VMware Aria Operations Reviews

In many cases, I have worked with vCenter within our virtualization environment. Some problems result in vCenter becoming corrupted, making it unusable. Consequently, I resort to utilizing it as a standalone server for each issue. This is the primary problem I've faced over the past two years, and for every problem that arises, I manage to resolve it. I've observed that using each server independently is the standard practice, and I occasionally utilize it for various purposes.

I have found the backup extremely useful in my use cases.               

In this vCenter, my wish is to establish a backup system that doesn't require VIN. It involves creating a backup ticket directly from the vCenter for the virtual machines and performing the backup task for each server, ensuring redundancy without the need for additional software. This would be a preferable solution if all of this could be accomplished within vCenter itself.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for the last two years.

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten.

I would rate it seven out of ten. Based on my experience, there have been occasional issues with vCenter. One of the recurring problems involves vCenter going offline, and when that happens, I'm unable to resolve it, necessitating the installation and reintegration into the system. This has been an ongoing challenge throughout its entire lifespan. However, when it comes to accessing the servers individually, there's a different issue. While using the solution, there are frequent occurrences where, when I make changes to a machine, such as adjusting RAM or other resources, I sometimes encounter a situation where the data doesn't load properly, resulting in a yellow screen. To rectify this, I have to refresh the page and then make the necessary changes to the machine. While this can be somewhat frustrating, it's not overly difficult for me to manage, and I've learned to handle it without considering it a significant problem.

I haven't taken any formal courses on vCenter, yet I've managed to install and troubleshoot them successfully. I've relied heavily on online resources, and the wealth of information available on the Internet has proven to be a valuable asset. I haven't sought support from any specific company. However, it's possible that in the future, I might encounter a problem that I can't resolve on my own, even with online resources. At that point, reaching out to a company for assistance might be necessary.

It is not difficult but sometimes requires extensive reading and knowledge to install it. It's not a complex task, but I need to fully comprehend everything in order to install it. Sometimes network-related issues can complicate matters, and having a strong background in network infrastructure, including switches and routing, is crucial for successful execution. If there's a preference, I'd appreciate guidance on which one to install. Also, it would be convenient if I didn't have to create everything from scratch on the switch. Some elements may need to be set up physically, and then I can connect them to two switches for network installation, requiring a three-step installation process. The deployment is scheduled for two months to complete the installation and server replacement. This timeframe should encompass all aspects of the solution.

It's not particularly challenging, but it's important to remain close to the users, ensuring that the data is functioning correctly. We need to verify its operation for a week. Out of ten servers, everything is working fine. Then, I'll proceed to another server, following a similar approach, to ensure it is safely set up. We won't be dealing with desktop servers; it's more about efficient and timely execution.  

I would rate it six out of ten.

There's a smaller category that stands out due to its affordability, especially for recent versions, which I rate as four or five in terms of value. However, if you're looking for a vCenter with older, more advanced features, it comes at a significantly higher cost, and I would rate it around ten. They provide us with a choice between a recent version and one integrated, and I lean towards the former.

I would rate it overall an eight out of ten. 

This solution is mainly used for the orchestration of servers and for obtaining reports such as utilization reports or load reports.

In decision making, it is very useful to have a nice dashboard. We have also integrated with QlikView, which is an analytic tool.

vRealize has a very nice dashboard.

It integrates well with other products such as those from Oracle.

It would be good to have more detailed reports and more details on the dashboard.

I've been using it for five years.

It is a very stable product.

It is scalable as well. Our system administrators and data center administrators use this product.

VMware provides 24/7 online support, and I would give them a ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is very easy because VMware provides 24/7 online support to us. Everything is much easier for us, because of their support.

The deployment took about one to two days. You would need one or two people, such as IT managers, for deployment and maintenance.

We used a third party team for the deployment.

We have licenses on a three year basis. Licensing costs are much higher, but given the stability of the solution, it is a reasonable price.

It's a stable product and is recognized worldwide. It is much more expensive than other products, but it is stable. Therefore, I would rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.

I was previously working remotely and using vRealize Operations in a virtual environment. Now I'm working in person, so we use vROps to monitor our critical systems. We didn't use all of the product's features. We mainly use vROps for monitoring and automation. In addition to my team, the 20-person management team also monitors this environment, so it's about 30 people in total.

Mainly we are working on the vSphere monitoring, orchestration, and automation.

We are trying to consolidate our data centers, so the monitoring could always be improved. VMware could improve the way VROps forwards critical alerts to Microsoft Teams. I can't give feedback about anything else because we are not using all the features. 

We haven't had any issues with vROps. 

I think vROps is scalable and suitable for our environment.

VMware technical support is good. 

I also work with ControlUp when our customers need a specific metric. We only use ControlUp for that single feature. 

The initial setup isn't complex.

I rate VMware VROps nine out of 10. It's an excellent product for monitoring a VMware virtual environment.

We use vRealize Operations Manager primarily for capacity management within our environment. To understand the capacity that we're using for vSAN storage, for compute and CPU capacity within our virtualization environment.

vROps is, by its nature, a very complex product. We have seen a lot of improvements around the usability of the product. With each subsequent version, the product is becoming much more user friendly. It's much faster to get up to the speed on the product, to become familiar with it, and to use the built-in dashboards. Especially, the included dashboards around the vSAN Management Pack, that are now integrated into the product, and are available to use immediately upon installation, without any additional configuration.

Those are areas that the product has been improving drastically, and we are working with VMware as a reference customer, and as design partner, based on our experience, to help continue improving the product.

vROps is stable, it's a mature product. We're using the latest release, which is 6.6.1

vROps is extremely scalable. It can size from a small, to a medium, to a large environment. There are options to have HA enabled or disabled, so the product scales extremely well.

VMware has a number of support options related to vROps. It's supported as standard production support. It's also supported out of VCS and MCS support. We are a VCS business-critical support customer, and we have had a good support relationship with the product.

With newer versions of vROps, VMware has improved the setup experience drastically. The new versions of the product install very quickly, very cleanly. Adding additional nodes to the environment is very fast, very easy to do.

For us, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor are that we look for a company that's going to support our business cases, that has an established track record of stability, and performance. Someone that's going to stand behind us and support us as we utilize their product. Those things are extremely important as we're evaluating whether to make a purchase.

I rate vRealize Operations as a nine out of 10 today. There are still some areas to improve around the initial user experience. But, the product has improved significantly with the more recent releases.

We use the application for capacity analysis and incident or threat analysis. We can fetch out reports and troubleshoot any incidents using it.

The application's capacity analysis feature gives complete insights into how many computing resources we may need soon. It helps us to procure the hardware accordingly.

The UI interface of the application has been stagnant for a long time. It could be improved to provide a good experience for the users.

We have been using the application for ten years.

After the implementation, I never had any issues with the platform's stability.

It is a scalable platform. It has become more user-friendly and supports a broader environment than previous versions. In my earlier experience, I had installed 4000 to 6000 virtual machines and those many hosts.

Along with the product, I am using Log Insight from VMware. Also, I have used SRM in the past.

I have been using different versions of the tool for a long time. Thus, the initial setup process was relatively easy and error-free. It is deployed both on-premise and on the cloud. It took a couple of hours to configure all the prerequisites.

It is a cloud-friendly application. Compared to other platforms, it is more stable, scalable, and easy to configure and deploy.

I rate it a nine out of ten, leaving one mark for more improvements or enhancements.

We mostly use vROps for troubleshooting and forecasting. We take some reports from previous months and years for capacity and future planning.

We mostly use it for infrastructure. I know there are many packages for different apps from other vendors, but we mostly use it for VMware infrastructure. It gives us a good look inside our infrastructure, mostly in terms of capacity and reporting.

We have benefited mostly from capacity planning. During some days of the month, we have huge traffic and workloads on our systems. So, we take the previous month's reports and see the month-to-month growth so we can plan next year's capacity planning.

We have integrations with other monitoring systems, so we mostly use vROps for troubleshooting.

We mostly create our own alarms and dashboards. We use the metrics in vROps with these dashboards. 

It is efficient and easy to manage. We can find what we need from the software's interface.

We did an integration with vROps and Log Insight. We use Log Insight mostly when troubleshooting and creating some alarms to send us notifications

Lately, the chargeback site has improved, but it could be simpler. You need to create your own dashboards. It should be simple to get a virtual machine and break down the compute and storage costs.

It is not real-time. It takes samples every five minutes. Therefore, we are not using it for real-time purposes.

I have been using it for more than five years.

The stability is pretty good. Besides upgrades, we don't have issues with it. There are some issues during upgrades, but I think that is normal. Sometimes, we have some errors during upgrades where we have to start over or fix some things.

Scalability is easy. You can create other vROps machines and add them to the system, making it run like a cluster. It is easy to add more depending on your requirements. 

We have a couple of thousand VMs in our environment. 

About 10 to 12 people in our team are mainly managing vROps demand. From time to time, it changes but other departments also use it. They don't have administration permissions on the system, but they can create their own views, dashboards, and alerts. So, many people are using it,

At my last company, we changed our monitoring system from another tool to vROps because we were not getting actions from it. Therefore, we decided to change it to vROps. Because vROps is a VMware solution, it was easier to integrate and use.

I have used two other monitoring systems. However, I didn't use them for a long time. One was very simple, doing basic monitoring, and the other was a Microsoft tool. They both have many pluses and minuses.

vROps is mainly for virtual infrastructure. The other solutions are for both physical and virtual LAN infrastructure. 

The initial setup was not that complex. It was easy to set up and integrate.

The initial setup was just a couple of virtual machines, so it was a very basic installation. It was very fast. However, the implementation of the infrastructure takes months because we need to see how the system works, then decide what to monitor and report. This takes at least a couple of months.

We talked with VMware to set up a straightforward installation of the vRealize suite: Log Insight and vROps.

vROps has helped to decrease overall downtime by about 10%. We have many other monitoring solutions. This solution is just a part of our underlying infrastructure.

Log Insight has had a good effect on our overall troubleshooting. We have a huge infrastructure and can't always individually monitor it. We also did some automation for alerts.

The value that we get from vROps is okay. It could be cheaper.

I would recommend doing a PoC before using it. You can get a trial license for 30 or 60 days, so you should test it in your environment before implementing it. You should have some hands-on practice because it may not fit with your environment.

The solution is a little bit complicated to use at the beginning. When you get how it works, it is simple. You can easily make or use dashboards, notifications, and alarms.

vROps capacity allocation and management has helped us save on hardware costs, unneeded licenses, power, or other data center costs. It is not the only solution or system that we use for these purposes, but it helps.

I would rate this solution as an eight out of 10.

Our primary use case for the product is to to look at all of our infrastructure and provide stats to our performance team for most of our applications. We integrate with vSphere and have a fairly large vSan, which we rely on vRealize Operations to keep on top of to let us know if there are disk failures, alerts, or system health issues. This is pretty much the day-to-day triaging problems of vRealize Operations. 

It has been performing very well. We've been a vRealize shop for about five years. There were early kinks in the some of the virtual appliances as we rolled them out, but for the last year and a half, it has been rock solid.

It has enhanced our ability to troubleshoot and effectively manage our solutions to understand what clusters are having issues and diagnose those programs right away, so we can be proactive. We are now proactive, which we weren't before. We achieve this through vRealize.

We're catching problems earlier. The troubleshooting which goes into it is proactive. One thing I did recently was right-size all my clusters. I did that through vCOPS within a couple hours. I was able to move workloads around to different clusters and optimize my whole environment, which was across about 300 ESX hosts. So, it's very powerful.

We pay attention to disk snapshots which are in the overhead on SAN data stores that we have. They have the ability to collapse different virtual machines to different data stores and do a lot of cleanup. Without that visibility, we would probably have a lot more wasted space and more money that would have been out the door.

One of the things that we had to rollout in the last year and a half is compliance. The product has done a great job of ensuring all of our virtual infrastructure is compliant, and we have met all our regulatory compliance, which has been a huge help. 

There is rich dashboarding, which has the ability to customize dashboards. It has gotten better with the versions. I have assigned it to some co-ops who learned it within a few weeks and have dashboarding almost right away. It's very intuitive platform. 

Working with vendors more to suck more pieces in via the infrastructure and do that for zero cost, if we could. While not always based on VMware, if we want to add something in like Microsoft SCOM data, we have to go out and buy it, or certain widgets we have to buy. The more pieces we can receive for free and have everything cooked into vCOPS to give us a single pane of glass (for zero or minimal cost), this would benefit us.

We don't have any downtime for our vRealize app. It's definitely helped out with the stability of our platforms. 

It's very flexible and scalable. Adding things in has become a lot easier along with utilizing some of the capacity analysis features. If I have a project to add in resourcing, I can go to vCOPS, and do an analysis. I can put it through its workflow, then it tells me what to add and it's usually pretty accurate.

From time and time again, there's little tweaks you got to make to the vRealize platform. The technical support has been excellent. 

I haven't had any problems. Usually within an hour or so, we have diagnosed the problem and have a solution that we either need to implement or implement right away. 

I was involved in the initial setup a long time ago. 

Now, the lifecycle product has provided some things which are very easy to roll out within the vRealize suite. It is just check things out and roll it out, then it sort of monitors the application. This has greatly enhanced our ability to roll out vCOPS quickly and augment it too.

The ability to not have to buy as much hardware. I can look across all my clusters and spread the resourcing out. I can see where I have some low and high points, then not have to go out and buy a whole bunch of blades which I don't need. It has helped us in our capacity analysis and purchasing. 

We looked at Turbonomic. It was expensive because of their ability to learn your environment. We already owned a piece of the vROPs suite, the compliance manager, so we sort of fell into the suite. We thought we can go out and buy Turbonomic, which will cost us so much money or we get the enterprise product because we already have the compliance manager piece, which is what we did, and never looked back. 

It's an excellent solution compared to others. When I first looked at a Turbonomic was a few years ago, they had a few more features than what vCOPS was doing at the time. I gave that feedback and all those features are now in the product. Therefore, there's not much of a comparison today.

• Dig into your requirements.
• Put a list together.
• Then, start taking a look at vCOPS, because it's a great product. It most likely will fit your requirements. 

I would highly recommend the product to anybody who is out there. It has saved us a lot of money.

I would give it a nine out of ten. It's an excellent product, but there's always room for improvement. I never give anything a ten.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We usually put together a list of requirements about what we are looking for within the product. One was the extensibility; the ability to kind of have a single pane of glass. This has been one thing which benefited us with vCOPS, as we can snap in almost any other vendor's hardware, whether it be UCS, Dell, or Cisco switches. This was a big requirement for us.

One of the key things is the ability to integrate data from other sources. That's always a huge issue. I'll give an example: We've got an issue in an Oracle database. We go to the Oracle database team to get data from the Oracle management tools. We go to the virtualization to ensure the data there. The last layer's a whole other thing. vROps brings them all together. Any tool that does that is a useful tool.

Also, the data retention is better compared to what vCenter does by default. vCenter keeps data for only a short window of time, so if it's an hour after a problem manifests, you're out of luck. vROps makes a copy of all the data from vCenter; it keeps its own copy and it can maintain it longer because it's not an actively used database that's trying to manage the system. It's just a copy for reference purposes.

One of the things we're going to look at is experimenting with the integration with DRS. In fact, I attended a session at a conference on that. We're looking at integrating it with our Citrix XenApp environments; we currently have somewhat of a gap on that reporting there as well. That's 2 areas we definitely are looking at using it for.

We have had major outages that we would have caught in advance had vROps been in place.

With both capacity management and performance management, we expect to gain. The outages I mentioned were capacity or performance related. They were in areas of capacity that we could not see with our current tool set without a lot of digging around, which are very easily accessible with vROps.

You can always improve the type of data you can merge in, but there's nothing that we're missing at the moment from it. I'm sure as we dig deeper into it, we'll start finding room for improvement.

The reporting can always be improved. The problem is that no one does reporting well, because no one can know what your company needs out of the tool. I'm sure refinements with the reporting would be great. I'm sure they'll be refining it with every version, but it's not something that's inherent to them; it's an inherent problem with any tool that's trying to report data. I've found no tools that report data the way you need it to be reported.

We’ve been using it for a couple of months now; we've been experimenting. Previous versions were not as strong. The last version before this one was when they started to actually make the tool particularly useful, and then the latest version's even better.

Stability is much better than it used to be. They went to a distributed model, so it's stable and you can expand and grow with it.

Early versions did not use a completely balanced distributed model. As the number of items being collected grew, performance could not be scaled easily by adding additional servers to the vROps infrastructure. The newer versions handle this much better and allow for performance to be maintained at high numbers of items being collected.

You can now expand outwards horizontally, which you think they would've done initially, but you know... If you have an instance, you can build it taller with more CPU and memory, or you can build multiple instances. You can build instances out in remote sites to collect data there. It's a scalable solution now, which it was not completely before.

I don't know what their limits are, but it's certainly scalable enough to accommodate our needs.

It does not get slow; that's why the model's much better.

We haven't used technical support for scaling it yet, but I'm sure we will.

We decided to invest in this type of solution because of gaps in our current reporting. There are certain constraints we're running into in the environment that we cannot attack easily with any other tool.

We currently use a lot of other tools. We use TeamQuest. We use Cirba. We use CA; both their standard monitoring tool and their application performance monitoring tools. Even with all those, there's certain nuances within virtualization that they can't easily capture. We'd either have to automate scripts for ourselves to pull the data and then use something else to do it, or we can use vROps, which is why we're installing it.

The most important criteria when we select apps and vendors is our experience working with VMware and the ability to take data from multiple sources, which a lot of tools cannot easily do.

I’m involved mostly with the engineering of how we're going to use it. Most of their products are really easy to install.

We've looked at VMTurbo and we've talked with the other vendors that I’ve mentioned we use, to see if there are ways of doing what we want to do within their goals.

There's been mass improvements; if they've looked at it previously, like a few years ago, I would look at it again. We looked at it a few years ago, decided it wasn't for us, but it's useful. Particularly if you're dealing with a large-scale enterprise, there are gaps in all the other toying that are hard to get at without this tool because this tool has much more direct access to the right areas of vCenter. You can use the API to get at anything, but VMware knows what to pull better because it's their product.