VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Probably, the most valuable feature is being able to see what's going on in my environment.

We use a combination of homegrown scripts and vROps for capacity planning. With the two, we get a really good view of what our environment is doing.

Mostly, it has provided capacity planning benefits; we can see where our strongest usage is and our clusters.

It probably has not helped us save on storage, but probably it has helped us more on the compute side.

Honestly, I wish the reports were a little bit more snazzy, if that makes sense.

Stability is good.

Scalability works great.

I have not used technical support.

Initial setup was straightforward. I actually converted from version 5 to version 6. It worked well.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

Look at the price and the features together.

When we select a vendor like VMware, the most important criteria are completeness of the product and support. This product is fairly complete and it works.

I think for me the most valuable feature is really capacity planning; knowing that I'm using our resources efficiently. We're going through a large hyperconversion project here and we really want to make sure that we are sized appropriately, so that we can build our next solution correctly. You know, save money and utilize hard work the most efficient way.

It has helped speed up performance. It's helped us size our environment appropriately, so that the servers that need the resources can get them. So we're not over-subscribing some and under-subscribing others.

I think we've used it to diagnose some things that might have caused trouble down the road, so it's helped us from there.

We haven't really looked at it from the storage standpoint, we're kind of storage strapped at the moment. As we go into hyperconversion, we're actually really going to start to utilize the tool to come up with a better sizing for that.

It's helped me and the IT department get a better idea of what's going on in the environment. Health checks make sure everything is running the most efficient way possible. It helps us plan for growth, to make sure we're getting the best return for our investment in the underlying hardware.

It’s really stable; haven't had any issues with it.

We're not a gigantic organization so, for us, there's no problem with scalability.

I’ve used technical support some; just to start to get to learn it and get it installed. It's an ongoing learning process for me. It's good. I think it's one of those things you have to take the time and learn it. We're gradually learning it over time.

We decided to invest in this solution because we were so heavily invested in virtualization, and just simply monitoring the virtual machines wasn't enough. We needed a full picture of the environment from the host all the way up through. It gives us a great complete picture.

We did not look at any other vendors at the time. This is the only one we looked at.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was very easy, straightforward to install, get running and start getting data.

I like that it's a single pane of glass with a single vendor, with a supportive VMware. It's really easy; it plugs in easy. There’s less to manage because it's all done through the center.

Support is an important criteria for us when selecting a vendor, as well as stability. That's why we like to partner with VMware, because the support is excellent and the stability is second to none.

A lot of my rating is a reflection of me not knowing the product. As I learn more and more, it becomes more valuable to me. I'd say it's not an everyday staple in our environment now, but it's becoming more and more important.

One of the things I really liked was being able to use the projects feature, which lets me say that I know in August or September or October, I'm going to need to deploy 20 more VMs on a particular cluster. Am I going to have the capacity for that project? I can actually see if that's going to be okay. Then I can sit there and say, if it's not okay, then when would I add hosts? At what point would that make it okay? Basically, what you project out, it provides all that information at great detail. It's pretty good.

I've been at my company for seven months, and there's no monitoring. They have no monitoring. That's going to be the big thing. Dashboards can be set in front of operational people and then we'll actually be able to respond both proactively for issues such as capacity, and reactively for issues such as, we just filled up a drive, as we build it out.

We also use the logging site, which basically does correlation of logs from hosts. All that's integrated together, so if you have a problem, all of a sudden, you're able to see that maybe the fact that this LUN had a problem and this array had this problem. You start realizing that they're all related because of the way it ties them together. Very specifically for us, when you're not getting phone calls because a drive filled up on a VM inside it, That would be the big thing, right there, guaranteed. That's the one that bites them more than anything.

We'll probably not save on storage. Storage is cheap, but we're going to see if we can right-size, because I've heard mentioned a couple times before, right-sizing isn't a technical problem, it's a political/business problem or a management problem. Going back and getting stuff back after you've given it away in a VM is very difficult. That's where I'm hopeful. Probably utilize less anything about storage, but more about CPU and RAM.

We have not used the performance management features yet, but that'll be more about getting VMs balanced correctly across clusters, that sort of thing, but not yet. We typically don't over-provision.

We're planning on using more of it for several different reasons. We want to do lifecycle management of some of our hosts. We need the capacity planning features, and maybe most important - and the first thing that we're going to do - is the end-point management that's now part of it but used to be separate. It used to be Hyperic. We used to have Hyperic as a separate purchased product and now part of it is end-point management. We'll use that as our monitoring platform.

It is a beast to deal with. To understand it, really takes effort. Several of us have been to a week of VMware classes, and that didn't even scratch the surface. There's so much there. I suppose if there was a nice get-started guide, that’d be an improvement.

I heard them talking about this in a VMworld session. They've got wizards that can be rerun, so you can go back and say, "I really want to change what I did before in terms of my general configuration." That's good. It is complex. I just don't know how you make it simpler. I don't know because it's a complex idea.

Ideally, it'd be nice if it was simpler.

We're running 6.2; 6.3 is out and 7, I guess, just came out. The worst case for us has been, a couple times, we've had to restart it. Otherwise, it’s been pretty stable. It's all virtual appliances, so that's nice.

Scalability's pretty good. I don't remember the limits, but basically, you just start adding what they call data analytics nodes, and you just start scaling out horizontally.

We're way under-speced right now. In other words, we need more data analytics and we're reporting on about six million metrics right now, so once we point all the end point management features back to it, we'll have to do something about it. Plus, we have remote collectors.

We're still going through a statement of work and professional services, so we've deployed it and have started to use it, but we're basically re-engaging with VMware, so we haven't really had to contact technical support.

I did not previously use a different solution. We relied on people, the users. We’d see an outage because a user called, and then say, "Let's go fix it." That's exactly how it was being dealt with.

Initial setup is pretty easy.

A lot of the decision to go with product and the vendor went on before or right when I was hired. They were very close to going with Foglight, very close. They basically were ready to sign and VMware showed up and said, "Whoa, you didn't even look at this." During my interviews, I even encouraged using VMware. I said, "Look, it's got some good stuff." I'd used version 5.8 before a little bit at a previous employer, and they basically looked at it again. It's really the thing to go with if you're using vSphere; it's just what you're going to do.

I don't think there's anything that's deserves a perfect rating. There's just not, so I'm a little skeptical of that. I could give it a higher rating after I've had a chance to really use it, but right now, we just have not been able to really engage with VMware. I'm probably rating VMware more than I'm rating the product, so the complexity part kind of hurts right now.

I think you've got to go and look at it first. If it just doesn't look like it's going to do what you want it to, then you can look at other places, but you've got to at least talk to them about it, because it's VMware. It does what it's supposed to do. It's geared for this environment and it can also manage and monitor the physical stuff. For me, that's my suggestion.

One of the most beneficial features is a single pane of glass as well as the interoperability that it comes with additional features. When you add in management packs, you have the ability to really extend upon the infrastructure and really fine tune what you want to see within the environment. When it first came out many, many moons ago, it was something that was very default and it was a very good attempt. But as it's progressed over the years, it's gotten a lot more extensible so that you can actually fine tune which workloads you want to monitor. They've progressed, and while there are definitely still a few gaps, these are probably the most valuable features.

It helps us do a lot of the VMware optimization assessments, which is one of the first things that our company does. We go in and we understand what the environment is looking like from a one- to seven- to 30-day window, and where their gaps are currently located, so we can deploy an evaluation license of VMware Operations Manager. We can deploy a couple of custom reports and provide them a path forward.

vROps has also helped us avoid outages and shorten our outage time. When you do data center consolidation, you understand a little bit more about the systems in there so you can map where they're going to go.

As far as capacity management, on the one hand, it has helped us, but on the other, it hasn’t. One of the shortfalls with the algorithms of vRealize Operations is that if you want to add additional capacity and you're moving from one, just as an example, Intel generation to another generation, generally speaking, vROps only does it by megahertz, and not the new spec end values, as other tools can. When it comes to capacity planning, if you're doing a consolidation of virtual machines, it makes sense because you're going into a target platform. But if you're adding additional hosts that are a new generation, it's not as accurate.

Similarly, for performance management, it has only partially helped us. There aren’t many vendors that do anything better than CPU monitoring of a virtual machine, because that's what their bread and butter is. But when it comes to memory management, they look at a best guess unless you have an agent in there. That - when you deal with business-critical applications - is a very touchy subject. The perfect example is, you oversize for these VMs, vROps is number one on the list and they say don't resize vROps because it keeps memory for the database. Well, it's the same thing with SQL and some other items, so that's one of the things.

Things that are already on the road map include improvements in guest monitoring when it comes to memory management. Right now, it does a very good guest with VMware tools.

One of the things they'd like to push is Hyperic. Unfortunately, it’s not there yet.
One of the other things that I could foresee happening is, to download different management packs, have it as a link within the appliance rather than having to go to a solution change.

Stability is much improved, much improved.

Scalability is also much improved.

I do not use technical support often. Usually, it's mostly just myself and whoever helps deploy them. So, it's usually the partners that help me out.

I probably have not used it at all, because usually the issues that I come up with, they haven't had a documented issue yet.

I did not previously use a different solution. I saw the demo many years ago and decided this one had some pretty good potential and just followed through with it.
No other vendors were really on my short list at the time.

I'm usually involved in all the initial setups that we do for customers; just not the tool itself. I set the tool up for customers. It's not complex to deploy. Complexity comes with the fine tuning of the policies and what you want to monitor, so you see what you need to see and not a plethora of information that you don't need to know. Setup is easy.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

When I select a vendor like VMware, the decision comes down to customer requirements, and that's what we go from, from the beginning. We go in, we discover, we understand what the customer’s requirements are, and then we use that as a basis of what meets their business needs.

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.

The most valuable feature is its ability to monitor the trends and accurately make predictions about when and where and how and what you need to buy to, first of all, get ahead of your sprawling growth. Also, at the same time, you can keep that sprawl under control because you are able to see easily that the sprawl is happening and where it's happening, who's doing it and how. It gives you the tools and the information you need to be able to bring it all together, and keep the sprawl from happening.

Previously, I was with a managed service provider and it would have been awesome if we had been able to do it as a managed service for people with multitenancy. I kind of hacked it into Log Insight; I wasn't really able to do it with vRealize Operations Manager, but that would be really big for us; would have been really big for us when I was doing that.

In my current deployment, container monitoring is an area with room for improvement: Docker, Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesos, whatever it's going to be, whatever anybody's going to use; just being able to monitor the Linux container ecosystem, resource utilization, contention, etc.

I've deployed vROps as far back as when it was vCOPS, which is like two-ish years ago, thereabouts. We've used it for a variety of different things from Horizon 7, specifically Horizon 7 monitoring, to VSAN, and all kinds of mostly VMware products, mostly in a virtual space.

I don't thing I've ever had one crash on me before.

I've never really scaled it a whole lot; three to four hundred VMs was the max I've ever used it for, so I can't really address that.

I love VMware support, when I can get them on the phone. That's the one thing, the one rub, is that I always have a very difficult time getting through the auto-dialer service. I have business continuity service, and even now, I still have so much trouble just getting someone on the phone. Once they get on the phone, they either breeze through the problem or they've identified a bug and they get it fixed. Just the management layer is the problem I have.

The initial setup itself is not complex. It's not something that I would consider complex. However, the time it takes until it is useful is very long and it's something that I've seen people take issue with. They want their information, they want to use their new toy, and they want to do it now, and they don't really care about the other stuff. They don't care that you need more data, that you can't just make predictions off of a day's worth of data, because that has no idea what you're actually doing.

You need to stick with it. You're not going to see immediate return on value. You have to trust the product and you have listen to it. You can't think that you know more than it, because it definitely knows more than you do. Whether it's making intelligent decisions, you have to evaluate what it's recommending, but they're utilizing information from across thousands of customers, so trusting the product is very important.

The actual capacity management piece of it is really, really nice. Being able to do scenarios in there, where you can see the output if you introduce new hosts or new VMs; you can see where you're going to be at capacity-wise. It shows you where you're going to fall short, if it's going to be memory or CPU.

There's a lot of power, way more than I've ever come close to touching. At first, it's a little overwhelming because there's so much to it. Once you get past the initial scare of, "Oh, my gosh, there's a lot of stuff to know in here," you realize how powerful it is from a reporting perspective.

The management packs are really pretty handy. We use Hitachi storage and there are management packs available for that. Not a whole lot of companies do that for Hitachi.

It lets you know where your hot spots and trouble spots are so you are being proactive instead of reactive.

You can start to see there's a particular badge for anomalies where you would look, "Okay, why is this machine doing this? Why am I getting dropped packets on a particular machine?" Then you're able to start digging and look a little more in depth into, "Okay, let's figure out what could be causing this. Do I have something wrong with the network, the NIC, things like that."

I think the interface itself could use a little cleanup. With some of the really cool parts of the interface, I’d say something like, "This is great information, how do I get it to a report that looks exactly like what I'm seeing." That was difficult. There was really no way to get some of the snapshots that you're seeing on the screen through the interfaces directly into a report.

Especially with the capacity management, when you're looking at it, there are some really cool windows and other things. Then, when you actually go through the reports and you start looking at the capacity management reports, what you get printed out isn't quite in the same format. It would be nice if there was some way to get directly when you see something exactly the way you want to see it, get that into a report.

I'm sure there's so much there already that I haven't even touched. For example, integration with Horizon, which we kind of toyed around with a little bit. It seems like there could be a little bit better, tighter integration with Horizon; something that maybe didn't require external agents or things like that.

It seems pretty solid.

I noticed initially that it seemed like it was laggy, but honestly, I think you just really need to size it properly for your environment and give it enough resources to have.

Not that we did a whole lot with scaling it out, but it looks like it has the capabilities to do so.

We introduced it as a PoC; we had 400 BMs.

I have not used technical support.

We previously used Foglight. I think the future of Foglight is kind of up in the air.

We looked at Foglight Enterprise, which I think is basically a complete rewrite from Dell when they acquired Quest. There were some things that were really nice about it and then other things of that product that weren't even as good as the existing Foglight products. That's kind of what led us down the vROps road. It's a VMware product, so obviously integration with VMware products is best. There's literally a management pack available for anything and everything. In a UCS environment, there are management packs for UCS.

There are some choices with initial setup. The most difficult thing was to figure out how to go back and change those initial choices that you made because they might have not been great. When you're looking at it and going through that initial setup, there are a couple of questions – whether you're allowing memory over-allocation and CPU over-allocation. If you picked a choice and it's not giving you the results you want, you then have to figure out how to go back and adjust it.

Spend some really good time with it. If you can, get an expert to help you through a PoC. I think what we did, we did on our own; there are a lot of gaps in there. So having somebody who's a professional go through that PoC and possibly even initial deployment would be a good way to go.

We use it for the monitoring and maintenance of the virtual environment. We have about 3,000 VMs. We use it for capacity management. We use it to help applications. We've got it separated out by the applications in each one of the VMs. It really helps to get our infrastructure team visibility into the virtual environment, so that they can troubleshoot issues and detect problems. What we've done is taken it a little further out, deploying it out to give visibility to the application team so that they can see their environment.

It's getting the visibility for all the different layers. From the application team to the infrastructure team, they need visibility into the operation of the environment, and driving that visibility and troubleshooting to what we call "fell fast" – “fell fast” and recover, or back out and recover. Giving us that capability in alerting and mechanisms, which is not there now.

We deployed Vblock 720s, and I’d like vROps to further integrate with them. I know it pulls the data from Vision, but further integration of Vision would be really good.

We have increased our tier 1 environment probably 70 to 80%. There have been very minimal sev 1s over the last two years by deploying this and putting it all in place.

We can scale up and scale out very quickly based on the demand of the business, and it has met those needs. It has not slowed down as we scaled up and out.

We have mission critical support with VMware, so we use those guys constantly.

In 2014, we had two data centers full of physical environments and we, as a company, made a decision to go virtual first. As we started looking at all of our refresh plans and our long-range plan, we saw we had all of the dollars tied up in refreshing the physicals. We started looking at the virtual environment and we partnered up with VCE. We bought two Vblock 720s and then we put ExtremeIO and VMAX on it for storage.

I manage the group that set it up. The grouping by application was pretty complex, but as far as bringing it in and getting the foundation set up, it was fairly simple.

ROI’s very good. Ultimately, based on the business case that we did, we spent 20 million dollars and got 50 million dollars return on investment.

We didn’t really look at any other vendors because we wanted it on a stable tier 1 environment, so VMware is what we made a decision on.

Put your critical workloads on enterprise software.

The most valuable features are the ability to look at performance metrics historically, and the capacity planning where we can see waste in our environment. Primarily, that's what we're using it for now. A company as big as us, we tend to over-provision. That's based on application requirements. Sometimes politics can be involved with that. We use vROps right now as a way to show application teams how much their server's working and how little it's working, so we can potentially take that stuff back.

It has helped the company function when we run reports. Every once in a while, we'll get complaints from our end users that an application is slow. The vendor gets on a phone call with us and says, "It’s your VM environment." They'll call us up and say VMware is slow. We use vCOPS to look at the analytical data of those VMs in question. We can show them: If you're having issues at this time, we don't see any CPU usage, we don't see a CPU usage increase, we don't see a memory increase, we don't see it needing more memory, we see low disk activity. We'll show those graphs to them in an email. Once we show them that, they typically back off.

Personally, I’d like to see improvement in its usability. As an IT professional, we're tasked with having to jump between various platforms. A tool like vCOPS, from my experience, requires a little bit of a higher learning curve. I believe they can work on that. For example, with reporting, it does a whole bunch more stuff that we don't even use it for right now. You have to put time in to learn all of that, such as creating the dashboards, all the widgets and so on. It's a high learning curve at first, and difficult to learn. You have to put in a lot of time with it. That could take years for some people at their company.

I would like to have the ability where, for example, you bring up clients into your environment for the first time. There should be an option to have all the alerts go into that. You turn the alerts off in vCenter and have them go through vCOPS. That would be a big help for me, personally.

It's available. However, we run into issues where it gets very slow, where you try to log in, you can't log in; or, if you log in and you search for an item, it doesn't take you to the right window. We've had issues with integration with the web clients; if you search for a VM in the vSphere web client, there should be a link to vCOPS. That link does not work for us right now.

We also had an issue where it just stopped working. The disk filled up, so we had to call VMware support. They had to clear out some temp files or something like that.

I think that's where the slowness, for us, comes in. As we add more VMs and similar items, it seems like it's slower, but at times it could be fast. I don't know if that's another bug.

Our environment is roughly 1,500 virtual machines and across 60-70 hosts. We've experienced that, as time goes by, it seems to be getting slower.

We call technical support whenever it's broken.

For the last issue, it was pretty straightforward. It was a documented issue, so hopefully it's a bug and it gets released in a fix.

Actually, at that time, nothing else existed. We, at the time, really fought to get that in the house.

Initial setup was straightforward; you just import the OVF file. Give it a name, IP, and so on; connect it to vCenter and you're all set.

We did not evaluate any other products.

Always look at the competition first, obviously. That's part of our job. PoC it first. Make an informed decision after that.

vROps provides visibility into the environment and be able to, from a really quick look, see the health of the environment, and find bottlenecks or issues with an environment; and also to predict the future state of the environment or virtual machines that are over-committed or under-committed, whether we need to increase or decrease resources. That's the most important.

We also use the newer automation features, and the increased integration with DRS for workload balancing and scheduling. One of the pieces I would like to use more is vRealize Orchestrator, which is part of the automation solution for vRealize.

For example, a lot of times developers normally ask for virtual machines to be oversized, meaning that probably from the vendors, they have requirements for a certain amount of CPU and memory. A lot of times they require, say, 12 CPUs and 64GB of RAM. After they require this, will we have a way to prove that they are not using all those resources? The way to prove it is by using vROps to keep an eye on the utilization for a month. After that month, we what the true resources the VM uses. Then, based on that, we talk to the developers and we can resize the virtual machines.

It probably has also shortened outage times. There was a really widespread issue in our environment; most of our larger systems were not responsive. I was able to log on to vROps and I saw that it was a storage problem that somehow got reflected on other systems. That saved us a lot of time because it was really creating a problem for us.

We have also saved on the CPU and memory side, although not on the storage side.
With its performance management, we saw things speed up. Fine-tuning the VMs helped improve the overall performance for the environment.

Definitely something that I would like to be included is more interactions with the multiple vendors, and to be the single management tool or monitoring tool. To be able to manage the storage or network; basically, to integrate with more management tools. For example, for our networking, we use HP OpenView, and then we have a ticketing system to generate alerts and so on. We would like to see more integration on that, with those systems.

It is stable. We haven't had any problems with it.

Our environment is definitely growing, but I will say that we've designed the architecture for what we were looking for. At this point, we didn't go above or further up.

We have used technical support sometimes. It could be a little bit challenging. A lot of times when we got support, the first person that is working on the ticket probably is not that knowledgeable. Sometimes, we didn't get the answers or the problem solved in a timely fashion, so we needed to escalate. Sometimes that escalation process or escalation person is able to fix the problem basically.

We previously used multiple vendors. There were probably four or five vendors. We evaluated vRanger. We evaluated Veeam’s management piece.

We decided to go with vROps basically because for the other vendors, monitoring and managing the virtual environment was a problem, but it was part of a larger problem, their enterprise solution. On the other hand, to get the small piece for VMware, we should get the bigger piece for everything else that we probably won't use.

Initial setup was straightforward. It wasn't that complex.

It is definitely a really reliable solution that completely integrates with VMware.