VMware Aria Operations Reviews

It's all about the push-pull configurations. Before, we were using home-brewed apps. We were also using a lot of open source products, and those are great. But if the guy that's managing the open source product leaves, then you're kind of up the creek without a paddle, so vROps fills this void. It's a packaged offer from VMware, therefore it plays well with the entire suite. We're running the entire suite with vRealize, vROps, and we've got our entire VMware infrastructure running our NSX platform in Amazon's private cloud, because of this vROps is able to monitor and examine stuff. We're able to push-pull configs from that, and the biggest thing I like is to be able to push-pull configurations.

The biggest benefit is because it's an app developed by VMware and we are a VMware shop, they play well together. There aren't any plugins that I have to download. There's no modification of code. You install it and away you go.

I'd like the GUI to be flashier. It's the one thing that's missing. It's very clunky, which is fine. It's functional. You don't need it to be flashy. The backend problems have been resolved for the most part. At least, I feel that they have.

There needs to be more training. Once I build this and hand it off to somebody else, there is a lack of training available.

I don't know if it's the environment. I have been having issues in the field. One of them was with vROps. We're trying to use containers with Docker, but we're having issues when we try to run these in containers. Outside of the containers, they run great. In a clustered form, we have three availability zones and vROps is running processes fine. We start a container, then it becomes an issue. I don't know if it's just the way we configured it. I don't know what it is, but that's my issue. When I try to make it run in containers, it doesn't work.

It scales really nice. Just like most VMware products, they all scale really nice.

I haven't used it.

We were using all open source products, yet I was having issues monitoring my environment. I was using stuff like ELK (we're still using ELK), but I was trying to do everything with ELK, Cisco Tetration, and other products. It just wasn't doing it, so the sales guy said, "I'll give you a 30-day PoC of vROps. If you don't like it, cancel it. If you like it, then pay for it."

It wasn't complex, but I've spoken to other people who thought it. So for me, personally no, it was pretty straightforward, but I've been working in the VMware world for a while. I would say, it was very straightforward.

A lot of open-source stuff. What vROps does today, I've done it with open source products. In fact, I logged stashed stuff like that. I've done all those functions there and I've written scripts in a box that push and pull from places where I need it. I know there are other competitors out there, but I've just never been able to see those guys.

It's a good product, but it's gotta be a partnership.

We made them switch our sales guys.

Because I really didn't like our last sales guy, he was really about pushing the product, not about relationship. He didn't care what business we're in. He didn't really care about me as a customer. Our current salesperson is fantastic. She's great. She cares about us. She's invested in what we do. She's local and familiar with that area. I love that. It creates a personal touch. It means a lot.

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 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.

For me, the most valuable feature definitely is being able to see VM over- and under-provisioning quickly and easily: "Hey, this VM has 8 CPU's; it really only needs 2."; being able to go back to the business unit and tell them that, "Hey, we can save money by reducing this."

I like the improvement it did make, it looks like with 6. We just upgraded to 6 recently. It looks like it's a lot more integrated. I noticed when we first upgraded, you go to a VM and right there is the badge of the health of the VM and similar features. I guess it's more tightly integrated because I know that before, it was a different tab, so I like that.

I have been using it on and off for probably the past five years.

I think it has been consistently stable as long as I’ve been using it. Maybe initially, when I first started using it four or five years ago, it might not have been as stable, but I think it's gotten better over time. Of course, having it in the vApp obviously helps.

I've upgraded it probably a couple times in the past two years. It's real simple. Nothing to it.

Our environment's only probably about 600 VMs, so it handles that fine. I guess I don't really know past that.

I don't know if I've ever contacted technical support for vROps specifically. Honestly, I don't think it's as good as it used to be. I think it's gone downhill a little bit. I think it's one of those things where I guess at most bigger companies, you want to try to get past the level-one person. I feel like I know a little bit about it and a lot of times some of that time is spent with that level-one person when maybe it can go up a little higher.

I will say it is still a lot better than EMC support.

I think initial setup is real straightforward, because with the vApp, you just deploy it; you basically plug in your vCenter information, create a user for it, and go. It's pretty simple and it starts just collecting the data. That's only 15, 30 minutes. While it takes about a month to start getting valuable data about oversized and undersized VMs in the environment, you just set it up and let it do its thing.

The company where I was before didn't have anything and then we started with vRA’s Ops. When I arrived at the company I'm at now, they were a user of VMTurbo. I think the initial reason they went with that was probably cost. At that point, I don't think VMware was pushing operations manager as aggressively as third-party companies I guess.

I recommend it because, as I’ve mentioned, I think it's a good product. It's valuable. I guess the only thing is, like with everything at VMware, they have the different licensing structures. Look at whether you can use some of the features such as, I think, Chargeback.

I think it's definitely valuable. If you have a small environment, maybe not, but for any environment over 8 or 10 hosts, I think it's definitely worth taking a look at because you could save some money.

Right now, we’re primarily just using it for monitoring. However, based on a VMworld session I attended, we’re looking at using it for enhancing our efficiency and to guarantee performance; make sure we can use vROps recommendations to relocate workloads based on utilization and so on. That session was interesting because they talked about cross cluster, being able to automate cross-cluster motions. That future ability is pretty good. For the most part, right now, we’re using vROps for just monitoring. We’re just monitoring vCenter right now, but we’re looking at adding all of our hardware UCS.

We’re expanding, but currently, we’re just using vCenter monitoring right now. Even that’s advantageous; just to have that dashboard. We need to do a lot of work to get where we want to go, but the tool is huge. I’m looking forward to that. Not a ton of value yet, but I can see it on the fairly near horizon.

I’m not our monitoring guy. We have a monitoring team and they’re responsible for that piece. I’m responsible for the cloud architecture. I’ve been a little unplugged from that because we’ve just moved multiple data centers. We’ve had a busy year and just implemented vRA and things like that. I need to get my hands a little dirtier this fall and try and get that moving along.

We’d recently done a business transformation. We’re in healthcare. We deliver software-as-a-service for the province of Saskatchewan. Recently, we’ve expanded our business to infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service, those kinds of things, and we’re starting to look at consolidation of 15 distinct health regions in the province, all with their own data centers and IT shops. Our, at least my VP’s, vision was to consolidate at least from an infrastructure perspective down to two data centers in the province from thirty.

One of things with that is being able to give your customers some insight into how that environment is behaving; how the machines within their tenancy are behaving. We needed some sort of analytics to be able to show them everything is running fine. They’ll know anyways if it’s not, but when you get up to certain levels, they just want to see some nice graphs or charts or whatever to show that their they’re getting value for their investment.

It’s that piece, just monitoring that multi-tenant environment, that is the primary driver, but I’ve got lots of extra uses for it as we go.

I’d like to see the ability to monitor more stuff we’re actually looking at vROps to pull in data from. I guess there is already a lot of stuff it can capture, but I’m actually pushing to use vROps as our managers’ manager. I’d like to pull data from SCOM, Windows, SQL, Oracle and all those kinds of things, and use vROps as our primary dashboard, as our MOM, basically.

I’m looking for broader support, and also like we talked about in the VMworld session, the ability to use the analytics within vROps to actually trigger events to possibly alleviate performance issues before without requiring manual intervention. Obviously, the further we go along this SDDC journey, the more important it is to automate and not have your guys doing it. vROps could suggest this server is starved for storage. It already knows that. Why do I need to have somebody go in and look and try and find a spot, when vROps already knows, has the analytics to probably find a better spot for it than the tech would, right?

The automation piece will be big for us. Then getting into the cross site, cross cluster discussion is neat because I didn’t even know they were looking at that. There is kind of a future state. It’s already got me rethinking how we build our clusters. We might have some more flexibility with how we build clusters because traditionally; we’ve built clusters around planning for DRS to handle some of that workload movement. Within a cluster, we’ve had to do a fair amount of, I don't know, due diligence to make sure that we had the right workloads in the right spots. DRS being able to look into that cross site, cross cluster is a cool feature. I’m looking forward to that.

I have been using for just several months, six months maybe.

It has been stable so far. We actually have two instances. I have to try and figure out how we’re going to consolidate that. We have an instance for our cloud and then an instance for EUC, for the end-user compute side. I’d like to amalgamate that into one. I’ve got to ask some questions to figure out what the right architecture for that is.

I hope that it is scalable. I haven’t looked too far into it. We’re not a massive shop. In state, we’re about two to three thousand server VMs and probably about 14,000 desktops. It’s large enough. I don’t think I’m too worried about scale. Most of the VMware products we have scale really well. I’m assuming vROps falls inline with that.

Technical support is good so far. Again, we’re just grazing the surface, so we haven’t had much call to leverage support. As with any vendor, it’s the luck of the draw who you get the first tier of support. You just have to know how to escalate correctly. For some of our operational stuff, it’s a journey to get them to learn. Sometimes, you get a resource that maybe doesn’t know to escalate it in time. That’s the case for any vendor; Cisco, BMC, whatever. They might sit on it, and not really know how to solve it, but they also don't want to escalate every ticket in their queue, so you have to force their hand. Sometimes, we don’t do that. When my guys would complain about support, I tell them, Well, it’s kind of a bit on you. If you pressure the vendor to escalate it, then they typically do. Then you get that tier-two, tier-three kind of resource.

I have spoken to Blue Medora about monitoring UCS, SQL, Windows, using Hyperic or whatever they call it now, and those kinds of things.

I recommend it. I think it’s a good choice. I know there are other tools out there. Those people are knocking on my door all the time. I don't know. I’ve had lots of pushback from different IT shops in the province saying, “Well, why do we need to use this tool or that tool? You shouldn't use VMware’s tool because they might be lying to you, or whatever, for monitoring or those kinds of things.”

I’m more of the mindset, Why would I buy a Ferrari and put a Ford engine in it? Why am I going to buy a third party? There is definitely a spot for third party. We use lots of third-party applications. Obviously, VMware is going to have the best insight into how their stuff works. Obviously, they’re going to support all the features within there.

With third-party vendors, maybe that solution works great today, but when the new features in the VMware solution come out, there is a lag. You can't use those features because they don’t support it yet because they have to play catch up. On the other hand, obviously, VMware development teams are going to work together and try and coordinate: We have this new feature. Now, you can leverage it, maybe, into a new feature in vROps. Now, we can leverage it in vRA or however that works.

For us, of course, we’re an ELA customer, so we’re licensed for pretty much everything anyway. For us, my preference is always to use the VMware stack unless it’s not the best solution.

The most valuable feature is the stress ratings of the different servers, with recommendations of how big a server should be. Being able to pull historical data is pretty nice too.

It's nicer for our customers, because if they say the server is slow, we can actually look and see if it really is slow or if it's their application, or figure out what's going on.

We mainly use it for memory and CPU performance monitoring and management; that is what we're most concerned with. It has helped speed things up. We've had a couple systems that people just accepted as being slow, until we got this tool and it started saying, "Hey, you need to give it more memory." We got in contact with the customer, increased the memory, and now it's great. In the past, the feeling was, "I don't know man. It's just your problem."

Out of, maybe, the 500 servers we have, it has helped about 20 of them, performance-wise.

We also like to use it for troubleshooting. Someone will say the server's slow, and it's nice to be able to give them the data to say, "No, it's not. The problem is somewhere else." I don't know how you would measure that. It's very helpful for that.

We use it for historical data and so on. We do have a couple of custom alarms, which are nice. We monitor things such as old snapshots and so on with it.

I'd like to see some more options with outage times, where you can set different parameters. It seems like you can only set one right now, so you have to make all these groups and do some workarounds. It would be nicer if they made that easier.

The maintenance windows items were kind of painful. Group management is a little cumbersome. I just really wish I could say, "I have outages four times a month, and this is what they are." Right now, you can only say, "I have one outage." In order to have more outages, I have to have four groups, each with different outages. It's a whole ordeal.

Dealing with the technical support the first time for that internal CA certificate, was quite painful. Once we figured it out, it was easy, but I kind of wish they had documentation on how to do it, rather than the solution being call technical support and they'll walk you through it. That's why I have not given it a higher rating.

It’s pretty stable. We haven't had any issues with it going down or anything. We just had minor GUI issues with it, but they got resolved.

I don't know about scalability. We only have one and it seems to be doing the job just fine.

Technical support was good. I'd give them 8 out of 10.

They wanted us to use it to try to track down some overprovisioned and underprovisioned servers. We've had a great relationship with VMware. They had a product so we grabbed it.

When selecting a vendor such as VMware, for me, the most important criteria is dealing with technical support, how good they are. If they're technical support is terrible, I won't be as eager to go with them. I also look at how stable the product is. If I never have to call tech support, then I'll totally buy all their stuff, but then, if I do have to call tech support, I want them to be good.

Initial setup was straightforward. The only issue we ran into was replacing the certificate on it with an internal certificate. It was pretty painful, but once I got support on the line, we figured it out.

We wanted to start with VM Ware. If it wasn't great, we would have moved on. It's been great.

It's a great tool. You should buy it.

It’s most valuable feature is being able to see at a glance if there's a problem in the environment, whether that's VMs or hosts or storage.

We have identified issues with performance in the past using vROps where vROps was the first thing that told us where the problem was.

vROps has also helped prevent outages and shortened outage time. During one of our go-lives with a new version of our hospital information system, we were able to determine that a particular cluster was overloaded and divert users to a different set of servers.

We've used the performance management features to really determine where bottlenecks or where issues were; the heat maps are very nice to be able to see right off at a glance what might be wrong, so you can start to drill down. A number of times, we've been able to identify issues and improve performance.

We haven't gotten into a lot of using forecasting or doing any capacity management, at least not formally. Generally, we are kind of constrained by what our vendors say regarding capacity. We use it to kind of argue against some of their ridiculous requests. But we're not using that as much as I'd like to.

I guess the biggest improvement might be some user interface improvements with speed. Also, some of the dashboards that are built-in are not as useful as I'd like. For some of the recommendations, the way the recommendations are made is not real straightforward. For instance, if it's going to tell you that you need some more CPU or memory for a VM, it's not always really easy to see exactly what it's recommending right off the bat.

I haven’t given it a perfect rating because of issues with a couple of the previous installs. We had an issue where the server just stopped responding and we ended up having to reinstall it, which is easy enough, but you lose the history. It's not something I want to do; reinstall vROps.

We have had some issues with the vROps server not really responding real quickly at times and we've actually had to rebuild it a few times. It could be better.

We haven't run into too many problems with scalability, unless that's the cause of our issues with vROps not responding real quickly.

We have not used technical support for vROps.

I did not previously use a different solution.

I have not been involved in the initial setup the last two times that we've done it. I set it up probably two years ago. Since then, someone else on my team has set it up. Initial setup is at least straightforward. There was nothing difficult about setting it up. We were able to get it up and running in just a matter of minutes, and then just waited for it to start collecting data.

Traditionally, we have not had much of a budget for monitoring. We actually have a NOC that we pay to monitor things. It's hard to convince leadership that we should spend some more money on another monitoring solution. I wish that wasn't the case. I wish we could actually choose our own monitoring. But because of vRealize, we were able to use vROps and that has been very helpful for us, more helpful in some cases than our NOC.

There were no other vendors on our shortlist while we were looking for something like vROps.

Install it, configure it to look at your environment and just watch and see what it's reporting back to you. It does have a lot of canned, built-in dashboards that are very helpful and you can develop; build from those if you need to. But really, you just have to use it. It's very easy to get started with it.

The company I work for is Sureskills. We're a consultancy based company. We have multiple customers that we sell a lot of virtual products to. We don't just deal with that. We deal with a lot of Microsoft, Stack, and Dell EMC products as well, but we do an awful lot of VMware based products. 

Our primary use case is two-fold. From one perspective it gives the local on-site IT people some ability to see what's happening with their virtual state and let them know if there's any issues or problems that may be starting to come to the surface. Secondly, from our perspective, because we provide support to these companies, it allows us to quickly see from a number of different reasons why there would be issues from this. It's useful from both sides.

The most valuable features would be that it gives us a breakdown on the ESX host and then the virtual machines themselves. Also, with some of the add-ons that they provide with vROps you can start to see if there are any issues with things like Exchange Infrastructure or SQL add-ons, etc. It's useful to get from the hardware perspective to the virtual machine down to the actual application that's running on those VMs themselves.

I do find this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. You could set vROps up in an hour and start to get some statistics from it. It's a very simple tool to use.

I would like to see improvement from the application layer. They have add-ons for SQL and Exchange. It would be nice to see some additional application support being developed further down the line.

We haven't seen any downtime. From our perspective, we haven't seen any issues with vROps in itself. It's simple to install. It's very easy to operate, so from our perspective, we would see it as a natural add-on to anything in terms of the virtual infrastructure.

Even if you're a small to medium size business and you have 50 virtual machines or if you're a large company with several thousand virtual machines, the solution works across the board for all.

Their technical support is outstanding. We would deal with VMware on a fairly regular basis for our customers, and possibly because a lot of the support is based in Ireland, we would have a fairly good relationship with them and they're very good at getting back to us very quickly.

The initial setup was very straightforward. From the web interface, you can literally just go straight into actually installing vROps with very little previous knowledge required to get it up and running.

I'm not sure about return on investment per se, but certainly in terms of being able to troubleshoot and identify issues quickly and in a timely manner which further down the line may have caused an issue with the production infrastructure. It's intuitive from that perspective, that it allows us to deal with issues before they become a problem and that could cause an issue down the road which would potentially impact on costs for our customer.

They compare reasonably well to alternative solutions. There are several products that are out there that would manage a virtual infrastructure for customers, but we perceive it to be the best of the existing range of products in that area.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.