VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We use it to identify performance issues and configure compute resources.

Currently, we are setting up automation with compute resources, shutting our servers down, and reallocating them. When we go into our busy season, it will allow us to be hands offs. It will perform everything for us.

This solution has helped to reduce time to troubleshoot issues, improve quality of service to users, and provide costs savings through higher capacity utilization. The system dashboards allow us to drill down into systems and find how they are talking to each other. They allow us to fix issues quickly and easily for the end user.

The most valuable feature is compute.

There is a lot of stuff which is hard to read and understand. I must do a lot of research to understand what is going on with the hardware.

It's good. I haven't had any downtime with it. 

It is easy to upgrade. It takes an hour or more to upgrade, and I am confident after an upgrade that it will be back up and running when I arrive in the morning.

If you want to scale, you must have management packs. For example, you can bring in Blue Medora and have them create the management packs for you.

For the most part, we have all the scalability that we need. We feel confident that we can grow our infrastructure with the product.

When I have used technical support, they were good. I would rate them as an eight out of 10. They have good people. However, sometimes they are slow, and sometimes, they are fast. It depends on whom you get.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

We have seen ROI in performance. It used to be our company was giving out eight CPUs to all servers. That was bad performance-wise. People were seeing slow compute times for their applications.

Take a look at the whole vRealize suite. They all interactive with each other. It can provide you with streamlined automation. It can get your company to where it needs to be.

We use it for troubleshooting and capacity planning. The current version I'm running, 6.6, performs as I want. In the newer versions, they've removed some functionality and I actually discussed that with the product manager yesterday.

The product is a single pane of glass for faults and warnings, for VMs that are undersized or hosts that are undersized or struggling with resources, and for validating that the sizing for a VM is accurate.

It has improved our ability to troubleshoot and isolate problems. It has reduced cost by allowing us to not oversize a VM. I am able to go back to a vendor and say "Hey, you know you're asking for this, you're not using that, and you should probably look at this part of your application."

For me, as an architect, it's the capacity planning piece, which is the Project section.

I've already spoken to the project managers during the TAM Customer Day here at VMworld 2018. They need to bring back the My Project piece. They removed it from the current release. That's the reason I haven't updated to the current release. They say the project or the infrastructure capacity planning is coming back.

The one stability problem that we have is that it eats a lot of disk space and, if I'm not monitoring it really closely, it will just stop running and we'll lose all of that data for that timeframe. That's really the only stability issue that we've had. That's more on us and what we're trying to retain, than it is on the product itself, because we can trim things and change things.

vROps has functionality where you can add remote collectors and remote data collectors, databases. We've actually started doing that. We've got a remote collector in place already and we'll be looking at adding an additional data collector.

Technical support for VMware has usually been spot on for me. Sometimes it's a little slow matching up because the specialists, who are typically whom I need, have to be scheduled. They only have so much time in which to take the calls they have to take, and then focus on me. But otherwise, the support is usually really good. I'm also a TAM customer, so if I have problems with support, I use TAM instead to escalate my tickets.

There are a few solutions out there that we never made the investment in it. I like to call what we used before "Kentucky Windage": You lick your finger and figure out which way the wind is going. That was our capacity planning and troubleshooting method before that. There was a lot of knowledge and time spent doing it all in the past. This has made it to where, when we suspect something, we can go look right at it and see what's going on.

It's a straightforward install. Getting all of the collections and making sure your data is coming in is a little time consuming, but the install itself, getting it up and running, is pretty simple. 

I used my TAM to help me. He is knowledgeable, absolutely. He's a great guy. He works with us all the time on stuff like that.

The biggest ROI is being able, when a systems group comes to us and says, "Hey we need to add more memory or CPU," to look at 'em and say, "Well, if you do that, you're going to add licensing costs, and we don't see that you need it," utilizing the vRealize tools that we have.

For me, there wasn't a competitor because, under the hood, vROps is going to know everything that VirtualCenter does. If you're relying on a third-party to discover all that and put it in place - when I can stay native, I'm going to stay native, when it's the best solution.

It's an absolute must to get the information that you want out of your VMs and to be able to help application people pinpoint problems. You just don't run a big VMware shop without vROps.

It is intuitive but in terms of "friendly", it takes a lot to learn how to use it. You can get really granular, so it takes education to really effectively use it.

I would rate it an eight out of 10, and the reason for that is, as I mentioned, they've taken some features away that I want back. They're telling me they're going to give them back but I'm going to have to teach myself how to use them again. But it has done everything that we've asked it to do. It can do more and my rating could go up if we actually got in and used it better than we do now.

Our primary use case is capacity planning. We do historical metrics gathering to determine if we need to rearrange our hardware resources, expand or contract them.

I like that it's integrated with the vRA. It is helping us, as we're rolling out automation, to do intelligent placement of new servers, based on the vROps metrics that are being created.

They've come up with more canned dashboards, which is great.

Also, it does have hooks into it. I like that it's integrated with the other suite of tools. That's a big plus for the tool. It's well-integrated with Log Insight. We use that integration quite a bit.

There are several additional features I'd like to see. 

For one, the metrics. It collects tons of metrics, but it's very unclear what exactly a metric is. There'll be something like a "CPU Usage" and "Usage of the CPU". What's the difference between those two metrics? It turns out there is a difference, but they should make it intuitive so I can say, “I just want to go find this out in the tool.” You can't really do that because you've ended up spending a lot of time creating a report against a metric which wasn't the metric that you thought it was. So I would like to see, when I have the metrics in any of the screens, when I hover over one, that it pop up at least a sentence, if not a paragraph, saying what the metric is and not just that it's the measurement of the CPU. It should say how it's collecting that metric and what the importance is of that metric. That would be very helpful. 

Also, there are some metrics that are not included in the canned set. They call them super metrics in the tool, where you create your own metric. But the super metrics are not really reliable. It might be because we didn't create them correctly, although we did have help from VMware. They also don't translate into newer versions like a canned metric would. One of them is a vCPU to pCPU ratio. That's one that is missing, which should be very simple for them to collect.

So the help on the metrics is super important because there are so many.

It's a little bit too extensible. I love having that freedom to create. But I, and maybe three other people, understand the math enough to be able to use it. Everybody else says, “But where do I click to get that report?"

The other thing is, when we first bought it, our vision was to use role-based access, give application teams access to view a dashboard for their stuff. We found out that the vROps tool can't handle more than about 20 concurrent sessions. For a company our size, we have some 3000 applications. If all these application teams want to have a dashboard up, that somebody is monitoring all day - we had to say nobody gets that because then everybody wants it. That was another thing that we were buying the tool for that we can't do.

On a specific version, it has been stable. But the whole point of the tool is historical data and, twice now, we have lost all of our historical data, as we've tried to move to the next version of the tool. That really removes a lot of the functionality that we purchased the tool for.

The tool itself is not as scalable as we'd like it to be. We have seven or more data centers and we have collectors deployed throughout the whole environment, but we have capacity and performance issues with the tool. We'd like to expand the product so that we would have more capacity, but it has limitations.

We're a large customer and we have people onsite holding our hand saying, “Sorry. My bad." I think we could have better technical support on this product. We have great technical support on other fronts.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

Pricing is starting to get unmanageable. It used to be a better pricing deal. They were selling us the suite and we were taking advantage of most everything in that suite. 

Something that we're concerned about was in the general session this morning, here at VMworld 2018. They announced the Premier. It's going to be interesting. 

I'm just about ready to send our sales person a text, because we've been VMware shop for a decade and we bought the Enterprise-class license, which was the top-of-the-line, "get everything they have," and we thought we had everything they had. And then they came out with Enterprise Plus. That meant we had to go buy a whole bunch more stuff to convert everything to Enterprise Plus. Well, now they have come out with Premier. They're going to be giving us all sorts of reasons why we need to re-buy everything up to the Premier level. That's getting old with our people with the purses, the supply chain people. That's why they're looking at other options. They just went and bought Turbonomic and they're looking at other options so that we're not so wholly a VMware shop.

From an operations point of view and from an architectural point of view, which is me, it's great to get a whole mess of tools that all integrate together; we've got Lifecycle Manager so that we can make sure they're all at the right versions at the same time. But, on the other hand, you become a one-vendor shop. Nobody likes that. Our leadership is starting to bring in other companies to do various things.

We looked at a couple of other products. We looked at Turbonomic and Veeam. But we have a very large relationship with VMware, so we have a hefty discount. We are also very involved with using Log Insight and with using vRA. So we buy the suite and vROps is free. It would cost us more to buy those other tools individually. Since we have the suite, we have the licenses so it makes sense to use it.

That being said, we did buy Turbonomic about a month ago because operations management says vROps is not working for us for the real-time monitoring and automatically adjusting to the environment. vROps is working for historical work, so are still planning on using it for that. Turbonomic does not have historical, so they work together in a way. But We've had to buy, for a few more million dollars, another product whose function, we thought, vROps was going to do all of.

Depending on your use case, I would caution you to know what it does and what it doesn't do. We bought it with pie-in-the-sky hopes that it would really solve everything.

For this product in particular, it just doesn't seem that it was enterprise-ready for a company of our scale, when we tried to adopt it. It's been going through a lot of changes now. I haven't been as involved in the last year with it but I know that they've moved up another rev in the versioning and, of course, everything gets better with each rev. But it was a rocky start for us.

We're still using it and we still have hopes. We're not going to give it to the application teams, but we might give them a scheduled report that at least gives them a non-instantaneous look at their systems.

For vRealize operations, we are using it to manage our entire virtual operations. 

From the beginning, it has improved everything from a management perspective. It has eased our current operations from what we previously used. 

The solution has helped to reduce time to troubleshoot issues, improved quality of service to users, and provided cost savings through higher capacity of utilization.

From an admin and operations perspective, the solution is intuitive and user-friendly. It has a good view. It's easy for technical experts to present a view of where are we standing to management.

It is good from a starter perspective, but when we go to an advanced level, it needs improvement.

Our hands are tied by using this product. It is not as flexible as it could be. In some cases, we have been working with our TAM and account manager plus the support to provide us flexibility in the way we want to customize. However, that has not been happening so far. As the whole world moves towards open source, we would like to see some open source added to the tool. 

Stability is good.

The technical support is unsatisfactory. Some of the tweaks that we were looking for have not happened even though we requested them multiple times. That is one constraint. vROPs is a good tool, but for big organizations when we run over 20,000 to 30,000 VMs, we would like to customize it in our own way to monitor, operate, and connect operations into Continuous Improvement and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). This is not happening.

We did not previously use anything else.

It's a good starter. If there is a company who has a small to medium business (or enrollment), it really works. If you have a large organization running 30,000 to 40,000 VMs, your network is very heterogeneous, your company has acquired lot of other companies, and enrollment is very scattered, it might not fit in well with the existing version.

The primary use case of vROps is to balance our infrastructure, both from a predictive and reactive standpoint, for outage and maintenance.

The solution has allowed us to become more predictive, versus reactive, in terms of our infrastructure management.

It has helped to reduce the time needed to troubleshoot issues, improved quality of service to users, and provided cost savings through higher capacity. The primary benefit we're getting is from an operational standpoint. It has helped us to operationalize our processes and procedures. It has also helped us to stay ahead of our capacity planning so that we become more predictive, versus reactive. And then, the analysis features available with it allow us to do very high-level, enhanced root-cause analysis on events and issues that arise.

One of the most valuable features is the trending analysis of our environment to make capacity-planning decisions, in addition to providing real-time analysis of events.

I find it to also be intuitive and user-friendly. The layout, from a GUI standpoint, is somewhat logical. There are definitely some improvements made in the latest version, but I have not worked with the latest version yet. Overall, we find it relatively straightforward to work with.

One thing we'd like to see, although I think they already have done so, is moving away from Flash.

In terms of additional features, we'd like to see more integration with management packs, because one of the challenges we have is, depending on our third-party, we'll have to go outside of VMware to purchase management packs. If VMware increased the native management packs library, that would obviously help save us money and not have to rely on third-party solutions.

When it comes to stability, we haven't had any issues.

For the most part, the solution is within our initial requirements, although our requirements are changing and evolving. One definite item we would like is the capability to expand the license count per solution. That would help us to ensure we have a single pane of glass for the entire company, versus having various solutions for different environments within the company.

We are BCS (business critical support) customers and, for the most part, they have been able to help us when we do have issues, and escalate as needed. The only concern that we do have, at times, is the availability of that support. There have been times where, when we've needed support, we've had to, unfortunately, wait for that support, for an available engineer. But it's improving, and we'll continue using it.

It became apparent we needed to switch when our tickets-to-resolve timeline was significantly higher. We weren't meeting SLAs as we needed to. With the introduction of this solution, we were able to meet the demand, rather than just meet SLAs. Through the trending analysis that we can do, it allowed us to quickly and easily right-size the capacity from a cluster.

In addition, when issues did arise, it helped us to quickly identify what those problems actually were. The main advantage was time. We got a lot of time back that we could then use to innovate and optimize our environment.

I initially deployed the solution for our company. It's relatively straightforward. There's a lot of good online documentation and there's YouTube.

Our ROI is time. It has reduced the amount of time it takes to troubleshoot an issue.

We looked at a couple of VMware's competitors. One of them was VMTurbo (now called Turbonomic). The main reason we went with vROps was the ease of integration, ease of use, and the support behind it. The community behind vRealize is relatively large and that just made the decision that much simpler for us.

Also, from a cost standpoint, we were able to negotiate with VMware. And, with VMware, the deployment process was a lot simpler for us, and the training-learning curve for vRealize versus the other solution tended to be the easier, so that was also a factor.

We've been using it for approximately two years now. We originally upgraded from vCOps to vROps. We have also expanded our platform to include vRealize Log Insight which further helped us to understand and perform RCAs as needed, when events occur.

Get involved in the community. Get involved in performing hands-on labs. And, quite frankly, deploy it. Create use cases, create your test cases, and validate them.

The reasons I rate vROps at eight out of 10 are because there are always areas for improvement. In addition, the limited amount of management packs natively available through vROps is a huge factor. As you can imagine, as with most companies, we do use a gambit of other solutions and other hardware, and the ability to use vROps as a single pane of glass would allow us to have one solution for all, and make for easier integration.

We use it for looking at the resources on our hosts and for looking at the resources on VM as well.

It allows us to see the VM, our cluster utilization - the cluster level is what I work on the most. We're able to see how much is being utilized, the rate of resource utilization, and when it will actually run out.

The solution is intuitive and user-friendly. The UI is nice, it's really simple to use. Building out reports is very simple.

One of the most valuable features was the cluster modeling, but they took that away. That's why I rated it a seven out of 10. They keep saying that it's going to be back in the next release and that's what we're looking for. We really want that back.

It works great. No problems whatsoever.

Scalability is pretty good too. They keep coming out with new releases. My vROps guy just put in v6.7 about two months ago, now they're coming out with v7.0. They keep coming out pretty fast. That's good, there are new features. But we just put v6.7 in and now we have to do all that same work over again.

I haven't used technical support for vROps. I'm mostly on the core: vCenter and ESXi. I don't open up tickets for vROps.

Overall, it's a great solution. It's really easy to use, really easy to set up, and especially for reporting, it's really good.

Our primary use case is to manage our virtual environment, to see where our hotspots are, to see where we can make improvements. It's a driver for us when it comes to purchasing and TCOs, to make sure that our money is focused on getting the most out of what we have, and utilizing the infrastructure we have in place to make sure it runs as efficiently as possible.

It has helped us with our goal of having a hyperconverged environment where we see workflows running on-prem, we see workflows running in the cloud, and the best place for the workflows to live. vRealize Operations is a key component to the entire infrastructure, helping us automate that whole process.

vRealize Operations and vRealize Automation are key components in making the whole process of automation, and distributing different pieces to the different groups the way we need it done, a lot easier; automating that process to make our infrastructure a lot more agile.

We're also able to bring in IT staff members who don't have to be VMware experts, they don't have to be experts in a particular area. We brought in a few junior guys to manage our environment, provision our infrastructure. We are able to do that with these key pieces to automate that process. They don't have to be a subject-matter expert to be able to figure it out and provision infrastructure.

One of the most valuable features is that it gives us granular insight into how the infrastructure is operating and running, down to the storage level, the hypervisor level, even the hardware level. It really gives us a deep dive into what is going on and lets us see. Instead of our having to figure it out, it figures it out for us.

It is also user-friendly and intuitive.

I would like to see them bring in metrics for other things in the infrastructure, not just the virtual infrastructure: for example, being able to bring in metrics from my arrays themselves or my fiber channel switches or my ethernet switches. Being able to collect that data would help in being able to lay a holistic view on top of how my entire system is functioning, from the hypervisor all the way down to my end-point.

It's a very stable solution. We haven't had any issues with it at all. We rely on it heavily every day so it's something that needs to be up and running. It has been very good for us.

When we need to scale it up it is easily scalable. It fits really well within our organization. As we grow, it can grow along with us, so we don't have any problems seeing our vision through or seeing where we're going to be in a certain period of time.

Personally, I have not had to use VMware's technical support. The products work really well so we haven't had too many issues with them. I haven't heard any complaints about technical support from our guys who get "down and dirty" with it, day-to-day. And if we do have technical support issues, in general, I do hear complaints all the time. VMware is never on that list.

We were using Foglight when Dell purchased Foglight; it was with somebody else before. That solution was very cumbersome, very hard. We needed to have a couple of people who were Foglight experts to make it work within our infrastructure and get any valuable use out of it. It became more of a burden.

When VMware came to us and said, "This is what we have," we PoC'ed it, liked it, purchased it, and have been using it ever since. Once it is set up, it is easy for our guys to use it and get value out of it, without having to be some kind of expert.

The initial setup and configuration take a little work but once it is set up properly it is very intuitive.

Overall, the setup is pretty straightforward. We have been using vRealize Operations for quite some time and, with every iteration of it, when the vRealize product line rolled out, it became easier, took the complexity out of initial setup and configuration. We're very happy with the way it's working right now.

Every time a new version comes out we're upgrading. The process is very easy. It's painless. When an upgrade comes out it's just one of those things that you put on the calendar and do. It's not anything that we need long, drawn-out planning for. We're confident that when there is an update we won't have any problems getting that update done.

ROI is a somewhat difficult question. I haven't sat down and looked, over the years, where the use of vRealize Operations fits within our ROI.

We have looked at other solutions. We purchased Veeam not too long ago. Veeam has a product called Veeam ONE that does somewhat the same thing, but the way vRealize Operations integrates with the functionality of other things - like Insight Manager, and vRealize Automation - makes it the thing that brings all the pieces of the puzzle together. Using a third-party product we would be missing that. And it does it better than other pieces, so for us, it was a no-brainer. It would help us out with our vision of using VMware plus it worked better than the other products we looked at and PoC'ed.

I would definitely encourage colleagues to look at vRealize Operations. I would tell them the experience I have had with it and help them see the differences, how vRealize Operations works with other components, depending on how they are using VMware. I would strongly recommend it.

I would rate this solution at nine out of 10 because there is nothing negative about it but I would, again, like to see it able to collect more metrics on things outside my virtual center.

We use it for capacity management and optimization. We are just now really getting into using it.

It helps us maintain optimal workloads.

One of the most valuable features is the ability to see "before" and "after". It will show you the current state, and then show you what it looks like after it does the optimization.

It needs dashboards that we can present at the executive level. The GUI, overall, could be better.

Stability is fine.

No issues with scalability.

I have not had to contact technical support.

Make sure it does what you want it to do. For me, when selecting a vendor, the most important criterion is, does the product do what it's supposed to do?

I would rate vROps at seven out of 10, mostly because it needs a better user interface.