delaying projects, because I have the insight of what resources that I'm short on or what resources I'm not short on. It's helped in that way. For capacity, that's been the biggest thing.

There are a lot more improvements that need to be done with the product. They've advanced from the last version, but there are many more things that should be there, and they're not. And they seem to be working on it, but until they get those things done, and I guess reduce the complexity of getting the system actually set up. As far as the initial setup, it is extremely easy, but then to configure and tailor it for your environment is very complex. Until they streamline that, I couldn't rate it any higher.

Until this week, it was very stable, but in the last week and a half, we've had some issues and we have a ticket open with VMware now to troubleshoot why there's an issue with it. And it's just random, that's the complaint I have about it. There's no way to actually troubleshoot or have insight when the product starts to go bad, when the system itself goes bad. Outside that, when it works, it works very well. But when it stops working, it's just all of a sudden. It's abrupt and there's no indication of why.

I'm not extremely large yet, and it has scaled fairly well. I've heard of other customers having to deploy many instances of it because of the global reach of their environment, or sometimes just the size of it. For me, I'd say it scales very well.

VMware actually had to make some changes because of us, because when we deployed it, we found some bugs in it. I worked with the product developers and engineers that developed the product to help resolve that, get the proper sizing, and get it to where it's scaled out to support our environment.

Technical support has been very good. When I escalated up, they got me in touch with the people who actually write it and develop it directly, so I'm on with them at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning on a Friday night/Saturday morning and so, they are very good. They're very helpful, they did the best to get in and find out what my issues were and get it resolved.

I've been using vROps since before VMware bought them. I knew of Integron before, when EMC bought them, and then transferred it over to VMware. I have used VMTurbo, but I like vROps much better. vROps has more in-depth analytics and things in it, and the capacity portion of it is much better. There's only one or two things that VMTurbo might do just as well as vROps but, overall, I like to have all of my solutions in one single pane of glass, and that's what vROps provides me.

I did the initial build. The setup was extremely easy, I feel. The original documentation about sizing was incorrect. That's why the system failed after I got it set up initially. Outside of that, the setup was extremely easy.

Support is going to be the number one criteria when selecting a vendor like VMware for me because on day two, after I get it set up and the vendor is gone, I want to know what type of support I'm going to have going forward when issues arise and when it's in real-world activity.

If someone asks me for advice, I'll say, Do your homework for one, engage their TAM, their technical team, to help them size it properly and make sure that for what they're going to use it, they're actually scaling it and setting up a way to accomplish that. Also, get involved with the community, go online. There are so many other resources out there: VMware employees that actually have blogs, and plugins. They just make your life much easier.

I like the dashboards. I like being able to just look at it and see what my environment's doing.

Something that I have talked to them about is communication. We have a lot of issues that end up going to VMware engineering, and I would like them to improve communication from engineering, rather than having our SR just sit there with no communication or update at all. Occasionally we'll get a response e-mail saying engineering still has it, that they're working on it. It would be nice to have engineering come back and say, this is what we're working on specifically. Maybe an ETA for a patch, or something like that. That's one of my biggest complaints.

We had an issue a couple weeks ago, opened the case and the person never responded. I escalated twice and we finally got a call back the day I provided this review. When we did get a call back, we got a call back from a level one. Most of us are level three status; when they call us back, they should be giving us somebody who's above our level rather than somebody who's going to ask us the same questions of possible resolutions that we've already tried. We were still waiting to fix that problem as far as I know from my e-mail contact an hour before I provided this review.

I have been using it for three or four years.

It's pretty stable. It's at 98% of the time. If we have issues with it, it's usually minor and most likely related to the environment and not the product.

I see it meeting our needs going forward. It's scalable. We have a big environment. We've doubled it in the last six months or in the last year. It's handled that transition quite well.

It's great support. We contact them by e-mail, phone, and so on. We have an MCS contract. We have a TAM with whom we’re on a first-name basis.

We weren't previously using a different solution.

I don't remember what the trigger was to bring this on board. I was not involved in purchasing or making that decision. I'm on the support side of it.

Plan it well.

The most valuable feature is being able to see what's actually going on, down to the VMware storage level. And the fact that it can give you a suggested change and it'll explain why.

The most common thing we see is that we've got too many CPUs on a virtual machine. It'll say - and there's always a debate - or someone thinks it could be running out of memory, and it's actually because it has too many CPUs.

A lot of guys want to add more memory or more CPUs and it'll know why. It helps me with the other guys on the team and to show them why, because if you look at it, it'll tell you: This is what's going on and this is what you need to do. Also, a lot of times, there's a link for more information. You can find that information and read up on it, such as a KB article that explains what the product is telling you. There's not a lot of space in the product itself; just a little synopsis about why you should do it. It's readable for a VMware admin. If you're a regular system administrator, you might not understand what they're saying or doing.

Probably the most common benefit is catching problems. It has a view where it shows you a hot spot that starts turning red and you're see there's an issue. It also shows trends, so you can see how long it has been going on and other things like that.

We don't currently use the increased automation feature or integration with DRS for load balancing and scheduling. We're looking into doing it, but it's a trust factor. We're afraid it'll add a CPU or take away a CPU – things like that – on the fly, and we're not comfortable with that yet. It gives us suggestions and we'll implement those, but we don't want it to just automatically do it. I expect in the future, we will. We've had about six months and we're happy with it so far.

It’s difficult to say whether we have had specific cases where it has helped us avoid outages or shortened outage times, because when something comes up, we usually address it. So, I wouldn't know if we avoided an outage. I haven't seen anything super serious.

It has helped us with performance management; getting the VMs tuned better. And that's what I think it's really good at. We have a staff of six VMware admins, and some are less experienced than others, so they'll overbuild a VM or something like that.

Even though we don't have the full license for the full vRealize automation and some automation is already built in, I’d like to see them expand that and make it a little easier to use.

Also, it is very CPU intensive. It's hitting the storage, or I guess more storage. Our storage admins are always complaining it's one of the most utilized virtual machines out there. They're saying it's just as high as any of our big databases. If they could improve the performance, so our storage guys will quit complaining about the usage on the data storage. They're saying the virtual machine is probably using more IOPS than almost every other virtual machine in the environment. It's constantly checking the environment.

I think the learning curve on setting it up could be improved; it takes a while to understand it. I wouldn't say I’ve mastered it at all. I'm still working on it. If you really want to get into the automation portion, you've got to learn a lot of Python and things like that, because that's what it's using underneath.

I think it's pretty stable.

As far as scalability goes, we have fairly a decent-sized environment and it doesn't seem to have an issue. We don't see a performance issue, but when our storage guys are looking at their console, they're getting worried because it's one virtual machine and this product stores a lot more than all the others.

I have not used technical support. I don't think we've used technical support; we've used our TAM to help us set it up, get it going and fix it up. I think we had one issue because we couldn't get it set up correctly and we had to call support. They were very good at resolving the issue, they just kind of walked us through it.

We previously used SolarWinds Virtualization, and it was not real time. We wanted something that was real time. It was always behind, because it was polling once in a while; it goes and grabs the data. So you'd be looking at all the data and it wasn't real. A problem would no longer, even though I'm looking at it. It's fine, I guess, for long-term monitoring, but when I wanted to deal with issues that were immediate, it wasn't a good fit for us.

There were no other vendors on our short list. We did the proofs of concept and liked vROps, so we went from there.

I think the most important criteria when we went with vROps was because it was a VMware product. We were more likely to choose it. They were getting the integration we wanted, so we didn't really look at a lot of other products.

Do the proof of concept. I think that'll tell you what you need to know; if it's going to be a good fit for your environment. I would say that's probably applicable for anything you're going to look at.