VMware Aria Operations Reviews

The most valuable feature has definitely been the ability to drill down on the performance metrics, to troubleshoot issues that arise.

Some of the areas that we have run into issues with are the upgrades, sometimes. We've had a few issues with that and had to work with support with that before.

I think managing the size, the sizing of the actually product itself can be improved. Several times, we had to go back and reevaluate how we had sized the environment.

The only other thing would be to make it easier for our end users to consume the data. Sometimes we've had to do a lot to try to customize dashboards; we spent a lot of time on that. If they develop ways to make that a little bit easier, so we can make it a little simpler for our users.

I've been using vROps for about three years.

It has been consistently stable. As I’ve mentioned, the only issues we've had are some upgrades, really.

The support has generally been pretty good with that. We've had some tough issues, so it's been pretty good. They managed to resolve them. We've got one that's in the queue right now, but they are working with us on it. It has to do with tagging.

Even though we became more virtualized, we were using traditional products such as HP OpenView and so on; we really weren't getting the full picture. We knew we needed something that was more hypervisor aware. It’s made a huge difference.

It really became mandatory as we started virtualizing things such as SQL Server and Oracle, because we really had spent a lot of time troubleshooting them.

There's some complexity to the initial setup, to do it right. We did have an engagement with VMware, for them to actually install it, because we knew there was some complexity to it.

It's a good solution. A warning: You probably need to make sure you can give it the proper amount of attention and time. You're just not going to throw it out there, hit the wizard and just walk away and say "Well, it's done." You're not going to be fair to the product or to yourself if you don't do that.

My personal requirements for a vendor are:

• Obviously, integration with our current tools, with the hypervisor and so on, which helps VMware a lot.
• Ease of maintenance, so far as updates and so on. I don't really want to spend a whole lot of time on that. Actually, vROps performs properly. We've had products before that just didn't perform very well. When that happens, the users just won't use it. It's very important.

The most valuable feature is the reporting, being able to give accurate reports to our management on what's going on in our VMware environment, for example, if they want to know what capacity is remaining on certain systems. We also like the fact that we can get ahead of a problem. They like the fact that we can go ahead and get ahead of a problem with vROps. Pretty much on a daily basis, we can see in a single pane of glass what our environment looks like, looking at the heat maps and so on. That's what makes it valuable to us.

For example, most of the problems on a daily basis are related to disk space utilization on VMs.

It also helps whenever there are anomalies with systems; if there's a lot of CPU contention or a problem with the host.

There haven’t yet been any other side benefits that specifically help us as an organization function, but we're actually looking to start utilizing it more for the enterprise edition that lets us delve into applications. We're not quite sure we're going to go with VMware for that.

It is somewhat not as user friendly as I think it could be. With configuring custom reports, custom dashboards, sometimes there can be a lot involved, where I wish it would be a little easier.

Also, I’d like more canned reports. Some of the reports are nice in some of the features, but I’d like more customizable reports. For example, if we have a group of VMs and we want to just get a simple report or a more complex report, to me, there are too many steps to get that done.

It's pretty stable to us. It doesn’t become slow down any more than expected; we have a pretty big environment, we have 3000 VMs, with over 300 hosts.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

We previously did not have a solution for monitoring our VMware infrastructure. We went with vROps because we were a VMware workshop and they provided us with a solution that we thought fit with us.

I was involved in the initial setup; it was not that complex. To get it all up and running, stood it up for all our systems, with the assistance of an outside vendor, it took three days.

Make sure you understand the difference between the standard, advanced and enterprise editions, what you can and cannot do with each edition. Make sure what you're going to get and what you're not going to get. For example, they present the enterprise edition to you, but the only thing you might be able to get is the standard edition, which doesn't let you customize dashboards and doesn’t have other functionality.

The automation is the most valuable feature; the whole automation and building a VM from scratch, all the way to the VM and life cycle the VM.

We can build a VM faster. From the same business unit, we can deploy VM in less time than we were doing it before.

There's some improvements that they can do as far as make it more user-friendly and get away from Java.

It's not that easy to understand and I found even at VMware, it is really hard to get someone that can answer some of the questions we have as far as the product.
I think they released a new solution recently, so I need to go back and see what's new on it but I’ve already seen some things that got fixed as far as going from one version to another. For example, there's more integration with vRA now.

Stability’s good; no problems at all.

Scalability is great.

I have not really used technical support.

We were doing a lot of scripting, and that doesn't scale to the way we wanted it to, so that's why we're going to use vRA.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor like VMware is that it will support Unix and Windows at the same time; VMware was more user-friendly with Unix machines; it comes with certain versions and flavors of Unix.

The initial setup was easy, but what came after that was complex, due to the fact that we needed to have multiple modules.

We’re thinking of Microsoft Azure Stack. It's not out on the market yet, but we're waiting on that.

Is it worth the money? That would be the question.

Because we're only using the foundation version, it's really nice to be able to have the one spot to look at all the details over the last six hours, troubleshooting, tagging on the performance statistics together.

We typically dive into it for troubleshooting when our customers complain of performance issues. It really helps by showing a little bit better-detailed report of how high latency is, storage and networking.

Because we're using the free version, it's nice that we can show our management team that, hey, it is a useful feature, so maybe we need to invest in a better monitoring tool for these solutions.

t also helps some of my newer technicians understand how the different components of a vSphere infrastructure actually work, or tied together a little bit.

I'd like a little bit more usability out of the foundation level, because our customers say it's really small. So it's hard to justify going up to that next level.

One of the biggest areas with room for improvement is more automated reports, so I don't have to send technicians in to get them.

I haven't had any stability issues at all.

Our problem is we're a management solution provider for multiple customers. All our sites are very distributed and have their own vCenters. So the problem is that I have no single console to view all of our environments in a singular spot. Each site gets their own vROps or vCOPS. Then we have to go into each one and review it as needed.

We do not really use technical support. We don't have a lot of need to go to technical support for the monitoring solution.

Initial setup was really straightforward because we just use the virtual appliance deployment.

We use this solution because I need a way to show my customers what we're doing in order to justify what they're paying for support.

I haven't had a chance yet to look at any other vendors, so far.

With the foundation version being included with vSphere software, it doesn't hurt to have it in there. So usually at least deploy that because then, if you upgrade, all that data comes with it.

If I was using the standard version with all the additional features, I might have rated it a little bit higher.

The most valuable feature is getting straight to the problem; figuring out the problem and getting to it. It allows me to verify what the problem is and then to dig deep into the problem to see what the solution would be.

• Quicker solutions to problems that appear out of the blue

vROps has not helped me avoid any critical outages, but I can see things coming up and I'll adjust. That's the big thing, so I don't even get close to an outage preferably.
I see the same type of improvements from vROps’ capacity management and performance management features. Seeing ahead is what avoids any problems.

When it finds a problem, the product currently provides certain solutions for you to implement to resolve the problem. It might be nice to have a trigger that would actually implement that solution directly into the VMware or into the WM itself; an action.

I have not encountered any stability issues at all.

I haven't had to think about scalability.

I used technical support in the beginning, but just during setup. Since then, nothing.
At the time, technical support was fine. It worked out fine.

The problem was that I wasn't using anything and I was going all over the place in VMware and vSphere to try and figure out issues. I also wanted to see ahead of myself; what was coming down the chain and vROps allows that. It gives me a short-term and a long-term view of my environment.

Initial setup was pretty easy. I just ran into a problem involving a previous version or two versions behind, called support and it was solved.

I think there were other vendors on my shortlist, but I really didn't get into it.

When selecting the vendor, and not the product, the most important criteria would be support. That's really big. And how the vendor presents itself – you know, presenting itself, the company, and presenting the application or software that they're selling to us.

Give it a shot.

Earlier versions were working fine and helping a lot, but the latest version simplified the management view. I can get to the view I want much easier. That's why I gave it 4.5 stars; probably, previous versions would be less than that.

The most valuable feature of the product is the visibility into the infrastructure and user experience of the customer's network. It shows detailed metrics that are otherwise very difficult to collect on your own. You can pull up the latency between your storage arrays, your CPU, contention that you would have between there, and RAM utilization based on host, based on VM, and based on application cluster.

It allows them to remedy problems much quicker in their environments, get that continuous health and improvement; a continuous improvement process.

We have used it to identify problems that avoids outages or shortens outage time, and for performance and capacity management.

I would like to see a rewrite of the database; a rewrite of the underlying supporting infrastructure.

It should be able to capture historical in-guest metrics for VDI. Currently, it has a limited set of data that it can keep over time, which is challenging when trying to support an organization long-term.

I’m not as comfortable with regard to stability. Some of the limitations of the database concern me. It is able to accept third-party data, but limits the amount it can take, in order to keep performance up. VMware actually limits their partners on what data they want them to send, as well as limit some of the information the partners collect because it'll overrun the schema. There are some architectural changes that must be made that will take time and resources.

Again, I have concerns regarding the underlying database architecture.
I have not experienced slowness.

Personally, I have not used technical support. Our customers do though.

We were previously using multiple tools, so this product collapsed a lot of tools into a singular platform to view all the information.

We also use LogicMonitor, and there are a couple of others out there that we're using right now.

Validate your environment in terms of how large you plan to grow, and ensure that the environment is going to give you what you need.

I would say the operational management piece for policy management and remediation as well as the predictive analytics and smart alerts. This can come in real handy in an environment that is constantly changing whether you are taking resources out or putting them in. Also the trending analytics you get from the performance monitoring as well as the capacity management features for planning and better optimization for the overall IT Infrastructure.

I would say for the short term and initial benefit of installing the software is capacity management which is something that immediately returns valuable data. Your ability once installed to see your entire virtual computer environment and what resources are over or under allocated such as vCPU, memory and storage. This can provide large savings in hardware purchases as well as allow you to recapture those resources and re-purpose them. The more long term benefits are felt in the policy management and the automated/guided remediation that can be setup to help analyze and resolve operational bottlenecks.

I would say the reporting side could be more flexible as well as including more information, maybe adding additional graphics and charts to better summarize the data it captures for operational review.

I've used it for over four years. We have integrated Operations Manager into the various layers of our IT infrastructure both virtual and physical. This assisted us in proactively monitoring as well as performing the analyzation and automated remediation of operational resources with in our dedicated and shared service environments. It also gave us the ability to provide high level operational reports to the companies senior management.

No pretty straight forward deployment via OVA wizard roll-out to get the x2 appliances up and running on the network. From there, it's just a matter of configuring the remainder of the software to talk to your IT infrastructure via the ops manager web console interface. This includes adding your Virtual and Physical hardware that you want to include for monitoring and analytics.

Not at all. The product itself is very stable and since its appliances are virtual DRS and vmotion can be configured to create an HA hosted environment. Outages in this configuration are very few and far between.

This product is designed to scale and assists you in planning with your infrastructure, including computing demand and growth. It's designed to guide you through the various areas of infrastructure operations and makes adding new virtual and/or physical hardware to the Ops Manager core console very easy and scheduled. Adding a vCenter or a piece of physical hardware is as simple as entering in an IP address and username/password. Since all environments are sized different you should establish a Ratio for vCOPS to manage, for example, so many virtual or physical components.

VMware’s customer services is one of the best in the market and they also provide TAM services full or part time that can help any company implement their cloud software suites successfully.

VMware's engineers are very knowledgeable about their products and can handle infrastructures with the complexity of an enterprise level service provider right down to the small to mid-range dedicated IT foot prints.

We used quite a few different solutions to get the same feature sets that this one product offers. We switched in order to consolidate into one solution that could support all of the features we needed as well as reduce our overall capitol spend on multiple software brands and service contracts.

Very straightforward even in a multi-networked environment which is what you tend to find from service providers. The install itself is wizard driven and asks you for the information needed to configure the software step by step.

We did the install via an in-house team which included myself and a network engineer. That’s all it took to get the project planned out and implemented successfully.

The ROI for us is a reduced overall software and support costs by consolidating our monitoring and analytic tool set from many products to one. This reduced the operation software capital expense required to provide monitoring and analytic services for a managed solution.

Licensing for vCOPs comes in two models, Per Processor with unlimited VM’s and/or Per Virtual Machine or Physical Server in 25 VM packs (one pack = 25 VM’s). A cost analysis should be done to determine which model your company operations best fits.

Yes but it was software previously installed and vCOPs was used as a replacement.

I would say that the above score is based on the level of licensing which you use within your Infrastructure. I use the Advanced edition which is designed more for use in a enterprise level environments. This will look at both the virtual and physical sides of Infrastructure Operations which includes Predictive Analytics, Policy Management, Automated and guided remediation as well as customizable dashboards and reports. On the performance monitoring and analytics advanced can examine your vSphere performance and Health beyond what the standard vCenter monitoring tools has to offer, it can provide SAN storage analytics, application discovery and dependency mapping, OS Monitoring (Windows, Linux, Solaris, etc for both Physical and Virtual servers). Advanced also includes additional features for configuration and compliance management for vSphere Harding. Last but not least there is some additional Extensibility with 3rd party management packs for server, storage and network monitoring tools. Some example of packs are Brocade SAN Analytics, EMC Storage Analytics, NetApp Storage, Oracle OEM, SAP Hana, HP OneView, Microsoft Hyper-V.

If your virtualized infrastructure is primarily VMware and you are having issues with monitoring, analyzing and planning from an operational perspective this is the software to use. It will save you time and money in various areas of your IT infrastructures operations

We use vROps for our many VMware infrastructures. It is mainly for IT operations because we're processing a lot of information. vROps is good for us for reporting and for monitoring hosts and VMs.

The most valuable feature would be the reporting because if the frame or something is not syncing or we have an issue it will report it to us and give us a warning.

I wouldn't say that this solution is user-friendly. You need to know a lot of tricks to know how to use it. It's quite buggy and quite slow when it comes to loading.

They should improve on the speed, first of all, because it is slow to load and then you can't use it at all and you need to keep refreshing the browser. They can also improve the GUI, like the placement, some buttons here and there. In short, they should make it simple.

Stability isn't bad. Not perfect but not bad. 

Their technical support is good. I am happy with them at the moment. 

Overall, the initial setup was straightforward. There are many ways to do this life cycle. We have many different views.

I would rate this solution an eight. It serves its purpose but it has room for improvement. For example, vCenter has Flash version and HTML5. HTML5 is really, really good. It's fast and good. If they can make it simple like this it would be perfect.