VMware Aria Operations Reviews

It gives us the ability to look into problems which are happening within the environment. This helps us to mitigate those problems more quickly. Then, if we see an alert from vCenter, and have to go and search for stuff, we have the ability to see where the issue is coming from, also what other systems or other components could be affected.

It's sped up the ability to track all this stuff as well as mitigated the issues that have come up during an importation. After an importation, if someone changes stuff; we see that stuff in there.

I'd like to see more ease of creating dashboards. It seems that creating dashboards is more difficult than it probably could be; more of a wizard type of feel for creating dashboards for every single department.

In our environment, we have people who we don't want to see everything. We want them to see what they need to see, not everything else. It seems harder to create that. It's not like a GUI, where you can say, "I want this stuff in here, and this is what I want them to see."

When you see everything, you end up having way too much information. It's overload if you don't know what you're looking for. It would be helpful to be able to give management just enough for them to look at, or the SAN people, and not have to see every little thing.

We have had problems, but I think it was more from the original implementation, not necessarily the product itself. We found that people are adding a lot of plugins that we weren't using. They were taking a whole list of plugins and popping them into place, even though they weren't being used, which then sucked the life out of the product and made it, at some point, unusable. We removed the ones that we didn't need, and left the other ones in there, and it seems to work fine. It's doing everything we need it to do. It's alerting us to problems, and it's helping us fix those problems pretty regularly.

It seems to scale pretty well for us. Other places I've worked, they had problems with scalability only because of the way they implemented it originally. For us, it seems to be working just fine for that purpose.

The first version we had in the environment, the problem was we seemed to have kept it longer than it should have, and it seemed that the technicians didn't have the knowledge about the old stuff. But after we upgraded, they seemed to be able to help us with any problems we had.

We were using things like Syslog and other products. They really didn't give you the direct information, "This is what the problem is," or "This is having a problem and these are the things that it could be affecting the product." Down the chain, it could be affecting the host, or it could be affecting the VMs. This is what vROps really gives you, the ability to see and to drill into what's going on in with all the components. Syslog and other components like that, they just told you the symptom, "This is happening," but not necessarily what else could the problem.

I'm not sure which ones they looked at because that was before my time, but they did look at a lot of vendors. I believe one of them was WhatsUp Gold, but that was more of just a product the system pinged. It went down because you can no longer ping it, so that wasn't really good for us.

We were trying to follow the validated design, which is part of VMware, and we needed some way of monitoring, which is one of the biggest problems.

We can't allow vCenter to do all the monitoring, to alert us. It doesn't give us enough information. There are a lot of products out there, and we just figured we'd use what they have in place, because it integrates much better than some of the others. I don't know about now, but originally the other ones didn't really integrate as well, with all the components including NSX and vSphere (and all the components underneath that), so that's why we decided to go with this.

The important things to look for are name recognition, reliability, and support. It's important that the support people have the knowledge to support the environment. Documentation and education, because you don't want to always be calling support for every little thing.

Test it out, put the demo in, or create a proof of concept.

Its centralized management. We have a large environment, and it's very difficult to try to stay proactive in it instead of being reactive.

It give us the real-time capability to see and measure CPU utilization, memory usage, consumption rates, and capacity management.

I would like to see more integration with the login site and different tools. I don't have the understanding of how to take that input and feed it right back into vROps to achieve the right reporting and alert notifications. More tutorials and training would be useful.

I think it's stable. We don't have any issues.

It seems to be scalable. We're medium-size, but I think it's there.

Good. They're very responsive.

No, just the older version. We were already licensed for it because we're a VMware customer. We were too reactive, so we needed to install it to get ahead of our issues and problems.

Pretty straightforward. There were some questions regarding rightsizing when setting it up, but overall it was good.

No.

When looking at vendors, it's important to look at technical support and responsiveness.

It allows us to view the statistics of our environment in real time. We're able to pull reports and generate other metrics from all the virtual infrastructure.

It's helped us because we're able to take a heartbeat or take a snapshot of the environment at any given time. With all the reporting and analytics built into vROps, we can rightsize the environment. We can reclaim resources. We can do a whole wealth of things that allows us to keep our datacenters running.

I'd like to see more integration with ticketing systems, so tickets can be based off metrics or thresholds that were met.

Lots of coffee and lots of donuts.

Just a thorough plan, which definitely needs to be had in making a deployment like this.

Early on, it was iffy, but the latest releases have been pretty stable.

It scales.

It was great. They were very knowledgeable. They were spot on.

We contacted them several times. We've even had a PSO Engagement where someone who was a specialist for vROps came on site.

Nobody else. Just VM.

I would highly recommend others to take a look at the vROps tool. It will definitely help them manage their infrastructure.

When evaluating vROps, they need to make sure all the plugins are working, and that it's the solution for them. Sometimes people evaluate a lot of products, and it's just an evaluation which really doesn't fit what their business needs are. Having a good understanding of what you're looking for and what you need is the most important part of evaluating a product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Their education
• Their product knowledge
• Ability to get support.

The historical performance monitoring and the ability to introduce it.

It's good, because it's about being able to scale. To know if we're going to hit our limits, as far as scale, and also when we need to buy more hardware.

Better artificial intelligence (AI) as far as its ability to give suggestions over precise mediums and those types of things.

It has been good so far.

It has been good so far.

I have not used it yet.

Fogbyte.

We needed a solution, or a better solution, versus very non-standardized solutions on that scale.

Was not involved.

If interested in the product, try to prearrange a training as quickly as you can. Get a lot of training. It's a big product.

Main criteria for selecting a vendor:

• Full scalability
• Price
• Vendor relationship.

The ability to gain insight into what your computing and storage resources are doing. More towards:

• Forecasting
• Time left until you get to capacity
• Capacity planning
• Hardware life cycling, etc.

When you have that capability so you don't have to stick your finger in the air and try to figure out how much capacity you have left based on some best guess. Takes the guess work out of it. Creates a uniform process.

A lot of around having parts of dashboards that need to be refreshed, then you don't refresh the entire dashboard. There's a lot of stuff around usability and reporting.

Their reporting library needs to improve.

Read the documentation first before trying to deploy solution.

The stability of solution's good. There've been some improvements in the last couple of versions, but it's been overall pretty stable.

Scalability is good. We don't have a very large environment, but a large environment around 5,000 VMs and it scales pretty good.

As far as making sure that the environment is operational, they are good. But, a lot of it has to do with customer porting and getting useful data out of it. Every company's different as to what they want to pull out of vROps. So, I guess in 6.6, which we just upgraded to right before I came here, they've done a lot more in the way of having a greater database of reports available. So, that's good. I haven't really dived in too far into it yet.

We have not used a different solution before.

I did the implementation of it and did it on my own. It was pretty straight forward.

We didn't really look at anyone else.

We decided on it just because vROps really ties into vCenter. There really wasn't any additional consideration for anybody else.

The foundation of our virtual infrastructure is VMware.

You have to look at your current solution, then see if it provides you with what you want it to provide you. As long as VMware is staying on top of development and addressing customer's concerns, and it's doing what you want it to do. It doesn't make a lot of sense to go to another solution.

My big thing is, with VMware, if they have a native product that handles a function, that's the first place you should look as opposed to a third-party. When you have third-party vendors sprawl, it leads into a lot of unnecessary complications in your environment.

One of the most valuable ones is being able to see an overview of your environment, and saying this VM is overallocated, in terms of CPUs or memory. If something is stressed, or if something is not stressed, that's one of the good things it can do. The reports: Print any kind of reports or generate them, and send them to somebody if they say my VM is going very slow. 

"We need to add more CPUs," We get a lot of those requests. Then you look at it, and you realize, wait a minute, this VM has 8 CPUs, 32GBs of ram, you probably have it overallocated. That's probably why it's going so slow. You can just do that in vROps with just a few clicks of a button. That's what is pretty cool about it.

It can save the organization money if you're using it right. It'll save you a lot of money. 

Don't overallocate! This means that you don't have to buy many hosts. You can save money that way.

Make sure your environment is scaled correctly. That it can handle whatever specifications are needed in your environment before you go and deploy it.

I would say on the scale of one to 10, probably a seven. 

It all depends on who sets it up, and if they set it up right. I haven't gotten that far in my career to know the correct way to set it up yet. I just know when I got to the place where I work on it now. It was set up, it would break, and you would have to go fix it. Then it would break, and they would have some other guys that knew a bit more about it, and they fixed it. It's been up and running for a few months now without any issue.

That's the thing with it. Many different users can use it, but you also have a learning curve. You have to have the employees, who know what they're doing, be able to teach the employees, who don't know what they're doing, how to use vROps.

We purchased vROps because wanted to see more of our environment.

I was not involved.

The most important thing you research before implementing a product in every company is the cost. You want to get the most bang for your buck. You want to make sure that you get something that's cost effective, too. Also, that it is good and easy to use. At the end of the day, when you bring it to your manager, they need to compare. 

 Other than VMware, I can't think of any others right now.

Do your research. Research it, research all your products which are similar, and see that it fits the mold of your company. If it's cost effective, or if it's going to give you the most bang for your buck.

When selecting a vendor:

1. They should know what they're talking about. 
2. If I don't know what I'm talking about, then I shouldn't fumble them up. 

But the number one thing is that they know what they're talking about and it's easy to use, also its setup is easy. If they can show me how to use it during their presentation and I can explain it to my manager or my boss, then that's one of the most important things.

Expanded insight into the actual workload in the environment, so we can plan and coordinate resources accordingly.

It gave us a broader insight into what was really going on, in a more manageable fashion.

The next release is already looking pretty good. We're one behind, 6.5; 6.6 is already out. They're already addressing it: continued enhancements regarding usability, user interface.

Stability is good.

Scalability is good.

Very good. I've only used them once, though, just to expand the database. But I reached the right person, and they were knowledgeable.

Fairly straightforward, straightforward as any anything.

In-house.

We were always looking to be better at what we do, so it was this or outside third-party products. We had a decent rapport with VMware already, and didn't feel like we needed to look outside to other solutions.

It's an extension of our vSphere environment.

Look for support, accessibility, vendor's direction, and vision supporting the kind of things you need to do on an enterprise basis.

I'd use this product. I would definitely direct people this way.

The analytics engine:

• Goes through all the data which we are out to collect and gives us a nice dashboard.
• Gives details about the whole infrastructure.
• Shows how things are working now.

We used to do all the calculations manually. Now everything is done within the analytics engine itself. So, it gives us a very clear vision, or data, about what we need in our infrastructure support applications.

A feature that would definitely help is something that automatically resizes the virtual infrastructure. That is one thing that we would like to see in vROps. It would understand the workloads' requirements and then resize them based upon orchestration and automation rules.

I've never had an issue with it.

I've never had an issue with it.

I have never used it.

No. We need the solution because we have to monitor our environment. So for monitoring the virtual infrastructure, it is the key component.

It is a straightforward architecture, but you can make it complex based upon your architecture. Based upon where and how you want to deploy.

All the architecture is based upon your datacenter layout. It's a pretty straightforward process but you have to consider your layout.

In-house.

The most important criteria is that the solution must understand the overall software, defined as it is in your architecture; not only the hypervisor layer but the VMs run on it, the storage, the computing that will be running, and the network as well.

Research integration with any other portal that you want to monitor along with your hypervisor.

I would highly recommend going forward with this solution.