VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Capacity management is probably the most valuable feature that made me want to bring it in. There was a lot of overprovisioned infrastructure before I came in. That was the main goal: being able to have evidence for when issues are not the infrastructure's fault, when there are application issues. There was a big issue with a financial management application that they were just certain they didn't have enough CPU and memory. We were able to demonstrate that, no, here's what it's using exactly, so what is going on is that the software is poorly written. vROps helped rectify those situations.

There's room for improvement; it's really good. Again, it's very powerful, but it's difficult to harness that power, and there's a lot of room for improvement there. They could improve the licensing and the expense, too.

In a vROps session at a recent conference, I heard they're trying to make it a little simpler, because when you first install it, it's very overwhelming. It's one of those products that's very, very powerful, but getting to a place where you can harness that power, there's a pretty steep learning curve. Doing custom dashboards and making things look simpler are not easy to do, compared to some other products. At my previous employer, we used VM1, which is a competitor, and I know there are other competitors such as VMTurbo; there are all kinds of other ones that do it. I guess those other solutions went more towards the ease-of-use side and less towards the power; the getting-into-everything side.

I've been with my current company for just over two years. About a year in, I campaigned to bring vROps in, so I have been probably using it for just over a year now.

It is a consistent, stable solution. Although it's not really a stability issue, we had one issue when we upgraded from vCOPS to vROps and tried to run it in parallel. It wasn't really clear about how you would go about doing that, so we ended up having to reinstall vROps completely, and had to start over. It takes 30 days to get to where you have good information coming out of it, so we had to start that over again. That wasn't necessarily the product's fault as much as the documentation's fault.

We're fairly small from an infrastructure standpoint, so I just have the one appliance. I don't have any remote collectors or anything running. I have one vROps appliance monitoring vCenters; one has about 400 VMs, the other one probably only has about 20 VMs that run all the time. It's our DR site, and there are some production workloads that run there all the time.

I'm one of those guys that'll never call technical support, so unless we have a major issue, I'd rather figure things out for myself. And my company tends to buy the lowest level of support. I don't usually call.

We did call them one time for vROps, which was the issue I’ve mentioned about the database becoming corrupted because of the way we had done the migration. They just said, "Can't do it that way."

Initial setup is really easy, especially with the appliance. You just deploy the appliance, and point it at vCenter. I had one issue that was a little bit non-intuitive as far as setup, which was the ability to pull in vSphere tags. If you want to pull in tags, you have to give it more permission than what you would do for a normal vROps appliance.

It is complex when you first set it up. It depends on how quickly you want to be able to get good and actionable information out of it. Obviously, there are things that are in it that are actionable from the start, but it's probably a subset of what you're actually looking for. If you do want to have custom dashboards and items like that quickly, you need to have a professional services organization, whether that's VMware themselves or a vendor that's familiar with vROps, just because of that learning curve.

There aren’t a lot of – at least there haven’t been – good resources for vROps. I don't know what it is about vROps, because for just about everything else in VMware, you can find lots of information. It's hard to find specific information on how to do things. Maybe I just haven't found the right places, but it seems to me that it's harder to find information – walkthroughs and things like that – on vROps than it is for some of the other products.

The tool really gives our VM admins the ability to dig deep into the VMs and really get a feel for what's going on. That's really a gap that we had prior to this product. Application teams would claim performance issues, etc. Our team really didn't have the tools to get in and do that deep-dive analysis without logging onto host and doing some very deep, technical commands. Very few people were able to do that type of analysis and this tool has really allowed us to open that up to more of our team, to be able to get a quick idea of what's going on with a VM.

It gives us quicker time to resolution. If we're in an outage situation, our teams can quickly get in there and identify whether it is a storage issue, a network issue, or a compute issue. It gives them the ability to discover that pretty quickly and then, when there is an issue, we can go back and do root-cause analysis. It gives them that ability to dig deep in and not just see it was a network issue, but get more specifics and hopefully get to an actual resolution because of that long-term fix.

It's a very powerful tool. It gives us the ability to get a lot of visibility that we just did not have before. The capacity management side of it is very big for us as well. Just being able to understand you know are we getting the most out of our infrastructure or not.

The biggest gap that we have today is that it doesn't integrate with our ticketing system. We get alerts out of the system in an email but those aren't actionable alerts. We actually did another professional service engagement with VMware to try and tailor those alerts some. We have been able to do that, but it's still an email alert, where we'd really like for that to be a ticket, so that somebody can be responsible for taking action on that.

There's also some gaps with the ability to aggregate the data and show it at a higher level. You have to dig deep into the specific VM to get the information you want. Not just anybody can do that. We've been able to open it up to more people on the team, but it's still not a completely intuitive tool that they can just pick up and use.

It seems to be a stable tool. We did have some issues early on with getting the kind of configuration correct. We've actually had to rebuild it, I believe two times, because of some bad configuration to start out with and, I guess, some databases getting too large. Outside of that, the tool has been pretty stable for us. For the most part, it's pretty reliable.

It seems scalable as well. It does a really good job of looking at the entire environment and aggregating all that data together. Going back to the scale and the database issues that we have had, I think that had to do with the amount of data that we were collecting on the number of VMs we were collecting. Now that we've got that fine-tuned a little better, it does seem to be pretty scalable in meeting our needs in that aspect.

We have used technical support. I don't know that I have a very solid answer regarding it, though. That would be more of our technical guys that were in there, day-to-day, dealing with it. I do know that we've had issues we've been able to resolve, but how easy that was, I'm not all that sure.

We really weren't using anything different. We were just using the vCenter functionality, really knew there was a gap there, and looked at the tools on the market at the time. We went with this tool because it really did give us that ability to dig deep into the VMs and get that technical deep dive. With some of the other tools, it was more of trusting the algorithms to tune the VMs correctly. We really wanted a little more control than that; that's why we went with this tool.

We use professional services to do the setup; that definitely helped us there. We did have configuration issues. There were some things that maybe weren't apparent at the time we went through the install. Over time, support realized there were some issues and made some different recommendations. I'll say using professional services definitely gave us a good foundation that we at least were doing things according to best practice at that time.

VMTurbo was the main one that we looked at.

The most important criteria when I’m selecting a vendor like VMware is the relationship. We have a good relationship with VMware. Also, whether it is a proven product, and then obviously cost is always at the top of the list.

I recommend vROps. I recommend professional services engagement, as well, especially for the tuning of the alerts, because it comes out of the box with just a lot of information. It takes a bit to get through that and kind of narrow it down. Your team either needs to really understand and be able to spend the time to do that, or get somebody to help you that's been through that experience before.

Capacity planning is the most valuable feature, as far as the storage is concerned, your servers are concerned, your ESX environment is concerned; when you need to add more ESX hosts.

It tells you if you have oversubscribed any of the VMs, if you're giving them more memory than they actually need, which is bad for the VM. You have to run that report and it shows you what the VM is actually using. If you have oversubscribed it, you can bring that number down; you can reduce the memory or the CPU.

Another good thing is when a customer asks you about an application running slow, you can go in and give them a snapshot that might show that the application is using only 20% of the memory, only 10% of the space; there's no issue with the resources as far as the server's concerned.

Clean up the dashboard; I need all the information right there, a high-level overview of everything. In the newer version, it's better. In the previous version, it wasn't.

I'm in the process of getting the latest version deployed. Right now, it's just gathering all the data. I still have to learn the product. I am not fully aware of the features that have been added in version 6. We’ve already purchased and deployed it; we’re waiting on professional services to come in and help us.

It has been stable

It offers flexibility; you can scale your environment any time.

It has not gotten slow at all. We have enough capacity on our ESX hosts to accommodate our workloads.

We use technical support a lot. It's good but they don't offer critical support for certain products. For example, we are using a product called VDP, vSphere Data Protection, to back up our VMs. We’re moving away from that; it's not reliable at all. It's like a free product.

For our operations manager, initial setup is complex, so you can't just have someone who just deploys ESX hosts. You have to research it and then move forward. Or, it has to be configured properly upfront before you move forward.

If you're running a VM, it's necessary that you get the Operations Manager. You can use third-party tools, but the data won't be that accurate, as far as monitoring using a native tool versus a third party.

The most valuable feature is the ability to get a view into all of my clusters from each one of my data centers at the same time.

It allows us to meet the needs of our customers a little better as far as capacity management. We can keep ahead of the curve of adding new hardware at the cluster side to meet the demand for what the other teams – such as the Windows team and Linux teams – need for their VMs.

The biggest room for improvement that I can see on vROps is for slightly better definitions around the metrics inside of the reporting. For some of that, it's difficult to find any kind of documentation that explains exactly what you're getting out of each particular metric.

I haven't seen any issues with stability at all. It works great.

Once again, I don't see any issues with scalability.

I have not had to use technical support.

We weren't using anything previously. Of course, we had a few talks with our reps at VMware, and they suggested we use it. We looked into it a little bit and it looked like it'd be a good tool for us.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor such as VMware is obviously market space and how popular they are. What everybody else's experience with them are.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I heard it was straightforward for us.

I don't believe we were considering any other solutions at the time.

Definitely give vROps a shot; at least if you can get a PoC to see if it works and if it's the right solution for you.

I think it works good. I'm not as experienced with it as some of the other people on my team, so they might have a few more things they dislike or like more about it. But so far from what I've seen, it works great.

The capacity planning is probably the biggest thing that I use and then I guess the monitoring alerting system and performance troubleshooting. Those are the top three.

It helps with troubleshooting the performance of different systems when customers complain or they say there's an issue. It helps us to narrow down and drill into seeing what's the root cause of the issue. It kind of gets in a good vicinity of that.

It has not helped us save on storage at all, and it has not helped us avoid outages, yet.

It's helped me plan capacity so that I'm always ahead of the curve. I'm actually deploying out systems and not delaying projects, because I have the insight of what resources that I'm short on or what resources I'm not short on. It's helped in that way. For capacity, that's been the biggest thing.

There are a lot more improvements that need to be done with the product. They've advanced from the last version, but there are many more things that should be there, and they're not. And they seem to be working on it, but until they get those things done, and I guess reduce the complexity of getting the system actually set up. As far as the initial setup, it is extremely easy, but then to configure and tailor it for your environment is very complex. Until they streamline that, I couldn't rate it any higher.

Until this week, it was very stable, but in the last week and a half, we've had some issues and we have a ticket open with VMware now to troubleshoot why there's an issue with it. And it's just random, that's the complaint I have about it. There's no way to actually troubleshoot or have insight when the product starts to go bad, when the system itself goes bad. Outside that, when it works, it works very well. But when it stops working, it's just all of a sudden. It's abrupt and there's no indication of why.

I'm not extremely large yet, and it has scaled fairly well. I've heard of other customers having to deploy many instances of it because of the global reach of their environment, or sometimes just the size of it. For me, I'd say it scales very well.

VMware actually had to make some changes because of us, because when we deployed it, we found some bugs in it. I worked with the product developers and engineers that developed the product to help resolve that, get the proper sizing, and get it to where it's scaled out to support our environment.

Technical support has been very good. When I escalated up, they got me in touch with the people who actually write it and develop it directly, so I'm on with them at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning on a Friday night/Saturday morning and so, they are very good. They're very helpful, they did the best to get in and find out what my issues were and get it resolved.

I've been using vROps since before VMware bought them. I knew of Integron before, when EMC bought them, and then transferred it over to VMware. I have used VMTurbo, but I like vROps much better. vROps has more in-depth analytics and things in it, and the capacity portion of it is much better. There's only one or two things that VMTurbo might do just as well as vROps but, overall, I like to have all of my solutions in one single pane of glass, and that's what vROps provides me.

I did the initial build. The setup was extremely easy, I feel. The original documentation about sizing was incorrect. That's why the system failed after I got it set up initially. Outside of that, the setup was extremely easy.

Support is going to be the number one criteria when selecting a vendor like VMware for me because on day two, after I get it set up and the vendor is gone, I want to know what type of support I'm going to have going forward when issues arise and when it's in real-world activity.

If someone asks me for advice, I'll say, Do your homework for one, engage their TAM, their technical team, to help them size it properly and make sure that for what they're going to use it, they're actually scaling it and setting up a way to accomplish that. Also, get involved with the community, go online. There are so many other resources out there: VMware employees that actually have blogs, and plugins. They just make your life much easier.

For me, the most valuable feature definitely is being able to see VM over- and under-provisioning quickly and easily: "Hey, this VM has 8 CPU's; it really only needs 2."; being able to go back to the business unit and tell them that, "Hey, we can save money by reducing this."

I like the improvement it did make, it looks like with 6. We just upgraded to 6 recently. It looks like it's a lot more integrated. I noticed when we first upgraded, you go to a VM and right there is the badge of the health of the VM and similar features. I guess it's more tightly integrated because I know that before, it was a different tab, so I like that.

I have been using it on and off for probably the past five years.

I think it has been consistently stable as long as I’ve been using it. Maybe initially, when I first started using it four or five years ago, it might not have been as stable, but I think it's gotten better over time. Of course, having it in the vApp obviously helps.

I've upgraded it probably a couple times in the past two years. It's real simple. Nothing to it.

Our environment's only probably about 600 VMs, so it handles that fine. I guess I don't really know past that.

I don't know if I've ever contacted technical support for vROps specifically. Honestly, I don't think it's as good as it used to be. I think it's gone downhill a little bit. I think it's one of those things where I guess at most bigger companies, you want to try to get past the level-one person. I feel like I know a little bit about it and a lot of times some of that time is spent with that level-one person when maybe it can go up a little higher.

I will say it is still a lot better than EMC support.

I think initial setup is real straightforward, because with the vApp, you just deploy it; you basically plug in your vCenter information, create a user for it, and go. It's pretty simple and it starts just collecting the data. That's only 15, 30 minutes. While it takes about a month to start getting valuable data about oversized and undersized VMs in the environment, you just set it up and let it do its thing.

The company where I was before didn't have anything and then we started with vRA’s Ops. When I arrived at the company I'm at now, they were a user of VMTurbo. I think the initial reason they went with that was probably cost. At that point, I don't think VMware was pushing operations manager as aggressively as third-party companies I guess.

I recommend it because, as I’ve mentioned, I think it's a good product. It's valuable. I guess the only thing is, like with everything at VMware, they have the different licensing structures. Look at whether you can use some of the features such as, I think, Chargeback.

I think it's definitely valuable. If you have a small environment, maybe not, but for any environment over 8 or 10 hosts, I think it's definitely worth taking a look at because you could save some money.

The most valuable feature of the product is the historical logging of the performance and other data.

It lets us analyze results even when customers aren't necessarily seeing problems in real time. It lets us go back, look, troubleshoot and perform similar tasks.

We've used it for some capacity management. I use it every day for that; mostly just monitoring the usage in the environment.

As far as compute resources, in some instances, it's helped us save. We use it to right-size VMs all the time.

Similarly, with performance management, we use it with right-sizing; they have all the recommendations and whatever their black box does, as well as some intelligent views into some historical metrics and seeing what VMs we're actually using, or seeing the performance profile.

They need to start including more compliance stuff, more granular compliance checks. For example, they're adding the 6.0 hardening guide, but my own compliance requirements are much more detailed than that. For our state government, we have to meet all kinds of regulatory requirements. Basically, I need a full view into all of the configurations and settings, so we can run compliance against a much wider swath of settings and configurations.

Stability’s been fine for us; haven't had any problems.

I think we have used technical support in the past. I think with some old versions, when it was vCOPS, but it was a separate guy. I don't know what the details of the tickets were.

It's been there since I started, so I can't answer.

An educated guess would be that my company was not looking into other solutions at the time when they were looking into vROps, because we were invested in VMware, so we were just using their tool to monitor what we had.

Throw it in the lab. Use it. I don't know. Nothing special.

The most valuable feature is being able to drill down and look at the health of my VMs when we're having issues with them. Lately, it's been our CPU ready time problems; getting ready times and CPU demand.

The dashboards are nice, because I can have one pane and have everything that I want to see and not have to drill into new things every time.

It has improved how my organization functions. It's not easy to do, but they are nice to have. It is fairly complex to get specific data in a dashboard.

Easier-to-create dashboards would be nice. Right now, it is complex because you have to know exactly the piece of data you're looking for. When you're looking through all the different levels, if you don't know exactly what you're looking for, then it takes a lot of time and research to get that data.

The upgrade process has been painful in the past.

With about 7,000 VMs, I have not encountered any scalability issues thus far.

I did not previously use a different solution.

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

Get some training. Get trained on it and make sure that you build it out correctly in the beginning. Size it correctly.