VMware Aria Operations Reviews

The capacity planning is probably the biggest thing that I use and then I guess the monitoring alerting system and performance troubleshooting. Those are the top three.

It helps with troubleshooting the performance of different systems when customers complain or they say there's an issue. It helps us to narrow down and drill into seeing what's the root cause of the issue. It kind of gets in a good vicinity of that.

It has not helped us save on storage at all, and it has not helped us avoid outages, yet.

It's helped me plan capacity so that I'm always ahead of the curve. I'm actually deploying out systems and not delaying projects, because I have the insight of what resources that I'm short on or what resources I'm not short on. It's helped in that way. For capacity, that's been the biggest thing.

There are a lot more improvements that need to be done with the product. They've advanced from the last version, but there are many more things that should be there, and they're not. And they seem to be working on it, but until they get those things done, and I guess reduce the complexity of getting the system actually set up. As far as the initial setup, it is extremely easy, but then to configure and tailor it for your environment is very complex. Until they streamline that, I couldn't rate it any higher.

Until this week, it was very stable, but in the last week and a half, we've had some issues and we have a ticket open with VMware now to troubleshoot why there's an issue with it. And it's just random, that's the complaint I have about it. There's no way to actually troubleshoot or have insight when the product starts to go bad, when the system itself goes bad. Outside that, when it works, it works very well. But when it stops working, it's just all of a sudden. It's abrupt and there's no indication of why.

I'm not extremely large yet, and it has scaled fairly well. I've heard of other customers having to deploy many instances of it because of the global reach of their environment, or sometimes just the size of it. For me, I'd say it scales very well.

VMware actually had to make some changes because of us, because when we deployed it, we found some bugs in it. I worked with the product developers and engineers that developed the product to help resolve that, get the proper sizing, and get it to where it's scaled out to support our environment.

Technical support has been very good. When I escalated up, they got me in touch with the people who actually write it and develop it directly, so I'm on with them at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning on a Friday night/Saturday morning and so, they are very good. They're very helpful, they did the best to get in and find out what my issues were and get it resolved.

I've been using vROps since before VMware bought them. I knew of Integron before, when EMC bought them, and then transferred it over to VMware. I have used VMTurbo, but I like vROps much better. vROps has more in-depth analytics and things in it, and the capacity portion of it is much better. There's only one or two things that VMTurbo might do just as well as vROps but, overall, I like to have all of my solutions in one single pane of glass, and that's what vROps provides me.

I did the initial build. The setup was extremely easy, I feel. The original documentation about sizing was incorrect. That's why the system failed after I got it set up initially. Outside of that, the setup was extremely easy.

Support is going to be the number one criteria when selecting a vendor like VMware for me because on day two, after I get it set up and the vendor is gone, I want to know what type of support I'm going to have going forward when issues arise and when it's in real-world activity.

If someone asks me for advice, I'll say, Do your homework for one, engage their TAM, their technical team, to help them size it properly and make sure that for what they're going to use it, they're actually scaling it and setting up a way to accomplish that. Also, get involved with the community, go online. There are so many other resources out there: VMware employees that actually have blogs, and plugins. They just make your life much easier.

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.

The most valuable feature of the product is the historical logging of the performance and other data.

It lets us analyze results even when customers aren't necessarily seeing problems in real time. It lets us go back, look, troubleshoot and perform similar tasks.

We've used it for some capacity management. I use it every day for that; mostly just monitoring the usage in the environment.

As far as compute resources, in some instances, it's helped us save. We use it to right-size VMs all the time.

Similarly, with performance management, we use it with right-sizing; they have all the recommendations and whatever their black box does, as well as some intelligent views into some historical metrics and seeing what VMs we're actually using, or seeing the performance profile.

They need to start including more compliance stuff, more granular compliance checks. For example, they're adding the 6.0 hardening guide, but my own compliance requirements are much more detailed than that. For our state government, we have to meet all kinds of regulatory requirements. Basically, I need a full view into all of the configurations and settings, so we can run compliance against a much wider swath of settings and configurations.

Stability’s been fine for us; haven't had any problems.

I think we have used technical support in the past. I think with some old versions, when it was vCOPS, but it was a separate guy. I don't know what the details of the tickets were.

It's been there since I started, so I can't answer.

An educated guess would be that my company was not looking into other solutions at the time when they were looking into vROps, because we were invested in VMware, so we were just using their tool to monitor what we had.

Throw it in the lab. Use it. I don't know. Nothing special.

The most valuable feature is being able to drill down and look at the health of my VMs when we're having issues with them. Lately, it's been our CPU ready time problems; getting ready times and CPU demand.

The dashboards are nice, because I can have one pane and have everything that I want to see and not have to drill into new things every time.

It has improved how my organization functions. It's not easy to do, but they are nice to have. It is fairly complex to get specific data in a dashboard.

Easier-to-create dashboards would be nice. Right now, it is complex because you have to know exactly the piece of data you're looking for. When you're looking through all the different levels, if you don't know exactly what you're looking for, then it takes a lot of time and research to get that data.

The upgrade process has been painful in the past.

With about 7,000 VMs, I have not encountered any scalability issues thus far.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

Get some training. Get trained on it and make sure that you build it out correctly in the beginning. Size it correctly.

The reporting is the product’s most valuable feature. It's for customers; they want to show some sort of reporting to their superior, and you can have those easy-to-read meters. You can find out easily where the problem is.

Also, you don't have to be an expert, you can just read the meters. If they're red, you have some problems; if they're yellow, you have to pay some attention; and if they're green, you're good. It’s user friendly.

I also like the indicators.

It kind of limits the finger pointing. If you have some problems in the virtualized environment, and it's not clear which area has the problem. We might have said something like, "Okay, network guys take a look, and then server guys, and storage guys." The individual departments would then say something like, "I don't have any problem, it's probably another department."

The product is really quite solid. For example, I think the UI is okay. It is easy to read. It's intuitive; you don't have to know all the technical stuff. When you drill down, you have to really know some stuff. I’d like it to be easier to drill down.

I also would like to see integration with BMC.

Actually, I don't think we had any problem with stability, ever. If you set it up correctly, you likely won't have any problem.

I think scalability is quite good. We have a couple hundred of VMs.

We have not really used technical support in terms of vROps, but more on the other things, such as ESX. They were very helpful.

Initial setup is quite straightforward, but you do have to find out some things. There is the step-by-step process, but it’s not just clicking Next and OK. You have to set-up some things. If you’re using virtual appliances, you have to know what to do in those appliances.

For virtual environments, I have not compared it with products from other vendors. I think it's better to go with vROps because they have some bundles. Who knows virtual infrastructure with VMware vSphere better than vROps?

Go with vROops, because it's easy to use.

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 capacity information is the most valuable feature of vROps. It shows that you're using too many resources on VMs, and you can reclaim some resources. It provides that kind of insight so that we right-size and not over-provision VMs. For example, if someone says that they think they need eight CPUs, we can show them that they don’t; that they only need two. It’s beneficial in that way. That’s starting to happen more and more.

I also appreciate the health monitors. When we get the alerts and so on, we can very quickly see what the problem is. Sometimes it's kind of difficult to get that information directly from vSphere itself, so it enables us to get it quicker. We're fortunate in our environment; we bought vSphere Enterprise Plus and vROps comes with it. We didn't have to buy it separately.

We're not very mature with our vROps installation, but we are trying to learn more and more about it, and use it more and more. One thing I wasn't aware of: I didn’t know you could monitor external things, such as Brocade switches or something like that. I didn't know that was a possibility with vROps.

Feature-wise, I don't know that I'm looking for any more features. What I would need more help with is establishing the correct baselines and that's something that's very subjective, based on each individual company. From my perspective, that's something I could use some help with; making sure I get the baseline set correctly. If you just take the out-of-the-box settings and an alert goes off because you have a certain disk latency, is that really a problem? Is that the correct level for your organization? The out-of-the-box settings might not be the best for your environment. I would think each organization would need to develop its own baseline, and that can be the trickiest part. Sometimes, you need a little guidance with that. You kind of have an idea of what is bad, but sometimes it needs to be a little more tight. Maybe they could offer a questionnaire or some sheet that I can go through that will help me establish what might be the current baselines for me. Something like that.

I'd also like to see a mobile interface. I don't know if later versions offer it, because we're on 5.5. I guess some of their guys are working on it, so it very well could be in later versions, but a mobile interface is something I can see as being beneficial.

It is absolutely stable; no issues whatsoever.

It scales really, really well. When we did it, we just installed it and it started doing the analysis. It's pretty much, set it and forget it. We need to adjust our baselines and similar items, but it's scaled really well for us. We have about 320 VMs. We're not doing any VDI or anything like that, so it's just our service infrastructure and I would say we're about 80% virtualized.

When we started using vROps, we had around 200 VMs. We’re now at around 320 VMs and haven’t had to change anything in vROps to accommodate that 60% increase in our virtual footprint. vROps simply began monitoring the additional VMs and reported on them as expected.

There are default baselines out of the box that VMware recommends for typical environments, but it’s probably a good idea to have those baselines adjusted for your particular environment, so that you get what you need and weed out what you don’t need.

We don't have to call very often for VMware support.

The biggest problem we had was with licensing, figuring out purchasing and those kind of logistical issues; not technical issues.

I did not previously use a different solution. The reason I initially wanted to look at it was to gain more insight into alerts, performance, and that type of information. As I’ve mentioned, it's kind of difficult to get that directly out of vSphere sometimes. I wanted to see what vROps would give me and it's very useful.

Initial setup very straightforward: install the virtual application, and let it start monitoring. Getting the web interface and all that set up wasn't that difficult. There's plenty of documentation out there on it. It took a couple of days, on and off. While I was working on it, I would get pulled off on something else, so it took a couple of days.

As I’ve mentioned, it was included with our Enterprise Plus, so it was a no-brainer.

vROps is definitely something you would want to look at because of the tight integration with vSphere. I don't know whether I would want to look at another product to do this type of information gathering and alerting. I've had some of my engineers look at some other solutions. They come back, share what they found, show it to me and I think, I don't know why we need to look at that. We have vROps and it works a lot better than that.

Do yourself a favor and look at vROps.

For me, the most valuable feature is the efficiency area because vROps helps us to recover undersized infrastructure.

The other feature we use is the management packs for our storage, for our SQL servers. Even though it is very slow with the SQL servers, it works fine.

My company is small; we have around 600 VMs. Before vROps, we had a lot of problems with performance. The full vROps reports showed me which VMs were overstressed. We don't have customized reports, yet.

The capacity management has saved us more than 30% on storage. We are trying to be an efficient data center. After vROps, we work better.

Make it easier to get customized reports; right now, it's very difficult.

I’d also like to see more integration with the storage servers we have.

Stability is better in this version than it was with vCOPS, which we came from.

We have only one vROps. We don't have a cluster. We know about the cluster, but we don't need it yet.

We have used their support page. They’re knowledgeable.

Initial setup was pretty easy. It took couple of hours.

Before we chose vROps, we also looked at EMC. All of our infrastructure is based on EMC and their servers. We liked the integration between vROPs, Dell, and EMC.