VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Monitoring, capacity management and the whole holistic view of our virtualization infrastructure were the key features for us.

First, we were using a different virtualization platform with zero monitoring and now, we have moved over to a virtualization site with vROps, so it's pretty good; it does what it says. It has been very helpful for us in terms of the roll out of VMware.

It has tremendously improved the way our organization functions. As I mentioned earlier, we had zero insight previously to the whole virtual platform, however, now with vROps and the analytics that it provides, we probably have insight in to what's happening with Harperizer stack and virtual machines so it's very helpful. Capacity management was a different problem altogether, but with vROps capacity management and predictive analysis, it's pretty helpful; it's really helpful.

Frankly, the predictive DRS was one such feature that needs improvement and proactive HA was another. I think we need more integration points between the IT Center to the Service Point which I don't think is a straightforward exercise. I think they also need to focus on the IT SNMP so that the integration is more seamless.

The navigation tool reporting and the way we create reports could also improve. We're good engineers, so I don't think that should be a problem, at least not for us. We have great dashboards and the reporting structure is pretty good.

It's pretty stable. We just broke down and we're in the process of migrating to VMware and so far, it has been stable. With VMware's PSE, I think we have a good design out there to support/sustain based on the requirements.

Again, it has scaled to meet all the requirements. Definitely, with the help of VMware, it has scaled to support all the data center, including the robots.

I would probably give the technical support team an 8/10 rating.

There is room for improvement probably in terms of the support that we received per se. I think we want to ensure that our engineers have access to the best VMware engineers. We don't want the level one teams and try to do the same stuff that we know our engineers are capable of doing. I think we need more streamline in terms of acknowledging the customer's impact and ensuring that it's translated properly within VMware, so that we have the right engineer from day zero.

We have been with the vCloud Suite and the whole product family. As I mentioned, monitoring was the very key factor for us and towards the success of this project. Hence, vROps was the perfect choice with VMware to have vROps as a monitoring tool.

Previously, it was all in-house developed scripts, then SCOM, partially one of the virtual machines; but other than that no other solution, otherwise a stack.

Cooperation from the vendor is what we look for while selecting a vendor. We need to ensure that the vendor understands our agenda, our goals, and then, works hand-in-hand with us, so as to ensure we need our timelines, then we can go to the market and are up and running. We don't need to beat around the bush with VMware and they have done a pretty good job with that.

The setup was straightforward. There were certain bits which were complex partly due to the way we do things. But again, with VMware's support and guidance, I think our roll out was pretty smooth and we hit all the targets in terms of our project turning; so, it was green all the way through.

I would definitely advise others to have a look at vROps. It's definitely good. The analytics engine is very powerful and the management feature is pretty good. Also, if you have other portfolios like VRA, VRB, it seamlessly operates with the VMware component. I would definitely recommend it.

The key for us is visibility into the infrastructure, both at the application layer and with performance of historical trends. Thus, the ability to drop in and see when an application has changed, what's gone wrong, and getting them to focus on a quick remediation.

Quick remediation of problems.

They could improve their consistency in execution.

I would like to see these additional features in the next release:

• Deeper dive analytics
• Better licensing models.

No issues. It's been good.

No issues so far.

We have contacted technical support in the past. They are very good. We do have a TAM resource on-site, which definitely gives us an in when we are having problems.

We weren't using anything previously for virtualization. We invested in this solution because we needed to stay ahead of our competition and landscape. It was the obvious choice for consolidating our datacenters and simplifying the infrastructure.

It seemed fairly straightforward, but I have very complex engineers.

IBM, PureSoftware, and Dell EMC.

Advice for anyone looking at VM solutions:

• Stay abreast of the changing technology, because it is moving fast. Simple is better for time to market.
• Do some PoCs and train your engineers.
• Research total cost of ownership, deployment time, and the complexity of their applications.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Reliability
• Peer reviews
• Technical support
• Their willingness to work with us.

Metrics and telemetry across our many environments, which allows us to be able to have transparency in capacity and performance management across a large enterprise infrastructure. The analytics that vROps provides related to things like oversized virtual machines, waste, and so on.

Capacity and performance management take five minutes, instead of five days.

There's room for improvement in the upgrade process. It always becomes a bit of a challenge, and the one big thing for us is we have no means of creating a CICD upgrade process for it. Somebody's got to download bits, click buttons, etc. until you get to the final stage. I'd like to see it fully-automated so that we don't have to mess around with manual tasks. It can take anywhere from two days to a week to complete the upgrade.

Also, the interface is very busy. It's complicated. It's tough for people. I can't tell my management to go log in and find something. You really have to drill in and click deep, so a lot of what we do is pull metrics out and put them in other dashboards, just so they're meaningful for us. If there was a means of doing that, it would be a better solution. Though it's definitely getting better over time.

It was all over the place. I think VMware and our Technical Account Manager (TAM) were a big help.

The initial issue was we downloaded it, then installed it ourselves. We didn't really talk to anybody. We probably should have kept tabs with the people who know the product from VMware.

It's gotten better over time. We had some challenges at first. It took a while to get things going right for us.

It's getting much better. The latest version is much better.

We have approximately 80,000 virtual machines. It works pretty well overall.

We have a good impression so far. We usually go through our TAM and get through to somebody who maybe is at a higher level when we need help. Though I don't really call them.

We switched because we needed a streamlined solution. Before, we had people logging in to do a lots of different things, like creating spreadsheets, charts, and graphs.

My team was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward, but again, it didn't work at first because of some decisions we made with the architecture. So after talking to VMware, they kind of led us in the right direction. We made some changes and things started working really well after that.

vROps and vSphere integrate well together.

The community is huge. We're really big into open source. We rely on the community for just about anything and everything.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Reputation
• Brand
• Accessibility.

The monitoring.

Easy to identify the bottlenecks.

We would like it to connect to other third-party products. We monitor some Cisco switches, and we are also looking for some storage. At the moment we only use it for EMC.

Sometimes it's very difficult to browse between different components. I'm looking at the latency and it's difficult to figure out which data store was related to that latency. That was one problem I figured out, so linking different components would be helpful.

I would also like to see more automation.

Very good. It was very stable. No problem at all.

We don't scale too fast.

We've barely used it. Once or twice, but for general questions. Nothing about problems. I would give it an eight or nine out of 10. We were able to reach the right person.

Sys IQ and another I can't remember at the moment. We switched when I realized I was spending too much time on troubleshooting.

I'm looking at the features, I'm not looking too much at the name of the company.

Pretty simple.

We deployed it for ourselves in our datacenter, but also for our customers.

vROps would be my advice because it's simple to use, you have a panel to very quickly identify trouble, eventual problems; and it's easy to troubleshoot.

Make sure you have a good understanding of the infrastructure. Define the product you need to monitor.

vROps allows us to quickly get an overview of what's going on in the environment, without even having to know too much. So from the low-end to the high-end individual, everyone can get something out of it. Obviously the better you are at it, the more you can truly drill down and find something invaluable. But even the service desk people that we have can look at it in the morning and say, "Okay, the environment is good or bad." Or they might see things in there before the customers do. So it's just a very quick and easy way to see what's going on.

How tightly integrates with the VM world. There's a lot of nice solution packs so we use Horizon, vSAN. They get integrated into the solution packs initially but then they get integrated with the product over time, and we get this better end to end view. Obviously we use VDI with vSAN to also get the end to end view, the protocol down to the storage and everything in between. So it's really clever.

I'd like to see some sort of better integration with vSphere. I couldn't get into the account setup, so it would be nice to set up an account somewhere which connects to vSphere. It would be nice if that was more streamlined. It would be something like, "Here's my vCenter, here's my admin credentials, create me an account, do the right delegation for me." Essentially it would automate the setup a bit further. I had to create roles, create accounts, and that sort of repetitive work that whoever has to deploy vROps will do.

I've never had a trouble with it. Once it's been set up it's been really "set-and-forget" from a management point of view.

My environment is probably, in the big picture, fairly small. We have one server that easily covers our environment. I do not consider vROps resource-heavy at all.

I think I had to use them only during set up because we were getting a lot of false positives. And that was a known issue then. When we first set up the environment and we were saying, "Are these... we don't believe we're seeing that but vROps says we're seeing that." Once that was all squared away it was fixed in a later version. Just bad timing, I guess.

We got it resolved quite quickly, so really no issues with tech support from that point of view. It was understood this was an issue on VMware side, and it was knocked out of the park. They knew what they were doing.

We went with it because it was recommended to me by a colleague who had already deployed it. He showed me what he gets out of it, and I could see the benefit in it for us as well. So the switch came internally to us.

I did the deployment at my site. It's very straightforward. It's deploying an appliance and just connecting it to your vSphere environment. You need to let it sit for a bit, to make sure it gets baselines for everything, but it was really easy. Took me more than about a day or two to get it fully running and to get everything connected that I wanted to get connected.

I had the offer of a team but I did not accept it at the time. I wasn't sure how much I would use the product.

Microsoft, and that's really about it.

When selecting a vendor to go with, it goes down to total cost of ownership pretty quickly. The product has to work, it's got to be reliable, and obviously it's got to provide benefits that are worth whatever investment in, time, money, licenses, you have to make.

Every solution we add to the environment adds complexity to the environment, so it's now under the product we advocated to use or maintain. You can only have so many products in your environment before there's just too much information so you need to keep it simple, to a certain extent.

Set it up and test it. It's really not hard to do. One day, two days, depending on how complex your environment is, and then just let it sit. It will pull in a lot of information, and you can see very quickly if it's telling you things you need to know.

There are some nice VMware session videos on it. Also read up. There's plenty of guides online. Really, it's not a complex thing to implement.

I can get insights into my infrastructure. Along with the VMware software, it offers me infrastructure consolidation. And I can get a predictive input on what is going where and how my infrastructure is working.

It enables to me to do a deep dive and get insights into my infrastructure. When I have predictive input on what is going on in my datacenter, it saves me lots of time and lots of cost as well.

The dashboard which provides the information; if it could be like Salesforce, that kind of dashboard. Because what I end up having to do a lot of drill downs into each and every inventory to detect the issues. So if I could have all the issues on one dashboard and the rest in another one it would make my life easier.

I've used as vROps now for the last five years.

It is absolutely stable. I haven't had any issues to date.

The scalability is also good because nowadays datacenters are not that simple. It's always scalable up and down and sideways.

I have not used it to date.

No we did not. We went with it because it would give me the insight into the datacenter. It was the ultimate solution. And since we are using the VMware environment, it was a must have.

It was straightforward.

We did it ourselves.

Dell, EMC, and one other. Among the most important criteria in choosing a vendor are their technology roadmap as well as the productivity.

When you look at the VMware infrastructure and software piece, they're more or less offering what vROps is offering you right now. It is comparable to any other third-party solution for the VMware. So it's always better to go with the best one.

To prepare for implementation, first and foremost you need to make sure that you inventory all the hardware and the stakes. And it's important that everything is on the same version. Multiple versions will make your life more complex because all the versions are in additional dashboards. It's not like a motherboard version and then a dashboard. Each version has different dashboards.

Capacity planning:

• Being able to see what's being used.
• What's forecasted to run out of space.
• What's the most constrained resource at any time.

When I get asked questions on how our infrastructure is doing (by management), I can give an accurate answer.

The advanced version could be more affordable, therefore giving us access to more advance features.

Five years.

I have never had any problems with it.

No issues. When I made it to capacity, it's been built pretty seamless to do that.

We've got an account manager. We also have an SE from VMware to help if I get stuck with support, but I haven't had that problem.

I don't know if you're gonna receive better support with another vendor than you do from VMware themselves.

They are very knowledgeable. I feel like I am getting the getting the right person when I contact them.

I wasn't involved with the initial setup, but I have done upgrades (by myself) and they have been very straightforward. Upgrades take about an hour to an hour and a half to complete.

We didn't really evaluate anyone else.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Brand name reputation
• Support, how good is it (according to other customers and community forums).

The ability to take a look inside my environment and tell me, not only how I'm using my resources, but also to help me better plan and reallocate resources or plan for increasing the amount of the resources that I may need.

It allows us to do future capacity planning. It also has the ability to go in and do some health monitoring and some preventive type maintenance without us having to get involved with the use of the Python strip. So it actually frees up additional resources on our team with the use of the automated scripts. We don't have to do certain tasks based on certain triggers and alarms that happen inside, that it actually catches inside of vROps.

Right now, it pretty much handles itself so it's hard to say. I can't really speak to anything that I would want to change in it right now. One of my operation guys might have a different aspect take on it.

I won't give VMware a 10 out of 10 because we don't want them to stop innovating.

The only thing I would say, and it has nothing to do with the product, it has more to do with the releases. If we could get the release of the reports when we do our assessments to also coincide with the release of the next product. That might be a little something that we could do. For example, 6.5 is out with the list of canned reports. 6.6 comes out but we have to wait on the reports for that. It's minor but it would be nice to have. That would kick it up to a 9.2 out of 10.

It's solid. I love it. It's a great product. No issues. Everything from the install to the actual day-to-day operational aspects of it. It's been really good.

We have two datacenters. One in Pleasanton, California another one in Fremont, California. We had no issues with the sizing of our vROps and, in fact, we have it monitoring and doing maintenance at both our datacenters.

We really haven't had too many issues so I can't speak to the tech support piece of it.

No, we didn't have anything. We needed something to tell us how we were using our resources. We needed to make a purchase but we wanted to make sure that we made the purchase in the right way and sized the right way. We looked at some other tools, but vROps just made more sense because it's VMware and that's our infrastructure.

For us, the most important vendor criteria are availability, knowledge, as well as how solid their product is and their reputation. And make sure that they've been around for a while.

It was pretty straightforward. We downloaded the appliance, installed it, and it was really pretty painless. One thing that we did do, we consulted our VMware TAM to assist us with the initial setup, and understanding which reports we wanted to see and that type of customization.

If you're looking to size your physical hardware or you're looking to rightsize your virtual infrastructure, then definitely take a look at vROps. It's a great tool for it. One of the easiest on the market to use and it'll provide you with a lot of good information.