VMware Aria Operations Reviews

The performance analytics, when we are troubleshooting performance issues. It's good to have insight into special metrics like CPU ready time, latency, network utilization. Otherwise, you're kind of like shooting in the dark, guessing what the problem could be.

From a conservative aspect, we can use the data to, for example, for purchase decisions. If someone asks for something and they are not using it, we're taking it back. So from a full-cost perspective or a show-back perspective, we are able to use that data and to say to application teams, "You are spec'd out, way over-provisioned." We're not seeing that so, for the business we are able to reduce cost by purchasing hardware because that data is showing us what needs to be and where it should be. So if application X is over-provisioned but application Y needs the utilization, we can shift those resources.

My number one request personally would be self-healing. So if there is an issue with the appliance, we should alerted and it should be clear as day. When you log in you get all these dashboards, everything looks really cool. But those dashboards don't do us any good if the health of the appliance is not 100%. So, if there are health issues with it, or it's not collecting data, it should self-heal. Or if the data is filling up on the disk, we need to know that and be able to click a button and say, "Do something about it," or "Give us step by step instructions on what to do to add a disk."

I think they could also work on the infrastructure a little bit.

It's highly customizable but it's hard to learn it. You have to be in there every day to really get the best use out of it. The nature of our organization is that my team kind is in charge of it but it really shouldn't be my team. It should be a monitoring performance type of team or operations team that owns it so that they can put the time in and create the proper dashboards. At the end of the day, they are going to be looking at those dashboards, not us.

So the ease of use: If you're not a vROps guy from the beginning, it's a high learning curve. It comes out of the box with all these settings, that is where training comes in. I know they offer courses for that. But I think the solution should be more natural in getting to know it.

I have some worries stability. Initially it was slow, so we ended up adding resources to it because the environment grows. That solved it. I'm not a big fan of the master data model that it has, so when we have failures, it's not always clear if the collectors are up.

You have to keep an eye on the actual appliances. If you're scaling higher, you're going to have to add add resources to the appliances themselves. Otherwise they slow down.

Their VMware technical support is always pretty good. In our specific case, we had a special issue that they couldn't resolve. Overall I would say it is good, when you get a hold of them.

We just open a ticket up on the web, we set the severity, and then they will work with us from there. They make it really easy to open them. I'll do my best to troubleshoot, but I only have so much time in the day. At the end of the day, I'm just going to open a support case and they'll help me directly.

We pay for support so, the business wants us to use it, take advantage. They look at how many support cases we open. Otherwise they might say, "Hey, you guys don't open up support cases. We're paying."

No. We just had the foresight to know we needed a solution like this because server sprawl is very concerning to me, personally. I don't want to have a whole bunch of hosts out there that I don't really need, because the bigger you get the harder it is to maintain it.

At the time, the other one was Turbonomic, but they are a little higher-end. We had to "sell" it to the business. vROps is not cheap either. We convinced the organization that it is in their best interest. And they followed suit.

There are different things to look for when choosing a vendor. From an engineering standpoint, it's the administration. From an organizational standpoint, it could be cost. So it has to come in between those and it has to be a stable product as well. Those three factors.

As engineers, we're the decision influencers but at the end of the day we are not cutting the check for the organization. So, we have to do our job to sell it to the organization if we think it should be recommended. They have to have total buy-in.

I think the decision depends on your server infrastructure. If you're hyper converged, your solution may already have those analytics built in to it. So first check if your infrastructure or server provider already has that. A Nutanix may have that. If you are a traditional shop with blade or rack and you know you don't have it then there's really no competition besides Turbonomic.

Being able to get detailed analysis on different applications.

We are able to do additional detailed reports for our customers, in terms of certain spikes in the environment, different loads, etc.

Possibly additional automation.

It's pretty good. 

It's good.

We weren't using anything previously, but we're always looking at new technology, just to see if it might benefit the customer.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward.

Before implementation, review best practice guides. There are a lot of them out there. It will make the process easier.

Hyper-V and Acropolis.

We went with VMware's vROps because the customer selected it.

I would definitely recommend this solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: simplicity, functionality, but mainly simplicity. 

It gives you a better understanding of your VM environment. 

The sizing of VMs, whether they are properly-sized and/or that they are central plain glass to see your environment.  

It's like plain glass. It helps you get to the problem quicker than you would without it. 

We've only been using it for three to four months.

We haven't scaled it enough in our environment.

We didn't have another product we were really using.

We heard about vROps through word-of-mouth.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward.

Not really. We've wanted this for a couple of years and we just didn't have the budget for it.

For anyone looking at vROps, "Do it."

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Vendor relationship. The VM work has got to be absolutely rock solid for us along with the stability. We have to feel comfortable running the enterprise on it. 

The most valuable features are the alerts about the environment because that way, if we have a server that goes down, a cluster we know about, or if there's a performance issue, we'll be alerted about it.

If we have one server in a cluster that went down or if we lost a network adapter, we would be able to know.

Anything that is more helpful to vSAN performance, such as dashboards.

Stability's good, stays up and running all the time.

I haven't really needed to scale, we have small companies.

I haven't been too impressed. There seems to be a lot of running around or not hearing back.

Our VMware salesperson recommended it.

Somewhere in the middle of straightforward and complex. I remember setting it up and dashboards would have empty data, and I'd have to do Google searches to figure out how to fix it.

Most important when selecting a vendor are support and performance.

It's a great product if you can get it to work properly and function according to your needs.

The performance trending and the capacity trending. They allow us to better predict when we have to grow and scale out.

We're more easily able to budget and schedule that scalability. We're more proactive and less reactive to situations.

Streamline the dashboard and reports. I know currently when we customize those they tend to be a little bit complicated and they're not quite as intuitive as I'd like them to be. What I'd like to have happen is that even my managers be able to go in there and create themselves a report or order themselves a dashboard that they want to see, without having to request that from some of our more senior people. It's a little bit too difficult for them.

Its ease of deployment is pretty good, towards the higher end of the scale. Its ease of use is a little bit lacking, because of that complexity. It's not real intuitive. But its stability has been up at the top end of the scale.

It's been terrific so far. No issues at all.

We haven't had to scale yet. So I can't really comment on that.

We have not used technical support yet.

We had previously used Operations Manager back before it became vRealize. So we had some experience with it. I would say probably the biggest thing that pushed us towards it was that our monitoring platform is Microsoft SCOM and we weren't real happy with that for the VMware side of things. It monitored the individual VMs and the host OSs just fine, but we weren't able to see anything vSphere-related for our capacity or anything like that. So that's where it really found a home.

The most important thing we look for in a vendor would be multiple compatibility with what other things we have. We have a lot things in place so it needs to be compatible, it needs to fit. Complexity's big, because we do a lot with every team. We don't have a lot of technologists that can work with it. So it's got to be fairly simple to use. And probably just the industry acceptability. Like one of our largest measuring sticks is: are other companies in our segment, in oil and gas, using the product?

As for difficulty, it was probably medium. It's much better than the old Operations Manager. I put in one of those as well and it was a lot more complicated. I think the most complicated thing for our deployment was that we had to externalize our platform services controller. It only took us a couple of days though and then it was deployed.

Veeam. It didn't really fit it very well.

I'd definitely recommend giving it a go. It's a good product. It's one of the best I've seen for future trending, looking forward. Maybe not one of the best or the easiest to use for actual looking at real-time statistics. I know it can do it but it's a little bit difficult to get to some of that data. There are a couple of screens that are really nice for throwing up some graphs and things of that sort.

For the vRealize solution that we are using, the most valuable feature that we find is the dashboard feature. It gives you a single overall idea in regards to how your infection is looking and if there are any problems, it can tell you in advance, i.e., based on whatever calculations it does.

In addition to that, we are really about to start the automation capabilities for vROps where it can increase or decrease the resources depending on the need.

Just the automation part of it is very important for us. Hypothetically, for example, if there is a machine that needs more resources and you have set that with the automation policy. It will, then, provide the resource to that machine; you don't need to worry about the fact that you are present there to do it manually. So, it's a wonderful feature that can help to increase the productivity and efficiency of the environment without you actually being there and monitoring it.

I haven't touched all the features that it offers as of date. If they can make the automation a little easier because we have tried a couple of things and have realized that you have to go through a lot of scripts and adapters for its configuration. So, if it can be a little easier, that'll be better.

It is a stable solution. It works, i.e., what it is supposed to do, it does that.

We are not a very big shop but we are expanding. However, as per what we have read about it, the vRealize solution is extremely scalable. We haven't tried it yet, but we believe in the VMware products, so if they say it will be scalable, then it should be scalable.

It was a business requirement and the user requirement, so that is why we decided to invest in this solution.

Previously, we were not using any similar solution. However, for the last seven to eight years, we have been using VMware products.

The basic factors that are crucial to us while selecting a vendor are that the product has to be cloud-ready, it can be scaled if we need to scale it and that it has to be secure.

I would advise you to go with it. vRealize is all about monitoring and automating things. So, if you are getting what you want, then it's a great solution. We have tried it, we are still using it and plan to use it so you should go for it.

It gives us the opportunity to take a look at our VM performance in a way that we don't necessarily get a chance to do with some of our other tools.

It has allowed us to do some capacity planning at a fairly detailed level so that we can go back and look at not only some of our workloads, in order to see if they need to be shifted around within the existing infrastructure, but it allows us to do some capacity planning. This allows us to look for what we need to purchase moving forward, so as to keep our infrastructure where we need it to be from a performance perspective.

Some of the improvements are related to the better user management. For example, there is need to see better tie-ins to the AD or to open the LDAP framework, so that we can actually have our main users logging in using the centralized authentication instead of having to set-up the users.

The dashboards are pretty configurable at this point, but possibly some more knobs are required to turn in terms of being able to look at the troubleshooting of the workloads at scale, and how to solve some of those scalability gaps.

I haven't had any issues in terms of its scalability with the current version. The previous version was not the most user-friendly one, but this one has definitely made some improvements.

We use it in a very limited capacity, so I can't discuss the scalability aspect.

We knew we needed to invest in this solution because we really didn't have a good way to look at our VM performance from a high-level across the entire enterprise.

The support structure has to be halfway decent. The software should work, and I've been with vendors where the software hasn't worked so that's always an important consideration while selecting a vendor. Cost is helpful, i.e., the fact that you don't have to spend an arm and a leg on it is always nice in terms of the budgeting time. Probably, not necessarily in that order, I think that the functionality, support, and cost are the way that we look at it from a business perspective.

Since we're a VMware shop this was pretty much where we hit the nail on the head.

Definitely, use it. Take a look at the licensing model and make sure that it fits what you're trying to do with it. Other than that, I would still recommend it, even though, I think it could use a little bit of improvement.

Since it sits alongside an installation, preparation is as simple as building another VM to put it on, as far as I'm concerned. The installation is pretty straightforward, at least based on the experience that my team had in terms of doing the upgrades and things of that nature.

The insight that it gives you actually is needed for the systems, i.e., from your storage to your computer to your hypervisor and all of that is very good. Also, capacity management is a valuable feature.

In our organization and also probably in most organizations, you are looking to get the most that you can for the least amount of money. This solution allows you to squeeze that little extra money out and lets you make more.

Basically, if you're looking at the money saving and time factors, then it can cut down those drastically, as much as sometimes even saved thousands of dollars.

A cleaner UI is needed. The user interface is very rigid.

The stability and user interface are horrible.

Stability is a real issue. In terms of the rapid growth, it didn't accommodate my rapid growth even after manual intervention. We sized it based on a large organization, and we filled that up extremely quickly; it was really difficult to quickly expand that.

The reliability is directly integrated with scalability for us. So, it is similar to the stability aspect.

Some of the technical support representatives are knowledgeable, I have discovered it depends on the time of day.

We have so many people, and the reports that executives wanted from us required more man-hours than what we have. So, we had to find another solution so as to give those reports easily.

Since we own VMware we decided to stay with VMware only.

Whilst looking for a vendor, we look for support.

The setup was complex. A lot of their terminology is not what we use; it's very technical, but it's not what a lot of the people use in the field. Actually, I had to set it up myself. I couldn't let one of my juniors do it.

If you have the technical experience and time to basically understand the user interface, then go for it. However, if you don't have the time, then don't.