VMware Aria Operations Reviews

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.

Because we are implementing Workspace ONE and Identity Manager, it helps us figure out that process. To scale properly, we need to get proper measurements to know how much storage we need and how much processing we need from a retail perspective.

Better reporting functionality would help plus an automated reporting functionality, because we don't sit with the product all the time.

It's very new to us.

Stability works fine.

I have not used technical support.

It wasn't very good.

Important considerations: Support would probably be number one, then how much pertinent information is provided.

I also think it's important working with a partner. We didn't initially, but we did get involved with a partner that helped us to understand the products better.

The reporting:

• Being able to look into how everything is running.
• How our equipment is running.
• What's going on in the overall environment.

Expressed to management when we're overseeing commitment and when we need more hardware. It helps us to determine that.

Easier management and it should be more user-friendly. When you look at it, and you see a lot of badges, you think, "Oh my god, that looks terrible." But it's really not, they just need to make it easier to read, a better UI.

It seems like a pretty stable product. We do have occasions where we have to reboot some of the appliances, but that's normal operations.

Seems to be fairly able to easily balance it out across datacenters and environments, although we've remained pretty static in terms of scaling.

Tech support is always good. They always work well. There are Irish guys, those are our late night calls and I don't really want to be on those.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

For us, they have to be on our approved list to begin with. There are a lot of legal ramifications for us.

They always do a comparison of different tools, whether it's DMC or if it's for different solutions. We have two or three different vendors we can go to. Personally, I'd prefer to stay with the VMware stuff.

VMware does a really good job of integrating all of their tools together, whereas you get some third parties where they kind of haphazardly integrate in, and they may or may not stay well-integrated. Or, they have difficulty getting integrated. You have to a lot API calls, WMI, and that kind of stuff.

Make sure initially you set it up properly. Don't try taking shortcuts.

I like the availability features and the capacity management. The availability features, like system uptime, we are using some of the endpoint monitoring features for service availability.

The user interface is good.

It definitely has a better view and visibility for everything that's going on, and helps keep tabs and makes sure everything is running well.

Continue on the endpoint side, so you can dig deeper into the Windows operating system, services, and events, because we're trying to use it to replace System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). It doesn't quite do everything, but it's getting there.

We've upgraded a few times, probably a year and a half.

We haven't had any issues with it. It's worked well for us.

It works fine for us. Our environment is pretty small. We have eight hosts on the service side and eight hosts on the desktop side. We're still working on integrating it with the desktop side, but it's fairly small, that has worked for us.

I have not personally used it for this solution, but we're a BCS customer, so we can get support pretty easily if we need to.

Just Microsoft Systems Center.

We were missing things, and weren't seeing alerts for different things. We're pretty heavily invested in VMware, so it integrated more easily.

It was straightforward.

It was pretty much Microsoft or VMware, from our concerns. So, we started with one and went the other way.

It's worth giving it a shot. I think there's a lot of benefit with it. It does pretty much everything you should need it to do.

Also, I find being part of the VMware community useful.

Whatever you go with, make sure you are able to get good support.