VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We use vROps to manage our on-site private cloud as well as our public cloud out in OVH. It allows us to perform trending and analysis on all of our workloads to make sure that they're running as efficiently as possible.

It has saved us quite a bit of money by making those workloads run more efficiently and it has allowed us to recover a lot of wasted resources.

The most valuable feature is the ability to right-size a workload, based on historical data for that workload.

It also allows us to "sanity-check" the entire infrastructure by getting monthly reports on how everything is performing and where we can make improvements. That's all done automatically, without any administrator involvement.

One issue that I had last year, they've already added. They've put some chargeback functionality into it, which they didn't have before. That was very useful for us.

It's a very complex product. It has gotten better over the years, but they still have some work to do. It still requires a lot of time, and some training, to get accustomed to it.

Moving forward, I would like to see some tighter integration with the vSphere Web Client, just so that I don't have to open multiple windows and jump back and forth. We're currently running vSphere 6.7 and there is a lot tighter integration between vROps and vSphere, but it can always be better.

I have no problems with the stability. It's always been pretty solid.

I haven't really had any need to scale beyond what we've always had. The last two versions of it, we've gone with the integrated, high-availability built into the product, and that was a welcome change for us. It's even better now not having to have any kind of load-balancer in front of it, so it's very nice.

I did add a couple of remote nodes. I think when we first started using it, that wasn't even possible, so it was nice having that capability. That did help us scale. If our company were to grow, probably through acquisition, which we seem to do a lot, it would be very easy for us to scale the solution.

For this product, we have not used technical support in a long time. Probably some four years ago was the last time we used it, which speaks to the stability. We haven't had any problems recently.

When I started with my current company, seven years ago, they were using another solution and it was terrible. It didn't give us any of the planning, the change management, any of that stuff that was built into the vROps. To be honest, vROps didn't even exist back then so they pretty much did what they had to do. 

When vROps was offered, it still took us a while to get familiar enough with it to adopt it and, ever since then, we've been happy with what we've been given. 

In terms of actually selecting a vendor, my opinion on what is important has just changed. Our storage vendor is just getting bought out after a period of uncertainty, so I would have to say longevity, first of all; stability. We need to know that they're going to be around tomorrow. Also, somebody that continuously innovates. I did a press release almost 10 years ago for VMware and one of the statements that I made then still holds true. I said, "VMware gives me things that I didn't know I needed, and now I can't live without." I still think that that's the way to judge whether or not they're still giving me what I think they should.

They're constantly giving me things, features that maybe somebody else is asking for. A lot of times, they are things I had never considered before and then I look at them and I say "I have to have that". If I don't look at your product and say, "I have to have that," then I probably won't buy your product because I hate going to ask for money.

The setup is pretty straightforward now. It used to be much more involved and a not very intuitive deployment at all, but now it's really nice.

There are other providers out there that will give a similar experience to vROps, but we're comfortable with it. We were being pressured to look at these other things because one of our acquisitions used one of them. They wanted us to come to an agreement on what was best and we didn't like what they were using, so we stuck with vROps. Now they're with vROps, and lucky for them.

You'd want the ease of use to be the primary draw to the product. Somebody who is evaluating vROps - when I didn't know anything about it and I was looking at it for the first time - it is very daunting. It's very complex and very confusing and especially, back then, there wasn't really any good training. I would tell a colleague not to try to do it alone. It's worth the effort, but you need to get help, either from your TAM or from somebody else, a colleague of yours who uses the product. Get some guidance because it's a very difficult product to get into and master on your own.

As good as it is, it's not perfect so I would have to rate it a nine out of 10. I would love to see something that I could turn over to a junior administrator who hasn't had my level of involvement with the product and say, "Here you go," and have it be, from a certain perspective, clear enough and intuitive enough for him to at least start getting some information out of it.

Like I said, it's a very complex product and you can get a lot of stuff out of it and I like that, for myself, but it's hard getting other people involved with it when it takes so long to figure out what's going on. I think that the engineers who created it are on the same page as me. As soon as it opens up, I see a wealth of information. But it's very daunting to somebody who is new to the product.

We primarily use it for monitoring our VDI environment and the performance is okay.

It improves some of the decisions we make. Based on those usage patterns, we can determine when our best maintenance times are and when we need to scale things up or down.

The most valuable feature we get out of it is the actual usage of the virtual desktop:  concurrent logins, when our peaks are, when our low times are. That's our main use of vROps.

Once you find what you're looking for, it is pretty user-friendly. There is just so much information in vROps, the drilling down to find exactly what you are looking for, that's the hard part. But once you find it, it's pretty easy. You can build a dashboard based on whatever information you have found and then, from that dashboard, it's fine.

The one thing that I am always missing is training specific to Horizon. There is no training class you can go to for the Horizon add-on for vROps. I'd like to see specific training for Horizon admins, as opposed to general vSphere admins.

It seems pretty stable. We've had a few issues as we do upgrades of different products, but other than that it's fairly solid.

When we've run into an upgrade of Horizon, or something breaks the agent in the connection servers, then we'll pull in resources. The support is good. They are able to get it resolved. Typically, a problem with vROps is not considered to cause end-users to have downtime or to be a production-down type of thing, so you sometimes have trouble getting somebody right away. But they've been pretty reasonable.

Previously, we weren't doing much monitoring at all. vRealize became our monitoring solution for VDI. The usage metrics were the driving force behind purchasing vROps and setting it up and spending the time to learn it.

The initial setup was pretty easy. It's an appliance so the deployment is quite easy. The documentation is excellent.

It's very valuable for us. We've since upgraded to the Horizon Enterprise suite, so now it's included with that. It was just another reason to go to Enterprise.

We compared a couple of different tools and it really came down to the fact that VMware was giving us a good price for bundling it with our Horizon purchase, at the time. And, at the time, we were doing PCoIP and it was basically the only product that really gave us that insight.

If you're planning to do a Horizon deployment I would definitely recommend vROps. It seems to be the best. In the past, when we were doing PCoIP exclusively, it was the only tool that gave you excellent PCoIP metrics. I assume that that is moving forward as well. For a Horizon deployment, you almost have to have vROps if you want that kind of data.

I rate the solution at eight out of 10. To get it to a 10, I would like to see some training on the Horizon-specific pieces and, somehow, they should make it easier to find those granular things that you're always looking for. You're always running into a situation where you want to use the tool to figure out a problem, but the amount of effort needed to delve into vROps and find the exact metric you're looking for is always so difficult.

We use it daily for troubleshooting. We use it for charting, for reports. It's an awesome product. The performance is good.

The most valuable feature is troubleshooting. When somebody comes and says, "I have slow response," and we say, "Really?" And they say, "Yeah, we want double the CPU and RAM." We can take a look at it and say, "Uh, no. Here's what you're using, and this is what you've allocated. Oh, and by the way, you've over-allocated, are you ready to give some back?" So it's been a great tool for us to reclaim resources.

It's user-friendly. When you click on it, everything is spelled out - as long as you understand the basics of how virtualization, CPU, and memory work. Everything you need when you click on it is right there. You just pick the right thing, and it gives you a report immediately. I think it's very intuitive.

I'd like to see more of the advanced reporting without having to go to the advanced product and paying the extra price. Canned reports are great, but you shouldn't have to pay for custom reports.

The stability is, for the most part, most of the time, excellent.

In terms of scalability, as far as I'm concerned, the jury's still out on that. There are some small details but we have a call coming up and we're working on it.

For the contract that we paid for, technical support was okay. For the service we're used to getting, before we downgraded our service, it was not as good. But that was not on them, that was on us.

Unfortunately, we were using vFoglight and that thing was the most complicated solution. You needed to be a rocket scientist to even use it. We were glad to get rid of it after three years, and we've been extremely pleased since we migrated.

The most important criteria, for us, when selecting a vendor are

• reliability
• length of time in the industry
• tech support.
  

The initial setup was not complex but a little hard.

I don't really have the numbers for ROI, but I can tell you it has increased them.

We looked at vFoglight again, but it was too difficult. We looked at a product called VMTurbo (Turbonomic), and it didn't really come up to par during the PoC that we went through. We weren't very happy with it.

In terms of advice to colleagues, I would give them examples of reports to prove that what we're saying is true, but the proof is in the pudding.

I rate it a nine out of 10. If it had more advanced features without having to pay for them it would be a 10.

vRealize with vCenter is primarily used to monitor our EMR platform for our hospital, and overall, it gives us good insight into what's happening and alerts us to possible conditions. For the most part, it's pretty much right on target.

It gives everybody a better sense of the fact that everything is okay. That is really the gist of it. We are using it because it is running our hospital and it is critical care. If certain systems are down, the hospital is down, or surgeries don't happen... It gives everybody a sense of being able to glance at something.

The most valuable feature is being able to take a quick glance and to understand the health of it, how that impacts things, and how quickly we should take a look at trying to resolve an issue.

In some respects, the UI is pretty stale. It has been that way from the beginning. Some easier ways to create custom dashboards for management, versus the tech guys, versus administrators, that would be helpful.

The stability of the product is good now. Initially, we had some issues, and with all new things there is the learning, on both parts, and that took place.

We haven't really scaled it much since we implemented it. It's still pretty much maintaining the same 50 hosts and supporting the hospital very well.

Occasionally, we have used technical support. During setup, there were a few little issues. During a couple of upgrades there were a few issues, but for the most part, tech support is very responsive. They haven't been mission-critical issues, like an ESX host being down, but most of the time we have gotten solutions within the same day, and at least contact with somebody very quickly.

The EMR provider that we went with, it was pretty much a strong recommendation for their default build that we go with vROps. It was really a no-brainer when we looked into the cost that it added to what was already a multi-million dollar project. It was a small investment at that time.

I now find it to be user-friendly but initially it wasn't. It was just an entirely different look and feel, so we had to break our habits from previous environments. A lot of the monitoring that we've done was with SolarWinds, which is entirely different. But even inside of VMware, with the C# Client and things like that, as we moved into using VRealize with 6.0, it was how the badges worked, how the color stratifications worked and the like. It took a long time to get comfortable glancing at it, and then educating management on their dashboards.

To be honest, ROI wasn't a tremendous factor because, the way we buy things, it was next to nothing for the initial purchase, and then a little bit of maintenance each year. The ROI was very quick on the product. This solution was also a requirement by the EMR provider too. It's nothing that we've regretted, it has definitely added an exposure that we wouldn't have had without it.

I would give it a thumbs up. I'm not certain there are too many solutions that integrate on the level it does with the data that it does. As I mentioned, our previous implementation, or previous corporate solution, was SolarWinds, and it just interfaces differently, and the data is not the same. This is the easiest way.

I rate it at about eight out of 10. That's primarily because there are always improvements. Technically, I don't see anything wrong that would drag it down quite a bit. I would like it to have a little more responsiveness. I know we are not running the latest vCenter environment that it's integrated with, but there are times that some of the data lags and sometimes the screens will somewhat freeze for a little bit, to repopulate. But that is really the biggest inconvenience that we've seen with it.

We use it for monitoring and maintenance of VMware environments.

It provides easier troubleshooting. Especially on the Horizon side of things, it helps us to troubleshoot if there are CPU issues or memory issues in the environment. It has resulted in shorter times for troubleshooting issues. It's easier to isolate an issue, especially things like bad neighbors. It helps me determine whether a host is having an issue. Suppose I'm troubleshooting a VM that's having an issue. I may actually find out that it's not that VM but it's a set of VMs that are encountering a bad-neighbor situation.

It also helps us determine whether or not we need to expand capacity, add more user licenses, etc. It helps us in capacity planning, in deciding when we need to introduce new hardware.

• Capacity planning
• Project management
• Troubleshooting

It gives us a pane of glass to troubleshoot all our VMware technologies in one place. Also, we haven't gotten into any of the automation yet, but a lot of the automation tools show promise of automating with vROps.

It's also user-friendly. It's a lot easier than the older versions. It has the multiple categories when you log in. It's a lot cleaner and easier to find solutions to what you're looking for.

I would like to see an improvement in the cost features, and by that, I mean the chargeback functions, because my company won't go all the way into vRA for the automation piece. We're looking at different tools for automation. If they could find some way to incorporate that, it's the primary thing that I would look for right now.

Also, I would like to find a tool that is a single pane of glass for everything. The endpoint operations agent doesn't really do much when you install it on an endpoint - for example, on a Windows Server or a Linux server. You don't really get any beneficial information at the OS level from VMware tools. That's something that I would like to see.

The stability is good. There are some issues, at least from my end, when it runs out of space. I don't know that I necessarily get notifications. Some of it is that I don't check the Health tab as often as I should. But it has run out of space once or twice and shut off. When that happens I have to manually add space to it.

Scalability is relatively simple. You just spin up a new appliance and you either add it to an existing vROps manager or you can create a new environment. You can forward statistics. If I have multiple data centers, I can spin up remote nodes and send our information back to our primary one. So the scalability is good.

Technical support has been hit or miss. We're a BCS customer and it's a struggle at times. Sometimes it's difficult to get support on the phone, sometimes it's a lack of resources issue, sometimes they'll still send it to a tier-1 person when it's a tier-3 issue.

We've looked at other solutions but we stick with the vRealize Operations mainly for the usability and the integration with VMware.

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. What would make it a 10 are improved features for the endpoint operations agent and the ability to more easily monitor solutions other than just VMware. We have a mixed environment that includes VMware, some oVirt and KVM, and some other things. The main goal of our management is a single pane of glass, if possible, and that is something that I would like to see.

We use it as a monitoring tool for our environment, it alerts us on the VM performance, capacity utilization. We also use a bit of the trending tool that it has.

It automatically alerts us to issues so we can spend time on troubleshooting other things, or even in innovation. We're not having to dig as deep into the internal environment each day.

It's proactive and alerts us on things before they could potentially become a bigger problem. We don't have to be handling problems reactively. It lets us keep our eyes and ears on other things.

One of my biggest complaints is that I wish there was a better, consolidated dashboard on the landing page when you first log in. You have to fine tune it and customize it a bit more than I'd like. I don't know if it's hard for them to determine what people generally want to see on a home dashboard screen, but it could be improved.

It works.

I guess that the scalability is fine. We haven't run into any issues with it.

We have reached out to VMware tech support on particular issues with vROps. The support has been fine.

We had actually tried a few of the third-party VM monitoring solutions and we figured that since we already had the licensing and had paid for this product, we would start using it instead. We found that it actually accomplished what we needed out of a monitoring product.

We tried Veeam ONE and one other whose name I can't recall.

Among the most important criteria when selecting a vendor is money, that is definitely a big factor; but also their dependability or their reputation. We need to know that the product is going to do what we're looking for it to do. We're a small shop, so we have a lot of work to go around. We want the product to do what they say it will do.

We have heavily invested in VMware technology. We're running vSphere, we're running other products, and obviously, we need visibility into our environment.

VMWare is quite good at following customer needs. We are working closely with our TAM so whenever we've had something that we want out of the product, around capacity planning, for example, they tend to be a good conduit getting our needs into VMware.

Sometimes what a customer sees as a need for improvement could be incorrect sizing or a result of a specific deployment. So usually, the things we want are a more frequent sampling of the various metrics and the like.

In terms of VMware support, VMware has been, to some extent, a victim of its own success. But in general, they've been always very helpful. It's always good to have the TAMs to get the support, even when they're overwhelmed with requests.

We've explored a number of products. We've used SolarWinds and their VMWare add-ons. But to be able to actually see what our infrastructure does, vRealize Operations Manager has been the closest match as part of our Enterprise agreement. We are licensed for the Blue Medora Advanced Suite which is like an add-on to vRealize Operations Manager. That gives us the visibility into our Cisco and HPE equipment. It's a natural choice.

I would recommend this solution to a colleague if they have a VMware shop and need something to provide visibility in their environment.

I would definitely give it around a nine out of 10 because sometimes, in terms of the user experience, people find stuff difficult to use. But obviously, the more dashboards you create that are relevant to you, the better it will be.

We use it for monitoring our VMs and our data storage.

It has certainly saved me from problematic phone calls from people like VPs in my company saying, "Hey, this service is down," because we know in advance when we are running low on disk space. It preemptively alerts us and we can go in and fix the issue. That is what I really wanted from it.

We would get calls a lot. We'd have servers that would suddenly start chewing up a ton of resources and storage and then, when they would run out, everything would stop. I would get that phone call at 2 am: "Why is this down?" and I would have to dig through and look. It's gotten rid of that part of it.

It is also helpful how vRealize looks at your data over time, at the performance of the machine over time. It can make assessments of the machine's health, based on that, for example, if there are sudden changes. That's helpful to look at because we've been able to see, on occasion, where machines suddenly start doing things that they weren't doing.

Sadly, we actually found a machine that had been compromised because it started doing a lot more work after hours and at weird hours. Apparently, somebody was using us for Bitcoin farming. It was helpful in that regard. That is another return on investment because I wasn't expecting to be able to do things like that.

It does exactly what I program it to do at this point, which is to tell me if I've got machines running out of disk space or over-utilizing CPU or memory. The monitoring component of it is the most valuable feature.

Intuitive? Probably. User-friendly? It could probably use a little work there. It is something of a beast. There's a lot that it can do but getting in there and getting everything working the way you want it to can be challenging. You have to dedicate more time than I've given to it.

It seems very stable. I haven't had any issues with the server going down. It's been pretty much hands-off. I set it up three years ago when we got it and it's still emailing me today, without any interference on my part. I probably need to go back and upgrade it.

It is pretty scalable. We really haven't gotten into building it out. We have a fairly small operation as far as VMware goes.

We really weren't using anything before. We tinkered around with some third-party products. Then I came to one of the VMworld conferences a few years back, and they were talking about - it was called something else before, like vCOPs, vCenter Operations. I sat through a spiel on that and realized it called out 90 percent of the things that I needed to know about and that I was getting calls on.

The initial installation was very easy, straightforward. Getting it to do the three things that I wanted it to do, in terms of emailing for those specific metrics, that was very easy to do. Beyond that, when I started looking at some other things it can do, it gets very complex very fast. There is a lot more to it.

The ROI certainly is apparent with the downtime being eliminated. As a college, if any of our critical systems go down, students can't register for classes, students can't get in and do things, and that means lost productivity for a lot of people - not just me at 2 am fixing something, or one of my guys fixing it.

We used ManageEngine, but that was more looking at the Windows side of things. I can't remember any of the others we looked at.

I would definitely suggest to colleagues that they use this solution. I would encourage them to take a training class on it so they can get more out of it, get their money's worth.

I rated it an eight out of 10. I like it. I think it could be a 10. There are things I'm not doing in there, so any difference between my score and a 10 is probably my own fault for not utilizing it fully.