VMware Aria Operations Reviews

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 thing it has is the depth of historical data. You can dig in really deep. If there was a problem at any point in time in the past, we can use it to get an idea where it might have come from.

Unfortunately, it hasn't done a whole lot in that regard. It's taken a lot of setup time to kind of keep it in tune. So, for us, it hasn't given us quite the data we were hoping for. We came from LogicMonitor. We got the data a lot faster and easier from there.

More globalized templates would be much better. Templates for different applications, for example, "this is a web server, so these are the things you're gonna want to monitor on the web server." You would just build from a template and it would apply nicely. The product should already come with 50-100; templates for a desktop, for an active directory server, and other generic server templates, so that you can just apply what you're probably going to want to monitor on any given server.

Also, it doesn't answer any question without you asking it first. I want it to say when it sees something out of whack. It should bring that up higher into the stack and let 99% of the stuff sit out and be ignored.

Stability wise, it's been good. I can't think of any crashes we've had with it yet. It's had some issues connecting to Horizon View, and keeping the connections alive, but other than that it's been good.

We don't have enough scale for it to matter.

I don't think we've used it on that product.

We needed some way to be able to see performance issues, particularly in the VDI environment. We had played around with using LogicMonitor, and we switched because it was cheaper.

Also important for us when considering a vendor is that it's a "set-and-forget" system. Just something that tells us when there's a problem and doesn't bother us when there's not.

It's pretty complex. There's a lot of tweaking to get it to either report on something, or not report on something. There isn't a good set of templates built into the system to really make it go fast. You can install it quickly, you can get it logging quickly, but then it's just a glorified log system.

Try to get it to actually install and run.

• Being able to troubleshoot specific VMs
• A high-level view for capacity planning
• Getting insight into our VM or environment, to see where it's trending

These features enable the business itself, the directors and managers, to use it.

We also use it to get inside our Cisco UCS environment. Those are the keys. It's been pretty valuable.

It was pretty outdated when I started, so I upgraded it. And we've just been dipping our toes into what it can do for us. But so far it's basically been trending, getting us a forecast of where we're going, and where we need to add resources.

As far as VMware's perspective it's got everything I'd expect. One thing that is not ideal is that I actually have to buy a third-party plug-in for things like NetApp. But that's more on the NetApp and Lumidor side of things. It would be great if there was native integration with vROps, with those storage providers.

Good. I have no issues with it at all. It's been very stable in our environment.

Right now we only have a single node, we haven't scaled a ton.

I haven't been in touch with tech support. My contact at VMware is definitely knowledgeable and can help if need be, absolutely.

Just an older version. vROps wasn't heavily relied upon for trending, for capacity. But I think it will definitely be more so in the future, based on its reports, etc.

I thought it was very easy. Easy to follow instructions. Got it deployed within an hour or two. Not hard at all.

vROps is packaged with our licensing. So that made it a pretty short list. We already had it. We went with it because it's included. We didn't really do a competitive analysis.

Just the fact that it's a VMware product, and that means that product updates are going to coincide with other products. You're not going to fall behind when VMware updates a new hypervisor. Just the fact that it's in cadence with their other releases, that's a big selling point for it.

The top criteria when selecting a vendor would likely be support and reliability. Also, that they're not just trying to sell us a product but, rather, it's something we can actually use and leverage in our day-to-day operations.

We haven't really dipped our toes into what it can do but so far I have been pretty impressed with the analytics we can get out of it. The high-level information we get out of it has been pretty valuable so far. We haven't even gotten into it, so it can do a whole lot more.

Try it out if it's in your licensing and you haven't deployed it. No reason not to.

Customers and non-technical managers and capacity managers love the reports and recommendations vROps generate. In one console, you can see both your Physical and Virtual Infrastructures merging together.

Using vRO, you can potentially get any user custom enhancements implemented in vRA and beyond.

The vRO (using Functional Programming of Javascript) is a hand-down of the favorite component of this suite. You can create your custom plugins to speak with any third-party application, not forgetting how many enterprise infrastructure product plugins are already available.

In addition, vROps is a brilliant tool for capacity optimization, assessment, and leveraging many benefits of SDDC.

vRLI still needs a lot of improvement to even start comparing with the market leader, Splunk, in terms of data analysis and customized charts/reports generation.

In addition, VMware is still essentially selling the vCAC, which was created by Credit Suisse's DynamicOps.

The CAFE part was created by VMware and it is pretty robust. However, I don't feel the same about the IaaS Windows part. They need to stop using these two loosely coupled components and probably migrate the whole thing to a SUSE-based appliance.

Version 6 of vRO did have its own issues, but the current version is pretty robust. Earlier, the Java client on reload lost flows, and the appliance needed to be started. This is no longer the case.

There are no scalability issues at all.

Customer Service:

Lately, it has been an issue with getting hold of the support team, but they generally are good.

Technical Support:

The juniors are strictly OK, but the escalation leads are brilliant with sound knowledge in troubleshooting.

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.

vROps is integrated with vRealize and VMware solutions, which helps us to get the best operation-level understanding across the environment; we get all the utilization reports.

By using vROps, you can actually automate your tasks, integrate it with vRO workflows, and amazing results can come up.

We have also used the integrations with DRS using the Site Recovery Manager, which are quite good. If anything happens at one site, another site immediately takes over; you can do that using vROps.

We have improved our understanding in terms of writing PoCs, and providing concrete examples of how vROps and vRA can get into the environment.

It should have some connectors in terms of showcasing third-party vendor's functionalities. For example, if some third-party storage that has been connected to the environment, this solution should actually be used instead of some third-party monitoring solution. This solution should work across the environment on its own, instead of relying on some trigger-pointed third party location and then acting it on it.

It should have some more functionality in terms of getting some more third-party vendor application-level integration.

The majority of VMware products are very stable, and I'm very happy with vROps.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

For PoCs, we have set it up for a cluster of five servers to showcase the scalability of VMware products.

I have used technical support, because the VMware solutions guidelines are quite complete and amazing.

I previously used a lot of freeware monitoring tools like Cacti, Nagios, and Ganglia.
We felt that we needed to invest in paying for a solution because it's amazing. The integration with the VMware family is amazing.

Initial setup is 9/10; it was nearly flawless. Some minor configuration services were complex; how you connect it out across, or how you actually connect two different services.

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

Probably, the most valuable feature is being able to see what's going on in my environment.

We use a combination of homegrown scripts and vROps for capacity planning. With the two, we get a really good view of what our environment is doing.

Mostly, it has provided capacity planning benefits; we can see where our strongest usage is and our clusters.

It probably has not helped us save on storage, but probably it has helped us more on the compute side.

Honestly, I wish the reports were a little bit more snazzy, if that makes sense.

Stability is good.

Scalability works great.

I have not used technical support.

Initial setup was straightforward. I actually converted from version 5 to version 6. It worked well.

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

Look at the price and the features together.

When we select a vendor like VMware, the most important criteria are completeness of the product and support. This product is fairly complete and it works.

We use it to monitor our system and optimize performance.

It visualizes stuff better, so we can pinpoint or see problems. However, I feel as though there is a lot of potential in the product that we haven't utilized.

The most valuable features are the trending and analytics.

When you deploy it as a single node, it's more stable than if you have multiple nodes. We've had some issues with this.

Scalability is good, but I haven't tested it that much.

I have tried the technical support.

It is pretty straightforward.

I would recommend NSX. From my experience, the solution is pretty good.