VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We are using it to monitor our virtualized environment, to take care, ahead of time, of any problems that develop, before they become major crises. It's a complement to our existing monitoring solutions.

We've managed to save quite a lot of resources because we haven't had to deal with the issues of over-provisioned VMs, which was a constant problem. People would always ask for very large VMs to hedge their bets. That's been its biggest assistance. We've been able to say to people, "Hey, the last two weeks your thing hasn't done anything. It doesn't need to be this big." We have been able to notch it down, save some space.

It has definitely helped provide cost savings through high-capacity utilization. We've been able to streamline a lot of our products and we're also getting ahead of problems before they really start becoming major issues.

Mostly it's pre-warning. We get to know ahead of time when systems are starting to have problems. We can pay attention to the alerts and know right away that there's an issue developing at some point.

We also use it to monitor poorly configured VMs: over-configured, under-configured.

It's reasonably intuitive and user-friendly. But because it's a very powerful product, there are a lot of details involved. There's no way to make that simple, as far as I'm concerned.

Rock-solid. No problems at all.

So far, so good on scalability. We're medium-sized so it's okay.

We only had to use technical support once, when we were doing the initial set-up, and that worked out. It was great.

We had been using an external monitoring solution called Zenoss. It worked great. We still use it, but we weren't getting good insights into the depths of VMware. vROps, for what it does is absolutely fantastic. It's good because it comes straight from VMware. We're not messing around with some third-party product. They know their stuff, obviously.

When selecting a vendor, what's important for me is stability, that the vendor has been around for a little while, and that they've got good, solid tech support.

The initial set-up was relatively straightforward. It was just an appliance to deploy. The setup took a little while to get right, but it wasn't that bad.

With this particular solution, with vRealize Operations, if you have a reasonable-sized on-prem environment, it's definitely worth investing in. If you're going to be just straight cloud, it may not necessarily be as perfect. But I would definitely recommend it.

We use it to help us optimize our environment and make better use of our resources.

We're new to it, so we're just learning the early steps of how to use the product and how to integrate it into what we do now.

I am here, at VMworld 2018, to learn about the new release, and I'm encouraged with what I'm seeing. Some of the stuff does make it a little easier on some of the other people who would be looking at it, such as managers. We will be able to build some dashboards that show them what they would like to see, that show the cost savings. We want to see the other stuff, where we're saving our resources more.

So far, the scalability has been working out. There's a cost involved in scalability though because you have to purchase the license for each of your hosts to go with it. Then, depending on what we want to do from here, there are more costs involved. If we want to look at the vRA automating stuff, there's another cost involved with that product. So we're in something of an evaluation phase.

We haven't used much technical support yet. We've had a few problems, but I was able to overcome most of them myself, with the KB articles and the like.

We didn't have a previous solution. We purchased it when we got an Enterprise Agreement with VMware. We had to buy some more stuff and this is one of the things we bought.

The initial setup was fairly easy. It's an appliance, so you just build it up and then turn it on.

There is a learning curve because it's a complex program. There is a lot to consume in terms of the metrics inside of it. That's the biggest hurdle: trying to understand all the places to go look.

We do have a competing solution in now. We have Turbonomic. We're looking at it at the same time.

Attend a training class first, before your boss hands it to you and says, "go."

We're new to it, so it's hard for me to rate it well at this time. In the early days, I'd say it's about a seven out of ten. I wouldn't give it anything higher than that until I get more time to play with the knobs and turn the switches and see how it works. It was easy to install, there's a lot of good documentation, and I'm finding a lot of good free training out there, since I'm constrained on purchasing training this year. This is my training budget for this year, the attending of the VMworld 2018 conference.

I love VMworld. I think it's very useful. That's why I'm here, to look at the vROps. I also came to talk to some experts about SQL questions I have, and some other clustering questions as we move forward with some projects. I have found the conference to be very useful this year.

We use it for our virtualization and infrastructure. It's used for a lot of clusters, a lot of hosts, VM workloads on-prem and a little bit off-prem. It's doing great. Really no complaints.

Increases efficiency, drives down costs. Being able to consolidate everything on similar hardware is really helpful, as opposed to trying to manage a bunch of hosts. It has helped us reduce time to troubleshoot issues and quality of service is better because there is more uptime. Taking maintenance is a lot easier now than it used to be. We don't have to take as many outages.

The most valuable feature is all the metrics we get. They're really good. Being able to drill down and find out where the CPU and memory bottlenecks are and being able to tune them is really helpful.

It's intuitive and user-friendly, especially with the new clients. It's really nice. It's really easy to use. The HTML 5 client is light years ahead of the old one. Everything runs faster, it loads a lot quicker, it's a lot cleaner, the UI is easier to navigate.

The stability is high. Normally, the problems we have are hardware problems, not virtualization problems. They're usually related to the hardware vendor.

You just need to pop in a new host, install ESX, and go.

I haven't needed to use technical support.

I've done expansion of it but I have not been involved in the initial build. What I have done is pretty easy. I've had some guidance but the documentation is online and a lot of it is easy to find.

Of course the licensing, if they could make it cheaper, that would help. But they have to build out new features, so I understand.

Everybody virtualizes now. It's just the thing you do. It's so efficient. I could go through the list but being able to consolidate infrastructure, you save time, you save money, it's just something you do.

They have done a pretty good job. The new client is really good.

I use vRealize Operations to do integrations with Log Insight, vSAN, NSX, and vCloud Director (vCD).

I have used it to pull recommendations for our data center or cluster and load balancer, then apply them.

It provides variety of management packs. It also supports the latest version of vCD, NSX, and vSAN.

I have found the recommendation tool extremely helpful.

It provides optimization recommendations for data centers, cluster workload migrations, and vSAN.

They should improve the vROps Federation Management Pack, so each customer can create a single pane of glass for multiple sites of vROps.

I did not encounter issues with scalability.

I used GroundWork before switching to vRealize Operations. I had a bad experience with GroundWork's support while doing software integration with its latest version.

vRealize Operations has proved to be a cost effective solution for our big environment.

I checked the integration capability with tools like JIRA and ServiceNow.

I recommend vRealize Operations for bigger work environments. It is a very helpful tool compared to others.

We use it to monitor old ESXi's, the storage, the vCenters, the Brokers, to see if they have enough memory, CPU; to make sure they're not overloading the network.

We can detect when a host is getting hit by a lot of VMs and we can take care of that host. We can add more memory, more CPU, or maybe we just replace the host.

It helps us to monitor the virtual environment. It is also easy to use. We have a monitor with vROps right there. We can see what is going on. Any activity is going to pop up right on the monitor.

It's a little bit scattered. I have to go through a lot of steps to get everything in one place. I would like it that if you click on one cluster, you get all the information from the host, VMs, whatever is there. Sometimes I have to go to different places to get the information.

The stability is good. It's fine. I don't have any problems.

We use technical support, but not that much. They're really helpful. Sometimes you get people who don't know what they're saying, but in general, it's good.

Whenever a new product comes, the licenses are renewed automatically.

Get it. It's the best.

No problems. It's a great product. I love it.

Being able to gather up the different application servers into groups and then I can give access by application types, and they can see the same things we can see.

Being able to tie in the other packages with storage and networking and being able to see, across the board, some of the analytics we can pull out.

There may be some features I haven't found yet; there are a lot of things in there. Perhaps some tighter integration with the upgrade manager would be helpful.

I also have some questions about the storage utilization and the expenses with that.

It is pretty stable but I do have some questions about the storage.

Ours is a pretty small installation, but I do have some colleagues in larger installations, so I think it has good scalability.

Not on vROps. I did ask some questions of TAM about storage utilization but I haven't had answers yet.

No, we weren't using something for this. We just used what came through our system.

Straightforward, I did it myself.

The most important thing when looking at vendors is long term support, that they don't just drop the product.

I would advise you put it in, try it out, put it through its paces.

The dashboard gives me good insight on what's going on in my infrastructure.

Before vROps, we were just stripping everything.

Now, we have:

• Data storage
• Virtual machines

I would like to see improvements in reporting. I would like it to be more customized. More templates would also be beneficial.

It's an easy appliance to deploy.

The stability is great.

It scales really well. We have two of them.

I haven't used technical support.

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

It's better than the moderating features built-in for vSphere.

Again, it gives you good insight on your environment.

The most important thing when selecting a vendor: stability.

The performance analytics, when we are troubleshooting performance issues. It's good to have insight into special metrics like CPU ready time, latency, network utilization. Otherwise, you're kind of like shooting in the dark, guessing what the problem could be.

From a conservative aspect, we can use the data to, for example, for purchase decisions. If someone asks for something and they are not using it, we're taking it back. So from a full-cost perspective or a show-back perspective, we are able to use that data and to say to application teams, "You are spec'd out, way over-provisioned." We're not seeing that so, for the business we are able to reduce cost by purchasing hardware because that data is showing us what needs to be and where it should be. So if application X is over-provisioned but application Y needs the utilization, we can shift those resources.

My number one request personally would be self-healing. So if there is an issue with the appliance, we should alerted and it should be clear as day. When you log in you get all these dashboards, everything looks really cool. But those dashboards don't do us any good if the health of the appliance is not 100%. So, if there are health issues with it, or it's not collecting data, it should self-heal. Or if the data is filling up on the disk, we need to know that and be able to click a button and say, "Do something about it," or "Give us step by step instructions on what to do to add a disk."

I think they could also work on the infrastructure a little bit.

It's highly customizable but it's hard to learn it. You have to be in there every day to really get the best use out of it. The nature of our organization is that my team kind is in charge of it but it really shouldn't be my team. It should be a monitoring performance type of team or operations team that owns it so that they can put the time in and create the proper dashboards. At the end of the day, they are going to be looking at those dashboards, not us.

So the ease of use: If you're not a vROps guy from the beginning, it's a high learning curve. It comes out of the box with all these settings, that is where training comes in. I know they offer courses for that. But I think the solution should be more natural in getting to know it.

I have some worries stability. Initially it was slow, so we ended up adding resources to it because the environment grows. That solved it. I'm not a big fan of the master data model that it has, so when we have failures, it's not always clear if the collectors are up.

You have to keep an eye on the actual appliances. If you're scaling higher, you're going to have to add add resources to the appliances themselves. Otherwise they slow down.

Their VMware technical support is always pretty good. In our specific case, we had a special issue that they couldn't resolve. Overall I would say it is good, when you get a hold of them.

We just open a ticket up on the web, we set the severity, and then they will work with us from there. They make it really easy to open them. I'll do my best to troubleshoot, but I only have so much time in the day. At the end of the day, I'm just going to open a support case and they'll help me directly.

We pay for support so, the business wants us to use it, take advantage. They look at how many support cases we open. Otherwise they might say, "Hey, you guys don't open up support cases. We're paying."

No. We just had the foresight to know we needed a solution like this because server sprawl is very concerning to me, personally. I don't want to have a whole bunch of hosts out there that I don't really need, because the bigger you get the harder it is to maintain it.

At the time, the other one was Turbonomic, but they are a little higher-end. We had to "sell" it to the business. vROps is not cheap either. We convinced the organization that it is in their best interest. And they followed suit.

There are different things to look for when choosing a vendor. From an engineering standpoint, it's the administration. From an organizational standpoint, it could be cost. So it has to come in between those and it has to be a stable product as well. Those three factors.

As engineers, we're the decision influencers but at the end of the day we are not cutting the check for the organization. So, we have to do our job to sell it to the organization if we think it should be recommended. They have to have total buy-in.

I think the decision depends on your server infrastructure. If you're hyper converged, your solution may already have those analytics built in to it. So first check if your infrastructure or server provider already has that. A Nutanix may have that. If you are a traditional shop with blade or rack and you know you don't have it then there's really no competition besides Turbonomic.