VMware Aria Operations Reviews

It’s most valuable feature is being able to see at a glance if there's a problem in the environment, whether that's VMs or hosts or storage.

We have identified issues with performance in the past using vROps where vROps was the first thing that told us where the problem was.

vROps has also helped prevent outages and shortened outage time. During one of our go-lives with a new version of our hospital information system, we were able to determine that a particular cluster was overloaded and divert users to a different set of servers.

We've used the performance management features to really determine where bottlenecks or where issues were; the heat maps are very nice to be able to see right off at a glance what might be wrong, so you can start to drill down. A number of times, we've been able to identify issues and improve performance.

We haven't gotten into a lot of using forecasting or doing any capacity management, at least not formally. Generally, we are kind of constrained by what our vendors say regarding capacity. We use it to kind of argue against some of their ridiculous requests. But we're not using that as much as I'd like to.

I guess the biggest improvement might be some user interface improvements with speed. Also, some of the dashboards that are built-in are not as useful as I'd like. For some of the recommendations, the way the recommendations are made is not real straightforward. For instance, if it's going to tell you that you need some more CPU or memory for a VM, it's not always really easy to see exactly what it's recommending right off the bat.

I haven’t given it a perfect rating because of issues with a couple of the previous installs. We had an issue where the server just stopped responding and we ended up having to reinstall it, which is easy enough, but you lose the history. It's not something I want to do; reinstall vROps.

We have had some issues with the vROps server not really responding real quickly at times and we've actually had to rebuild it a few times. It could be better.

We haven't run into too many problems with scalability, unless that's the cause of our issues with vROps not responding real quickly.

We have not used technical support for vROps.

I did not previously use a different solution.

I have not been involved in the initial setup the last two times that we've done it. I set it up probably two years ago. Since then, someone else on my team has set it up. Initial setup is at least straightforward. There was nothing difficult about setting it up. We were able to get it up and running in just a matter of minutes, and then just waited for it to start collecting data.

Traditionally, we have not had much of a budget for monitoring. We actually have a NOC that we pay to monitor things. It's hard to convince leadership that we should spend some more money on another monitoring solution. I wish that wasn't the case. I wish we could actually choose our own monitoring. But because of vRealize, we were able to use vROps and that has been very helpful for us, more helpful in some cases than our NOC.

There were no other vendors on our shortlist while we were looking for something like vROps.

Install it, configure it to look at your environment and just watch and see what it's reporting back to you. It does have a lot of canned, built-in dashboards that are very helpful and you can develop; build from those if you need to. But really, you just have to use it. It's very easy to get started with it.

In comparison to the other management suite that we tried, StrataCloud (which started out as Reflex), vROps has a very quick heads-up display that is nicely concise on what's going on in the environment. It shows the overall health of the environment with weather maps, and it quickly drills down - seems to be - a bit deeper than the other products that I've tried. Not so much fluff, more tech talk.

In terms of what we found the most useful, we were having storage problems and instead of, where StrataCloud points you to another map that goes one level deeper, vROps is very concise; it'll give you the HBA number, the LUN, and exactly what it's seeing. It was latency in our case.

Another benefit is the kind of manager-based mapping it can do and the layout; they love that kind of stuff.

We have another management platform installed in another one of our clusters, for a different department. When we get help ticket calls and I have to use that other platform, it seems to take me forever to actually drill down to what the problem is. vROps is faster. vROps just drills down to the nitty-gritty and if you're a tech, it tells you what you need to see. The important information.

We have nothing documented, but when we first put in vROps, we were having storage latency problems and we weren't sure where it was coming from. We weren't even sure it was a storage latency problem and immediately after installing vROps, it narrowed the issue down right to the VM store and the iSCSI adapters that were causing us our problems.

It also helped us with performance management: virtual CPUs, under-sizing and over-sizing, and the RAM.

Personally, from what I've seen, I think what I'd like to do is get the inside log added to it now for an even deeper drill down into what's going on in the environment. Based on what I saw at VMworld, I think I might be missing stuff. I don't know if I have any proof of that. With vROps, you're not seeing small faulted events unless you drill down deeply. With the VM login site added to it, it's going to tell me everything: initial events and it builds very nice graphs of events and the amount of events that occur over time to customizable periods.

I think I’d like it to be easier to see that type of information, based on what I saw in a lab at VMworld. I really didn't know I was missing anything, and I might not be, but based on the lab, I think that we are not getting full visibility right now without that.

Also, I think it should be cheaper, especially at an enterprise level. If it could be cheaper, that would be great.

I've had no issues with stability.

I don't know; we've never had to grow it out beyond the initial install, so I don't know if I can speak to that either.

We have 600 VDIs; that's one install, and then we have probably about 300 and so servers.

We've used our SE as technical support, and he's really good. He knows the product and whenever we were having trouble, he was able to help us out. It was more with the install; haven't had a lot of trouble since the install.

We started with nothing and then we bought another product, StrataCloud, because we were aware it was taking way too long and we just didn't know what was going on. You get the ticket call saying things are slow and without a product like that, where do you start? I think initially the investment was in StrataCloud because vROps was just too expensive.

We got into it because it was included in our licensing level with VDI. As soon as we installed VDI, it just quickly showed us a ton of problems we were having we didn't even know about. After seeing it there now this year, what I'd like to do is push back, see if I could get the product we're using out and invest on this one on the other side - on our production server side also.

We had some initial setup issues; I think there was some kind of a shim driver we had to install, if I'm remembering correctly. We had some issues with that shim driver initially. He did it remotely; he called in and we got over it quickly, the initial problems.
The full install was a few hours.

We had a request for proposals on management suites and the winner of that RFP was the StrataCloud suite. At that time, we had 6 or 7 competing products come in (all of their names escape me right now). They were all demo’d and we chose the one we were on based on a number of different areas, but I think the biggest one was price.

Price wasn't the most important part to me; it was important to the people buying, the end financial guy. To the technicians, we all wanted the best technical product.
I don't know if that is vROps, but right now it seems to me to be the best one.

For me, from what I've seen, just go with the vendor’s monitoring product. It seems to be that they always know the product best. If you go for somebody else, I think for the most part you might not be seeing the information presented the same way.

The number one, most valuable feature is the simplicity of deployment. It's basically an appliance you deploy. It's easy to go in; you set up your connector to vCenter and it pulls in the information.

I like the predictive analytics, so over time, vROps will learn the environment; learn when you have peaks and valleys.

I like the heat map, unless there's a bug. I ran into an issue before and it relates to where there was a bug, everything was red. The week after I left the deployment, I had to, put out a new release. I had to go and wipe everything and re-install it. That was a pain, but that's what I like the most. It learns the environment. You can see where your sore spots are. Where you have contention. As a former sys admin, that helps a lot.

Going back to the heat map, it gives you more visibility. You go into a vCenter and see, this data store is getting full, or this or that.

It simplifies the troubleshooting when you have a VM that is having problems. You can go into vROps and see, for example, there is high disk latency on this data store. You can see it instantly. The VM will show red and you can see which VM has the problem and where the issue is at.

For previous releases, I would say they needed to streamline the deployment model, which they’ve now done.

I'd like to see them bring custom dashboards into all versions of the product. A lot of times I'm deploying vROps, the base version comes with essentials plus kit and it doesn't allow you to do custom dashboards. You've got to get the higher tier.

Right now, when I install vROps, it has the default: Here's your heat map, here's this, here's that. If they had a way to do custom dashboards, they could create one for the storage guy to go in - okay, here's all the top storage things the vCenter is saying. Or, they could have the sys admins that manage, maybe Linux or Windows, create custom dashboards that show the top five Linux VMs that are having issues or the top five Windows VMs.

That would probably be the biggest improvement they could make.

Since I mainly just install it and go, it's fairly stable. I haven't had any customers report that vROps keeps crashing or that they’re having issues. It seems fairly stable for what I use it for.

I don't have too much insight on that because most of my deployments have been fairly small.

I haven't had to use technical support yet.

Initial setup is super easy. All of the OVA appliances - as far as what I've used - from VMware are easy. What's even easier is - I don't remember which release it was - but it's now a single appliance. Whereas before, there were multiple appliances. It could get somewhat convoluted because you had to get multiple IPs, but they've really streamlined the deployment model with one appliance, one VM to run it.

Make sure you read the release notes.

I would usually try and deploy the very latest version. I ran into issues where there was a bug and the reporting was broken.

We use vROps because it just makes sense. vROps is being included in most bundles that our sales team is selling. It's nice. I like to stay within the same family of products; one throat to choke if something goes wrong.

The product is valuable - when we start virtualizing everything, specifically in the compute stack – for looking at the health of the ecosystem. It is very difficult to pinpoint your challenges in terms of performance. It also helps understand where your issues lie. vROps actually demystifies that for you, drilling deep into the infrastructure beyond what vCenter Server gives you. It puts together real metrics that make sense to you. For example, if we look at the metrics inside a vCenter Server, we can look independently at, for example, CPU utilization, processor, networking, but it's not tied together to give you a holistic view of the health of your environment. vROps actually does that for you, and then makes recommendations.

The other thing I love about the product is that, with other products like vRA and Orchestrater, we can actually send that information to an automation platform for self-healing and for mediation. That makes it very, very powerful.

For example, we can actually proactively monitor and anticipate server sprawl, or capacity depletion. We can actually see that coming before it arrives. We can head off issues such as saturation of resources in any particular host, aberrant behavior of applications. We can actually see those issues coming, head them off and manage more proactively, as opposed to reactively.

For example, we have people that have unfettered access to the vSphere environment. They just spin up servers at will, without really any regard for how that's going to have an impact on resources. vROps will give you a health batch, and you can start seeing problems develop before they arrive. It gives you an opportunity to anticipate a problem before it happens, address it and then remediate it before it actually becomes an issue in production.

The main concern, the main dropper right now was capacity planning, capacity management and heading it off.

Storage tends to be something that's always in high demand at our company. We really use this product to get a better forecast of organic growth and new organization. When you're going to look towards your budgeting for future years, you have to have something that's going to provide some type of a benchmark for you in terms of what you need to acquire for that next fiscal year.

One of the things about vROps is that, it's very robust. If you want to set up a notification, it's very, to me, involved. If they can streamline some of that through orchestration into what you’re trying to do with setting up alerts and things of that nature, in groups and policies, and tie those things together in a more seamless manner. I think that would be helpful.

There are multiple elements that need to be set up for a purpose, by contrast. I'll compare it to the installation of a vRA; when you set up vRA, it steps you through everything sequentially, like a workflow. If they can put a workflow into vROps for the types of things that you want to set up for policies, triggering and monitoring, I think that'd be very helpful; as opposed to clicking out of one pane, clicking into another pane, referencing what you just set up in a previous pane, those types of things.

Think about if, when you're setting up your triggers and your alerts, it could be something sequential, like through a wizard, or something of that nature. To help you walk through, take you right to the next screen that you need to go to. You don't click out of one area and then back in.

We’re not yet using any of the new features in version 6; that’s what I'd like to get to.

I think it's very, very stable. When it first came out, I did have some concerns with it. When it first came out, I can understand, as a maiden voyage, that there were some opportunities for improvement. I think VMware has worked very hard, as they typically will do, to remediate those issues. The only issues I had in the beginning was, the amount of information and tuning it required for the information to make sense to the typical admin. It really wasn't there, maturity-wise. I think they've done that now. The health batches now really do make sense to someone who has tuned the environment, or make sure that the application is tuned to their environment.

I think it's incredibly scalable.

We have a small environment. In our production environment we have 60 hosts and only, maybe, 500 VMs. I've not had an opportunity to use it in massive scale but for us, it's been something that we've been able to use.

I haven't used technical support; I haven't had the need to.

We previously the SolarWinds virtualization manager. The way in which it's licensed, the way in which it provides dashboarding is very, very complicated to use. The information is not easily consumable; it's just not easy digestible. We found that we had licensed versions of it sitting out for years without actually using it, because it just wasn't helpful for us.

I love the fact the vROps is tightly integrated with the other VMware families; purpose-built for running on vSphere. It's purpose built from the ground up by VMware architects and engineers who understand their other products and how they're bringing it to the family. For example, I'm looking to use vROps today to coalesce with vR Orchestrator, so that we could do some of the software mediation types of things through messaging to the vRO platform.

vROps is very, very straightforward to stand up. I would say, much more straightforward than some of the previous iterations. That's one of the other things I appreciate about the products VMware is bringing to market. They're making their products easier to deploy.

We looked at VMTurbo, now re-branded as Turbonomic. It didn't bring anything new to the fold for us. The way in which it's licensed is really, I think, a little bit outrageous. I just think VMware continues to do a stellar job in how they put together solutions that are purpose built and threaded together to work as an entire ecosystem.

Give it a chance, put it in a honey pot. I come from a consulting background, so a lot of companies tend to throw something directly into production. They don't actually have the opportunity to spend the time to learn the product first. That gives the product a negative connotation because it doesn't give them the results that they're looking for.

Apply the appropriate principles of project management during your pilot, your proof of concept, proof of technology. Then, pilot it, and then have a clear understanding of what it is, the scope and scale that you're trying to get out of the product. Then tailor your installation for that. I think that'll be something that'll have a higher chance of success.

The quick dashboard visibility into the environment is the product’s most valuable feature. It gives you a quick comparison of health states; is something deviating from best practices, or are there capacity problems? Potential problems, things like that; those are some of the key things; the quick view of the environments.

One, we can quickly, whether we're dealing with a customer, a project, a new deal, or somebody's environment, to help them improve their environment. After deploying it, we can quickly analyze the environment, and see quick trouble points that we can actually start targeting and then fixing.

An improvement would definitely be quick analytics on what to do. I know they have some of that, but when the product shows a problem, it should also provide recommendations; what can we do to resolve the issue? They just added something like that in version 6.3, from what I saw in a presentation at VMworld. I'm hoping, I haven't seen it yet. That's what I was looking for.

Stability has actually improved over the years. The new distributor model they came out with in version 6 is a lot of improvement there. I appreciate it.

Scalability is part of the improvement in version 6, where you can distribute the load and start easily out deploying appliances. Version 6, I think, is greatly improved.

For some cases, I have used technical support. The biggest need we have and that comes our way, is how to analyze the data. You have a whole lot of features in there and most people think, Can I call support and ask them about it? That covers most of the questions that I get: How to look at this data and how to interpret it? Here are the metrics vROps shows. What does it really mean? Those are the questions I get more than anything on the support aspect of that.

From a technical infrastructure side, they’re technical support is great. It might require more explanation to people to help them with the interpretation of the data.

Actually, there wasn't much that existed, as far as being able to get quick visibility in the environment or point you to pain points. Otherwise, you have to analyze flat file logs and really go through them. That takes a lot of time, especially from an engineer’s perspective, to analyze and see where problems are. Now, you have vROps and the data's fed in and they can quickly say, Here are the stress points; here are the pain points; here are the health points. That's key. As the virtual environment grows, you quickly see where the trouble points are.

At the time, I was evaluating all of the other alternatives; I mean third-party providers and similar solutions. In the beginning, there was a lot of data and I couldn’t really utilize it, but it's more intuitive now. I looked at other products, too, but everybody was in that infancy stage at that point in time.

My rating reflects the improvements I've been seeing over the years. As far as being able to get that data analyzed, it started out as a good product but it's really made some good strides in helping me, and doing thing in different environment.

Definitely, take it for a spin. Analyze your environment, look at what it can tell you. Look at the custom reports and dashboards that can really quickly give you a daily view of what your environments performance and their capacity is. That's it.

Reporting is product’s the most valuable feature: VM reporting, ESX reporting, trends, seeing where processes could be improved, seeing where resources could be reclaimed; basically, managing and balancing the vCenters. For what I do, most of the things I monitor are VMs. Application owners at times will have problems with their applications running on the VM and they want to see trends such as when are peak times when their resources are being used, such as CP use or memory, IOs and information like that. I could easily give them feedback - run a customized report - and say, "These are your peak hours, peak times."

It gives you a quicker view into the organization, instead of having to go through manual steps to figure that out; it's right there in front of you. We have app owners that use information. Most of the users currently are other IT folks in a virtualization environment.

The application monitoring helps us avoid outages. For example, we set up an application and we monitored it. Then, once the application started using a lot of resources, we're able to realize that we needed to add more resources to this application to avoid any outage.

Capacity management is awesome, too.

Maybe improve the user interface, immediate access to data, and make it easier to get reports, from the application owner's perspective, not for me. I can go in and I can manipulate the data and get what I want. I'm just thinking from the application owner's perspective. They want a quick report to monitor; see a group of VMs and see the process over time. Something like that.

It has been stable; that's good. I haven't had any issues with it. Like I mentioned, even though I do use it, I'm not the main person who manages it.

It's scalable. Right now, I think we have 10 vCenters all over the place. From my perspective, it has not slowed down.

I have not used technical support.

At my previous job, we used VMTurbo. I was looking into vROps on my own. I actually came across it and I saw that it was cool, so I decided to invest in it because of how it was integrated with the virtualized environment.

At my previous job, I started to set up vROps, but then I left. When I arrived at my current job, it was already configured and everything.

It's a great product. It offers a lot of great benefits. It's something that they should definitely look into.

The most valuable feature I see is how it dynamically figures out the environment. It's not using straight baselines. You can configure the baselines, of course, but you can automatically sample the network over time and figure out the environment, figure out what's wrong, bad, etc.

There is something I haven't seen yet or maybe I just don't know a way of doing it. We can do some automation deploying DOVF, but it'll be even nicer if we can do automation for getting initially configured. I deploy a lot, so ways for me to automate deployment would be helpful.

Some of our clients use VM tags a lot, and another major improvement would be if we could dynamically create groups and policies in vROps that match the VM tags. If we could say something like, "Auto-import these 10 tags. Auto-create the groups of these 10 tags," that'd be amazing, because right now it's about five or six steps to create a tag for each one. It would be great if it could create a group for every single tag automatically for tag collection – I forget the correct term.

I’ve been using it for about a year and a half.

Probably the only downtime I've seen is when it runs out of hard drive space. When I worked at a previous company, we had a really large environment and we routinely ran our disk space. We got the alerts but didn't always get to them in time by the time it ran out of space.

Previously we had four large nodes and a non-HA scenario; we were capturing around 20 vCenters and close to 10,000 VM's, so it definitely scales. It's gotten even more scalable now.

I haven't had to call support for vROps before. I have called support for other issues with VMWare, and it's been hit or miss.

Initial setup was very straightforward, very easy. I wish all the other VMWare products scaled out and were deployed and configured as easy.

If someone was to come and ask for my advice on the product, I’d definitely recommend it, for sure. I'd describe what some of the benefits are, and I would do that with all clients. We'd deploy a trial and say, "Let it scan your network for 30 days, and it's going to come up and show you what's wrong." Whenever I do that, it's always able to find things that the client doesn't know about. They really like that.

When I decide to work with certain vendors, I look at what's the best solution for the target. For example, we're a big Cisco partner, so we do a lot of Cisco business. We don't do very much of their firewall business because Palo Alto has a much better firewall. At the end of the day, we choose what the best product is for the client. Typically, that's the main thing we look at; what's the best product. For how we choose the best product: performance, availability, features.

Personally, I steer clear of any product that uses a Java interface, but that's just my preference.

vROps offers a lot more detail that is really helpful for the enterprise. For example, when you're doing performance troubleshooting, or evaluating the efficiency of mission-critical labs, capacity planning, or just looking at environment consolidations, for example, to cut costs. I have actually used it to a fair degree to bring about a few thousand dollars of savings, partially because of how the environment was configured; which is how it should be configured. Those metrics were available through vROps. For example, consolidating the number of leads in a cluster versus adding new clusters for other business needs. There was a level of cost avoidance and there was a level of cost savings at the same time. This was in a previous company that I used to work with that I left just two months back.

We use it to help the team understand how they should be leveraging that infrastructure and how it should be performing. For example, you can talk to your team and ask them to ensure performance at certain milliseconds for IOPS, specific gigahertz for performance, and then you have maybe 60% peak usage or 70% peak usage. There should be capacity for more production workload to go off and run when there's a peak demand in a sudden way; for example, unexpected requirements. At least your environment assigns resources appropriately from that standpoint. If you don't know how your environment if functioning, and you're just relying on real-time metrics, then you're not really planning ahead, and it also can cause a business impact because you don't really know what your environment is doing.

During initial setup, it actually gives a lot of false alarms, so that's one aspect that can be improved, but that's why you have to tweak it to get the right type of metrics.
If it were more agile and more self-descriptive, and in fact, scripted in a way that it just goes and self-installs, and then you specify certain metrics for configuration, that would be awesome.

Also, it needs to catch up with the times. The user interface is really buggy and slow. I'm not sure if it is now on HTML5 or not, but I'm hoping it would be in the latest release. I do not have any experience with version 6 and later. My last experience was at 5.5.

From that standpoint, other improvements would be some intelligence monitoring, and intuitive reporting. Machine learning, if it's integrated with the capabilities of vROps, would be awesome. For example, why should I set an alert at 65% for one environment and 75% at the other, when it might change or fluctuate from time to time. If there's machine learning and it automatically knows the optimum level, that would be awesome. Half of the configuration pain gets cut down right there.

It is rock solid once it's configured properly and it's running.

I have had no issues with scalability, as far as I was concerned. I have actually used vROps for thousands of VMs and have had no issues.

I’ve never had to call VMware for any type of technical support, except maybe for one time when we had an issue with the SQL database - but over a year, one call is nothing.

There is a little bit of complexity initially to set the right metrics and put in certain alerts and tweaks.

There are competitors who are doing something similar, with regards to machine learning. For example, Splunk, not a direct competitor to vROps, but does a lot of stuff that vROps does. CloudPhysics is a great tool. I have also tested out CloudPhysics and worked with one of it in one of the clusters. I can tell you that it’s also a really good product. VMTurbo is another competitor to vROps, but it does a few other things that I might not want to do in an automated fashion in an enterprise. However, there are other things that VMTurbo would be really good at doing where people want that level of automation.

When we spoke to vendors, the detailed metrics was the biggest thing. The level of granularity you get, it's awesome. One bad thing about vROps is the level of granularity from a time perspective; it averages data out at five minutes. If it was possible to go down to 30 seconds, for example, or 10 seconds, that would be really great.

Granularity is good but I want even more, because, to be honest, peaks don't stay around for five minutes. When data gets averaged out at five-minute intervals, you don't catch all of the required information that you need. Still, you get a lot of information out of vROps because you can tweak it for time.

If you have all the core pieces of VMware, vROps is a no-brainer. If you want a little more level of agility, there are other products at play, but it all depends on your requirements. You can't go wrong with vROps. Are there things that are always going to be better? There would be. Would vROps catch up? It would. Would it evolve into something new? It might. Right now, it's there. It does everything you want it to do.