VMware Aria Operations Reviews

The vRealize Operations Manager gives you complete insight of the VMware environment. You can check the bottleneck in the environment and it can directly tell you what needs to be fixed. What I really like about vROps is the dashboard. It's completely insightful, very clean, simple, and even for those who don't really manage the environment, it wouldn't be difficult for them to understand by looking the dashboard what's wrong and how it needs to be fixed. That's what I like about vROps.

It's the ability to forecast. It would tell you what is overprovisioned, therefore you can accordingly fix it, which helps you save on your costs. If you are over-provisioning the VMs, you're adding more memory and storage, or CPU sources, which are going to waste. With this solution, we can actually keep them on track which helps save costs, which is good for the company.

With a little more smoothness to the application, as it can lag a bit at times. Although, I don't really find too many negatives with it.

For the next release, I would like to see the HA feature (should already be in the next release).

It's quite stable. I haven't tried the HA feature, which has recently been added, but I never had any problems with vROps.

It's quite scalable. We have instances for different vCenters running, so I think it is quite scalable.

I have used it once. Something broke while I was working and I had no idea what it was, so I call up the support guys. They were quite helpful and able to fix the problem.

We always had problems in understanding issues related to resources. So our temp, he suggested vROps and that's when we invested in it.

For this company, I was involved in the initial setup. It was mostly straightforward.

Even if you Google it, you will find the implementation steps. I didn't have any problems doing the installation. I think if you're a virtualization administrator, you should be able to manage.

CDW.

We chose VMware because they are the technology leader in virtualization. We have been using it for years now.

vROps is something that most companies should be using, because you never quite know where you're actually wasting a resource until you start using vROps.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They should be able to keep us informed (the most important aspect) on upcoming technology trends, the new releases, and new features.

From a manager's standpoint it's the dashboards. To be able to quickly and easily see what's going on in our environment, from my perspective. But it's able to find the hot spots and things that are happening in the environment and helps to be more proactive about troubleshooting and getting to the root cause.

As a manager, I'm a big user of dashboards and reporting, so I love vROps. I'm always trying to have them create different dashboards. Even I get in there at times and create my own dashboards and my guys will look in and say, what is that? And I'll say, "I just created this one on my own because I needed to have this other thing. You know, not to bother you guys with that one," and I'll dabble with it. I love the reporting, and it's visual. To be able to set that up on your bulletin board or electronic bulletin board, and have people come by and go, hey what's that all about? And I can tell them, this is where your sessions are, this is what's happening in your environment.

We're just really starting the journey into virtualization work. It's been about two and a half years, so the benefit really has been that my team, and the desktop engineering team as well, can see as they're developing a product what's going on, almost real-time, so they can figure out where we need to do optimization.

Honestly I don't know. It's just really good. Maybe the interface is a little bit archaic. It needs to be updated and again we're on view 6.2, we're not even on 7 yet. So maybe it's changed, but a more modern look and approach.

I'm not sure about exportability of data, and I haven't really toyed with that, I'm not even sure if it exists. Being able to find something and then export the needed data into something that's reusable for the team too. Visually, it looks great but what will you be able to do with it? You have to bring people over to your bulletin board and say look at this thing, or to your device and say look at this thing; versus being able to report out or maybe send out reports. So giving dashboards to people or even giving them periodic reports.

The stability part has probably contributed to what's going on in our environment. We've had a couple of ups and downs with our product, but overall it's good. The ups and downs in our environment are probably based on our configuration more so than the product itself.

We're trying to get it out to our help desk, dashboards for that kind of stuff. We haven't really done that yet but I envision us being able to do that. And then, from the management layer, being able to give people an idea of where their users are, how they're interacting with it, and giving them a dashboard so they can put some validity behind when their users are saying that there's an issue. Is it really an issue or is it a user issue? The biggest thing I see about vROps is it gives you a truth perspective in terms of, as I said, is it a user issue, a training issue, or is it truly a technology issue.

Our technical support is great. We have a TAM so we have a pretty good line in with finding the right technical resources, so it's a really good service.

I was not really hands on in the setup but I was there. I think it was pretty straightforward. Although, my guys are really smart, so what they make look easy may not be as easy as I would think.

VMware did come out for us, they did help us. We have a pretty good relationship with them. But I thought it was pretty straightforward.

No. We invested in the overall package and we got vROps as part of it.

Look for the partnership when choosing a vendor. We're in a pretty tough environment, healthcare, so we have some unique challenges. If things don't happen right, patient care is affected. So they have to be able to partner with us and understand the urgency behind some of the things we're trying to do. As long as they're flexible and can understand where we're coming from, that's fine. We've had some vendors that just don't get it. VMware has been excellent.

Utilize VMware. Let them come and help you. Utilize them to get some kind of canned reports or some kind of templates so you don't have to create them all from scratch.

That's probably the biggest thing: find other peers that have done that and then draw upon what they've already created so you don't have to recreate it.

The whole feature set, to be honest. Monitoring and, for me, the performance analysis.

It helps us to create better reports of historical analysis, of performance data, and do better capacity planning.

More stable upgrades, if that's a feature. Had some problems so far. Also, more reliable failure detection and more realistic out-of-the-box simplicity.

Quite good.

Could be better, to be honest.

It was okay. I'm not always able to get to the right person. It takes a while. Once I do reach the right person they are usually knowledgeable.

I stumbled into VMware and never got out, to be honest. It's been cool technology for multiple years.

It was straightforward.

We are the partner so we implement.

Nutanix, Rubrik, Cohesity.

When choosing a vendor the most important criteria are experience, maturity and, probably, documentation.

I would advise you get training because it's not so easy to start with and not get lost in vROps. Also, have everything ready the partner tells you to have and have straight expectations about what a solution does and does not do.

It gives a broad view of my environment, which I can basically see from one dashboard. My servers, storage, etc. That would be the most important one.

It doesn't. No benefits.

The biggest item that I would want to see is instant capture of data from storage. One second or even less than a one-second period, of capturing data. I think one minute is too long. There are too many things which can happen in one minute on storage devices.

It's stable, in a way. It crashes every eight months and I have to reboot it. And that's about it.

I only have 60 hosts, so I can't really say if it's scalable to a lot of environments.

I haven't used technical support, nor do I have a contact that might be able to help if needed. I'm a self-learner, so I go into the application and learn on my own. It didn't crash in a bad way that I had to call tech support.

I was using vCenter. I thought that vROps would give me benefits and I bought it.

I thought I needed a solution which would allow me and about five other team members to monitor the host, but unfortunately my team members are not monitoring anything so I'm stuck by myself. I know my environment, because I deal with it, so I don't need to monitor socially.

There was another solution that I though was the best because it allowed me to see what I wanted in the storage. But I went with VMware because it was one supplier of everything. I went for simplicity and that's what I paid for.

Straightforward. I did it myself.

Most important when considering vendors is price, that's the first one. And the ability to contact them in a timely fashion.

If you have less than 100 hosts, don't buy it, depending on what the pain in the environment is for you. My pain was storage and I researched storage. And that was my biggest obstacle. It depends on people, on their issues. Sometimes it's a CPU, sometimes the memory. I was going for the storage and, as I said, one minute for me in the storage environment is not enough. It needs to be much quicker.

The performance analytics, when we are troubleshooting performance issues. It's good to have insight into special metrics like CPU ready time, latency, network utilization. Otherwise, you're kind of like shooting in the dark, guessing what the problem could be.

From a conservative aspect, we can use the data to, for example, for purchase decisions. If someone asks for something and they are not using it, we're taking it back. So from a full-cost perspective or a show-back perspective, we are able to use that data and to say to application teams, "You are spec'd out, way over-provisioned." We're not seeing that so, for the business we are able to reduce cost by purchasing hardware because that data is showing us what needs to be and where it should be. So if application X is over-provisioned but application Y needs the utilization, we can shift those resources.

My number one request personally would be self-healing. So if there is an issue with the appliance, we should alerted and it should be clear as day. When you log in you get all these dashboards, everything looks really cool. But those dashboards don't do us any good if the health of the appliance is not 100%. So, if there are health issues with it, or it's not collecting data, it should self-heal. Or if the data is filling up on the disk, we need to know that and be able to click a button and say, "Do something about it," or "Give us step by step instructions on what to do to add a disk."

I think they could also work on the infrastructure a little bit.

It's highly customizable but it's hard to learn it. You have to be in there every day to really get the best use out of it. The nature of our organization is that my team kind is in charge of it but it really shouldn't be my team. It should be a monitoring performance type of team or operations team that owns it so that they can put the time in and create the proper dashboards. At the end of the day, they are going to be looking at those dashboards, not us.

So the ease of use: If you're not a vROps guy from the beginning, it's a high learning curve. It comes out of the box with all these settings, that is where training comes in. I know they offer courses for that. But I think the solution should be more natural in getting to know it.

I have some worries stability. Initially it was slow, so we ended up adding resources to it because the environment grows. That solved it. I'm not a big fan of the master data model that it has, so when we have failures, it's not always clear if the collectors are up.

You have to keep an eye on the actual appliances. If you're scaling higher, you're going to have to add add resources to the appliances themselves. Otherwise they slow down.

Their VMware technical support is always pretty good. In our specific case, we had a special issue that they couldn't resolve. Overall I would say it is good, when you get a hold of them.

We just open a ticket up on the web, we set the severity, and then they will work with us from there. They make it really easy to open them. I'll do my best to troubleshoot, but I only have so much time in the day. At the end of the day, I'm just going to open a support case and they'll help me directly.

We pay for support so, the business wants us to use it, take advantage. They look at how many support cases we open. Otherwise they might say, "Hey, you guys don't open up support cases. We're paying."

No. We just had the foresight to know we needed a solution like this because server sprawl is very concerning to me, personally. I don't want to have a whole bunch of hosts out there that I don't really need, because the bigger you get the harder it is to maintain it.

At the time, the other one was Turbonomic, but they are a little higher-end. We had to "sell" it to the business. vROps is not cheap either. We convinced the organization that it is in their best interest. And they followed suit.

There are different things to look for when choosing a vendor. From an engineering standpoint, it's the administration. From an organizational standpoint, it could be cost. So it has to come in between those and it has to be a stable product as well. Those three factors.

As engineers, we're the decision influencers but at the end of the day we are not cutting the check for the organization. So, we have to do our job to sell it to the organization if we think it should be recommended. They have to have total buy-in.

I think the decision depends on your server infrastructure. If you're hyper converged, your solution may already have those analytics built in to it. So first check if your infrastructure or server provider already has that. A Nutanix may have that. If you are a traditional shop with blade or rack and you know you don't have it then there's really no competition besides Turbonomic.

Being able to get detailed analysis on different applications.

We are able to do additional detailed reports for our customers, in terms of certain spikes in the environment, different loads, etc.

Possibly additional automation.

It's pretty good. 

It's good.

We weren't using anything previously, but we're always looking at new technology, just to see if it might benefit the customer.

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

Before implementation, review best practice guides. There are a lot of them out there. It will make the process easier.

Hyper-V and Acropolis.

We went with VMware's vROps because the customer selected it.

I would definitely recommend this solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: simplicity, functionality, but mainly simplicity. 

It gives you a better understanding of your VM environment. 

The sizing of VMs, whether they are properly-sized and/or that they are central plain glass to see your environment.  

It's like plain glass. It helps you get to the problem quicker than you would without it. 

We've only been using it for three to four months.

We haven't scaled it enough in our environment.

We didn't have another product we were really using.

We heard about vROps through word-of-mouth.

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

Not really. We've wanted this for a couple of years and we just didn't have the budget for it.

For anyone looking at vROps, "Do it."

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Vendor relationship. The VM work has got to be absolutely rock solid for us along with the stability. We have to feel comfortable running the enterprise on it. 

The most valuable features are the alerts about the environment because that way, if we have a server that goes down, a cluster we know about, or if there's a performance issue, we'll be alerted about it.

If we have one server in a cluster that went down or if we lost a network adapter, we would be able to know.

Anything that is more helpful to vSAN performance, such as dashboards.

Stability's good, stays up and running all the time.

I haven't really needed to scale, we have small companies.

I haven't been too impressed. There seems to be a lot of running around or not hearing back.

Our VMware salesperson recommended it.

Somewhere in the middle of straightforward and complex. I remember setting it up and dashboards would have empty data, and I'd have to do Google searches to figure out how to fix it.

Most important when selecting a vendor are support and performance.

It's a great product if you can get it to work properly and function according to your needs.