VMware Aria Operations Reviews

As it's the only tool that I've found which I could provide to our NOC team. Because we have our set of tools that we use in system administration, but we do have a NOC team, and the NOC team is not very proficient in the tools we use. Therefore, we had to give them something that is simple enough to use, something they could display on a big screen in their NOC, in order to see alerts in our virtualization infrastructure. vROps was the only tool which we found which was capable at the time to create customized dashboards, and we created the dashboards specifically for our NOC team to find any storage issues and any network latency issues.   

It was also one of the only tools that was available back in 2015 that was able to integrate with our storage area, so it had the management pack. We used to have HP 3PAR at that time, and HP gave us a free management pack to install on our vROps, so not only did we have full visibility into our virtualization infrastructure, we also had the visibility into our 3PAR.

The one thing that I miss the most with vROps is that it's a read-only tool, meaning that you see the issue happening. You can troubleshoot, you can do all kinds of deep-dives into the issue and find out what the root cause is and everything, but in order to get it fixed, whatever it is (doesn't matter what it is), you need to log into another tool in order to fix it. Thus, if you see a latency issue with data store, you can pin point where it happened on your 3PAR, but you need to open the 3PAR management console to get it fixed. Same with a VM. If it tells you that you have a lack of resources, and you need to add 4GBs of RAM to the machine, it doesn't offer to do it for you. You will need to log into vSphere Client and add RAM.

I started using it in 2015. Three years ago.

I would say it is stable, but it does require frequent updates. 

In the early days of vROps, back when it was vCenter Operations, we did have some stability issues with it. Every now and then, we had to reboot it for no good reason because no one was able to log in, but I think with version 6, released a year and a half ago, those things disappeared. Still you need to keep it well-maintained. By comparison, if we upgrade our vSphere infrastructure every six months or so, unless there is a critical patch with vROps, we find ourselves updating it every two to three months.

With version 6, we were able to add instances, so it's very scalable. Once you run out of resources, you can either scale up by adding RAM and virtual CPUs to it, or you can just add another instance. It synchronizes automatically. With version 5, this was not available, like horizontal scaling - just going up. 

I don't have a good opinion of VMware support. 

I remember at one point, one of our instances was corrupted, and they tried their best to recover it, but in the end, after digging in its insides for three days (and they really dug), they just told us, "You need to rebuild the instance. We can't recover any of your data. Just spin up a new instance and start collecting data from scratch." 

So we lost all our historical data. It wasn't business-critical, because we were able to export our dashboards and import them into the new instance, so NOC was operational a few days after the incident.

Other than this experience, we have not had the best experience with VMware support.

The pricing: It's expensive.

The dashboard gives me good insight on what's going on in my infrastructure.

Before vROps, we were just stripping everything.

Now, we have:

• Data storage
• Virtual machines

I would like to see improvements in reporting. I would like it to be more customized. More templates would also be beneficial.

It's an easy appliance to deploy.

The stability is great.

It scales really well. We have two of them.

I haven't used technical support.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward.

It's better than the moderating features built-in for vSphere.

Again, it gives you good insight on your environment.

The most important thing when selecting a vendor: stability.

It allows you to integrate all the VMware products like vCenter, vCloud Air and it also allows you to gradually look at any issues for root cause solutions in your environment.

It gives us a single pane of glass to be able to look into our environment and find what the problems are. It allows us to monitor our environment, to be proactive, and do preventative maintenance. Therefore we'll know if things are about to take place in our environment, which could cause problems, and we can head them off before they happen.

I'd like to see more of a cloud integration. Something which could work with the Cloud. In other words, a hybrid-type window pane, which you could manage both ways. Instead of having the hybrid cloud manager, have something similar for vROps.

It is stable depending what license you buy. Mainly enterprise is already integrated. There are little modules you can add to it, depending on what you're doing. There are no costs for the most part, and you can modify the environment for vROps for your infrastructure and VMware, and for your customers.

It is very scalable. You have to decide what you want to do with it first. It's scalable in the sense of what you want to show the customer, or if you want to grow your environment out. If you want to be able to scale your resources out for planning, adding to your environment, and other resources. It allows you to scale within a cloud, make it a hybrid cloud cross platform, and so on.

I haven't needed to contact them. I have enough skill set, education, and hands on with the product/solution that I can figure it out myself for the most part.

I do use Uila, which is very good. I would say it's more robust than vROps, because it's a single solution. I still use Uila. I didn't switch. I use both of them. vROps has its place, and Uila has its place.

The SLAs drive it and customer requirements require it, plus you can't keep the same technology and provide the same type of services. You have to be able to show the customer there is some value in what you're offering them.

I set up my own environment. I didn't set up the customer's.

Once you understand the layout, then it's not as complex. It seems to be, but it's not really, because there's a lot of moving parts. You need concentrate on the moving parts which would pertain to your environment.

I recommend to anyone looking to implement: Have a stable environment. If you don't have a stable environment, you still can implement it, but you're really putting yourself at a disadvantage, because you want to ensure your environment is stable. You don't want to keep concentrating on fixing something stuff. You want vROps to be able to show you, not just what's broken, but what can be scaled out and how to improve your environment. The less you have for it to do, the better it is for you.

I just downloaded it myself and installed it.

If you are looking at this solution, try it out first. Ensure you have enough resources in your environment where you can test all the resources for vROps. Resources like CPU, memory, being able to scale the VM after it's deployed application-wise to see if that's causing issues, or does it need more resources - those type of things.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Does it do what you say it does and more? If you just trying to promote your software, and it's not working, you are wasting my time.

We just starting using it in the last month. We've been able to use it to diagnose several performance problems with our environment, and being able to tie it into login site has been incredibly useful.

We've also solved several challenges that have been ongoing for the last several months, within a couple of days, after having vROps in the environment.

I don't think I have enough experience to be able to answer this question fully. Maybe some easier ways of getting some of the NSX monitoring products. It wasn't obvious how it was tied into NSX, and how it was usable at first. It took a couple days of looking at it, and configuring it, and toying with it to get it. I'd be in favor of that being a little easier.

It seems fairly stable. I'm always a little concerned about version changes and things that change when you go up or down a version. So far, it hasn't gone down, so I'd say that's pretty stable for the month it's been up. It's been great.

I see no problems with the DM itself. With that said, it's collecting a lot of diagnostics at this point and it doesn't seem to have any issues at all with latency. It seems it should be able to scale up and out if we needed to.

I haven't used it yet.

We messed that one up. We decided to ask for logins to vROps, for the last two years, and then finally our accounts team said, "Hey, you know you already have one, right?" Turns out we had them but the licensing hadn't been activated and we didn't realize it. Once we realized that, it was awesome. We already made the investment and it was some previous person's decision who is no longer at our company, so I cannot speak to that.

I knew that I wanted it because we have a full 100% virtualization and we're using SolarWinds. SolarWinds is built to monitor everything possible, and we don't need everything possible. I needed VMware monitoring. vROps was the obvious solution there. Once I realized that we already had the licensing for it, being able to install it and configure it within a few days was incredible.

Absolutely straightforward. As I said, we have a full SolarWinds environment and we're trying to move away from it. And then we finally realized we have licensing for the login site and vROps. So I went ahead and installed and configured it and got it running and rolling. Because of it being straightforward, plus the setup, we're probably going to get rid of most of our investment in SolarWinds products, which is a big bonus for our company.

What's important when looking at vendors is

• Ease of talking to them
• Ease of working with their sales team
• Availability

Also their presentation of the products. Having trial versions available to be able to try it out before so you know if it's like, "Oh yeah. I want to use it more." That's the most important.

I would definitely be looking at long term solution, at a way to get better insight into your controlled environment. I don't have too much experience with the different monitoring tools but vROps has been, hands down, the best thing I've reviewed so far.

Why vRealize is the most valuable for us, for my company, is that we use it to measure and monitor the environment.

We're saving resources, because we are monitoring them. We know where they go and how the capacity is spent, thus we are saving.

The dashboard is too complicated. Those badges that they give you as a rating badge are too hard to understand what they mean. This is something that they need to figure out.

Three years.

No issues. So far, so good. We are happy with it.

So far from our environment, it is okay.

We haven't used it yet.

I have a contact in VMware. Every time that I call VMware, they help as I expect, though they are not that easy to reach compared to say, Cisco support.

We used to use SolarWinds and the support was not great.

VMware has been much better.

I was involved in the setup. It was straightforward.

It was just that the dashboard is a little hard to understand at the beginning, but after you get used to it, you're fine.

In-house. They were were helpful.

We went straight from SolarWinds to VMware.

We chose VMware because of its time on the market, the company's reputation, and the support.

I mostly use VMware products. They integrate well together. I also participate on VMTN, the VMware community online.

We invested in this solution because monitoring was really important for us.

I would definitely recommend this solution.

The predictive analytics and reporting.

It's been able to reduce our over-provisioning, help with ease of reporting, and billing.

Extendable API, for programming.

Had zero problems with stability.

Easy, very easy.

Very good. I've had no problems with support.

No.

It was intermediate. You had to understand exactly what you were deploying, so you could actually click all the right buttons.

Looking at vendor selection, you want reputability, and make sure that they have a good background and history of support.

The most important areas to research before making your decision are price and scalability of the solution.

This is the whole package, it has everything that you need.

It gives you really good insight into what's going on with the overall environment, with VMs, and we can see what's going on with the storage, etc.

I'm able to find problems quicker than before. And when there are issues with the operating system on the guest, or even the application on the guest OS, if they believe that it's the host or the back end, I can show them where the problem really lies, that it's not the back end. I've used that a couple of times.

Also, there's some capacity planning and stuff like that built in. That's another issue, where people have asked for more resources and I've been able to show them that they aren't using the resources that we're giving them.

We're using the standard version, not the advanced. I think some of the features that I'm interested in are in the advanced and we just haven't gone to that yet.

I'd like to be able to do more customization. With the standard, I have to use out-of-the-box reports, dashboards, etc. With advanced, you can do more customization.

I haven't had any issues with it. We've upgraded it one time and that went very well.

We're not really growing out too much right now. I haven't really encountered the scalability issue yet, but I'm assuming that would work well too.

For vROps I have not used it. I haven't had to call them for anything. Again, everything has been running great, I haven't had any problem with it. We obviously call VMware for other issues but not for vROps.

The biggest issue that I have is that if it's not an urgent issue I don't get contacted back very quickly. So a lot of times, we'll end up solving issues ourselves, when they're not critical "down, down" issues. That is my big issue with VM support. Otherwise, they are giving us great support and help us out a lot.

We just weren't getting enough information just from the basic charts and things like that. I looked into other options and vROps just seemed like the best fit for us.

I like to stick with companies that work very closely with me, or even products that are owned by VMware because then I feel that the synchronization between the main VMware products and those other items works well. I don't have any issues with them.

I helped, but I was not the main person.

Complex. I think it takes a lot of insight into the product. You have to spend a lot of time preparing for it. And if you do that, then you'll see that things go pretty seamlessly.

When looking at vendors, support is important. We like to have good support. And then I would say ease of setup and ease of use. The more complex, the less interested we are.

Regarding vROps I would say to a colleague, "Totally do it." I think it would benefit your organization. You get a lot of good insight into what's going on very quickly and the cost of vROps is totally worth it.

For me, it's the dashboard. When you first go into the application, just getting that quick overview of what's going on and being able to take action without having to dig in and look at things.

For myself, it saves me a lot of time. I'm busy doing several different things so having that quick view into the environment saves a lot of time in my day. It also of streamlines the process so I can drill down and see exactly what's going on. Helps us resolve problems before they occur or more quickly resolve problems.

For what I use it for I can't think of any improvements needed. Except, perhaps, it's a little slow to load when you go in to it. It could be a little bit quicker to drill into.

Stability is great. Never had a problem with it.

Scalability is great as well. Haven't had any issues.

I haven't used it.

No.

But we knew we needed it because we needed to get a better picture of our environment and what was going on, to troubleshoot. We don't have the staff to do it so we try to utilize technology where we can to save on having to hire additional staff.

It was really easy to set up.I set it up myself.

Pricing is good for us. We're non-profit so we get a break on that.

I really look for support, it is extremely important to me. So if there is an issue, how soon are they going to respond? Also, local partners, that's important too. So a strong partner with a strong organization behind them.

Also, look for what's important to you. For us it was the single pane of glass, not another bolt-on vendor to try to have a view into it. It is nice having everything all live right there inside the center.

In terms of preparing for implementation, I didn't think it was too difficult. I don't know if there's a lot of preparation you need to. Maybe just some clean up work on the front end. It's more after it's implemented that you have things to do.