VMware Aria Operations Reviews

I am working for a company that provides a cloud computing solution in Bangladesh. We are like an AWS or Azure in Bangladesh. We have a huge infrastructure with different data centers and different availability zones. We need to monitor our customers' VMs and their workloads. Many of them are financial companies and big corporations. We use vROps as a visibility tool to do all this. We also use it for planning and for performance monitoring.

In our country, whenever people are using virtual machines or cloud computing, they want reports, every day or week or month, about how VM instances are working. They want to know about the CPU, memory, and data usage. That's especially true for FinTech companies. We generate those reports from vROps. It provides them with relevant information and helps them to better understand things.

The most challenging part of a data center is the monitoring. You have to see how things work, such as particular instances and workloads, what the ideal VMs are, et cetera. It's important to understand cost optimization and performance tuning. If you have that kind of visibility, when you have a large infrastructure with 10,000 or 20,000 VMs, a product like vROps is great for doing all these things in one place.

The solution has helped us to decrease overall downtime. We have segregated things. We have a master replica in a different segment, and it has helped us to do so. In two years, we have had one hour of downtime, in total. vROps helped achieve that.

It has also enabled us to be more proactive in anticipating and solving problems and that has helped to decrease our mean time to resolution by about one hour.

For efficient workload placement, it's great. It's a multi-purpose solution. If you have multi-purpose workloads in your infrastructure you must use this kind of product.

In terms of cost savings, it's about optimization. When you have lots of hardware in your data center you need to optimize it. If you have lots of workloads running, you need to optimize them. With this kind of solution, you optimize your data center. It has helped to optimize our operations by 15 to 20 percent.

In addition, the solution has replaced multiple monitoring tools. It combines a lot of tools. We are still using SolarWinds and Grafana, but our infrastructure is totally built on VMware, so we are planning to use vRealize Operations Manager with everything because it's a VMware product.

One of the most valuable features is the ability to compare between AWS/Azure and the local cloud. When customers deploy something on the local cloud, with the same configuration that would apply to AWS or Azure, we can calculate the estimated cost difference between the local cloud and the public cloud. We do this kind of analysis for optimization and it is one of the best features of vROps. It is an advanced feature that came out in version 7.5.

The most commonly-used functions are easy to access.

When it comes to the visibility the solution provides, from apps to infrastructure across multiple clouds, it is a great product. If you have a VMware infrastructure, or a multi-cloud infrastructure—including AWS or Azure or Hyper-V—you need visibility and dashboards to monitor everything. vRealize Operations Manager, for managed service providers, makes it easier to understand all the scenarios. It's a good product, providing visibility into everything in a single dashboard. It is an amazing product.

They need to improve the capacity and infrastructure planning side of things. Also, I would like to see them integrate more stuff, with more detailed monitoring and different cloud providers.

I've been using VMware vRealize Operations for two years. Initially, I was using version 7, then we upgraded to 7.5, and now it's 8.0.

Out of five, the stability of the solution is 4.5.

The scalability is 4.6 out of five.

Initially, the tech support was not that good, but now it is very good. They've improved.

We were only using vCenter and ESXi initially and then we started using vRealize Operations Manager.

The initial setup of vROps was pretty straightforward, but I have been working on VMware stuff for the last six or seven years. Deployment takes about 30 minutes.

In our data center, we have a NOC monitoring team and we have a system team. Those are the two departments that are using the solution. And it doesn't require much staff for deployment and maintenance.

The value we get from the solution is worth the cost because it enables us to optimize things.

If you have a big infrastructure, you should calculate the cost for those systems. But if you have a small workload, a small environment, don't go for vROps.

We are using Veeam and SolarWinds, but they are not that efficient.

My advice is to take a good look at vROps. When you have a big infrastructure with a large volume of instances, monitoring everything in a single dashboard is very difficult, but with this solution, it's pretty easy. It's like a Swiss Army knife. You can troubleshoot and monitor in a single place. It's pretty convenient.

Overall, this is a very good product. We are using lots of VMware technologies, including Log Insights, VMware ESXi, vCenter, and NSX. There were a lot of improvements with version 8. They integrated AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. It is improving day by day. If some of your instances are situated in AWS and some are on Azure, and you have to monitor all the systems in a single place, that's where they're improving on things. Now, they are providing the cloud-provider stuff.

We are planning to deploy Kubernetes in our data centers, because Kubernetes is a very new technology, but in our country it is not that popular yet. We will look at integrating that kind of offering later.

Previously we integrated this solution with vRealize Log Insight as a trial. But later on, we stopped using vRealize Log Insight because we were using Splunk for analytics. vRealize Log Insight is a different product. When you have a lot of stuff in your data center and you need to archive and manipulate things, you need to use different tools. vRealize Log Insight is not useful for our use case.

We wanted a tool for monitoring the entire virtualization infrastructure. In addition to infrastructure monitoring, a second use case was application monitoring. At the time we were looking, they had a tool called EPOps through which you could do application monitoring. We also heard about some other components, partner integrations for VMware, through which we could monitor the SAP landscape and storage performance.

There was a team of five or six members. Only one member implemented the vROps, but the visibility was provided to all five of the core infrastructure members. They have been able to use the tool effectively to monitor all the applications from an infrastructure point of view.

We also created an application-specific dashboard, from an infra point of view, which was released to end application teams, so that they can then monitor the performance of their applications: How is the CPU and memory? How is the software: working or not working? It is a one-of-a-kind solution where we have onboarded application teams and given them logins for their specific areas.

vROps also provides proactive monitoring, at some level. It's not practical to keep on logging in to the tool to look at it. So you can create alerts and it will alert you if memory utilization is going beyond 80 or CPU utilization is going above 90. It significantly improves the monitoring, because we are able to act on it beforehand, before the system goes down. It has decreased our downtime by 20 percent. We are more proactive in anticipating and solving problems, and it has also reduced our mean time to resolution for infrastructure by about 10 percent.

We also use it for capacity management, for buying new capacity. It has saved us on hardware costs because we're able to plan properly and we're able to buy the necessary hardware. It has saved us around 50 lakh in Indian rupees [about $70,000 at the time of this review]. And because we are not buying as much infrastructure, the licensing requirements and costs have also been reduced. And it has saved us about 5 to 10 lakh [about $7,000 to $14,000 at the time of this review] in power and other data center costs.

For VMware monitoring, it gives a good amount of data, which can be circled back with the IT hierarchy, or application owner, to have a discussion. 

VM rightsizing is another very good feature and capacity planning is something else that I like about it.

In addition, over time it has become more user-friendly. When we deployed, it was only three-years-old. Recently, it has matured enough to monitor cloud infra also, but we have not tried that yet. But it has matured over the time. The GUI has become more user-friendly and it is very lightweight now.

It shows end-to-end visibility for infrastructure: CPU, memory, and all the processes that are running on the server. It will provide you everything. It will provide you some information about applications, depending on the tool capability, but it is not an application performance monitoring solution.

We integrated vROps with vRealize Log Insight, but it was not helpful to me. It was not giving me any good data.

Another area where there is room for improvement is an area which I've not looked at: cloud management and how efficiently it can do it. 

Also, while it is able to do VMware management very effectively, if you have any other hypervisor solution, I don't know how effectively it would work. It should scale to other infrastructure also.

We have been using VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) for the last five to six years now.

The product is more or less stable. We may find a database-related issue once in a year because it uses the open source Cassandra DB, so sometimes that does not work the way it should. 

Also, high-availability within the product is not so good. They have tried to improve it over the time. We have created a two-node cluster where, if one cluster goes down, the other node will take over. Whenever we have tried, it was not that seamless, and we had to involve their support.

It is scalable. It is easy to scale. We also implemented it in a remote location, where we just had to install a remote connector. All you need is good connectivity.

In a given week we were using vROps three to four times. That frequency has been reduced and now we use it about twice a week. I look at it in my role as manager of IT infrastructure and data center. On my team there are three people and they also look at vROps from time to time. They create VMs. They are database, software, and backup administrators. Above me there is our leadership team that also looks at it on a case-by-case basis.

Technical support is very good, no doubt about it. If you raise a very high-priority case, you will get an immediate response. And most of the people are able to solve the problems. You don't have to roll the case over to the next available or superior agent.

We didn't have any tools before vROps, but it provides a single tool for virtualized infrastructure monitoring.

The initial setup was a complex process, and it is still a complex process. There are too many products: the UI, database, and you have to properly size it according to your requirements, otherwise it does not work well.

Our deployment was a one-year project.

We took a full suite of licenses for all the VMs which we had. And that time we had some 600 VMs. We took two types of licensing, advanced and enterprise, where we were trying to achieve our application monitoring in the enterprise licensing. The advanced was used to create dashboards and other kinds of reporting.

Besides this, we used one more product, VMware Compliance Manager, which they have now stopped. That is one area which they have now integrated into vROps, but we have not tried it so far.

We used VMware professional services. Our experience with them was okay. We thought we would implement way further, with VMware onboarding, but it took a year to complete the project.

We haven't really seen ROI. That was not the idea at the time. We wanted a monitoring platform. Return on investment on such a product is also fairly difficult to calculate.

Over time they have changed the pricing and the licensing model. Five or six years ago, when we took it, it was a very good option. Now, I think I have to reevaluate, to be honest.

We looked at SolarWinds and BMC. One of the primary reasons we went with vROps was that we had a large VMware infrastructure. Also, at that time, the dashboards were very good. Also, at some level, it was an agentless solution. In all the other cases you had to install an agent in the end VMs. But because vROps is tightly integrated with VMware, it monitors without agents. That was a factor. Cost was also a factor.

My advice would be to look at it holistically, meaning look at what you want to achieve in the final endgame. Also, evaluate a couple of products to get a feel for them and which product suits you. In addition, create roles within your company, because this needs dedicated attention when you implement it and attention to sustain it. There should also be alignment with an application team or leadership team when implementing this kind of solution.

I've been using this for managing our company's infrastructure. We have a cluster of somewhere around six nodes. 

We're using it in a hybrid mode. We have our on-premise data centers and we are operating on AWS as well. We have multiple legacy apps which require a certain type of monitoring to be enabled and we kept that enabled from the on-premise, but the advanced features for monitoring are being explored on AWS.

Primarily I have found it very useful from the compliance perspective and for control and agility. These are the three main things which are helping us to have a more proactive approach in managing the infrastructure.

We used to have COTS products for monitoring our ESXi hosts. We had a team that would check on alerts and then go on to our approach for remediating the problems. vROps has helped us to reduce the costs and increase the efficiency, because it has a lot of features that tell you where things are going wrong. We have been able to cut down on the cost of resources and we have a smaller team to manage the infrastructure now. The solution helped us to reach a level where we have low resources but high efficiency. Its gives you the most accurate alerts and remediation processes for closing problems.

We have a support operations center where we have a dashboard running 24/7 and that is where vROps manages things and tells us about the health of the infrastructure. If something is going wrong, if it picks up any anomalies, the team takes care of it, remediating based on the recommendation of vROps in the dashboard.

Since incorporating vRealize Operations over the last two years, I don't recollect there being a big concern in regards to downtime. We have not had any downtime happening in the last two years, since we put vROps in place. If we correlate it to the other models we were using earlier, we had certain incidents where we were not even aware of what was going on, on the ESX level. vROps has helped us to reduce our downtime by 90 percent. I'm taking the 10 percent off to account for planned maintenance, because sometimes we need to go offline for maintenance done for our entire infrastructure. But downtime has been reduced 90 or 95 percent since we incorporated vROps.

It has also increased our efficiency and decreased our mean time to resolution. Infrastructure agility has gone up and we're much more efficiently handling the infrastructure now, whether on-premise or Amazon. It provides the agility to do the deployments, but even then, deployment has to be initiated at a user level. Overall, it has increased our efficiency by 30 to 40 percent, in terms of deployment.

The solution has also played a very vital role in workload placements and we have been able to manage workloads and capacity planning, among other things, in a very efficient manner. We are 70 to 80 percent more efficient in regards to management and capacity planning. It gives you visibility into the infrastructure so that you never go beyond the sources that you have and it has helped increase our VM density by around 70 percent. In addition, performance has definitely increased by a similar rate of 70 to 75 percent compared to the previous product we used. There was a leap forward when we used vROps.

Regarding hardware costs, what we used to do before we had vRealize Operations was to buy things in chunks. If we needed storage or additional memory, we might procure 10 TB of storage at one go and then start using it, despite the fact that only 4 of the 10 TB was being used. That's how we would do hardware resource allocation: we would have to buy that item and put it into the system. But now, because of the visibility with vROps, we know how much storage we will require six months down the line. That means we do procurement in smaller chunks. We save hardware costs and, at the same time, resources are planned in such a way that we never run out of resources. Because we have six- or seven-node cluster, from the power perspective, we are not seeing that much in savings, but definitely due to the capacity planning and the visibility, we have seen a cost benefit.

There's a feature known as Smart Alerts in vRealize Operations, which I have found to be useful if there's anything going wrong in the infrastructure. What usually happens is that you get so many alerts that you become confused. Smart Alerts give you visibility into your infrastructure and also recommend how to fix the situation. That's a feature which I'm really a fan of.

Control, from the compliance perspective, is also helpful because we are a PCI DSS-certified company. It keeps us in compliance so that all of our servers and other things are not breaching any of the baseline protocols and baseline policies which we have laid down for the company. That's another thing which I like about the VMware vROps.

For the initial setup, there should be some sort of auto discovery of the environment. That should be enabled. It has the ability to discover a main node, but it could still be made easier, to reduce the initial configuration and setup time.

We have been using VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) for the last two years.

After incorporating it during the initial phase, there was a discovery period for the infrastructure and for vROps to adopt our set of configurations and advanced policies. Since then, it has been pretty stable. We haven't had any issues.

The scalability is fine. When we started using vROps, we only had a three-node cluster. Over the last two years, we have gone up to a six-node cluster. It is pretty scalable. The good part is that adding nodes to vRealize Ops is a pretty straightforward thing. It has given us the visibility to plan and to scale to the level we are at now.

We have over 3,000 people, out of an employee base of 10,000, using the apps that are running on the ESXi that is managed by vROps.

In terms of increasing our usage, as of now there are no plans because it widely depends on the expectations of the business. It's a global thing now because of COVID-19. We still don't know how we are going to grow this over time because the business is in a "back seat" right now. But I'm positive, down the line, of the possibility that we will go further with this.

We have had a couple of cases where we have reached out to VMware support and the tech support has always been awesome from all perspectives. Their problem-solving attitude has always helped. We have been using VMware for seven to eight years now and we have gradually grown but support has been awesome during that time.

In the past we used Paessler PRTG as well as other tools.

The initial setup is straightforward, not complex.

Initially, because we were not familiar with vRealize Operations, it took us a while to get it set up. Our infrastructure is dependent on multiple volumes, ESX clusters and the storage. It took us seven to 10 days to have a fully functional deployment of the solution. The initial setup took us less time, but setting out and defining the policies, the baseline and advanced policies, happened within 15 days of the deployment.

For deployment, we used a team of four onboard resources and we got in touch with local consultants who are VMware Certified partners for doing the deployment. The initial deployment was done by the certified partner and then a knowledge transfer to the resource team took place. After a month or two, our team was able to be 100 percent hands-on with it and started using it.

I rate VMware vRealize Operations very highly because it gives you multiple features such as compliance, agility, and staying hybrid, although if you want you can do it on-prem or on the cloud. I would recommend it regardless of the deployment, whether it's on-prem or AWS or hybrid.

It is user-friendly, but it definitely requires a little tweaking in the environment when you're doing the installation to set it per your requirements, your infrastructure, and per your expectations. What are you trying to monitor? Once you're done with setting up vROps for your cluster or nodes, then it's very easy to use. It will really help you out to get to the stage of automation for your infrastructure, so you don't need to depend on manual processes at all. 

We are not using Kubernetes or Tanzu as of now, but we are planning to incorporate it down the line, maybe in three to six months.

Overall, I would rate vROps as a nine out of 10. The one point I'm leaving out is because there is room for improvement, as I mentioned earlier.

Our customers use the solution to monitor the health of the cloud platform and ensure everything is okay.

Heat maps are valuable. The alerting feature has been the most beneficial in managing virtualized environments.

The solution must provide better training options to help us make the most of the tool. The learning curve is fairly high. It's a deceptively easy product when we first look at it, but it has tremendous depth. There's a lot to it.

I have been using the solution for five years.

The tool is stable.

The tool is scalable. We use a lot of different installations of the product. Our customers are small, medium, and large enterprises.

The support is good. We often wonder whether the support team will meet the SLAs. I'm very reluctant to make all of our support issues P1. VMware is reasonably good at fixing problems. They probably don't have enough qualified engineers in Aria Operations’ support. When you get them on the phone, they are very knowledgeable.

Positive

We used Turbonomic. We do not use it anymore because it isn’t as useful. It didn't have all the features that we needed in an MSP solution.

The solution is easy to deploy. We have a lot of configuration, so it takes a lot longer. However, the basic installation takes 20 to 30 minutes. One engineer is more than enough to deploy the tool. It is reasonably easy to maintain the product.

The return on investment is reasonable. However, the features we would most want from an MSP perspective are those we can't afford because we can't pass on the costs to the customers. We will have an issue if we need more hosts and storage. Our customers cannot afford it.

Reducing the cost would be the most beneficial. The product is too expensive to implement. We can't afford the extra features because it's simply too expensive.

We are cloud providers. We use the solution as a part of our support for the customers. We should be able to model our requirements and purchase in advance. Modeling would be very useful if our platform is growing. If a customer has a particular amount of CPU, storage, and memory requirements, we'd like to model it and get ahead of the storage availability and CPU memory availability issues. We could also model the upgrades when there is a need for maintenance. Such modeling is very useful to an MSP. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

Our clients use VROps to monitor their virtual machine performance, create reports, do capacity planning, and do project planning. We also use the tenant-student app for billing purposes.

I've found the reporting and analytics features to be the most valuable. 

The latest release of VMware Aria Operations has some great new automation features, but I think the pricing could be improved. It's quite expensive, especially for the entire VM workload.

In future releases, I would like to see VMware Aria Operations integrate with Ansible. I understand that VMware has their own orchestration and automation product, but I think it would be valuable to be able to integrate with Ansible as well. This would give users the flexibility to choose the best tool for the job, without having to invest in two separate products.

I have been using VROps for about eight years.

It is a very stable solution. But it requires a lot of knowledge to manage. For example, if you are collecting a lot of data for analysis, the virtual appliance drive spaces can fill up. In this case, you need engineers who know how to expand those spaces. The procedure is simple: you just add a new VMDK and start the appliance. The appliance will automatically expand the drives with the NVMe and stuff. However, the problem is that you need engineers who know how to manage and clear up the logs and ensure that they are sent as a stop.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten.  I did have some scalability issues when working with the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) stack. For example, if I deployed one instance and needed to scale out to a second instance, I would sometimes run into problems. 

VROps is most suitable for enterprise-level companies.

The initial setup process is fairly simple, especially if you are only setting up a standalone instance. However, if you are setting up a multi-tenant or multi-cluster environment, the setup process can take longer.

Our clients have hosted it on cloud as well as on-premises. 

The licensing is quite expensive for our company. I would probably give it a rating of seven out of ten, where one being expensive and ten being affordable.

I've used both VMware Aria Operations and Veeam ONE.

If I need to troubleshoot a problem, I would use VMware Aria Operations. If I need to get a complete overview of my environment and generate reports, I would use Veeam ONE.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. There is only one area of improvement for me.

We can manage the virtual environment of our organization with the help of the solution.

They keep improving and updating their apps over time. In each new version, we get lots of good features; thus, I don't have any concerns.

They should include an integration feature through which we can connect to different vendors by installing a small plugin.

We have been using the solution for more than five years. Also, I have been using it for 16-17 years, personally.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable product. We have a couple of 100 users using the solution in our organization. 

We are using VMware as it is a known product that helps to manage companies' virtual environments. Consumers are accustomed to using VMware, and it's a very old product as well. That's the main reason we are using it.

I recommend others use the solution and rate it as a nine.

We use this solution to monitor the virtual infrastructure health with deep-dive analytics ensuring hypervisors, VMs, network, and storage health. We can also use it for future forecasts for virtual machines, and allocate additional resources for where contention occurs.

Efficient use of resources/planning has helped my organization.

We like that we are able to combine all infrastructure monitoring using this solution, meaning we receive analytics from across our whole network.

We would like to see an improved licensing model to be set up for this solution. The current model charges per CPU, as opposed to being product-based, which would allow us to monitor our complete virtual infrastructure under a single license.

I have been using this product for two years.

We would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The most valuable features of the solution are the effectiveness of hardware availability and flexibility.

The deployment of the solution can be improved by making it less complex.

The licensing cost is high and needs to be reduced.

I have been using the solution for 20 years.

VMware Aria Operations is a great product that is very stable.

The solution is scalable and we currently have 800 people using VMware Aria Operations.

I previously used other solutions and switched to VMware Aria Operations because of its functionality.

The initial setup of this solution is complex and takes a couple of weeks to deploy in our environment. We require six administrators for the deployment and maintenance.

The implementation was completed through a vendor.

The solution requires an annual license which is very expensive.

Before choosing VMware Aria Operations I evaluated other solutions. 

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

I would recommend the solution to others.

We use this solution solely for reporting purposes.

We appreciate that this solution gives accurate reporting.

We would like the default views on the reports for this solution to be improved; at present we have to customize the view before use.

We would also like the option for this solution to be cloud operated.

We have been using this solution for just over one year.

We have found this to be a stable solution.

To our knowledge, this is a scalable product.

The initial setup of this solution was easy.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

This solution is mainly used for the orchestration of servers and for obtaining reports such as utilization reports or load reports.

In decision making, it is very useful to have a nice dashboard. We have also integrated with QlikView, which is an analytic tool.

vRealize has a very nice dashboard.

It integrates well with other products such as those from Oracle.

It would be good to have more detailed reports and more details on the dashboard.

I've been using it for five years.

It is a very stable product.

It is scalable as well. Our system administrators and data center administrators use this product.

VMware provides 24/7 online support, and I would give them a ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is very easy because VMware provides 24/7 online support to us. Everything is much easier for us, because of their support.

The deployment took about one to two days. You would need one or two people, such as IT managers, for deployment and maintenance.

We used a third party team for the deployment.

We have licenses on a three year basis. Licensing costs are much higher, but given the stability of the solution, it is a reasonable price.

It's a stable product and is recognized worldwide. It is much more expensive than other products, but it is stable. Therefore, I would rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.