VMware Aria Operations Reviews

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.

The detailed metrics of the virtual servers/machines and the graphing capabilities. It's amazing to use this product.

If any server has high CPU utilization, we can get its usage patterns along with the time frame, which helps our team to analyze the system and to take action more appropriately.

They should show the processes that are consuming the CPU/memory usage rather than taking the RDP of the server.

I've used it for one and a half years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

10/10.

Apart from vROps, we do use SCOM but the main reason for switching to vROps is because of it shows real-time server statistics and it updates after every 5 minutes in vROps automatically.

It's straightforward and I find easy to use it.

It was done in-house.

• SCOM
• HPOM

I would say that it will be easier for any team to investigate patterns of CPU/memory use of any VM and the drive utilization.

In addition, you can add many options like memory ballooning, ESX memory utilization, etc. in your own way.

I like the reporting capabilities.

Being able to figure out trends, i.e. somebody reports issues and uses vROps to figure what’s going on.

There's none that I can think of, but I don't think I've used it enough to offer an opinion.

From a monitoring perspective, it's stable, and seems to always run.

I expect it to scale, being a VMware product. They seem to be good at that. I haven’t run into products that have limited scalability.

I've not had to use it.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

It's solid and gives us the info we need, and are looking for. Learn about it before you implement it.

I would say the operational management piece for policy management and remediation as well as the predictive analytics and smart alerts. This can come in real handy in an environment that is constantly changing whether you are taking resources out or putting them in. Also the trending analytics you get from the performance monitoring as well as the capacity management features for planning and better optimization for the overall IT Infrastructure.

I would say for the short term and initial benefit of installing the software is capacity management which is something that immediately returns valuable data. Your ability once installed to see your entire virtual computer environment and what resources are over or under allocated such as vCPU, memory and storage. This can provide large savings in hardware purchases as well as allow you to recapture those resources and re-purpose them. The more long term benefits are felt in the policy management and the automated/guided remediation that can be setup to help analyze and resolve operational bottlenecks.

I would say the reporting side could be more flexible as well as including more information, maybe adding additional graphics and charts to better summarize the data it captures for operational review.

I've used it for over four years. We have integrated Operations Manager into the various layers of our IT infrastructure both virtual and physical. This assisted us in proactively monitoring as well as performing the analyzation and automated remediation of operational resources with in our dedicated and shared service environments. It also gave us the ability to provide high level operational reports to the companies senior management.

No pretty straight forward deployment via OVA wizard roll-out to get the x2 appliances up and running on the network. From there, it's just a matter of configuring the remainder of the software to talk to your IT infrastructure via the ops manager web console interface. This includes adding your Virtual and Physical hardware that you want to include for monitoring and analytics.

Not at all. The product itself is very stable and since its appliances are virtual DRS and vmotion can be configured to create an HA hosted environment. Outages in this configuration are very few and far between.

This product is designed to scale and assists you in planning with your infrastructure, including computing demand and growth. It's designed to guide you through the various areas of infrastructure operations and makes adding new virtual and/or physical hardware to the Ops Manager core console very easy and scheduled. Adding a vCenter or a piece of physical hardware is as simple as entering in an IP address and username/password. Since all environments are sized different you should establish a Ratio for vCOPS to manage, for example, so many virtual or physical components.

VMware’s customer services is one of the best in the market and they also provide TAM services full or part time that can help any company implement their cloud software suites successfully.

VMware's engineers are very knowledgeable about their products and can handle infrastructures with the complexity of an enterprise level service provider right down to the small to mid-range dedicated IT foot prints.

We used quite a few different solutions to get the same feature sets that this one product offers. We switched in order to consolidate into one solution that could support all of the features we needed as well as reduce our overall capitol spend on multiple software brands and service contracts.

Very straightforward even in a multi-networked environment which is what you tend to find from service providers. The install itself is wizard driven and asks you for the information needed to configure the software step by step.

We did the install via an in-house team which included myself and a network engineer. That’s all it took to get the project planned out and implemented successfully.

The ROI for us is a reduced overall software and support costs by consolidating our monitoring and analytic tool set from many products to one. This reduced the operation software capital expense required to provide monitoring and analytic services for a managed solution.

Licensing for vCOPs comes in two models, Per Processor with unlimited VM’s and/or Per Virtual Machine or Physical Server in 25 VM packs (one pack = 25 VM’s). A cost analysis should be done to determine which model your company operations best fits.

Yes but it was software previously installed and vCOPs was used as a replacement.

I would say that the above score is based on the level of licensing which you use within your Infrastructure. I use the Advanced edition which is designed more for use in a enterprise level environments. This will look at both the virtual and physical sides of Infrastructure Operations which includes Predictive Analytics, Policy Management, Automated and guided remediation as well as customizable dashboards and reports. On the performance monitoring and analytics advanced can examine your vSphere performance and Health beyond what the standard vCenter monitoring tools has to offer, it can provide SAN storage analytics, application discovery and dependency mapping, OS Monitoring (Windows, Linux, Solaris, etc for both Physical and Virtual servers). Advanced also includes additional features for configuration and compliance management for vSphere Harding. Last but not least there is some additional Extensibility with 3rd party management packs for server, storage and network monitoring tools. Some example of packs are Brocade SAN Analytics, EMC Storage Analytics, NetApp Storage, Oracle OEM, SAP Hana, HP OneView, Microsoft Hyper-V.

If your virtualized infrastructure is primarily VMware and you are having issues with monitoring, analyzing and planning from an operational perspective this is the software to use. It will save you time and money in various areas of your IT infrastructures operations

• Capacity planner
• Analysis reports
• Health check
• Dashboard (Default and customized one’s)

Best tool for capacity planning and analyzing the existing infrastructure in VMware.

By scheduling the reports on a weekly basis on under-utilized machines and over-utilized machines and analyzing them to provide the best resource. We can then balance them to improve the benefits of the resources and plan for the integration of more VM’s into the existing infrastructure.

• Resource management
• Capacity planning

For the last three years.

No, it's a very simple installation with OFV available from VMware.

No, it’s got a very smooth with functionality.

No.

10/10 as we analyze the infrastructure and present it to our customers to improve the use of resources.

10/10, whenever we have faced any issue with this product VMware have given us good support.

No, I have learned about this product in one of the forums. I thought to use this product to utilize in my environment as it is the best resource analysis and utilization tool.

It’s very straightforward as the installation is done via OFV provided by VMware or easily available for download from VMware site.

In-house implementation.

Good product.

We just need to purchase licenses from VMware and this depends on how many VM’s we need to monitor via this product; else the setup is freely available at VMware site.

No, as I thought this is a good tool as heard in a VMware forum.

Best tool for Capacity Planning and getting the best use of resources.

VCOPS is the best product for vSphere and vCloud Director. It helps me to deeply understand what is going on in the VMWare platform and to fix issues before they happen. Every time it tells you things are going to go wrong, and you really can be proactive.

While using it, we have had a few minor virtualization and performance problems that VCOPS has helped us fix. For example, once the SQL server started consuming much more resources than expected and VCOPS told us there was something wrong with that server and when I investigated the issue VCOPS showed us that SQL was the problem. After some research, we had fixed the issue before the SQL server consumed more than 70% resource.

I think the product covers all OS's and virtualization platforms. I would recommend that they need more focus on networking.

I have used it for over five years.

I have deployed it at least 10 times from scratch and upgraded it many times. I have had zero problems!

Once we had problem that caused a two hour outage on the monitoring system. Mostly it is an install and configure once then forget it product.

No, I have had no problems scaling it.

Reaching the correct level of technical support is easy. All you need to do is to call the support line and explain your situation. After that VMware will take care of you.

I have used at least five different monitoring products. When I recommend it to my clients, they have a small hesitance at first. After I implement it to their production environment, they changed their thoughts about VCOPS. At the end of the day, I have always received good feedback.

Anyone can install this product!

Sometimes, I was on the vendor side, and sometimes I installed it in-house.

ROI starts after the initial installation is completed.

Setup cost is zero because it requires nothing, and the day-to-day cost is also nothing. In order to see what is going on with the system, we invested only in a big screen TV for the Help Desk room.

I always examined the other options and I like to see the Pros and Cons every time. What I see is while other products are improving themselves every day, VMware takes more steps.

Look at the big picture and prioritize your needs and business requirements. Always get technical consultancy and ask the correct questions. Those answers that you will see, will show you that VCOPS is the most suitable product for you.

Complete product is valuable to me, but the best of its features is that it monitors VM from vCenter or ESXI perspective. This means it is collecting data from vCenter/ESXI, and when you virtualize servers it should be monitored from Hyper-V for performance and not from what we are seeing inside the VM (when doing performance diagnostics it should come in last). Another feature is the dynamic threshold, where its’ algorithm defines it over a certain period of time.

One of the features is capacity planning and it is most useful for me. It helps to correct sizing of VM. It shows which VMs are over-provisioned and undersized. You can then increase you VM density on the ESXI.

I think, one of flaws is in its reporting, in that you can’t search, export or manipulate metrics relating to VM IOPS in a useful way, (version 5.6). VMware has revisited its product VCOPs and launched under the name vRealize Operations Manager, vRO. I still need to explore this product.

One and a half years.

No

It is a pretty stable product, but when it is integrated with a vSphere client sometimes I see internet explorer popups, for this I open vCOPs directly in the web browser.

As of now I haven’t found any issues, mostly I have deployed it for small infrastructures. There are sizing tools available for vCOPs (some excellent posts by Sunny Dua and Prasanjit Sarkar), I recommend that you have a look.

8/10.

8/10, however sometimes you have to figure out where the exact problem is because you know your infrastructure better than technical support as you know what the ins and outs of your infrastructure are and they don't.

I have used Nagios, and ICINGA, but after monitoring through them I strongly feel they are only meant for monitoring physical server.

It is easy, but for best practice go through the VMware official documents.

I implemented it. Initially I did a POC by reading VMware documents and blogs.

It helped me to double my consolidation ratio and increased density of VMs per host.

I looked at VeeamOne, SolarWinds Virtualization Management, and I found that both are the best software to use.

VCOPs is one of the best products from VMware. It uses internal algorithms to calculate data. Let it collect some data over a period, I would suggest at least one week. Then start real monitoring. VCOPs can pull data from storage as well, you will have configure adapter. Another thing Custom dashboard is somewhat hidden, I have seen many people use VCOPs but they are not aware of it.

As in the screenshot this is small tip for beginners, I have pointed out the brackets, they are the dynamic threshold set by vCOPs, anything going above that range, means you have to look into it, also on the box if you see above the Green bar there is a grey color stacked line that is also a dynamic threshold., above that workload is increased.

Real time analytics and reporting plus integration with Log Insight and vRealize Configuration Manager.

I’m a consultant who delivers this product as well as numerous other VMware products. For the organizations I have deployed it for, and on projects where it has been deployed, it has certainly aided in operating expenditure, better management and reporting of current and future metrics and values.

The solution is growing and starting to have more custom dashboards into existing reporting systems which will make it fit better into organisations who have existing solutions that they need to integrate with in an interim manner or permanently.

Three years.

No, it’s an OVA and is now only one machine so it’s very simple to deploy.

No issues encountered.

Only on a very large scale and this is continually being expanded with new releases of vRealize Operations.

Hard to say I am normally part of that customer service.

If someone needed to contact VMware Global support which I have done on behalf of clients before I can say they are very capable.

Some customers use SCOM as this monitors the OS's on the VMs being monitored by vRealize Operations.

Straightforward, as stated before it is one appliance you deploy.

I am normally doing this as either my current company Xtravirt or as VMware PSO.

Customers normally save on operating expenses due to monitoring and future planning being made easier as well as savings due to reporting of wasted resources that they can claim back or at least plan better in the future for deployments.

I’m not an end user but customers normally evaluate others like SCOM.

Do it as it’s a brilliant product.