VMware Aria Operations Reviews

I can get insights into my infrastructure. Along with the VMware software, it offers me infrastructure consolidation. And I can get a predictive input on what is going where and how my infrastructure is working.

It enables to me to do a deep dive and get insights into my infrastructure. When I have predictive input on what is going on in my datacenter, it saves me lots of time and lots of cost as well.

The dashboard which provides the information; if it could be like Salesforce, that kind of dashboard. Because what I end up having to do a lot of drill downs into each and every inventory to detect the issues. So if I could have all the issues on one dashboard and the rest in another one it would make my life easier.

I've used as vROps now for the last five years.

It is absolutely stable. I haven't had any issues to date.

The scalability is also good because nowadays datacenters are not that simple. It's always scalable up and down and sideways.

I have not used it to date.

No we did not. We went with it because it would give me the insight into the datacenter. It was the ultimate solution. And since we are using the VMware environment, it was a must have.

It was straightforward.

We did it ourselves.

Dell, EMC, and one other. Among the most important criteria in choosing a vendor are their technology roadmap as well as the productivity.

When you look at the VMware infrastructure and software piece, they're more or less offering what vROps is offering you right now. It is comparable to any other third-party solution for the VMware. So it's always better to go with the best one.

To prepare for implementation, first and foremost you need to make sure that you inventory all the hardware and the stakes. And it's important that everything is on the same version. Multiple versions will make your life more complex because all the versions are in additional dashboards. It's not like a motherboard version and then a dashboard. Each version has different dashboards.

Tells us about alerts and risk that we might not know about. The Help feature's probably the best, that's what we look at all the time. Go in and look, if something's red we're jumping on it.

We weren't aware of these alerts beforehand. So, if there was an application slow-down, latency, nobody knew if it was the server, the application or what. Now we can actually point to it and eliminate the server as the problem and look for the application as the issue.

I don't know if there's a way to e-mail alerts from it. We always have to go look into it. We have other monitoring solutions that will e-mail our whole team, or text them if there's a critical alert. I don't know if vRealize has that capability, because I know we're not getting alerts from it. We just go and look every morning.

Fabulous. We haven't had any issue with it yet

I don't know if this is relevant. I guess it's scalable. For us, we haven't really needed to use scalability or it hasn't had to scale in our case, I guess.

Maybe one of my systems guys has used technical support once. I think he called about an issue, but I have not.

When we got here, there weren't any solutions monitoring our systems. We're a new team in the last couple years, and we knew we needed something to monitor what's going on. One of our vendors introduced us to this and it was a great tool. We actually went to a class all about vRealize. We ended up purchasing the solution a few months later, so it was great.

I wasn't involved in this, the systems guy was.

I know our predecessors went through a whole rip and repair, new hardware as well as software, and they eliminated a lot of servers they didn't need. It's a big project. You have to go through and see what you have in the company and probably eliminate a lot.

Peer. We don't have them yet. We're doing a PoC with them, but the people that I've dealt with, their customer service is great.

I would say customer service is important. It's one of the higher things in terms of priority. My systems guys would say the product itself is most important - what it does. But I think customer service is key. If you can't get service when you have a problem, it's not even worth having the product.

VMware has been solid. Stable. I say hands down, VMware. There are other solutions out there, but VMware works.

The reporting:

• Being able to look into how everything is running.
• How our equipment is running.
• What's going on in the overall environment.

Expressed to management when we're overseeing commitment and when we need more hardware. It helps us to determine that.

Easier management and it should be more user-friendly. When you look at it, and you see a lot of badges, you think, "Oh my god, that looks terrible." But it's really not, they just need to make it easier to read, a better UI.

It seems like a pretty stable product. We do have occasions where we have to reboot some of the appliances, but that's normal operations.

Seems to be fairly able to easily balance it out across datacenters and environments, although we've remained pretty static in terms of scaling.

Tech support is always good. They always work well. There are Irish guys, those are our late night calls and I don't really want to be on those.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

For us, they have to be on our approved list to begin with. There are a lot of legal ramifications for us.

They always do a comparison of different tools, whether it's DMC or if it's for different solutions. We have two or three different vendors we can go to. Personally, I'd prefer to stay with the VMware stuff.

VMware does a really good job of integrating all of their tools together, whereas you get some third parties where they kind of haphazardly integrate in, and they may or may not stay well-integrated. Or, they have difficulty getting integrated. You have to a lot API calls, WMI, and that kind of stuff.

Make sure initially you set it up properly. Don't try taking shortcuts.

The performance graphing, and being able to dig in if there are any issues with a particular VM alerting.

It helps with troubleshooting times, or at least proves to somebody it's not a virtualization issue. Shows what's going on inside the VMs and the environment as a whole.

I don't know if this really helps us with anything stability-wise. It can uncover some things that we may not have known, and it will bubble them up to the surface.

I definitely would like to see the development of dashboards not requiringe a PhD. There's so much data in there. There's so many knobs and things you can turn, that's all great and all, but just to get the basic data that I think is usable, and to build an easy to use dashboard, could be simplified. More of a drag and drop type model, without having to dig into things for correlations.

The solution itself has been very stable. Upgrades are easy, and it's been real stable.

We haven't scaled it since we deployed it from the initial sizing other than adding disc space to it, but to add extra collector nodes, or whatever. Simple.

Not for vROps.

I was not involved.

It's not always the easiest product to work around in, and build (meaningful) dashboards. I think the UI has improved greatly over the years, but I think there's definitely room for improvements to make it overall easier to manage the product without having to be a specialist in the product.

Do your due diligence. Evaluate all of the products, and make sure what you're buying is going to meet your needs and criteria. Whatever that may be.

Things to look out for:

• Definitely functionality
• Ease of use
• Scalability
• Cost value

The alerts are the most valuable feature of the product. We run terminal servers and I like the granular ability of it getting into the guest OS. It gives us alerts for the hard drive, how is it on space, or pretty much anything happening at the guest level. It gives us a single pane of glass.

We use it a lot for capacity planning. Like I’ve mentioned, we do terminal servers. What we've been doing lately is giving it a metric that shows how many more VM's can we fit on that particular host. It's been great for that, and told us, with the research that's available, we can fit 10 more VMs on that host. From a capacity planning view, it's been great.

It has definitely helped us avoid outages with our internal servers. We've been having an issue with temporary profiles filing up the hard drives, and early on, before we really had the monitoring, that terminal server would just go down. Now at least we have something that says we have 10% hard drive space left on this particular machine; we get the alert in vROps, and we are able to get to it before it goes down.

It has not been helpful from a capacity planning point, but we have done a lot with the oversized reports, tuning some VMs. We were able to pull back vCPUs, memory and storage. We can reclaim some of that space that was being wasted on oversized machines. I guess that's capacity planning to some degree, but tuning is more what we use it for.

We also haven't really used the performance management features too much.

Even though the set up was kind of straightforward, getting the lay of the land was at times kind of confusing; I don't know if that's an indictment on me or the software. There was documentation readily available, it just wasn't as intuitive as I thought it would be, straight out the box.

Other than that, I don't really know about specific areas with room for improvement because at this point, we are just scratching the surface of what it does, because we are a smaller shop. We just had a merger, so at the top of the year, we're going to be onloading, onboarding a lot of DRs and scaling pretty quickly. Then I'll be able to really take it for a test drive.

Stability-wise, I haven't had any issues.

Because we are still a smaller shop, we haven't really had to scale it. Pretty soon, we probably will, because we are going to add some VMware Horizon for our VDI and NSX. I'm pretty sure we're going to have to scale it.

I haven't used technical support for vROps.

We weren't previously using anything. Just having a central measurement point was light years ahead of trying to go into each one, or setting up different types of software that have monitoring. It was just easier doing it with vROps.

Initial setup was actually pretty straightforward. I pretty much launched the VM, went into the web query and set it up from there; set up all the sensors, took you through a wizard. That was pretty much it. I didn't have to read about any customization.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options. We actually bought vSphere with vROps, so we never even looked at anything else.

Definitely go with it, if you're looking for a centralized management point, as far as being able to monitor everything, without having to manually go in and get sizing reports for VMs. It even reports on networking issues.

I'm waiting to see when we go into VDI and NSX; I think we'll really open it up then with a lot more monitoring options.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor like VMware is pretty much support. We've had some vendors where it's not that the product’s bad, but when it does go south, the support hasn't been there. We definitely research, whether it's going online, looking at message boards, just kind of getting a feel for what other customers’ expectations are, if the vendor is meeting them or not. That's one of the things that we are really big on, the support perspective.

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.

The most valuable feature has definitely been the ability to drill down on the performance metrics, to troubleshoot issues that arise.

Some of the areas that we have run into issues with are the upgrades, sometimes. We've had a few issues with that and had to work with support with that before.

I think managing the size, the sizing of the actually product itself can be improved. Several times, we had to go back and reevaluate how we had sized the environment.

The only other thing would be to make it easier for our end users to consume the data. Sometimes we've had to do a lot to try to customize dashboards; we spent a lot of time on that. If they develop ways to make that a little bit easier, so we can make it a little simpler for our users.

I've been using vROps for about three years.

It has been consistently stable. As I’ve mentioned, the only issues we've had are some upgrades, really.

The support has generally been pretty good with that. We've had some tough issues, so it's been pretty good. They managed to resolve them. We've got one that's in the queue right now, but they are working with us on it. It has to do with tagging.

Even though we became more virtualized, we were using traditional products such as HP OpenView and so on; we really weren't getting the full picture. We knew we needed something that was more hypervisor aware. It’s made a huge difference.

It really became mandatory as we started virtualizing things such as SQL Server and Oracle, because we really had spent a lot of time troubleshooting them.

There's some complexity to the initial setup, to do it right. We did have an engagement with VMware, for them to actually install it, because we knew there was some complexity to it.

It's a good solution. A warning: You probably need to make sure you can give it the proper amount of attention and time. You're just not going to throw it out there, hit the wizard and just walk away and say "Well, it's done." You're not going to be fair to the product or to yourself if you don't do that.

My personal requirements for a vendor are:

• Obviously, integration with our current tools, with the hypervisor and so on, which helps VMware a lot.
• Ease of maintenance, so far as updates and so on. I don't really want to spend a whole lot of time on that. Actually, vROps performs properly. We've had products before that just didn't perform very well. When that happens, the users just won't use it. It's very important.

The most valuable feature is the reporting, being able to give accurate reports to our management on what's going on in our VMware environment, for example, if they want to know what capacity is remaining on certain systems. We also like the fact that we can get ahead of a problem. They like the fact that we can go ahead and get ahead of a problem with vROps. Pretty much on a daily basis, we can see in a single pane of glass what our environment looks like, looking at the heat maps and so on. That's what makes it valuable to us.

For example, most of the problems on a daily basis are related to disk space utilization on VMs.

It also helps whenever there are anomalies with systems; if there's a lot of CPU contention or a problem with the host.

There haven’t yet been any other side benefits that specifically help us as an organization function, but we're actually looking to start utilizing it more for the enterprise edition that lets us delve into applications. We're not quite sure we're going to go with VMware for that.

It is somewhat not as user friendly as I think it could be. With configuring custom reports, custom dashboards, sometimes there can be a lot involved, where I wish it would be a little easier.

Also, I’d like more canned reports. Some of the reports are nice in some of the features, but I’d like more customizable reports. For example, if we have a group of VMs and we want to just get a simple report or a more complex report, to me, there are too many steps to get that done.

It's pretty stable to us. It doesn’t become slow down any more than expected; we have a pretty big environment, we have 3000 VMs, with over 300 hosts.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

We previously did not have a solution for monitoring our VMware infrastructure. We went with vROps because we were a VMware workshop and they provided us with a solution that we thought fit with us.

I was involved in the initial setup; it was not that complex. To get it all up and running, stood it up for all our systems, with the assistance of an outside vendor, it took three days.

Make sure you understand the difference between the standard, advanced and enterprise editions, what you can and cannot do with each edition. Make sure what you're going to get and what you're not going to get. For example, they present the enterprise edition to you, but the only thing you might be able to get is the standard edition, which doesn't let you customize dashboards and doesn’t have other functionality.