VMware Aria Operations Reviews

The reporting is the product’s most valuable feature. It's for customers; they want to show some sort of reporting to their superior, and you can have those easy-to-read meters. You can find out easily where the problem is.

Also, you don't have to be an expert, you can just read the meters. If they're red, you have some problems; if they're yellow, you have to pay some attention; and if they're green, you're good. It’s user friendly.

I also like the indicators.

It kind of limits the finger pointing. If you have some problems in the virtualized environment, and it's not clear which area has the problem. We might have said something like, "Okay, network guys take a look, and then server guys, and storage guys." The individual departments would then say something like, "I don't have any problem, it's probably another department."

The product is really quite solid. For example, I think the UI is okay. It is easy to read. It's intuitive; you don't have to know all the technical stuff. When you drill down, you have to really know some stuff. I’d like it to be easier to drill down.

I also would like to see integration with BMC.

Actually, I don't think we had any problem with stability, ever. If you set it up correctly, you likely won't have any problem.

I think scalability is quite good. We have a couple hundred of VMs.

We have not really used technical support in terms of vROps, but more on the other things, such as ESX. They were very helpful.

Initial setup is quite straightforward, but you do have to find out some things. There is the step-by-step process, but it’s not just clicking Next and OK. You have to set-up some things. If you’re using virtual appliances, you have to know what to do in those appliances.

For virtual environments, I have not compared it with products from other vendors. I think it's better to go with vROps because they have some bundles. Who knows virtual infrastructure with VMware vSphere better than vROps?

Go with vROops, because it's easy to use.

The most valuable feature has definitely been the ability to drill down on the performance metrics, to troubleshoot issues that arise.

Some of the areas that we have run into issues with are the upgrades, sometimes. We've had a few issues with that and had to work with support with that before.

I think managing the size, the sizing of the actually product itself can be improved. Several times, we had to go back and reevaluate how we had sized the environment.

The only other thing would be to make it easier for our end users to consume the data. Sometimes we've had to do a lot to try to customize dashboards; we spent a lot of time on that. If they develop ways to make that a little bit easier, so we can make it a little simpler for our users.

I've been using vROps for about three years.

It has been consistently stable. As I’ve mentioned, the only issues we've had are some upgrades, really.

The support has generally been pretty good with that. We've had some tough issues, so it's been pretty good. They managed to resolve them. We've got one that's in the queue right now, but they are working with us on it. It has to do with tagging.

Even though we became more virtualized, we were using traditional products such as HP OpenView and so on; we really weren't getting the full picture. We knew we needed something that was more hypervisor aware. It’s made a huge difference.

It really became mandatory as we started virtualizing things such as SQL Server and Oracle, because we really had spent a lot of time troubleshooting them.

There's some complexity to the initial setup, to do it right. We did have an engagement with VMware, for them to actually install it, because we knew there was some complexity to it.

It's a good solution. A warning: You probably need to make sure you can give it the proper amount of attention and time. You're just not going to throw it out there, hit the wizard and just walk away and say "Well, it's done." You're not going to be fair to the product or to yourself if you don't do that.

My personal requirements for a vendor are:

• Obviously, integration with our current tools, with the hypervisor and so on, which helps VMware a lot.
• Ease of maintenance, so far as updates and so on. I don't really want to spend a whole lot of time on that. Actually, vROps performs properly. We've had products before that just didn't perform very well. When that happens, the users just won't use it. It's very important.

The capacity information is the most valuable feature of vROps. It shows that you're using too many resources on VMs, and you can reclaim some resources. It provides that kind of insight so that we right-size and not over-provision VMs. For example, if someone says that they think they need eight CPUs, we can show them that they don’t; that they only need two. It’s beneficial in that way. That’s starting to happen more and more.

I also appreciate the health monitors. When we get the alerts and so on, we can very quickly see what the problem is. Sometimes it's kind of difficult to get that information directly from vSphere itself, so it enables us to get it quicker. We're fortunate in our environment; we bought vSphere Enterprise Plus and vROps comes with it. We didn't have to buy it separately.

We're not very mature with our vROps installation, but we are trying to learn more and more about it, and use it more and more. One thing I wasn't aware of: I didn’t know you could monitor external things, such as Brocade switches or something like that. I didn't know that was a possibility with vROps.

Feature-wise, I don't know that I'm looking for any more features. What I would need more help with is establishing the correct baselines and that's something that's very subjective, based on each individual company. From my perspective, that's something I could use some help with; making sure I get the baseline set correctly. If you just take the out-of-the-box settings and an alert goes off because you have a certain disk latency, is that really a problem? Is that the correct level for your organization? The out-of-the-box settings might not be the best for your environment. I would think each organization would need to develop its own baseline, and that can be the trickiest part. Sometimes, you need a little guidance with that. You kind of have an idea of what is bad, but sometimes it needs to be a little more tight. Maybe they could offer a questionnaire or some sheet that I can go through that will help me establish what might be the current baselines for me. Something like that.

I'd also like to see a mobile interface. I don't know if later versions offer it, because we're on 5.5. I guess some of their guys are working on it, so it very well could be in later versions, but a mobile interface is something I can see as being beneficial.

It is absolutely stable; no issues whatsoever.

It scales really, really well. When we did it, we just installed it and it started doing the analysis. It's pretty much, set it and forget it. We need to adjust our baselines and similar items, but it's scaled really well for us. We have about 320 VMs. We're not doing any VDI or anything like that, so it's just our service infrastructure and I would say we're about 80% virtualized.

When we started using vROps, we had around 200 VMs. We’re now at around 320 VMs and haven’t had to change anything in vROps to accommodate that 60% increase in our virtual footprint. vROps simply began monitoring the additional VMs and reported on them as expected.

There are default baselines out of the box that VMware recommends for typical environments, but it’s probably a good idea to have those baselines adjusted for your particular environment, so that you get what you need and weed out what you don’t need.

We don't have to call very often for VMware support.

The biggest problem we had was with licensing, figuring out purchasing and those kind of logistical issues; not technical issues.

I did not previously use a different solution. The reason I initially wanted to look at it was to gain more insight into alerts, performance, and that type of information. As I’ve mentioned, it's kind of difficult to get that directly out of vSphere sometimes. I wanted to see what vROps would give me and it's very useful.

Initial setup very straightforward: install the virtual application, and let it start monitoring. Getting the web interface and all that set up wasn't that difficult. There's plenty of documentation out there on it. It took a couple of days, on and off. While I was working on it, I would get pulled off on something else, so it took a couple of days.

As I’ve mentioned, it was included with our Enterprise Plus, so it was a no-brainer.

vROps is definitely something you would want to look at because of the tight integration with vSphere. I don't know whether I would want to look at another product to do this type of information gathering and alerting. I've had some of my engineers look at some other solutions. They come back, share what they found, show it to me and I think, I don't know why we need to look at that. We have vROps and it works a lot better than that.

Do yourself a favor and look at vROps.

For me, the most valuable feature is the efficiency area because vROps helps us to recover undersized infrastructure.

The other feature we use is the management packs for our storage, for our SQL servers. Even though it is very slow with the SQL servers, it works fine.

My company is small; we have around 600 VMs. Before vROps, we had a lot of problems with performance. The full vROps reports showed me which VMs were overstressed. We don't have customized reports, yet.

The capacity management has saved us more than 30% on storage. We are trying to be an efficient data center. After vROps, we work better.

Make it easier to get customized reports; right now, it's very difficult.

I’d also like to see more integration with the storage servers we have.

Stability is better in this version than it was with vCOPS, which we came from.

We have only one vROps. We don't have a cluster. We know about the cluster, but we don't need it yet.

We have used their support page. They’re knowledgeable.

Initial setup was pretty easy. It took couple of hours.

Before we chose vROps, we also looked at EMC. All of our infrastructure is based on EMC and their servers. We liked the integration between vROPs, Dell, and EMC.

I think the best thing I like about vROps is that all the information is in vCenter’s database, but most customers won't take the time to mine the data in vCenter. vROps presents that data in an easy-to-consume format. You don't have to dig in to all the numbers as to why something needs to change or why you might have to improve performance.

It's huge in the performance management arena because it has the ability to really show us that we are over-provisioning a lot of the virtual machines to the point where they're hurting themselves; too many virtual processors, too much memory. The virtual machines can actually be built smaller and perform better.

vROps has the ability to provide insight, fully look at and monitor your environment, and give you recommendations on optimization, efficiency, and risk management.

For instance, let's say that I have a virtual machine that appears to be starving for memory. vROps has the ability to monitor that virtual machine in real time, and give you a recommendation on how to make that virtual machine perform better. Possibly by, say, moving it to another host.

For troubleshooting, it can also be pretty cool, and give you an idea if you're having issues, say, at storage level. Let's say latency has gone too high on one of my LUNs; it has the ability to monitor that by working with SIOC. and some other products on the hypervisor. Also, it has the ability to look at troubleshooting from a performance standpoint; troubleshooting between networking devices.

We have also used capacity management to definitely save on the compute side.

Given that I help others learn how to use the product, in most cases, even with the default dashboards that come with the product, most customers get a wealth of information. Then you couple that with the ability to customize those dashboards for their specific environment. One of the things I've always enjoyed is that we've been teaching and preaching for years on the training side: Right-size your virtual machines to get the best ROIs. The efficiency badge in vROps will tell you exactly how many virtual processors you can reclaim, and how much memory you can reclaim. It's not just an administrator saying, "Hey your virtual machine could be smaller." It's the product actually telling you that you could get a lot more out of your environment.

I would probably like to see better recommendations. I think sometimes the recommendations for performance optimizations tend to be a little too simplistic. The recommendations could be a little bit more in depth, as to why you need to do this or that.

For instance, in a performance optimization, it might say you just need to move this virtual machine from here to here. If you really look at the virtual machine’s overall performance, moving it might be a way to fix it, but resizing the virtual machine might by a better recommendation. Or moving it to another data store might be a better recommendation. I think the recommendations could be a little more tightened up and probably a little bit more in depth.

Also, one of the things I like about vROps is the ability to add the additional adapters to monitor other kinds of products, whether it's NSX, or storage, or even physical hardware to a degree; cloud-based environments. I'd like to see more on that front, to continue developing those additional adapters, those additional third-party add-ons. For example, working with Palo Alto Networks, working with some of our additional storage vendors. There are some good adapters out there, for sure, but there's new stuff coming out all the time.

Finally, I think its ability to interact with vRealize Automation could be enhanced.

We've been teaching on it now for four or five years now.

So far, stability's been pretty good. I can't think of anything off the top of my head where we've had any issues.

Scaling is pretty good, especially when you have the ability to put nodes in remote offices to grab the information then pull it over for it to be crunched. From a scalability standpoint, pretty good.

I personally have not used technical support.

The initial setup is actually quite easy because you just go through the wizard and you deploy your different nodes: your master and your slave secondary, and then your data nodes. It's pretty easy to deploy these days, and then they've got different versions. They've got a version that will run on Red Hat; I've got one customer that uses that. I've got most of my customers using the Windows version.

Definitely get training on it. Of course I represent that, but it's a very complex product. Out of the box, you can get a lot out of it, but there's so much more customization available with vROps. If you'll take the time, you'll get much more out of the product, but it usually requires a bit of training. It's probably taken me a good part of the year to understand a lot of the ins and outs to the product.

• Quick troubleshooting: If the VMs are performing poorly or the multi-tier application has multiple hooks in multiple places, it's easy to troubleshoot that kind of thing. It shows when data stores are getting full, and we can take action based on that. People want reports as to how many VMs are in a particular cluster, for example.
• Forecasting
• Trending
• Analytics

With the VM sprawl at my company, we found a lot of overprovision. With vROps, we had a script that ran, and that would automatically, based on vROps’ recommendations, size it in properly. We gained a lot of CPUs back from that exercise.

It just helps us better use resources; better troubleshooting; quick troubleshooting. It saves time.

We also use the capacity management feature to save resources, which found a lot of VDI desktops were overprovisioned. For example, if we needed one vCPU and 2 GB RAM and they already had four vCPUs and 4 GB RAM. So that's how we saved a lot of resources.

With the performance management feature, things sped up dramatically. We freed up so much resources that could be used by other desktops as well. So that let us spread out the infrastructure a lot more.

I need some simplicity in the products. The products are great. There's a 101 million metrics that you can use, but it needs to be a little bit more simple. People need to be able to create dashboards much more easily.

There are too many metrics to choose from, and the people don't know what to choose. It's very difficult to accurately pick the right thing. If someone asks for a report right away, you can't do it because you have to know exactly which metric you want to use.

I'm experienced with this part of the product, so I know a little bit more but, for example, the BAU teams and the help desk teams don't know as much as I do. Hence, the problem.

I think it's pretty stable. I like it.

We had a little bit of slowness; just the size of the deployment. It hooks into about 30,000 VMs under the hosts. It was running on shared discs and then, after that, we deployed some all-flash arrays, and then we moved it everything to all-flash. And then the problems were a lot better.

Technical support is okay; it could have been better. When I contacted them, they initially assigned a lower-level technician. The problem was not simple and it had be dealt with by someone more technical.

I did not previously use a different solution. This was the only thing. We needed something that could help us troubleshoot quicker, help us focus a lot better. We find that vROps exactly fit the bill.

Initial setup was straightforward, and I found that the upgrades were quite simple. They took a couple of days, maybe three days.

I recommend it. I highly recommend that you check it out. It's just amazing. VMware is an amazing product. It gives you great insight into how your infrastructure's doing. There are thousands of reports that you can run. It gives you data inside of how your infrastructure is doing. So I highly recommend it.

• Troubleshooting: All the way from the cluster level down to the VM, you can see it as a whole perspective or troubleshoot the individual VM.
• Creating custom dashboards
• Customer reporting

We use it to monitor CPU and memory usage. We also monitor our storage for latency, and things like that.

For the most part, we have not used the new features in version 6, such as integration with DRS and capacity planning.

It has helped identify bottlenecks and contention. One of them was a storage issue; trying to find out what VMs were pulling the highest latency or a highest IOPS, and narrowing it down from there. It also identifies any type of CPU contention ready time or memory issues.

The biggest improvement I'd like to see is when you create custom dashboards, there isn’t an easy way to specify custom time settings. When you create a dashboard, it is always statically set for a specific time frame versus specifying a different time frame.
The other improvement would be to be able to create a custom report out of a dashboard you just created.

We do a little bit of reporting. We'd like to get a little more, though.

I'm going to mess with 6.3; maybe it's better. It's improved, but I don't know how much yet.

It's very stable. I'm having no issues with stability.

I haven't really had an issue with it scaling out. We have over 5,000 VMs. No issues.

I've not used technical support for vROps.

We were using a little bit of SolarWinds, which was probably the biggest one that we're using at the time.

You can get a lot more granular with vROps, and it's made for what we need specifically, for VMware.

Initial setup was straightforward. It was very simple; right out of the box, it worked. We've been using vROps since they first came out with 5.0 and 5.5. It's come along way with 6.0.

I don’t have any issues with configurations. Once you understand how the templates and the reporting stuff works – once you understand how that comes together – then it's pretty simple to do the reports.

Give it the good 30-day time frame to mess with it and see what it has to offer. Take advantage of the free trial.

The most valuable feature is the reporting, being able to give accurate reports to our management on what's going on in our VMware environment, for example, if they want to know what capacity is remaining on certain systems. We also like the fact that we can get ahead of a problem. They like the fact that we can go ahead and get ahead of a problem with vROps. Pretty much on a daily basis, we can see in a single pane of glass what our environment looks like, looking at the heat maps and so on. That's what makes it valuable to us.

For example, most of the problems on a daily basis are related to disk space utilization on VMs.

It also helps whenever there are anomalies with systems; if there's a lot of CPU contention or a problem with the host.

There haven’t yet been any other side benefits that specifically help us as an organization function, but we're actually looking to start utilizing it more for the enterprise edition that lets us delve into applications. We're not quite sure we're going to go with VMware for that.

It is somewhat not as user friendly as I think it could be. With configuring custom reports, custom dashboards, sometimes there can be a lot involved, where I wish it would be a little easier.

Also, I’d like more canned reports. Some of the reports are nice in some of the features, but I’d like more customizable reports. For example, if we have a group of VMs and we want to just get a simple report or a more complex report, to me, there are too many steps to get that done.

It's pretty stable to us. It doesn’t become slow down any more than expected; we have a pretty big environment, we have 3000 VMs, with over 300 hosts.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

We previously did not have a solution for monitoring our VMware infrastructure. We went with vROps because we were a VMware workshop and they provided us with a solution that we thought fit with us.

I was involved in the initial setup; it was not that complex. To get it all up and running, stood it up for all our systems, with the assistance of an outside vendor, it took three days.

Make sure you understand the difference between the standard, advanced and enterprise editions, what you can and cannot do with each edition. Make sure what you're going to get and what you're not going to get. For example, they present the enterprise edition to you, but the only thing you might be able to get is the standard edition, which doesn't let you customize dashboards and doesn’t have other functionality.