VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Dashboards. They give a single pane of glass where you can view multiple clients, multiple issues, networking, data stores, etc. Another good tool it has is capacity planning for your host, your costs.

We have large environments, around 55,000 VMs and 5000 to 8000 hosts. So there's a lot of hosts, a lot of clusters, a lot of movement.

During upgrades I'd love to see a single pane of glass showing what the system's actually doing. In our case, we have a UK datacenter. It might take five, six, or seven hours to upgrade the whole environment. All I'm doing is looking at a screen that says "four out of nine steps". I don't know where it's at. I don't know if space is filling up, if I have to run a df-h on the nodes to actually see if something's filling up during that time. I have to read the upgrade log files.

For me, I want to see some kind of metrics there, which I can look and say, "Okay, at this point it's pushing the pack file out to the UK." I don't want to sit there and look at each screen for three hours, and then have to wonder if I should call VMware or not. If I let it sit three more hours, then we're down for six hours, and I could have called three hours ago to fix it. The problem is, I didn't know if there was an issue or not.

Stability is good. It's easy to upgrade, easy to maintain. They made it easier with 6.5. Instead of having to add in an extra data node, or an extra remote collector, to add into the virtual center to pull in metrics, all you do is expand the memory. You start off small, then you start expanding the memory. Therefore, as long as your host can handle the memory you don't have to purchase anything extra.

GSS is pretty good. They're not so key to the actual architecture behind it. They can answer general questions. If you need to escalate, you need to escalate to BCS. In general, GSS does a really good job.

I think they've been using vRealize about five or six years now. I'm not sure what they used before we got monitoring tools.

In this case, it was a company-wide decision. Really we're using vROps for host monitoring, for clustering, and for data store vSAN. We had a use case where we have to work with hospitals, so it can't be down.

I wasn't involved in this.

I have set it up in another site, initially, starting it off with Horizon View.

It was real straightforward. There are lots of guides out there. VMware helps you with it, guides you on how to set everything up. All you're doing is installing a management pack file for the vCenter. Then, to connect to your vCenter you have to have a username, password, and the fully qualified domain name name, and that's it.

Not at this time, because we're partnered with them.

When selecting a vendor be sure to look at reliability, uptime, and make sure that they're available for you. Because we work for hospitals, hospitals can't be down, they can't be down at all, even for a minute or two.

Definitely find a couple of use cases to make sure that vROps is what you need. vROps, can do pretty much everything up to capacity planning. It comes with different licensing levels, Standard, Enterprise, Advanced. Find out what you need, which version and edition.

Tells us about alerts and risk that we might not know about. The Help feature's probably the best, that's what we look at all the time. Go in and look, if something's red we're jumping on it.

We weren't aware of these alerts beforehand. So, if there was an application slow-down, latency, nobody knew if it was the server, the application or what. Now we can actually point to it and eliminate the server as the problem and look for the application as the issue.

I don't know if there's a way to e-mail alerts from it. We always have to go look into it. We have other monitoring solutions that will e-mail our whole team, or text them if there's a critical alert. I don't know if vRealize has that capability, because I know we're not getting alerts from it. We just go and look every morning.

Fabulous. We haven't had any issue with it yet

I don't know if this is relevant. I guess it's scalable. For us, we haven't really needed to use scalability or it hasn't had to scale in our case, I guess.

Maybe one of my systems guys has used technical support once. I think he called about an issue, but I have not.

When we got here, there weren't any solutions monitoring our systems. We're a new team in the last couple years, and we knew we needed something to monitor what's going on. One of our vendors introduced us to this and it was a great tool. We actually went to a class all about vRealize. We ended up purchasing the solution a few months later, so it was great.

I wasn't involved in this, the systems guy was.

I know our predecessors went through a whole rip and repair, new hardware as well as software, and they eliminated a lot of servers they didn't need. It's a big project. You have to go through and see what you have in the company and probably eliminate a lot.

Peer. We don't have them yet. We're doing a PoC with them, but the people that I've dealt with, their customer service is great.

I would say customer service is important. It's one of the higher things in terms of priority. My systems guys would say the product itself is most important - what it does. But I think customer service is key. If you can't get service when you have a problem, it's not even worth having the product.

VMware has been solid. Stable. I say hands down, VMware. There are other solutions out there, but VMware works.

The reclaimable capacity feature. It makes it easy to go and find over-provisioned VMs and then reclaim that capacity for use in other areas.

We get better use out of our hosts.

I can't think of any, really. We've run into a some small issues with our storage, but I don't believe it's because of the storage. It's because of some issues we have in a couple of our datacenters.

Seems okay. Just stand up data collectors or remote data collectors as you need them.

I have not contacted technical support but I do have a VM team contact. They're knowledgeable and would be able to answer my questions, for sure.

Well, we ran into an issue with the version we were running, and we found that that issue had been resolved in the newest revision. We found out through our EMC partner which is on the project.

I installed it. It was fairly easy. We just upgraded and the user interface is much better.

We have a team that is contracted to work on our project.

Dell, EMC.

In our case, all our hardware is Dell, our storage is EMC and our software is VMware, so it's a one point of contact for all of our support.

Definitely take a look at Operations Manager. It seems to fit really well within the environment.

The most valuable features would be the insight into our operating environment. It lets us see what's going on with our virtual infrastructure, with our virtual machines, with our hardware, with everything.

It makes it easier to manage. It streamlines our operations. We don't have to go digging around a dozen different places to find out performance statistics or performance information. It allows us to more easily rightsize virtual machines.

It never goes down.

Easily scalable.

I haven't used technical support for this solution. I do have a contact within the dealer who is knowledgeable. We just haven't had any issues with it.

No, we didn't really have one beforehand. We just needed performance statistics, to quantify how our VMs are operating, and vROps is a logical solution for that.

It was easy. It was simple. It took an hour to install one of our virtual machines, tied into our vCenter server, and that's it. It's a straightforward product. It's really easy to use.

We upgraded and that was really easy, too. Just a couple of clicks and it goes through.

There weren't any. There's nobody else that can do what it does.

In terms of criteria when selecting a vendor the important criteria are cost, reliability, and reputation. They're the top three. Perhaps community feedback plays a role as well.

• Being able to troubleshoot specific VMs
• A high-level view for capacity planning
• Getting insight into our VM or environment, to see where it's trending

These features enable the business itself, the directors and managers, to use it.

We also use it to get inside our Cisco UCS environment. Those are the keys. It's been pretty valuable.

It was pretty outdated when I started, so I upgraded it. And we've just been dipping our toes into what it can do for us. But so far it's basically been trending, getting us a forecast of where we're going, and where we need to add resources.

As far as VMware's perspective it's got everything I'd expect. One thing that is not ideal is that I actually have to buy a third-party plug-in for things like NetApp. But that's more on the NetApp and Lumidor side of things. It would be great if there was native integration with vROps, with those storage providers.

Good. I have no issues with it at all. It's been very stable in our environment.

Right now we only have a single node, we haven't scaled a ton.

I haven't been in touch with tech support. My contact at VMware is definitely knowledgeable and can help if need be, absolutely.

Just an older version. vROps wasn't heavily relied upon for trending, for capacity. But I think it will definitely be more so in the future, based on its reports, etc.

I thought it was very easy. Easy to follow instructions. Got it deployed within an hour or two. Not hard at all.

vROps is packaged with our licensing. So that made it a pretty short list. We already had it. We went with it because it's included. We didn't really do a competitive analysis.

Just the fact that it's a VMware product, and that means that product updates are going to coincide with other products. You're not going to fall behind when VMware updates a new hypervisor. Just the fact that it's in cadence with their other releases, that's a big selling point for it.

The top criteria when selecting a vendor would likely be support and reliability. Also, that they're not just trying to sell us a product but, rather, it's something we can actually use and leverage in our day-to-day operations.

We haven't really dipped our toes into what it can do but so far I have been pretty impressed with the analytics we can get out of it. The high-level information we get out of it has been pretty valuable so far. We haven't even gotten into it, so it can do a whole lot more.

Try it out if it's in your licensing and you haven't deployed it. No reason not to.

It gives complete visibility in the form of cache nodes and the health of all our virtual machines, clusters at all levels. And it gives deeper insight into a particular element of the health of the company, each of the virtual machines, storage. It gives a single point of reference to have a complete view and monitoring of the infrastructure layer, at all levels.

You can categorize what kind of alerts you want to get into, what is the performance of a typical virtual machine.

It gives us complete insights.

It gives proactive alerts and it can really be useful when it comes to capacity planning. It easily monitors utilization, it helps optimize infrastructure as well, based on the capacity and the real-time utilization. It's a complete product that provides multiple benefits to the organization.

One of the expectations would be to have third-party integrations, plug-ins like with Lumidor.

Also, alerting any potential violations in performance monitoring.

Version by version it comes out with a lot of enhancements.

When it comes to scalability, I think we haven't reached that threshold.

They are knowledgeable.

No, not at all.

When selecting a vendor it's important to look at the product roadmap; the underlying platform is VMware anyway. They go hand in hand when it comes to monitoring the infrastructure.

I would definitely suggest evaluating vROps. It's particularly valuable for anybody who is on the VMware platform.

We use vROps a lot to do trouble shooting, especially in terms of performance. Also, it helps to utilize our resources, because we can help if the machine is oversized or if it's undersized.

We've gone from having no insight (into the type of resources which we're using) to a lot of insight. This provides a lot of different reports as to how to keep our business running efficiently.

Possibility getting the additional features onto physical boxes in the next release.

It's stable. It doesn't crash.

We like the scalability of the product so far.

We're using another professional services group for this.

We invested in this solution because them management team asked, "Why are you spending this much money on hardware when you're not using it?"

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

We have 11 different pieces of the VMR environment. We had to go through and upgrade them all getting everything done in the right order.

The product is useful and it helps, especially going into a conversation with other IT staff and management.

Wireless Operations Manager allows us to troubleshoot any issues proactively, so that's really good with the solution that we have.

As I noted above, we are able to proactively look at if there would be any potential issues, plus planning on the demand and supply.

I'm a very core systems admin guy, so what I would like to look at, when I see DRS migrations, it would be interesting to see why it really migrated. We have a dozen SATA as of today, but it would be really interesting to see what is the metric that Wireless Operations Manager used to initiate re-motions.

Stability is pretty good.

No. Scalability is good.

I haven't used it for wireless operations. Not yet.

We use vROps. Apart from that we were using couple of other tools but I don't want to give their names.

I wasn't involved.

When choosing a vendor we look at what pain points we have today and then we look if any vendor can kind of satisfy or fulfill all the pain points. vROps was one of them we looked into

I would suggest if you pain points that we had, then go with vROps.