VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Out-of-the-box integration and monitoring capabilities on vSphere are the most valuable features.

The out-of-the-box integration with vSphere platform is valuable. Upon initial configuration, you connect the vROps appliance to communicate with your vCenters. You receive a detailed view of your entire vSphere estate managed by those vCenter servers. This is automatically built up within vCenter.

This effectively uses data mining and analytics on the vCenter databases to provide you with initial health, risk, and efficiency views of your estate. This provides lots of valuable information of the operational well-being of your virtual data center for a relatively small amount of work.

I’ve designed and deployed vROps on many customer sites as a part of their core virtualized data center solution and based on their feedback. This is a dashboard providing a single pane of glass view for health, risk and efficiency views for the whole vSphere estate. This makes it easier to keep on top of reactive support requirements

Advanced customization of the product is somewhat complicated, though understandably, that’s due to its flexibility.

The UI could be redesigned to make this easier. Multi-tenancy configuration, especially when integrated with vCloud Director, definitely needs more improvement to be used effectively.

We have used this solution, including previous versions, for over two years.

The previous versions with dual appliances had some stability issues. Since the move to a single appliance, it has been pretty solid.

There have been no scalability issues. Especially with Version 6.2, scale out architecture is pretty good and has been more than sufficient for most of my customers.

We used a previous solution. We switched because vROps is naturally more integrated to vSphere and other VMware products.

It is a simple appliance deployment and a simple one-off configuration for a standalone setup. It takes slightly more effort to scale out deployment configurations.

Start small with standard/advanced or a vSOM bundle. Once you are happy, upgrade to enterprise which is where you get the true benefits of being able to monitor everything.

Always use professional services assistance from either VMware or your resellers with the configuration. It is important to get the configuration correct. Initial deployment and native vCenter/vSphere integration is straightforward enough that users are encouraged to do it themselves.

• Custom dashboard
• Out-band (get alert in a text file)
• Capacity planner

• Capacity planning
• Alerts dashboard
• Get all the alerts from the external network and use ELK to show them in the production environment.

There was a collection bug and some alert bugs (didn’t show all the alerts and popped up fake alarms).

I’ve used this for four years: three years with vCOps 5.x and one year with vROps 6.x.

We have encountered stability issues. I redeployed the cluster twice.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 8/10.

Installation is simple.

We checked three solutions and we chose vROps for our environment.

Read the installation guide and tech blogs.

We were trying to create a virtual routing setup with a cluster of Ericsson equipment. We were setting up vApps for that and multiple NICs were used to route the traffic within the cluster. We tried for a year and there were a lot of tickets with VMware regarding that. It was an ongoing struggle, but we could not make it happen until we used vROps.

Deployment was pretty quick. Once you start up your templates, it was pretty quick to deploy. That was the biggest advantage. Otherwise, this takes many days.

I think they can look into some features that they're missing, like OpenStack. This is there, but not in the vApps. We were trying to get that from them, but we could not.

Overall, our project was kind of average, but we were trying something totally different than what our current product was able to do. So we looked at some features of vApps and what our software can do. We were trying to hook that up.

You can scale them quickly and easily. We had around 20-30 hosts containing all these vApps and they were really huge. We were trying to create a PoC for one of our departments. It's kind of an ongoing process.

We did call technical support quite a lot. They tried many solutions to resolve issues and create product updates. I think they're going to get better.

We were using VMware for a long time so we just kept going. It was easier to have one platform and one vendor.

Advice I would give depends on what you're really trying to do. If you're really scaling out the environment and vApps, this is a tool you can look into doing that.

• Reports
• Dashboards
• Email notifications
• Health, risks, efficiency badges
• Troubleshooting capabilities
• Auto rotation feature of dashboards for NOC displays

• With the use of dashboards, we can provide Business Units and customers a certain level of self-control over their virtual environments.
• Access can be restricted to only objects relevant for certain users/administrators.
• With the combination of email notifications of health issues and upcoming risks, administrators and engineers can respond in a preventive way instead of reacting after issues.
• The network administrators and engineers can monitor all NSX components with this product.
• The storage administrators and engineers can monitor physical storage components with this product.

Improvement can be achieved in reports automation when creating custom environments and dashboards.

It would be very useful and time saving if this could be included in the process of creating dashboards to generate a report based on the created dashboard. Also it would be handy if it would be possible to export all snapshot images in one click action.

We have been using the system for about 18 months now. We have just upgraded to 6.2 this month.

We have not yet encountered any stability issues.

Unfortunately, we encountered a limitation in version 6.2. In this version it is not possible to import data from another Operations Manager instance already running. The workaround is to first import on version 6.0 and then upgrade that instance to 6.2.

Technical support is good. Inside the vRealize Operations Manager in each section there is a direct link to the document center of VMWare containing technical documentation, and tutorials for that particular section.

We did use other solutions and still do. Especially certain hardware equipment needs to be monitored in an other way or is not yet supported in vRealize Operations Manager.
The reasons we chose this product are:

• Licensing model is the best choice for the way we provide services to our customers.
• Our virtualization platform is VMWare and we are implementing more components (currently LogInsight) to complete our Software Defined Datacenter.
• vRealize Operations Manager can easily integrate with all these components.

I would advise to make a design before starting actual setup.
A few examples of design considerations:

• More than one vCenter to monitor.
• Need for high availability.
• Need to migrate historical data from previous version.

The initial setup is very straightforward and relatively easy. Depending on design you can have certain choices during installation to fit your needs.

There are different versions and licensing models available.
I would advise to read this pdf: https://www.vmware.com/content.

We also considered Veeam One. Our choice for the VMWare SDDC is the best product for us.

Before purchasing this product, I would advise to install the 60-day trial (http://www.vmware.com/try-vmware.html) in a test environment and see if this is a fit for the organization as well as the administrators and engineers. In my opinion the way vRealize operations manager operates (and will be used) is different to most traditional monitoring solutions.

Being able to get, at a glance:

•  An overview of your environment
• The resources that you have available
• If there are any outstanding issues

It allows us to give our end users performance data. They may ask about network utilization, compute utilization, or storage utilization. We're able to get that information in a central location and give it to our end users when they request it.

I would like to see more multi-tenant support. I know that multi-tenant support was added recently, but expanding on that would be helpful for us.

Overall, it's pretty stable. I haven't had any stability issues with the product.

I haven't really had to scale it, so I can't comment on that.

We weren’t using anything previously, but we started using it in our cloud environment. That's where we really identified a need for it. It also comes with the vCloud suite of applications. We deployed it because it comes with the vCloud suite.

I was involved in the setup and it was really straightforward. It's like any other virtual appliance. You just deploy it and it just works.

It's really a no-brainer. It really should be deployed in any fairly large VMware environment.

The most valuable features are the custom dashboard, the management pack, reports, and policy.

vROps propose some scheduled reports on the resource consumption for each VM.

The policy and some few metrics are not very clear. More explanations would be great.

I have been using this product for 2 years.

I haven’t had any issues with stability.

I haven’t had any issues with scalability.

Technical support was excellent.

We used vCOPS, but vROps is the new version of vCOPS. vROPS has more scalability and more features.

The initial setup was very simple. Tuning it is harder.

It’s better to buy vROps as part of the vRealize Suite package or vCloud Suite.

We evaluated VMTurbo and Foglight.

The design is very important for flows and rules. It is better if you have good vSphere skills.

What's valuable to us is that we can create virtual routers and NICs. We setup multiple vROps for virtual routers within our Ericson cluster, as well as multiple NICs. Also, scalability is very good and deployment was relatively easy using templates.

Additionally, deploying vROps allowed us to implement a solution in software that we were unable to achieve using the physical devices.

It was also an advantage that we could stay with one platform and one vendor.

We really benefited by using templates, which made deployment much quicker.

Integration with OpenStack would be a very useful improvement.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

vROps can scale quickly and easily. We have around 20-30 hosts running really large applications.

We used technical support quite a lot. They worked hard to find solutions to our problems and helped us with product updates. But, I think they need to improve.

We were using VMware for a long time, so we just continued with their products.

If you scale out the environment and want to use vROps, this is a tool you should look at.

The reporting feature is most valuable to me for capacity management. For example, I can produce a report that tells me how much data store I have or how much compute I have. This is critical system information that tells me what’s going on.

Also, vROps can estimate how long the current environment will be sufficient before expansion is necessary. For example, vROps can indicate that the current setup will suffice for six more months or two more months. If it’s two more months, I know I need to start provisioning new resources now.

I can monitor performance with vROps as well. One thing I like is that I can group resources together, like tier-one apps and put them in a group. Then, I can easily monitor their performance. I couldn't do that in vCenter unless I created a folder.

Storage is very hard to keep track of, so the reporting has really benefitted us.

The troubleshooting features have also been very beneficial. When I see a problem, I can drill down to the network level to see what is happening on that machine.

I would like to see the automation perform a bit smoother. For example, if the data store usage is high, you must move the VMs on that data store to another data store. But, I have to program that common action myself. I would like to see common actions come pre-configured.

Also, I would like to see the login site reintegrated with vROps. It used to be a free portal, but now we have to pay for it.

We have not had any problems with stability. Although we did have one crash, it was easy to rebuild.

I did not use technical support, because the one error we had was an unusual appliance error.

We didn’t use any previous solutions because we have been using VMware and wanted the benefit of using a single vendor.

We didn't evaluate any other products.

I suggest using VMware with vROps.