VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Right now, we’re primarily just using it for monitoring. However, based on a VMworld session I attended, we’re looking at using it for enhancing our efficiency and to guarantee performance; make sure we can use vROps recommendations to relocate workloads based on utilization and so on. That session was interesting because they talked about cross cluster, being able to automate cross-cluster motions. That future ability is pretty good. For the most part, right now, we’re using vROps for just monitoring. We’re just monitoring vCenter right now, but we’re looking at adding all of our hardware UCS.

We’re expanding, but currently, we’re just using vCenter monitoring right now. Even that’s advantageous; just to have that dashboard. We need to do a lot of work to get where we want to go, but the tool is huge. I’m looking forward to that. Not a ton of value yet, but I can see it on the fairly near horizon.

I’m not our monitoring guy. We have a monitoring team and they’re responsible for that piece. I’m responsible for the cloud architecture. I’ve been a little unplugged from that because we’ve just moved multiple data centers. We’ve had a busy year and just implemented vRA and things like that. I need to get my hands a little dirtier this fall and try and get that moving along.

We’d recently done a business transformation. We’re in healthcare. We deliver software-as-a-service for the province of Saskatchewan. Recently, we’ve expanded our business to infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service, those kinds of things, and we’re starting to look at consolidation of 15 distinct health regions in the province, all with their own data centers and IT shops. Our, at least my VP’s, vision was to consolidate at least from an infrastructure perspective down to two data centers in the province from thirty.

One of things with that is being able to give your customers some insight into how that environment is behaving; how the machines within their tenancy are behaving. We needed some sort of analytics to be able to show them everything is running fine. They’ll know anyways if it’s not, but when you get up to certain levels, they just want to see some nice graphs or charts or whatever to show that their they’re getting value for their investment.

It’s that piece, just monitoring that multi-tenant environment, that is the primary driver, but I’ve got lots of extra uses for it as we go.

I’d like to see the ability to monitor more stuff we’re actually looking at vROps to pull in data from. I guess there is already a lot of stuff it can capture, but I’m actually pushing to use vROps as our managers’ manager. I’d like to pull data from SCOM, Windows, SQL, Oracle and all those kinds of things, and use vROps as our primary dashboard, as our MOM, basically.

I’m looking for broader support, and also like we talked about in the VMworld session, the ability to use the analytics within vROps to actually trigger events to possibly alleviate performance issues before without requiring manual intervention. Obviously, the further we go along this SDDC journey, the more important it is to automate and not have your guys doing it. vROps could suggest this server is starved for storage. It already knows that. Why do I need to have somebody go in and look and try and find a spot, when vROps already knows, has the analytics to probably find a better spot for it than the tech would, right?

The automation piece will be big for us. Then getting into the cross site, cross cluster discussion is neat because I didn’t even know they were looking at that. There is kind of a future state. It’s already got me rethinking how we build our clusters. We might have some more flexibility with how we build clusters because traditionally; we’ve built clusters around planning for DRS to handle some of that workload movement. Within a cluster, we’ve had to do a fair amount of, I don't know, due diligence to make sure that we had the right workloads in the right spots. DRS being able to look into that cross site, cross cluster is a cool feature. I’m looking forward to that.

I have been using for just several months, six months maybe.

It has been stable so far. We actually have two instances. I have to try and figure out how we’re going to consolidate that. We have an instance for our cloud and then an instance for EUC, for the end-user compute side. I’d like to amalgamate that into one. I’ve got to ask some questions to figure out what the right architecture for that is.

I hope that it is scalable. I haven’t looked too far into it. We’re not a massive shop. In state, we’re about two to three thousand server VMs and probably about 14,000 desktops. It’s large enough. I don’t think I’m too worried about scale. Most of the VMware products we have scale really well. I’m assuming vROps falls inline with that.

Technical support is good so far. Again, we’re just grazing the surface, so we haven’t had much call to leverage support. As with any vendor, it’s the luck of the draw who you get the first tier of support. You just have to know how to escalate correctly. For some of our operational stuff, it’s a journey to get them to learn. Sometimes, you get a resource that maybe doesn’t know to escalate it in time. That’s the case for any vendor; Cisco, BMC, whatever. They might sit on it, and not really know how to solve it, but they also don't want to escalate every ticket in their queue, so you have to force their hand. Sometimes, we don’t do that. When my guys would complain about support, I tell them, Well, it’s kind of a bit on you. If you pressure the vendor to escalate it, then they typically do. Then you get that tier-two, tier-three kind of resource.

I have spoken to Blue Medora about monitoring UCS, SQL, Windows, using Hyperic or whatever they call it now, and those kinds of things.

I recommend it. I think it’s a good choice. I know there are other tools out there. Those people are knocking on my door all the time. I don't know. I’ve had lots of pushback from different IT shops in the province saying, “Well, why do we need to use this tool or that tool? You shouldn't use VMware’s tool because they might be lying to you, or whatever, for monitoring or those kinds of things.”

I’m more of the mindset, Why would I buy a Ferrari and put a Ford engine in it? Why am I going to buy a third party? There is definitely a spot for third party. We use lots of third-party applications. Obviously, VMware is going to have the best insight into how their stuff works. Obviously, they’re going to support all the features within there.

With third-party vendors, maybe that solution works great today, but when the new features in the VMware solution come out, there is a lag. You can't use those features because they don’t support it yet because they have to play catch up. On the other hand, obviously, VMware development teams are going to work together and try and coordinate: We have this new feature. Now, you can leverage it, maybe, into a new feature in vROps. Now, we can leverage it in vRA or however that works.

For us, of course, we’re an ELA customer, so we’re licensed for pretty much everything anyway. For us, my preference is always to use the VMware stack unless it’s not the best solution.

The faults and alerts features are the most valuable features of the product. That helps us a lot if we're looking at any VMs that might be having issues, something we need to address immediately. We like the over-size, under-size reporting too. It'll tell us if one of our servers needs more memory or CPU.

Right now, we're not using it too much as a proactive tool; it's more of a reactive thing, so it helps us pinpoint any faults when a user calls and has issues and helps us try to figure out what might be causing that issue. It helps us. It's like another troubleshooting tool that we can use.

The capacity management is helpful. It helps us. A lot of our developers and apps people will complain and say, "I need a lot more resources." I can show them with the reporting that you're barely touching the server, so that helps us. If we're running out of resources, we could also run reports and see if we need to add more hosts or whatever we need. It does help a little bit.

vROps has not really helped us avoid outages or shorten outage time. We also use other monitoring tools that, for some of the warnings, say the same thing as vROps. It's good that we know that, but not really any big outages of anything such as application or server outages but we have other tools that would tell us that too.

I don't know about room for improvement. Maybe have it be a little bit more user friendly because even though I know where to go to change certain thresholds and everything, my co-workers - who don't really work on it - they just log in, look at the color, is it green or red, and that's about it. It's pretty simple to use right now, but maybe because I haven't had time to look at it. Trying to get all of the features configured right for our company could be easier. I don't know if there is a way, though, because there are a lot of features available on vROps.

My rating would probably be higher if they improved the ease of use. The numbers are really nice; and also the badges. It's great for management, but most of the other VMware tools I have are pretty easy to use. I can try to figure vROps out, but this one seems to be a little bit more complicated. It might just be me because I haven't had too much time to spend on that.

I haven't had any stability issues with it; it's pretty stable for us.

We're not a huge shop. I think we have about 500 VMs, and it handles that fine. It's not like we have to build more machines or collectors or anything like that.

I haven't called technical support for vROps.

We were previously using VKernel for a lot of our over-sizing reporting, too, but the VM tool is a lot better. We worked with a partner and they were showing us how the VMware tool worked. They thought it would work well for us, so we tried it out with the trial and my boss liked it, so that's how we got it.

Initial setup was very easy for installing the whole configuration part. We're not using that because we're basically accepting all of the default numbers and thresholds for the learning. I think if we had more time and resources, we would probably go in and tweak it to make it more customized for our company. That's probably the most difficult part - the configuration - but setting it up was real easy.

The most important criteria while selecting a vendor like VMware would be features, but just as important for me is price and the value we get out of that.

We were yet to fully deploy it as it should be. We've yet to fully implement it. Mainly because we have almost the entire HP OpenView suite, so that's been saving our life for right now, but we've noticed the benefits. We've noticed the night-and-day difference from monitoring everything from the hypervisor into the VM as opposed to from the VM's point of view out, without the machine knowing that it's really virtualized, that it’s sharing resources. It believes it is in a physical environment and it owns direct access to the CPU and memory, but it doesn’t: it’s virtual, it’s sharing it and it's pretend. vROps takes that into account because it all goes through the API for VMware.

Definitely, the first win for us was being able to see a CPU wait time where people were still building VMs as if they were building virtual servers, requesting too many CPUs. Not enough memory and they were really shooting themselves in the foot because you can have as many CPUs as you want, but if you're not really using them all, you're sitting there waiting for those virtual slots to fill up before it actually goes to the physical CPU. So you're adding so much overhead.

There were a couple of application teams that were able to take the constructive criticism, per se, and brought down how many virtual CPUs they had and they noticed a huge performance gain. Being able to do that for the environment was a quick win for us.

When you migrate from vCOPS to vROps, it has this awesome API where it grabs all the data, everything you've collected, and it puts it into vROps and you don't really lose that much. Everything you've already collected gets moved over and copied over and you're good to go. However, if you are on vROps and you're migrating to a major version of vROps or a new architecture design – like we're trying to do because we're trying to size it correctly – it doesn't go from vROps to vROps. I believe they had mentioned they were going to do that in the later version, or try to, but that would be my biggest request, because we need to build it out correctly and then migrate all that data we've already collected for so many years.

Aside from that, I would say getting around, creating your own custom super-metrics and all of that: It might not be that it needs to be easier to do, but maybe more well-documented.

Definitely reporting is nice and maybe they could develop an easier UI to do your own custom reports. We're still using all of the out-of-the-box reports, which are great. They've helped us hit that 70% of requirements, but it would be nice to have a nicer UI. Hopefully something like HTML that I can just drag and drop and just play around as opposed to the current UI that I have, which is like a popup; you have to know the metric name, and then somehow click over and get the metric. You really have to know how they're doing it and what they call their metrics and what they call the groups of their metrics and all that to know how to do the report right.

We actually got it back when it was vCOPS 5.2, so I would say we’ve been using it for about three years.

Unfortunately, it has not been a consistently stable solution, because we've never fully deployed it as it's supposed to be. If you go through their sizing guide, we need I believe three virtual appliances tiered and we're currently on one virtual appliance. We have to reboot it often and it's just because it's not sized correctly. That's on us. We haven't had the time. We haven't had the resources. It is a big appliance, one of the bigger appliances that we own, but it's mainly because of what we're monitoring. We're monitoring so many VMs, so many data stores, so many network paths, and all that goes into, I believe, VMware’s equation for how it should be sized.

I believe it will meet the company's needs going forward once we size it correctly. Definitely its internal high availability is very simple to configure. We haven't looked at the disaster recovery for it. Unfortunately, we haven't given it the love that it needs to get it up to the way it's supposed to be, but I believe it will meet the company's needs.

Technical support is excellent; never had an issue with support with VMware.

Try it out. Yeah. Just spin up.

We have access to the software. I don't know how easy it is for somebody else that doesn't have an account with VMware or doesn't have an existing contract with VMware, to get the software, but for me, my solution, for everything that I have questions about, spin it out. They're all virtuals; why not? Worst-case scenario, you erase it. Move on to the next one.

The most valuable feature is that it stores all the data from the vCenters that we point it at, so it's an essential place to get that sort of performance data; the CPU utilization and disk utilization data is the most important part. It also provides us with inventory information, which is somewhat useful.

We use it to do many things. One is to investigate and troubleshoot problems in the environment, and another is to set thresholds and then notify the operations center when things are outside. I guess the key benefit is that alerting capability and having the data available when we have to troubleshoot problems.

We can set thresholds for disk utilization, memory utilization and CPU utilization, which is usually like a side effect of disk performance.

Like everything at VMware, they should just throw the FLEX stuff - the UI abstraction - out. It's terrible. They've got to have more natural language querying tools, easier ways of building reports. The reporting interface is pretty terrible. It's not real intuitive. It's in FLEX; it's really difficult to use. It's sort of clunky and slow. It's not a natural way to work with the data. There are lots of layers and the presentation is quite ugly. In some ways, it would be easier for me to just work directly with the relationship database or something.

Another thing that would be nice - I don't know if it works yet: We're sort of missing metadata and tagging throughout the whole vSphere ecosystem. If we tag things in a cloud abstraction - we use Bio; actually, we're one of the only customers that does - and we put meta data tags in there, those don't show up as real tags in vSphere. I don't even know if we could get tags in vSphere; if we could actually get them consumed by vROps, we'd like to organize everything in tags and not in folders. It's sort of antiquated, the whole object model inside of vSphere feels like it's from 20 years ago.

Those would all be nice things to have.

I think it's stable. It doesn't fall down. It's fine.

Scalability seems to be a lot better now too. I don't know what they did with the six-step or whatever it is, but they created some sort of different database underneath that seems to be pretty much invisible and just works. We had issues with earlier versions; I think it just got faster. It is my understanding that they changed up the database.

I don't really pay a whole lot of attention to vROps, but it does seem to require very little maintenance from us. Which is good, because otherwise we probably would've bought something else.

I do not really use technical support. There's another group that's our tools and monitoring team. They may use it because they built some dashboards and set some of the thresholds. I haven't really had to.

I did not previously use a different solution; this is all we've used in our environment. There's another side of the house that's sort of a more traditional IT side of the house that I work with. There's vFoglight from Dell. That's really terrible. vROps is a step up from that.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward, although you have to think about the overall size of your environment and do a little planning. It requires a little bit of thought.

We looked at VMTurbo. That one seems okay, but it wasn't compelling enough to buy something different. vROps is a part of the suite license that we have, so it's sort of already there.

Probably, the most valuable feature is being able to see what's going on in my environment.

We use a combination of homegrown scripts and vROps for capacity planning. With the two, we get a really good view of what our environment is doing.

Mostly, it has provided capacity planning benefits; we can see where our strongest usage is and our clusters.

It probably has not helped us save on storage, but probably it has helped us more on the compute side.

Honestly, I wish the reports were a little bit more snazzy, if that makes sense.

Stability is good.

Scalability works great.

I have not used technical support.

Initial setup was straightforward. I actually converted from version 5 to version 6. It worked well.

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

Look at the price and the features together.

When we select a vendor like VMware, the most important criteria are completeness of the product and support. This product is fairly complete and it works.

I think for me the most valuable feature is really capacity planning; knowing that I'm using our resources efficiently. We're going through a large hyperconversion project here and we really want to make sure that we are sized appropriately, so that we can build our next solution correctly. You know, save money and utilize hard work the most efficient way.

It has helped speed up performance. It's helped us size our environment appropriately, so that the servers that need the resources can get them. So we're not over-subscribing some and under-subscribing others.

I think we've used it to diagnose some things that might have caused trouble down the road, so it's helped us from there.

We haven't really looked at it from the storage standpoint, we're kind of storage strapped at the moment. As we go into hyperconversion, we're actually really going to start to utilize the tool to come up with a better sizing for that.

It's helped me and the IT department get a better idea of what's going on in the environment. Health checks make sure everything is running the most efficient way possible. It helps us plan for growth, to make sure we're getting the best return for our investment in the underlying hardware.

It’s really stable; haven't had any issues with it.

We're not a gigantic organization so, for us, there's no problem with scalability.

I’ve used technical support some; just to start to get to learn it and get it installed. It's an ongoing learning process for me. It's good. I think it's one of those things you have to take the time and learn it. We're gradually learning it over time.

We decided to invest in this solution because we were so heavily invested in virtualization, and just simply monitoring the virtual machines wasn't enough. We needed a full picture of the environment from the host all the way up through. It gives us a great complete picture.

We did not look at any other vendors at the time. This is the only one we looked at.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was very easy, straightforward to install, get running and start getting data.

I like that it's a single pane of glass with a single vendor, with a supportive VMware. It's really easy; it plugs in easy. There’s less to manage because it's all done through the center.

Support is an important criteria for us when selecting a vendor, as well as stability. That's why we like to partner with VMware, because the support is excellent and the stability is second to none.

A lot of my rating is a reflection of me not knowing the product. As I learn more and more, it becomes more valuable to me. I'd say it's not an everyday staple in our environment now, but it's becoming more and more important.

One of the things I really liked was being able to use the projects feature, which lets me say that I know in August or September or October, I'm going to need to deploy 20 more VMs on a particular cluster. Am I going to have the capacity for that project? I can actually see if that's going to be okay. Then I can sit there and say, if it's not okay, then when would I add hosts? At what point would that make it okay? Basically, what you project out, it provides all that information at great detail. It's pretty good.

I've been at my company for seven months, and there's no monitoring. They have no monitoring. That's going to be the big thing. Dashboards can be set in front of operational people and then we'll actually be able to respond both proactively for issues such as capacity, and reactively for issues such as, we just filled up a drive, as we build it out.

We also use the logging site, which basically does correlation of logs from hosts. All that's integrated together, so if you have a problem, all of a sudden, you're able to see that maybe the fact that this LUN had a problem and this array had this problem. You start realizing that they're all related because of the way it ties them together. Very specifically for us, when you're not getting phone calls because a drive filled up on a VM inside it, That would be the big thing, right there, guaranteed. That's the one that bites them more than anything.

We'll probably not save on storage. Storage is cheap, but we're going to see if we can right-size, because I've heard mentioned a couple times before, right-sizing isn't a technical problem, it's a political/business problem or a management problem. Going back and getting stuff back after you've given it away in a VM is very difficult. That's where I'm hopeful. Probably utilize less anything about storage, but more about CPU and RAM.

We have not used the performance management features yet, but that'll be more about getting VMs balanced correctly across clusters, that sort of thing, but not yet. We typically don't over-provision.

We're planning on using more of it for several different reasons. We want to do lifecycle management of some of our hosts. We need the capacity planning features, and maybe most important - and the first thing that we're going to do - is the end-point management that's now part of it but used to be separate. It used to be Hyperic. We used to have Hyperic as a separate purchased product and now part of it is end-point management. We'll use that as our monitoring platform.

It is a beast to deal with. To understand it, really takes effort. Several of us have been to a week of VMware classes, and that didn't even scratch the surface. There's so much there. I suppose if there was a nice get-started guide, that’d be an improvement.

I heard them talking about this in a VMworld session. They've got wizards that can be rerun, so you can go back and say, "I really want to change what I did before in terms of my general configuration." That's good. It is complex. I just don't know how you make it simpler. I don't know because it's a complex idea.

Ideally, it'd be nice if it was simpler.

We're running 6.2; 6.3 is out and 7, I guess, just came out. The worst case for us has been, a couple times, we've had to restart it. Otherwise, it’s been pretty stable. It's all virtual appliances, so that's nice.

Scalability's pretty good. I don't remember the limits, but basically, you just start adding what they call data analytics nodes, and you just start scaling out horizontally.

We're way under-speced right now. In other words, we need more data analytics and we're reporting on about six million metrics right now, so once we point all the end point management features back to it, we'll have to do something about it. Plus, we have remote collectors.

We're still going through a statement of work and professional services, so we've deployed it and have started to use it, but we're basically re-engaging with VMware, so we haven't really had to contact technical support.

I did not previously use a different solution. We relied on people, the users. We’d see an outage because a user called, and then say, "Let's go fix it." That's exactly how it was being dealt with.

Initial setup is pretty easy.

A lot of the decision to go with product and the vendor went on before or right when I was hired. They were very close to going with Foglight, very close. They basically were ready to sign and VMware showed up and said, "Whoa, you didn't even look at this." During my interviews, I even encouraged using VMware. I said, "Look, it's got some good stuff." I'd used version 5.8 before a little bit at a previous employer, and they basically looked at it again. It's really the thing to go with if you're using vSphere; it's just what you're going to do.

I don't think there's anything that's deserves a perfect rating. There's just not, so I'm a little skeptical of that. I could give it a higher rating after I've had a chance to really use it, but right now, we just have not been able to really engage with VMware. I'm probably rating VMware more than I'm rating the product, so the complexity part kind of hurts right now.

I think you've got to go and look at it first. If it just doesn't look like it's going to do what you want it to, then you can look at other places, but you've got to at least talk to them about it, because it's VMware. It does what it's supposed to do. It's geared for this environment and it can also manage and monitor the physical stuff. For me, that's my suggestion.

One of the most beneficial features is a single pane of glass as well as the interoperability that it comes with additional features. When you add in management packs, you have the ability to really extend upon the infrastructure and really fine tune what you want to see within the environment. When it first came out many, many moons ago, it was something that was very default and it was a very good attempt. But as it's progressed over the years, it's gotten a lot more extensible so that you can actually fine tune which workloads you want to monitor. They've progressed, and while there are definitely still a few gaps, these are probably the most valuable features.

It helps us do a lot of the VMware optimization assessments, which is one of the first things that our company does. We go in and we understand what the environment is looking like from a one- to seven- to 30-day window, and where their gaps are currently located, so we can deploy an evaluation license of VMware Operations Manager. We can deploy a couple of custom reports and provide them a path forward.

vROps has also helped us avoid outages and shorten our outage time. When you do data center consolidation, you understand a little bit more about the systems in there so you can map where they're going to go.

As far as capacity management, on the one hand, it has helped us, but on the other, it hasn’t. One of the shortfalls with the algorithms of vRealize Operations is that if you want to add additional capacity and you're moving from one, just as an example, Intel generation to another generation, generally speaking, vROps only does it by megahertz, and not the new spec end values, as other tools can. When it comes to capacity planning, if you're doing a consolidation of virtual machines, it makes sense because you're going into a target platform. But if you're adding additional hosts that are a new generation, it's not as accurate.

Similarly, for performance management, it has only partially helped us. There aren’t many vendors that do anything better than CPU monitoring of a virtual machine, because that's what their bread and butter is. But when it comes to memory management, they look at a best guess unless you have an agent in there. That - when you deal with business-critical applications - is a very touchy subject. The perfect example is, you oversize for these VMs, vROps is number one on the list and they say don't resize vROps because it keeps memory for the database. Well, it's the same thing with SQL and some other items, so that's one of the things.

Things that are already on the road map include improvements in guest monitoring when it comes to memory management. Right now, it does a very good guest with VMware tools.

One of the things they'd like to push is Hyperic. Unfortunately, it’s not there yet.
One of the other things that I could foresee happening is, to download different management packs, have it as a link within the appliance rather than having to go to a solution change.

Stability is much improved, much improved.

Scalability is also much improved.

I do not use technical support often. Usually, it's mostly just myself and whoever helps deploy them. So, it's usually the partners that help me out.

I probably have not used it at all, because usually the issues that I come up with, they haven't had a documented issue yet.

I did not previously use a different solution. I saw the demo many years ago and decided this one had some pretty good potential and just followed through with it.
No other vendors were really on my short list at the time.

I'm usually involved in all the initial setups that we do for customers; just not the tool itself. I set the tool up for customers. It's not complex to deploy. Complexity comes with the fine tuning of the policies and what you want to monitor, so you see what you need to see and not a plethora of information that you don't need to know. Setup is easy.

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

When I select a vendor like VMware, the decision comes down to customer requirements, and that's what we go from, from the beginning. We go in, we discover, we understand what the customer’s requirements are, and then we use that as a basis of what meets their business needs.