VMware Aria Operations Reviews

The ability to project our workload and determine what kind of hardware needs we have into the future.

For example, we recently made a large purchase of servers and blades, and the solution told us exactly how many we needed to get through in X amount of time.

It has made it much easier to approve purchases.

We are upgrading the solution now, so we would like the alerting piece to be a little bit easier in the next version.

Some of the metrics of their recordings are a little confusing and hard to figure out (what exactly what they're telling you).

We started our PoC with the solution a year ago (June) and went live with it in September 2016.

It's very stable.

Right now, it scales up well beyond where we're at and where I think we would ever be.

Whenever I need help, I contact my local SE (sales engineer). He is very knowledgeable. When he can't answer me, he gets other guys who can assist.

At the time, we did not have anything besides vCenter, so we were looking for a new solution because we really didn't have anything which could tell us what our workloads were doing to our hosts or provide us with anything else we really needed to know.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was very easy. I had assistance from our SE and our sales rep on a call, and we set it up as a PoC. Then, we just roll out that PoC and licensed it after.

VMware and VMturbo.

We were already heavily into VMware. We looked at other operations and the projection planning and we went with VMware. The projection planning and budgeting wallets are a major piece and there are only once a year. The VM Operations Manager gave us more the rest of the year than the other solution did.

It's a very good product. You can't go wrong.

The UI is great, and it's fairly intuitive to use.

The most valuable thing it has is the depth of historical data. You can dig in really deep. If there was a problem at any point in time in the past, we can use it to get an idea where it might have come from.

Unfortunately, it hasn't done a whole lot in that regard. It's taken a lot of setup time to kind of keep it in tune. So, for us, it hasn't given us quite the data we were hoping for. We came from LogicMonitor. We got the data a lot faster and easier from there.

More globalized templates would be much better. Templates for different applications, for example, "this is a web server, so these are the things you're gonna want to monitor on the web server." You would just build from a template and it would apply nicely. The product should already come with 50-100; templates for a desktop, for an active directory server, and other generic server templates, so that you can just apply what you're probably going to want to monitor on any given server.

Also, it doesn't answer any question without you asking it first. I want it to say when it sees something out of whack. It should bring that up higher into the stack and let 99% of the stuff sit out and be ignored.

Stability wise, it's been good. I can't think of any crashes we've had with it yet. It's had some issues connecting to Horizon View, and keeping the connections alive, but other than that it's been good.

We don't have enough scale for it to matter.

I don't think we've used it on that product.

We needed some way to be able to see performance issues, particularly in the VDI environment. We had played around with using LogicMonitor, and we switched because it was cheaper.

Also important for us when considering a vendor is that it's a "set-and-forget" system. Just something that tells us when there's a problem and doesn't bother us when there's not.

It's pretty complex. There's a lot of tweaking to get it to either report on something, or not report on something. There isn't a good set of templates built into the system to really make it go fast. You can install it quickly, you can get it logging quickly, but then it's just a glorified log system.

Try to get it to actually install and run.

We can check the capacity management, then tell customers their usage on the machine compared to what they're asking for and right-size the VM's based off that information. This is valuable because we are overcapacity in their environments, by far.

This improves organizations through monitoring, and showing customers the data that their BEAM is not actually using what it is saying that it is.

The UI needs to be made more user-friendly.

It's been pretty stable.

Scale is pretty low. We're a big environment.

I have not used technical support for vROps.

If you are looking at vROps, take your time researching it. Make sure you get with vROps. Make sure you do all the recommended settings and don't rush it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor (for our company):

• Discount prices
• If they can handle the scale of our business, because we are a large scale.
• The support behind it. That we can access it 24/7.

Big things. Scale is the biggest, usually because handling our scale is hard.

Analytics, reporting, and visibility into the expansive virtual datacenter. We get a lot of data that normally you wouldn't be able to see without it.

Gives you a single pane of glass for your virtual infrastructure, as far as capacity planning, analytics, and even custom dashboards are available.

It's helped a lot with our capacity planning and it helps a lot with our "what if" scenarios.

I would like to see a larger online library and a more expansive YouTube presence of how-to's. A lot of the stuff you have to look up, to go to multiple third-party sites on how to do it. VirtuallyGhetto.com is a really popular one but it should be one-stop shopping. If I want to know how to do something inside a VMware tool, I should be able to find that inside a VMware community on a VMware website.

It's very stable.

It scales incredibly well. At the initial installation we put "large" because we just didn't know how large it was going to be. But from all the documentation, what we did is big enough to support the most expansive enterprises.

Six out of 10.

First-call resolution is low. You have to call back a lot and get another tech agent who is a little bit more knowledgeable and, unfortunately, at the enterprise we don't have the time to be calling back.

I was using Excel. We switched because I had no idea what was going on in my data center. I couldn't get any key metrics to anyone.

It was very complex. That were a lot of the calls to tech support. A lot of the documentation wasn't accurate or it was outdated. And a lot of dead-ends, so we ended up calling support to get the installation complete.

We had a third-party on site to help us with the installation.

Turbonomic, VMTurbo, and Splunk. But I don't think Splunk does the same thing, so, the first two. We chose VMware because they gave us the best price and because of the enterprise association we already have with them.

When selecting a vendor, stability is one of the big things for us. Also, cost is another big thing. We don't do a lot of bleeding edge companies, we're more conservative so stability is important.

Regarding cost, it's especially important to look at forecasting the cost in the future. The per-socket model's okay but SNS services and solutions or maintenance is what really drives up your budget.

I would suggest going to the VMware website, downloading that 30-day key, and kick the tires on it. Check it out.

And for implementation, bring in a third-party vendor to help your internal team. But allow your internal team to actually do the implementation.

The dashboard: Create your own dashboard and it will give you the right result that you want to see. It's very usable. It shows you many tricks that you can use. It provides you with what you are trying to search for.

Saves us lots of money.

Monitoring:

• Regular stuff, such as if machines are up or down.
• The CPU and how it is working.

I didn't scale it.

I haven't used it.

If you have enough money to go to an enterprise company, don't go to another company. Use VMware. Other companies make a similar solution, but not as great.

I don't think there is another company that makes cables better than VMware.

The most important criteria for choosing a vendor:

• Support
• Reputation of the vendor.

• Alerts
• The insight as to what is going on in the environment.

If there is something wrong with a particular VM, we can see what's going on. It alerts on disk space, memory, etc. to what is going on. Then we also use it for our Horizon View environment. It gives us more details which we can't get on the dashboard from the canned Horizon View Administration consult.

It's mostly from the administrative side for us. It has helped us stay on top of issues in our environment, less downtime, etc.

It is somewhat hard to manage the alerts. Granted, that is probably training on my side. But I would like to actually do more custom alerts for our environment. I know you can do it. It is just hard to intuitively figure it out. You've got to dig into it. It would be nice for VMware to simplify it.

Last six to 12 months.

I haven't had any issues with it.

It's been fine.

We haven't used it.

I was not involved with the initial setup for this organization, but I have set it up in other organizations.

It is really easy to set up. You just deploy the OVA, and it's done. Give them an IP address, point it at your environment, and you're good.

I really like the new version. Better interface.

If you are looking at the solution, I say, "Go for it." It has been good for us.

We've been using it mostly with capacity management and, especially, with decommissioning workloads that weren't necessarily used properly or sized properly when built. Thus, we've been able to decommission probably 600 servers over the last two years that either had been used for a short time and nobody ever told us that we could decommission them or were never used in the first place after being built.

Efficiency has been the big thing. Being able to cut down those unused workloads has freed up capacity and prevented us from having to purchase more hardware which we don't actually need.

Price could be cheaper. I would like it to be able to project into vCenter the information that we're seeing inside of vROps. It'd be nice if we didn't always have to go into the vROps webpage in order to see the more in-depth info. Obviously pushing that into vCenter comes with performance issues with the vCenter web, so I understand why it's not always been there but it would be nice.

Pretty good. We've had a couple of issues with management plugins causing some small outages with the vROps appliance, but other than that, it's been pretty stable for us.

I haven't had any problems with it.

I haven't used it for vROps.

I was involved in the initial setup. Originally, it was pretty rough. We first put it in about four years ago and it wasn't terribly intuitive at the time. Updates, especially recently, have been pretty straightforward.

In-house.

We invested in a new solution because we have issues with people asking for things and not necessarily using them, or people getting distracted by other problems that come down from upper management. The push towards cleaning up some of that mess was a big part of it. It also gave us the ability to get more in-depth into how workloads were performing and being able to identify where we were having issues before the app consumers and users were seeing major issues. This was something we really wanted to push towards.

If someone is researching this solution: Get an expert in. It is such a big solution that if you walk into it not knowing what you're doing and don't have anybody to lead you along, this is what will happen:

1. You're going to look at it.
2. You're going to buy it.
3. You're going to install it.
4. You're going to look around and see so much information.
5. You're going to have no idea what to do with it.

Know what you want to do with it and make sure it's going to fit that. If you get the chance, talk to other companies that use it or use similar products. Just kind of get an idea of how well it works for them and what pitfalls to avoid with it.

• It is about being able to keep tabs on your VMware environment as a whole, instead of having to log into your vCenter all day and keeping tabs.
• It's about being able to get alerts for whatever goes wrong with your systems, and what helps in getting around in your vCenter environment.

We have use it to maintain our VMware infrastructure, and for that, it seems to be good.

What we can do is product chain monitoring. We can keep tabs on a certain app which is running. Whatever is wrong just shows up as red, instead of green, then when we know who to talk to. It's an easier way of doing things than logging into vCenter for every little problem, and trying to find out what's wrong.

Maybe a little more flexible in terms of being able to combine monitoring results with results from other products without having to buy stuff from Blue Medora. It used to be that way in the past, but they gave it all to Blue Medora, and they charged everything, "with a fork".

It seems okay. Not much to complain about, since it seems stable enough. We have had a few problems with the stability in the past, when we tried to make it a cluster, but as long as you don't do something like that it works.

The issues we did have were general database corruption issues, and problems getting it to do whatever it was suppose to do. Also, problems getting settings changed, which kept making them stick.

This is not an issue for us yet. We don't have enough VMs to go outside the scaling properties of vROps.

We have used the basic VMware support, and it seems alright.

If you want to monitor something else, besides VMware, use something else. Use it for monitoring VMware, nothing else.