VMware Aria Operations Reviews

It gives you a better understanding of your VM environment. 

The sizing of VMs, whether they are properly-sized and/or that they are central plain glass to see your environment.  

It's like plain glass. It helps you get to the problem quicker than you would without it. 

We've only been using it for three to four months.

We haven't scaled it enough in our environment.

We didn't have another product we were really using.

We heard about vROps through word-of-mouth.

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

Not really. We've wanted this for a couple of years and we just didn't have the budget for it.

For anyone looking at vROps, "Do it."

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Vendor relationship. The VM work has got to be absolutely rock solid for us along with the stability. We have to feel comfortable running the enterprise on it. 

It gives us the opportunity to take a look at our VM performance in a way that we don't necessarily get a chance to do with some of our other tools.

It has allowed us to do some capacity planning at a fairly detailed level so that we can go back and look at not only some of our workloads, in order to see if they need to be shifted around within the existing infrastructure, but it allows us to do some capacity planning. This allows us to look for what we need to purchase moving forward, so as to keep our infrastructure where we need it to be from a performance perspective.

Some of the improvements are related to the better user management. For example, there is need to see better tie-ins to the AD or to open the LDAP framework, so that we can actually have our main users logging in using the centralized authentication instead of having to set-up the users.

The dashboards are pretty configurable at this point, but possibly some more knobs are required to turn in terms of being able to look at the troubleshooting of the workloads at scale, and how to solve some of those scalability gaps.

I haven't had any issues in terms of its scalability with the current version. The previous version was not the most user-friendly one, but this one has definitely made some improvements.

We use it in a very limited capacity, so I can't discuss the scalability aspect.

We knew we needed to invest in this solution because we really didn't have a good way to look at our VM performance from a high-level across the entire enterprise.

The support structure has to be halfway decent. The software should work, and I've been with vendors where the software hasn't worked so that's always an important consideration while selecting a vendor. Cost is helpful, i.e., the fact that you don't have to spend an arm and a leg on it is always nice in terms of the budgeting time. Probably, not necessarily in that order, I think that the functionality, support, and cost are the way that we look at it from a business perspective.

Since we're a VMware shop this was pretty much where we hit the nail on the head.

Definitely, use it. Take a look at the licensing model and make sure that it fits what you're trying to do with it. Other than that, I would still recommend it, even though, I think it could use a little bit of improvement.

Since it sits alongside an installation, preparation is as simple as building another VM to put it on, as far as I'm concerned. The installation is pretty straightforward, at least based on the experience that my team had in terms of doing the upgrades and things of that nature.

The insight that it gives you actually is needed for the systems, i.e., from your storage to your computer to your hypervisor and all of that is very good. Also, capacity management is a valuable feature.

In our organization and also probably in most organizations, you are looking to get the most that you can for the least amount of money. This solution allows you to squeeze that little extra money out and lets you make more.

Basically, if you're looking at the money saving and time factors, then it can cut down those drastically, as much as sometimes even saved thousands of dollars.

A cleaner UI is needed. The user interface is very rigid.

The stability and user interface are horrible.

Stability is a real issue. In terms of the rapid growth, it didn't accommodate my rapid growth even after manual intervention. We sized it based on a large organization, and we filled that up extremely quickly; it was really difficult to quickly expand that.

The reliability is directly integrated with scalability for us. So, it is similar to the stability aspect.

Some of the technical support representatives are knowledgeable, I have discovered it depends on the time of day.

We have so many people, and the reports that executives wanted from us required more man-hours than what we have. So, we had to find another solution so as to give those reports easily.

Since we own VMware we decided to stay with VMware only.

Whilst looking for a vendor, we look for support.

The setup was complex. A lot of their terminology is not what we use; it's very technical, but it's not what a lot of the people use in the field. Actually, I had to set it up myself. I couldn't let one of my juniors do it.

If you have the technical experience and time to basically understand the user interface, then go for it. However, if you don't have the time, then don't.

Metrics and telemetry across our many environments, which allows us to be able to have transparency in capacity and performance management across a large enterprise infrastructure. The analytics that vROps provides related to things like oversized virtual machines, waste, and so on.

Capacity and performance management take five minutes, instead of five days.

There's room for improvement in the upgrade process. It always becomes a bit of a challenge, and the one big thing for us is we have no means of creating a CICD upgrade process for it. Somebody's got to download bits, click buttons, etc. until you get to the final stage. I'd like to see it fully-automated so that we don't have to mess around with manual tasks. It can take anywhere from two days to a week to complete the upgrade.

Also, the interface is very busy. It's complicated. It's tough for people. I can't tell my management to go log in and find something. You really have to drill in and click deep, so a lot of what we do is pull metrics out and put them in other dashboards, just so they're meaningful for us. If there was a means of doing that, it would be a better solution. Though it's definitely getting better over time.

It was all over the place. I think VMware and our Technical Account Manager (TAM) were a big help.

The initial issue was we downloaded it, then installed it ourselves. We didn't really talk to anybody. We probably should have kept tabs with the people who know the product from VMware.

It's gotten better over time. We had some challenges at first. It took a while to get things going right for us.

It's getting much better. The latest version is much better.

We have approximately 80,000 virtual machines. It works pretty well overall.

We have a good impression so far. We usually go through our TAM and get through to somebody who maybe is at a higher level when we need help. Though I don't really call them.

We switched because we needed a streamlined solution. Before, we had people logging in to do a lots of different things, like creating spreadsheets, charts, and graphs.

My team was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward, but again, it didn't work at first because of some decisions we made with the architecture. So after talking to VMware, they kind of led us in the right direction. We made some changes and things started working really well after that.

vROps and vSphere integrate well together.

The community is huge. We're really big into open source. We rely on the community for just about anything and everything.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Reputation
• Brand
• Accessibility.

The monitoring.

Easy to identify the bottlenecks.

We would like it to connect to other third-party products. We monitor some Cisco switches, and we are also looking for some storage. At the moment we only use it for EMC.

Sometimes it's very difficult to browse between different components. I'm looking at the latency and it's difficult to figure out which data store was related to that latency. That was one problem I figured out, so linking different components would be helpful.

I would also like to see more automation.

Very good. It was very stable. No problem at all.

We don't scale too fast.

We've barely used it. Once or twice, but for general questions. Nothing about problems. I would give it an eight or nine out of 10. We were able to reach the right person.

Sys IQ and another I can't remember at the moment. We switched when I realized I was spending too much time on troubleshooting.

I'm looking at the features, I'm not looking too much at the name of the company.

Pretty simple.

We deployed it for ourselves in our datacenter, but also for our customers.

vROps would be my advice because it's simple to use, you have a panel to very quickly identify trouble, eventual problems; and it's easy to troubleshoot.

Make sure you have a good understanding of the infrastructure. Define the product you need to monitor.

The ability to take a look inside my environment and tell me, not only how I'm using my resources, but also to help me better plan and reallocate resources or plan for increasing the amount of the resources that I may need.

It allows us to do future capacity planning. It also has the ability to go in and do some health monitoring and some preventive type maintenance without us having to get involved with the use of the Python strip. So it actually frees up additional resources on our team with the use of the automated scripts. We don't have to do certain tasks based on certain triggers and alarms that happen inside, that it actually catches inside of vROps.

Right now, it pretty much handles itself so it's hard to say. I can't really speak to anything that I would want to change in it right now. One of my operation guys might have a different aspect take on it.

I won't give VMware a 10 out of 10 because we don't want them to stop innovating.

The only thing I would say, and it has nothing to do with the product, it has more to do with the releases. If we could get the release of the reports when we do our assessments to also coincide with the release of the next product. That might be a little something that we could do. For example, 6.5 is out with the list of canned reports. 6.6 comes out but we have to wait on the reports for that. It's minor but it would be nice to have. That would kick it up to a 9.2 out of 10.

It's solid. I love it. It's a great product. No issues. Everything from the install to the actual day-to-day operational aspects of it. It's been really good.

We have two datacenters. One in Pleasanton, California another one in Fremont, California. We had no issues with the sizing of our vROps and, in fact, we have it monitoring and doing maintenance at both our datacenters.

We really haven't had too many issues so I can't speak to the tech support piece of it.

No, we didn't have anything. We needed something to tell us how we were using our resources. We needed to make a purchase but we wanted to make sure that we made the purchase in the right way and sized the right way. We looked at some other tools, but vROps just made more sense because it's VMware and that's our infrastructure.

For us, the most important vendor criteria are availability, knowledge, as well as how solid their product is and their reputation. And make sure that they've been around for a while.

It was pretty straightforward. We downloaded the appliance, installed it, and it was really pretty painless. One thing that we did do, we consulted our VMware TAM to assist us with the initial setup, and understanding which reports we wanted to see and that type of customization.

If you're looking to size your physical hardware or you're looking to rightsize your virtual infrastructure, then definitely take a look at vROps. It's a great tool for it. One of the easiest on the market to use and it'll provide you with a lot of good information.

It gives complete visibility in the form of cache nodes and the health of all our virtual machines, clusters at all levels. And it gives deeper insight into a particular element of the health of the company, each of the virtual machines, storage. It gives a single point of reference to have a complete view and monitoring of the infrastructure layer, at all levels.

You can categorize what kind of alerts you want to get into, what is the performance of a typical virtual machine.

It gives us complete insights.

It gives proactive alerts and it can really be useful when it comes to capacity planning. It easily monitors utilization, it helps optimize infrastructure as well, based on the capacity and the real-time utilization. It's a complete product that provides multiple benefits to the organization.

One of the expectations would be to have third-party integrations, plug-ins like with Lumidor.

Also, alerting any potential violations in performance monitoring.

Version by version it comes out with a lot of enhancements.

When it comes to scalability, I think we haven't reached that threshold.

They are knowledgeable.

No, not at all.

When selecting a vendor it's important to look at the product roadmap; the underlying platform is VMware anyway. They go hand in hand when it comes to monitoring the infrastructure.

I would definitely suggest evaluating vROps. It's particularly valuable for anybody who is on the VMware platform.

It gives us the ability to look into problems which are happening within the environment. This helps us to mitigate those problems more quickly. Then, if we see an alert from vCenter, and have to go and search for stuff, we have the ability to see where the issue is coming from, also what other systems or other components could be affected.

It's sped up the ability to track all this stuff as well as mitigated the issues that have come up during an importation. After an importation, if someone changes stuff; we see that stuff in there.

I'd like to see more ease of creating dashboards. It seems that creating dashboards is more difficult than it probably could be; more of a wizard type of feel for creating dashboards for every single department.

In our environment, we have people who we don't want to see everything. We want them to see what they need to see, not everything else. It seems harder to create that. It's not like a GUI, where you can say, "I want this stuff in here, and this is what I want them to see."

When you see everything, you end up having way too much information. It's overload if you don't know what you're looking for. It would be helpful to be able to give management just enough for them to look at, or the SAN people, and not have to see every little thing.

We have had problems, but I think it was more from the original implementation, not necessarily the product itself. We found that people are adding a lot of plugins that we weren't using. They were taking a whole list of plugins and popping them into place, even though they weren't being used, which then sucked the life out of the product and made it, at some point, unusable. We removed the ones that we didn't need, and left the other ones in there, and it seems to work fine. It's doing everything we need it to do. It's alerting us to problems, and it's helping us fix those problems pretty regularly.

It seems to scale pretty well for us. Other places I've worked, they had problems with scalability only because of the way they implemented it originally. For us, it seems to be working just fine for that purpose.

The first version we had in the environment, the problem was we seemed to have kept it longer than it should have, and it seemed that the technicians didn't have the knowledge about the old stuff. But after we upgraded, they seemed to be able to help us with any problems we had.

We were using things like Syslog and other products. They really didn't give you the direct information, "This is what the problem is," or "This is having a problem and these are the things that it could be affecting the product." Down the chain, it could be affecting the host, or it could be affecting the VMs. This is what vROps really gives you, the ability to see and to drill into what's going on in with all the components. Syslog and other components like that, they just told you the symptom, "This is happening," but not necessarily what else could the problem.

I'm not sure which ones they looked at because that was before my time, but they did look at a lot of vendors. I believe one of them was WhatsUp Gold, but that was more of just a product the system pinged. It went down because you can no longer ping it, so that wasn't really good for us.

We were trying to follow the validated design, which is part of VMware, and we needed some way of monitoring, which is one of the biggest problems.

We can't allow vCenter to do all the monitoring, to alert us. It doesn't give us enough information. There are a lot of products out there, and we just figured we'd use what they have in place, because it integrates much better than some of the others. I don't know about now, but originally the other ones didn't really integrate as well, with all the components including NSX and vSphere (and all the components underneath that), so that's why we decided to go with this.

The important things to look for are name recognition, reliability, and support. It's important that the support people have the knowledge to support the environment. Documentation and education, because you don't want to always be calling support for every little thing.

Test it out, put the demo in, or create a proof of concept.