VMware Aria Operations Reviews

• 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.

I would have to say the most valuable features are the active monitoring and the integration into Virtual Center; then, just the logging and history. It monitors the health of the system, as well as resources such as CPU, memory, RAM, and disk usage – not only on the data store, but on the OS level, as well.

One of the big benefits was when we were introducing a new solution for the data center and our vendor needed historical data to right-size a solution for us. We were able to pull everything out of Ops Manager and provide that to them, and then they were able to right-size a current-need, as well as future-needs, type solution for us.

The capacity management was key when we just purchased new hardware. We do not necessarily measure its value by what we save but by making sure that what we bought is going to meet today's needs and tomorrow's needs, as well.

After using the Capacity Planner, if you install new hardware, obviously, you're going to notice a big difference, so we have seen cases where performance has improved.

I would like to see some better dashboards, overall dashboards. There are a lot of dashboards – easily more than 20 canned ones – and I’d like to see something that encapsulates everything into an easier interface to look at from a 30,000-foot view.

I would like to see them do something about the complexity of the reporting mechanisms. It's not just for anybody. You've got to get in there and roll up your sleeves. I learned by doing just that: rolling up my sleeves, getting in there, reading documentation and so on.

It's never had an issue with stability.

We're a four-host environment, so we're not a major big environment. We've got about 60 VMs and four hosts. There have been no issues. It has never slowed down.

I have not needed to use technical support, really. It's pretty much, set it and forget it.

I wasn't getting visibility into the operations of the virtual machines. Performance charts are great and whatnot, but I was not able to dive deeper into web server activity, database activity, and so on, without having to buy third-party products.

Because we're such a small shop, trying to minimize the number of vendors is key. Looking out there, sometimes I'm a little hesitant to go outside the box in a sense. That’s one reason why we chose vROps.

I set it up, and it was pretty straightforward. It took about a week, off and on. It wasn't too difficult.

First, ask yourself what you're trying to accomplish. If that's what the product gives you, then go for it.

The most valuable feature of the product is the ability to watch performance indicators inside of the VM, as well as the indicators outside of VM. It's basically a very deep monitoring tool that gives lots of insight.

It's given us the ability to optimize our ability to allocate resources correctly instead of overallocating. Most vendors shoot for the moon when they give you the recommendations. vROps says, "No. You don't need that. You can get away with less." In the long run, our hardware and software costs are reduced.

We use it for capacity management; that's one of the biggest uses is capacity management. I would say we probably have saved 10-15 percent on storage.

With performance management, while we have not necessarily seen speed improvements due to vROps, in general, we have seen better performance. Again, it gives us the ability to say, "No, you're not making use of this set of resources being CPU memory; I'm going to cut this machine down. It makes the whole system better because now that's available for something that actually does need it."

I would add a capability to easily add new policies. For example, the 6.0 product comes with the vSphere 5.5 hardening guide. I have been digging for months now trying to figure out how to add the 6.0 version of the hardening guide. It looks like I have to write my own policy to do so. That's going to be a pain. That's a very large policy to write, so that would be a policy writer instead of the way they got it. I guess that would be one of the biggest things.

I would just like to see a similar policy be made for the 6.x hardening guide as a prepackaged policy also. The 5.5 guides are quite extensive and the policy is also very detailed and comprehensive.

Starting from scratch to build a policy to reflect the 6.0 guide would be very time consuming. Starting with the 5.5 policy and modifying it would be equally as so. While I am doing just that, because of my regular responsibilities, it is a "side" project that gets attention when I have a few cycles to spare for it, which is not much.

Having a prebuilt policy that is to the current hardening guide would be a great convenience.

It's very stable, once you get to learn it; it is a very complex product.

Scalability’s there. I feel like I could take this up to 1,000 VMs, easily.

I use technical support all the time. :) I rate them 7 or 8 out of 10.

I inherited it. When I came to the job, it was already there. It was basically there, and they said, "Can you get this thing running?" :)

The initial setup was very straightforward. Basically, unpack it, turn it on, and tell it where to start looking. The follow on and ongoing setup is still a bit complex; as I’ve mentioned, it's a very deep product. The more you figure out what you're doing with it, the more you discover what you can do with it; it's an ongoing cycle. It could very easily be a dedicated job for one or two people.

Look very strongly at vROps. Some of the other solutions that I'm aware of – such as VMTurbo - will offer things like automatic shifting of resources, etc. That's, in my opinion, not necessarily the best idea.

I gave it four stars because it is very, very complex. Again, I get the feeling that to use it properly, you almost need a dedicated person for vROps. That being said, it's a great tool.

When selecting a vendor like VMware, my most important criteria are reliability, service, and reputation. There are other virtualization companies out there; I'm not impressed with any of them except VMware.

I like the dashboards. I like being able to just look at it and see what my environment's doing.

Something that I have talked to them about is communication. We have a lot of issues that end up going to VMware engineering, and I would like them to improve communication from engineering, rather than having our SR just sit there with no communication or update at all. Occasionally we'll get a response e-mail saying engineering still has it, that they're working on it. It would be nice to have engineering come back and say, this is what we're working on specifically. Maybe an ETA for a patch, or something like that. That's one of my biggest complaints.

We had an issue a couple weeks ago, opened the case and the person never responded. I escalated twice and we finally got a call back the day I provided this review. When we did get a call back, we got a call back from a level one. Most of us are level three status; when they call us back, they should be giving us somebody who's above our level rather than somebody who's going to ask us the same questions of possible resolutions that we've already tried. We were still waiting to fix that problem as far as I know from my e-mail contact an hour before I provided this review.

I have been using it for three or four years.

It's pretty stable. It's at 98% of the time. If we have issues with it, it's usually minor and most likely related to the environment and not the product.

I see it meeting our needs going forward. It's scalable. We have a big environment. We've doubled it in the last six months or in the last year. It's handled that transition quite well.

It's great support. We contact them by e-mail, phone, and so on. We have an MCS contract. We have a TAM with whom we’re on a first-name basis.

We weren't previously using a different solution.

I don't remember what the trigger was to bring this on board. I was not involved in purchasing or making that decision. I'm on the support side of it.

Plan it well.

The most valuable feature is the ability to drill down and figure out exactly where CPU and memory contention could possibly be.

It helps with troubleshooting and figuring out where an issue actually could be, which helps us pinpoint what the issue might actually be.

I would like to see some ability for automatic mitigation or scripting. If we see an issue, I’d like to have automatic remediation for it, or be able to do a one-click or one-touch to remediate some issues that we see.

Stability is good.

I have not used technical support.

We're currently using vCOPS in our VDI environment. I guess we're just showcasing both of them at the same time to figure out weaknesses and issues. vROps is doing better than vCOps, I guess, with the ability to drill down and figure out granular issues.

When selecting a vendor like VMware, my most important criteria is stability, the length of time they've been around, as well who their current customers are.

Demo it out first before you buy it.

The analytics and sizing are the most valuable features. We saved over a 1000 virtual CPUs, a few terabytes of storage and memory.

I can actually do the historics on any VM that's being used so we can refuse architects that want to throw too much memory or CPU at something. We can do recommended sizing.

For example, they put the SAP Hana environment in, and they sized it to the moon. They kept throwing more and more resources on it; ate up the majority of one of our FlexPods. We proved them wrong and dialed it down.

A lot of our different tools actually hook into it; they have APIs that actually launch into it. We'll use some Blue Medora or we're going to be putting in a couple bits such as that.

We use UCS for OnCommand Unified Manager, and it has an API that hooks into it. We're installing Log Insight, and then we're also going to be putting in NetApp OnCommand Insight. That's got to hook in there too. All these different products, they always have their own little dashboards. I hate that. I want one, and that's what vROps does.

While we haven’t saved on storage, because of the over-allocation issue I mention elsewhere – we're not going to get two different views – we did save a ton on CPU and memory.

With regards to performance management, over-allocating VMs actually hurts their performance, their computing wait times, so once we started tuning that in, it got a lot better.

I want it to have a better view in the thin provisioning. Right now, it shows us what is over-allocated in all of our graphs. That's great, we need to add more, but I don't want to look at red lines every time I log in; makes me think that we have huge issues, not that we just need to add a rack or a shelf. We're using a hyper-converged infrastructure with FlexBots. I'd like a little bit more granularity there, maybe break it into two different views: one would say that we're over-allocated, and the other one would say, "This is how much disk you currently have remaining." It would show the aggregates, because right now it doesn't; basically two lines: what are you using and what's left.

It gets a little bit kludgy – slow, sluggish, takes a while – when it gets bigger. We've got a bunch of dashboards that show problem VMs; a lot of different metrics. Those take a while to spin up the more that we expose into it. The database can get a little unwieldy after a while. It is in a lot of infrastructure.

The bigger it gets, the slower it moves.

I think once you start tuning your environment, scalability will get better, but in the beginning, when you just try to throw as much into it as you can so you can see what you have, it can appear as if it's not working as well as it should.

We have a Business Critical Support with VMware. I think it's pretty good. In our circumstances – we're currently outsourced, I work with an energy company – our contract only allows the non-international folks to use it, so our folks in India have some difficulties. When we have a problem, if we engage them correctly, it usually gets driven pretty well.

When we came in, we went to VMworld in 2015 and we got sold on the idea. We came in and we had no way to do really good reporting on any of our environment; we had 25 years with IBM. It kind of got really hard to get your arms around and figure out what all you had. This gives us an inventory, and when our outsource partner comes back and says, "We don't know what's wrong," we can just go on the console and say, "Well, this is what's wrong." It helped us all be held accountable.

Actually, we wanted the SDDC, and VMware had it, and then we got the whole vRealize Suite. It's pretty good.

Initial setup was complex. We have a very old environment, so there were a lot of issues – mainly our issues, not the tool itself – getting access to service accounts, the infrastructure stood up, and all of that. We needed a project manager from VMware and a project manager from our company to basically work together and it still took a long damn time; a month.

If you don't have it, you need something like it, so you get more out of your infrastructure, because you waste so much in most companies. Everyone always gives resources, no one ever takes them back and looks at that. There's no reclamation, so you waste resources all day.

No other product basically gives you an eyes-on-glass that says, "You're wasting a 1000 CPUs." Or 700, or whatever.