VMware Aria Operations Reviews

The primary use case for our organization is forecasting and troubleshooting.

For our organization, the ability to go back historically and see the data that accumulates in there, that's really the best thing for us.

In addition, the solution has helped to reduce time to troubleshoot issues and improved the quality of service to users.

There are many valuable features. The top feature is historical trending analysis and future workload predictions. There's a workload forecaster/predictor model in there and it's very helpful for capacity planning.

I sure don't find the solution to be intuitive or user-friendly. It takes a lot of time to get familiar with the interface. You've got to spend a lot of time poking around there, it's not very user-friendly. There have been improvements over the versions but, even still, there is a pretty steep learning curve for the product, in my opinion. In the latest and greatest version, there has been quite a bit of a step up from the last version, as far as the user interface goes. They are making improvements. So that's positive.

It's solid, there's no problem with stability at all.

It seems to scale pretty largely. You do have to add some nodes to it to make it scale, but that's not that big of a deal, so it's pretty easy as far as scalability goes.

We have not needed to use technical support for this product.

We didn't have a previous solution. We needed something to fill that gap.

When selecting a vendor, what's important for us is whether or not they can fill the need. That's top of the list, and behind that would be support.

The initial setup was not complex at all, it was pretty straightforward. Just deploy.

Give it a chance. They have a demo, you can fire it up and actually use it in your environment. That's the best way. That's what everyone wants to see, the product with their data. That's pretty standard but they offer it, and that's the best way to look at it.

I rate the product at eight out of ten because of the need that it fills, it's very specific. I don't know of any other products that fill that need to the same extent.

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.

The value from vROps, from a traditional sense that we had, is the visibility into the back-end, to know when we are having issues with VMs before it actually becomes an end user issue. Especially with hard drives, making sure we extend those out, memory and CPU utilization, as well as overloading host.

I would like to see a free offering. Cost is always a factor in any sort of line. Obviously, the value added is there and it's worth it.

The automation piece could be done simpler.

REST APIs: more REST API calls. It seems like all of the technologies are facilitating those calls back and forth. The more we can get inside vROps, the easier it's going to be to integrate other product lines with it as well.

It's very stable. We've had no issues with it that I can be aware of; even through the upgrade process everything has been very clean.

It will scale, we've seen that as we've ramped up, we've had a 30% increase year-over-year over the last five years. We've never had any issue with the VMware or vROps installations at any of them. As a matter of fact, we only see increased usage and availability with it.

Tech support has been very good. Quite honestly, sometimes they're better than we are. As opposed to getting back to them, they almost hassle us to make sure that they're getting the information. They want to make sure that they get the solution in hand and they close those tickets. It seems that we don't move as timely as they do lots of times.

It's fairly straightforward, obviously, with their initial installation. The more you become an automated system, the more you really delve into the dynamics of vROps, it can become more complicated, but no more so than any other product line. I feel like it's the easiest of any product line to get through. Obviously, there's intricacies with any of this technology.

In terms of the most important criteria when selecting a vendor, I feel like you have to look at it all. You have equal shares.

I work in an industry that is a very secure environment, and you have to have the long-term stability there. One thing that we're asking all vendors that we're looking at their product lines is, "Are you viable five, 10, 20 years from now?" We don't have that three-year turnover rate that a lot of other industries have. We want to make sure that whoever we partner with is going to be there, to support us for the long haul. We don't want it to be purchased and gobbled up, in an environment that is today.

We know that VMware isn't going to be. It is a very well-maintained product line throughout its life expectancy and will continue to be.

As I said, I would probably give it a 10, or greater if I could, if it had more of those REST APIs. They open it up a little bit more to integration with, honestly, the competition, as well as some of the newer technologies that are coming out. I feel they'll have to, and they'll mature in that respect over the next year to two years, but I wish we had a little bit more today.

It allows you to integrate all the VMware products like vCenter, vCloud Air and it also allows you to gradually look at any issues for root cause solutions in your environment.

It gives us a single pane of glass to be able to look into our environment and find what the problems are. It allows us to monitor our environment, to be proactive, and do preventative maintenance. Therefore we'll know if things are about to take place in our environment, which could cause problems, and we can head them off before they happen.

I'd like to see more of a cloud integration. Something which could work with the Cloud. In other words, a hybrid-type window pane, which you could manage both ways. Instead of having the hybrid cloud manager, have something similar for vROps.

It is stable depending what license you buy. Mainly enterprise is already integrated. There are little modules you can add to it, depending on what you're doing. There are no costs for the most part, and you can modify the environment for vROps for your infrastructure and VMware, and for your customers.

It is very scalable. You have to decide what you want to do with it first. It's scalable in the sense of what you want to show the customer, or if you want to grow your environment out. If you want to be able to scale your resources out for planning, adding to your environment, and other resources. It allows you to scale within a cloud, make it a hybrid cloud cross platform, and so on.

I haven't needed to contact them. I have enough skill set, education, and hands on with the product/solution that I can figure it out myself for the most part.

I do use Uila, which is very good. I would say it's more robust than vROps, because it's a single solution. I still use Uila. I didn't switch. I use both of them. vROps has its place, and Uila has its place.

The SLAs drive it and customer requirements require it, plus you can't keep the same technology and provide the same type of services. You have to be able to show the customer there is some value in what you're offering them.

I set up my own environment. I didn't set up the customer's.

Once you understand the layout, then it's not as complex. It seems to be, but it's not really, because there's a lot of moving parts. You need concentrate on the moving parts which would pertain to your environment.

I recommend to anyone looking to implement: Have a stable environment. If you don't have a stable environment, you still can implement it, but you're really putting yourself at a disadvantage, because you want to ensure your environment is stable. You don't want to keep concentrating on fixing something stuff. You want vROps to be able to show you, not just what's broken, but what can be scaled out and how to improve your environment. The less you have for it to do, the better it is for you.

I just downloaded it myself and installed it.

If you are looking at this solution, try it out first. Ensure you have enough resources in your environment where you can test all the resources for vROps. Resources like CPU, memory, being able to scale the VM after it's deployed application-wise to see if that's causing issues, or does it need more resources - those type of things.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Does it do what you say it does and more? If you just trying to promote your software, and it's not working, you are wasting my time.

The vRealize Operations Manager gives you complete insight of the VMware environment. You can check the bottleneck in the environment and it can directly tell you what needs to be fixed. What I really like about vROps is the dashboard. It's completely insightful, very clean, simple, and even for those who don't really manage the environment, it wouldn't be difficult for them to understand by looking the dashboard what's wrong and how it needs to be fixed. That's what I like about vROps.

It's the ability to forecast. It would tell you what is overprovisioned, therefore you can accordingly fix it, which helps you save on your costs. If you are over-provisioning the VMs, you're adding more memory and storage, or CPU sources, which are going to waste. With this solution, we can actually keep them on track which helps save costs, which is good for the company.

With a little more smoothness to the application, as it can lag a bit at times. Although, I don't really find too many negatives with it.

For the next release, I would like to see the HA feature (should already be in the next release).

It's quite stable. I haven't tried the HA feature, which has recently been added, but I never had any problems with vROps.

It's quite scalable. We have instances for different vCenters running, so I think it is quite scalable.

I have used it once. Something broke while I was working and I had no idea what it was, so I call up the support guys. They were quite helpful and able to fix the problem.

We always had problems in understanding issues related to resources. So our temp, he suggested vROps and that's when we invested in it.

For this company, I was involved in the initial setup. It was mostly straightforward.

Even if you Google it, you will find the implementation steps. I didn't have any problems doing the installation. I think if you're a virtualization administrator, you should be able to manage.

CDW.

We chose VMware because they are the technology leader in virtualization. We have been using it for years now.

vROps is something that most companies should be using, because you never quite know where you're actually wasting a resource until you start using vROps.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They should be able to keep us informed (the most important aspect) on upcoming technology trends, the new releases, and new features.

Capacity planning:

• Being able to see what's being used.
• What's forecasted to run out of space.
• What's the most constrained resource at any time.

When I get asked questions on how our infrastructure is doing (by management), I can give an accurate answer.

The advanced version could be more affordable, therefore giving us access to more advance features.

Five years.

I have never had any problems with it.

No issues. When I made it to capacity, it's been built pretty seamless to do that.

We've got an account manager. We also have an SE from VMware to help if I get stuck with support, but I haven't had that problem.

I don't know if you're gonna receive better support with another vendor than you do from VMware themselves.

They are very knowledgeable. I feel like I am getting the getting the right person when I contact them.

I wasn't involved with the initial setup, but I have done upgrades (by myself) and they have been very straightforward. Upgrades take about an hour to an hour and a half to complete.

We didn't really evaluate anyone else.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Brand name reputation
• Support, how good is it (according to other customers and community forums).

The most valuable features are historic trending and showing outliers; being able to determine if something is operating differently than it has normally operated in the last six months or even the last week.

We don't use it as much as I'd like, mostly because it's a little too heavy for what we have time to do with. vROps works best when somebody has it open 24 hours a day, is sitting in front of it, actively monitoring the heat maps and everything that's going on, and has the time to adjust all of the policies, so that when your operation is normal, you don't have any alerts going on, and you don't have any heat maps going on. I don't have anywhere near that kind of time. I'm the administrator of not only our global vSphere environment, the 500 servers that operate in there, and all of our storage infrastructure that supports our MetroCluster. Actually trying to spend hours and hours defining policies to get others to shut off that I don't care about, is very cumbersome.

It already has so many features that I can't utilize, it's difficult for me to determine what’s missing.

For me, the biggest area is out-of-the-box ease of administration. There are a lot of features that are turned on constantly and a lot of metrics that they use that, instead of asking you what you'd like your baseline to be, there are assumptions that are made about what good baselines are. Then, you have to go back and change all of those baselines so that it works for your organization. It would be nicer for me if the process interviewed you when you first bring it up about what kind of metrics you'd like to see in the different clusters in your environment so that that first day when you turn it on, you're not flagged as 90% of your stuff is out of compliance.

We just went through the implementation of vROps 6.2. We were coming off of an older version. I've been working on it as much as I can for about the last three weeks, and we still have some 150-odd active alerts that I'm going to have to go write policies to shut those off. That's sort of the complication. There's nothing broken in our environment; these are not problem machines. It's just metrics that fall outside of what the vROps team thought would be optimal for our environment.

I'd certainly like to be able to get more than I'm getting out of it. It's not a limitation of what it can do, it's just a limitation of the cumbersomeness of the management. My company is mid-range-sized and there are huge companies that have multiple people that actually just work on vROps. That's not, I would think, the majority of vROps customers. I suspect there are more of us, more mid-range-sized companies. It's a valuable tool, but it does require a ton of administration for the size of the IT org that we have.

I have been using it for about four years now.

Historically, it's been pretty stable. The biggest complication I have with stability is the fact that the management packs are written by a third-party organization and they don't necessarily interact well with all of the different versions of vROps. We have Storage Analytics from EMC as one of our plugins, but vROps only supports very specific versions of Storage Analytics for very specific versions of VPLEX hardware. Those very specific plugins can only be run on very specific versions of vROps. What actually determines the version of vROps we're running is the firmware revision running on our VPLEX. It's sort of the tail wagging the dog; I can't upgrade because then I couldn’t monitor my VPLEX. That's been very frustrating, as far as, "I'd like to upgrade and do this and do that and get this feature in, but I can't, because my VPLEX hardware code is too old."

I haven't talked very much to the vROps support team at all. I've only had, I think, one open case, and I resolved that before they got back to me. He was very nice when I talked to him, but I haven't really overly utilized support.

We've used a lot of different products for a lot of different parts of what it does. We mostly used vCenter monitoring and vCenter alerts prior to using vROps.

I didn't do the original vCOPS installation.

I did do the 6.2 installation. The actual out-of-the-box installation's not terribly difficult. Some of the certificate pieces for getting that plugged in is a little more cumbersome than I'd like, but that's a global thing with VMware in general; the certificate management is not where it needs to be.

It's not something that out of the box you just throw in and is going to give you a good return on investment. You really are going to have to use it and have somebody managing it to get your money back.

Make sure that you have sufficient resources to manage vROps before you actually pay for it. It's a very expensive product in the mid-range for what you get for the cost; you're going to pay a significant amount. You need to make sure that you're willing to dedicate the resources to that from a salary perspective. You're going to have to hire a person that helps manage this, or get some resources or free up some resources to really help do that, or you're going to waste your capital expenditure on vROps.

The alerting is probably the most valuable feature of the product. If issues come up, we can tell right away to look in the system, dive a little deeper and see if there's a real problem and if so, we can fix it before there's an outage.

I definitely think some of the adapters could be enhanced.

When building out metrics, it would be better to have a more granular approach to that. Sometimes the metrics are all or nothing, and it would be better if you could adjust those to make it fit your particular needs better. On occasion, we can't even use some of the metrics because of the way our environment is set up; I can't turn it off for this pool and then have it on for this pool. It will give errors and then those errors don't mean anything. If you give errors that don't mean anything, then people stop listening to them and then bad things could happen. I would definitely like finer control of some of the metrics and how they work.

I have been using it for about a year and a half now.

It is a stable product most of the time. Occasionally, the adapters will go down and I'll have to reboot them, but that's maybe once every few months.

We haven’t needed to scale it yet. We have about six nodes and it's been pretty solid.

Technical support depends on the product. The people that work on the vROps side are definitely a lot more knowledgeable than some of the other support people I've worked with. Anytime I put a ticket in for vROps, it usually gets solved a lot quicker than a ticket for vSphere, Horizon or something like that. They've done a good job training their employees on the vROps part.

We switched from another solution to vROps because we weren't really happy with the first product.

vROps was attractive because it was part of our licensing deal so we figured if we don't have to pay for it, why not use it? Also, it does integrate a lot better with both vSphere and Horizon. We're big Horizon customers, so that was one of the big driving forces.

When I choose a vendor to work with, my criteria are that the product needs to be stable and easy to manage, but still be able to customize it to fit our environment; then, definitely, regular feature updates and bug fixes.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. The Horizon adapter had some interesting licensing part to it. You just had to follow the white paper but it was a little tricky at first. Once I got the hang of it, it was no big deal.

My advice would depend on what you're trying to do with it. Our main goal was more of a monitoring solution, but obviously it does well in analytics, so I would ask what you're trying to do for it and then I could probably go into some of the details on what features would benefit you and if that was something you found useful, then yeah, great.