VMware Aria Operations Reviews

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.

The most valuable feature is that I see the whole infrastructure. I get the information from my source system, switches, and VMs. I can see what capacity will look like or what capacity I will need in the future, and where the issues will be, risks and so on.

It reduced the number of tickets or support calls we have. It reduced the number of incidents or problems, in a good way.

It also has helped us avoid outages. There was a particular case when we had some issues on the network level. We had a lot of dropped packets and suddenly we realized that there's a component that is going to fail in the near future. So we replaced it and we did not have an outage.

It has not helped us save on storage that much, but we saved a lot from the memory perspective and the CPU perspective. We were able to reduce over-provisioned VM's; we reduced the amount of resources.

We have seen performance improvements. We had several systems that were running okay. After we implemented vROps, we were able to identify the systems. We could see that we have an issue with the system, and why it's not performing that well. It gave us the insight we needed.

Compared to, maybe, an easy-to-use solution such as Veeam, I think the user interface could get a bit more responsive. For the users that are not familiar with VMware, it should be more focused, to give them a better quick start, so that they get faster into the product and see the positive things faster. Make troubleshooting easier. There is a lot of information; make it even simpler for the user.

I've had some stability issues with past releases that stopped collecting information. Support calls did help. Nothing bad.

Interestingly, we usually don't have really huge environments. But for the environments in which we used it to scale out, it’s very good. We deployed multiple nodes and we were able to monitor the whole environment for our customer.

I'll give technical support for vROps a 7/10. Sometimes it takes a bit more effort. We are also a partner. We are at the first level of support. So we ask for logs and real basic questions. It would be nice for us as a partner to have a direct path to second-level or third-level support, to escalate it, because sometimes first-level support just takes too much time.

We previously used Veeam, the management pack, but the way vROps is able to connect with our source system, the network switch, you get the whole view. You don't only get the view on your virtual environments. If we want, you get the whole overview of the whole system. That's why we switched.

Initial setup was straightforward; very easy to set up. We did some PoCs or optimization assessments. Customer liked the way it sets up. Simply, setup is real good.

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

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor like VMWare are quality of the product and support. We had some issues with past releases and with vSphere. But, generally speaking, the products of VMware are really well engineered, and you can count on support if you have an issue.

It's not that straightforward to get in. If they start troubleshooting, it is a bit complex. It's huge, but it takes some time to get into it. That's the reason for my rating.

It's a really good product. I like using it. I like the feedback I receive from my customers.

I would definitely recommend checking out vROps because of the whole package, the overview of the whole infrastructure.

I guess the faults, the alerts, are the most valuable feature; being able to see what could become a problem when I'm running out of virtual machine capacity, and definitely the faults, as far as whether there any issues with the VM storage, any performance issues. I mostly use it for CPU contention, memory contention, as well as latency, obviously; to correlate latency between data stores and virtual machine latency, virtual machine disk latency as well.

I have a dashboard now; I set up dashboards for the help desk team. They are able to look at the dashboard and see right away if there's a VM issue, or whether it’s an actual guest OS issue or an application issue. I think that's the easiest. That's the best feature that I've gotten out of it, as far as the organization is concerned. They are able to understand the information they're seeing.

I was able to sell some custom dashboards to the community. I was able to download some of the dashboards that they have and it's like a help desk central type of a dashboard, where you can drill down to the VM that you're having issues with, and it'll tell you right there and then if there's memory, CPU or a storage contention problem. That's the easiest thing to go by.

I would like to see better built-in policies, so when you deploy an environment, you are able to apply policies that are more realistic for a production environment. That would definitely be a nice release.

They do have some policies now centered around a production environment; maybe easier to make exceptions with where, if you have an alert, you can say, "Don't worry about it. It's an exception. Don't notify me again about this issue.", instead of having it come back up again after a few months. That would be nice.

Once I figure I know this is not a real issue, maybe I can flag something saying, "This is something I know about. You don't need to notify me again about this." Or maybe say "This can be an exception to this rule.", without needing to change the whole policy around, just for that one VM. Maybe there is a way of doing that, I don't know, but I haven't figured it out.

I've had no issues with stability, to be honest; it's worked really well.

We only have two sites on which we use it, so we have two of the servers deployed. So far, for our needs, the scale is fine. It's a web-driven menu just like the web client, so it's kind of sluggish sometimes when I'm down in to certain menus, but overall it's not so bad.

I have not used technical support since this release. I have used it in the past when it used to be called vCloud Operations. When it was vCOps, that's when I had more issues with it. I had to call technical support. But now that it's vROps, no, I've had no issues.

It’s the first-use solution I've used for VMware.

I was the one to set it up. The new setup environment's pretty straightforward. Setting up the alerts, definitions and actions were kind of tricky because there's a lot of false positives. A lot of things it alerts you on are not really problems, so you have to go in and tweak the policies around to see the actual real issues. Sometimes the notifications can be too aggressive, where it notifies you of almost every little thing that can possibly be wrong but in reality, it's not an issue. That tweaking does take a while to get figured out. It's an ongoing process. I'm still doing it to this day. It takes a while.

Maybe after the fact, we looked at VMTurbo a little bit, but that was already after I'd purchased vROps. So it wasn't very realistic as far as going after that product. We also have Veeam Availability Suite, which comprised the same functionality as well. That's because of the way we purchased Veeam for our backup environment. The Availability Suite just came with the backup environment. The vendor gave it to us that way. We don't really use it too much. It seems like Veeam is a nice product as well.

Definitely look into your other products, along with vROps as well. We were short on time, so we made a decision when we should have probably researched more. See what's out there. See how well it compares to other products. I'm sure there are other products that'll do just as well. That would be my number one recommendation. Try to do a PoC with multiple products.

See what fits best for your environment, and what fits best for your staff as well. If you have a dedicated VMware guy, maybe vROps is great. Or maybe, if you need that level of trainability, vROps is great. If you want something right out of the box that just works and just tells you the high-level information and the kind of nuts and bolts of what's wrong with your environment, without having to do too much modifications or tweaking, then maybe something out there is maybe better.

The most valuable feature is being able to see what's actually going on, down to the VMware storage level. And the fact that it can give you a suggested change and it'll explain why.

The most common thing we see is that we've got too many CPUs on a virtual machine. It'll say - and there's always a debate - or someone thinks it could be running out of memory, and it's actually because it has too many CPUs.

A lot of guys want to add more memory or more CPUs and it'll know why. It helps me with the other guys on the team and to show them why, because if you look at it, it'll tell you: This is what's going on and this is what you need to do. Also, a lot of times, there's a link for more information. You can find that information and read up on it, such as a KB article that explains what the product is telling you. There's not a lot of space in the product itself; just a little synopsis about why you should do it. It's readable for a VMware admin. If you're a regular system administrator, you might not understand what they're saying or doing.

Probably the most common benefit is catching problems. It has a view where it shows you a hot spot that starts turning red and you're see there's an issue. It also shows trends, so you can see how long it has been going on and other things like that.

We don't currently use the increased automation feature or integration with DRS for load balancing and scheduling. We're looking into doing it, but it's a trust factor. We're afraid it'll add a CPU or take away a CPU – things like that – on the fly, and we're not comfortable with that yet. It gives us suggestions and we'll implement those, but we don't want it to just automatically do it. I expect in the future, we will. We've had about six months and we're happy with it so far.

It’s difficult to say whether we have had specific cases where it has helped us avoid outages or shortened outage times, because when something comes up, we usually address it. So, I wouldn't know if we avoided an outage. I haven't seen anything super serious.

It has helped us with performance management; getting the VMs tuned better. And that's what I think it's really good at. We have a staff of six VMware admins, and some are less experienced than others, so they'll overbuild a VM or something like that.

Even though we don't have the full license for the full vRealize automation and some automation is already built in, I’d like to see them expand that and make it a little easier to use.

Also, it is very CPU intensive. It's hitting the storage, or I guess more storage. Our storage admins are always complaining it's one of the most utilized virtual machines out there. They're saying it's just as high as any of our big databases. If they could improve the performance, so our storage guys will quit complaining about the usage on the data storage. They're saying the virtual machine is probably using more IOPS than almost every other virtual machine in the environment. It's constantly checking the environment.

I think the learning curve on setting it up could be improved; it takes a while to understand it. I wouldn't say I’ve mastered it at all. I'm still working on it. If you really want to get into the automation portion, you've got to learn a lot of Python and things like that, because that's what it's using underneath.

I think it's pretty stable.

As far as scalability goes, we have fairly a decent-sized environment and it doesn't seem to have an issue. We don't see a performance issue, but when our storage guys are looking at their console, they're getting worried because it's one virtual machine and this product stores a lot more than all the others.

I have not used technical support. I don't think we've used technical support; we've used our TAM to help us set it up, get it going and fix it up. I think we had one issue because we couldn't get it set up correctly and we had to call support. They were very good at resolving the issue, they just kind of walked us through it.

We previously used SolarWinds Virtualization, and it was not real time. We wanted something that was real time. It was always behind, because it was polling once in a while; it goes and grabs the data. So you'd be looking at all the data and it wasn't real. A problem would no longer, even though I'm looking at it. It's fine, I guess, for long-term monitoring, but when I wanted to deal with issues that were immediate, it wasn't a good fit for us.

There were no other vendors on our short list. We did the proofs of concept and liked vROps, so we went from there.

I think the most important criteria when we went with vROps was because it was a VMware product. We were more likely to choose it. They were getting the integration we wanted, so we didn't really look at a lot of other products.

Do the proof of concept. I think that'll tell you what you need to know; if it's going to be a good fit for your environment. I would say that's probably applicable for anything you're going to look at.