VMware Aria Operations Reviews

Capacity planning: Being able to see trends, so we can help plan for next year's capacity needs.

In infrastructure, from host down to storage (being levels), it can track problems easier and is able to diagnose problems quicker.

We're more proactive than reactive, so that's important to our customers.

The interface can be slow sometimes. I don't know if it's because all the data's being transcribed. When there's an issue, drill down, wait, and that could be a problem.

There's lots of whitepapers out there and installation guides. They also offer installation services for you. I highly recommend having them by your side to do it or else you'll be missing out on a couple things.

We haven't had any issues at all with it.

It's perfect.

Have not used it.

It's a lot easier to click and drill down, which are two things. It is as important as the capacity planning and business chargeback as well.

It was pretty straightforward. Obviously, we had VMware help us through it, but most of it was pretty straightforward.

The vendor has to have great support: 24/7 support.

ManageEngine, and we used Veeam and Veeam ONE. Those were basically the only ones.

I would definitely recommend having VMware come in and do a demo about all of the features it has, because a lot of places don't use all the features that are baked in. Thus, they're missing a lot of data that could be useful.

Definitely look how it helps their company and what the product does, because it's not a one size fits all. So definitely understand what the business requirements are and how vROps helps.

Getting firsthand information in the environment straight to the people that would respond to those actual alerts and events, in real time, versus a phone call or having to play catch up after the events happened. We're being very proactive with the tool up front.

The ability to create custom dashboards for specific application groups and let them do some of the in-house monitoring themselves. Also, the ability to deep dive into their applications where these groups didn't have that visibility before. We've actually reduced our ROI because people are actually more hands-on with the tool whereas before it was just a small select group of people that you would call, "Hey, how's my VM doing or what's going on?"

Now, the user is actually engaged, so it's actually helped us out tenfold.

In terms of using vROps, it's actually educated small groups of VM professionals to everyone who has access to the VM world regarding their responsibilities. From an application perspective, it develops stuff, therefore they can actually see how their application's behaving in the environment versus having to call somebody else and actually see what's going on. Thus, they get a firsthand experience from development rolling right into production.

One of the big challenge with vROps is there so much to learn as a user as you're doing it. It is also getting these dashboards in front of the executive committee, so they can actually see the environment. It's much easier to give a manager a dashboard of his environment, but he drives the events down to his team, "Why are we getting these alerts, what's going on in our environment?"

It's easier for him to do it because he's the boss of that area. Versus the support team, the VMware team, or the vROps team, in this case, driving these issues. I think we need to come up with more intuitive, outta the box dashboards, something I've even talked to about Blue Medora with.

Help us out-of-the-box. Help us get that initial footprint up and running. We'll build from there.

vROps 6.5 is rock solid. We have 6.6 in our development environment. We're gonna look to roll it out next month and all the reviews have been very positive so far.

We did an internal customer survey: The first 100 people that we gave dashboards and access to, plus the customer survey internally came back over 90% positive.The customers that we're giving it to really like it, but they want more. As those requirements come in, we're gonna build on it, and hopefully deploy as we roll along.

We have multiple locations around the world as well as in the United States. Our main data center is in New Jersey, but we have another main data center in Georgia and flight operations in Louisville.

It's really helped us out in terms of managing our environment.

They been good. We have used tech support for vROps because it's relatively new in our environment, and they've been wonderful, very responsive. They have helped get us in and "Fisher-Price" some of this stuff from a technology perspective, so we know exactly where we're going.

We had no tool to give us visibility into the virtual environment. We had the traditional tools from the enterprise management suite of tools, the BMC and IBM tools, but really nothing that catered to the virtual environment. This was our opportunity to actually get something to do a deeper dive and get more visibility into the organization.

The initial setup was out-of-the-box.

It comes up petty clean, but the layers of complexity that we introduced into the environment obviously changed some of those parameters. It's a learning experience, as with any other VM port tool.

There's a couple big players in this address space obviously. One of the major considerations for us was our aggressive timeline which we were looking to deploy, and that our deployment head already reached, not just a New Jersey-Atlanta implementation, but throughout the world as well. So the flexibility to expand across the globe is really an important piece of it.

Flowchart your dashboards first before you do anything technical within the tool itself. It's much easier to take what you have on paper and transpose that off to an actual flowchart or a diagram. It's always easier to clone a dashboard than create one yourself.

It'd be easier if you had a repository of dashboards from a VMware perspective. Whereas, as a user, I can go to that repository and clone one, then customize it for my environment. Clone is your friend.

Customers and non-technical managers and capacity managers love the reports and recommendations vROps generate. In one console, you can see both your Physical and Virtual Infrastructures merging together.

Using vRO, you can potentially get any user custom enhancements implemented in vRA and beyond.

The vRO (using Functional Programming of Javascript) is a hand-down of the favorite component of this suite. You can create your custom plugins to speak with any third-party application, not forgetting how many enterprise infrastructure product plugins are already available.

In addition, vROps is a brilliant tool for capacity optimization, assessment, and leveraging many benefits of SDDC.

vRLI still needs a lot of improvement to even start comparing with the market leader, Splunk, in terms of data analysis and customized charts/reports generation.

In addition, VMware is still essentially selling the vCAC, which was created by Credit Suisse's DynamicOps.

The CAFE part was created by VMware and it is pretty robust. However, I don't feel the same about the IaaS Windows part. They need to stop using these two loosely coupled components and probably migrate the whole thing to a SUSE-based appliance.

Version 6 of vRO did have its own issues, but the current version is pretty robust. Earlier, the Java client on reload lost flows, and the appliance needed to be started. This is no longer the case.

There are no scalability issues at all.

Customer Service:

Lately, it has been an issue with getting hold of the support team, but they generally are good.

Technical Support:

The juniors are strictly OK, but the escalation leads are brilliant with sound knowledge in troubleshooting.

The most valuable features are:

• the metrics.
• the amount of data that it collects.
• the fact that it doesn't summarize our data over a long period of time.

It helps us to see the root-cause analysis faster when figuring out an issue. We can see some overall performance issues and rectify them at the server level as opposed to the VM level because of the visibility we get.

It gives us baselines and visibility at any given time, i.e., visibility that we just don't find with any other product. Being able to get five minutes worth of data for up to six months is a great feature.

The GUI is very confusing, but the product itself is great.

It's a very stable solution.

It seems like a very scalable solution.

I haven't used the technical support at all.

The setup was very straightforward. The wizard-based install is self-explanatory. It's probably one of the best examples of VMware product installations.

This seemed like the right product. It was integrated with VMware and had the most visibility into the VMware software and stuff that was running on it. We weren't looking at any other solutions.

It is important knowing that the vendor is committed to the product and committed to keeping it updated on the stuff that it's monitoring. It's pretty important that when VMware releases a new version of the infrastructure, vROps will be there and monitor any of those changes.

Definitely give vROps a fair shot. The other products out there aren't as deep. When you're looking for something beyond the high-level 4-5 metrics that would indicate an issue, well, you're not going to get the depth from other products like VM server or whatever. You can get past the GUI and just live in the metrics section and the charts. It's going to give you a lot of value.

Out-of-the-box integration and monitoring capabilities on vSphere are the most valuable features.

The out-of-the-box integration with vSphere platform is valuable. Upon initial configuration, you connect the vROps appliance to communicate with your vCenters. You receive a detailed view of your entire vSphere estate managed by those vCenter servers. This is automatically built up within vCenter.

This effectively uses data mining and analytics on the vCenter databases to provide you with initial health, risk, and efficiency views of your estate. This provides lots of valuable information of the operational well-being of your virtual data center for a relatively small amount of work.

I’ve designed and deployed vROps on many customer sites as a part of their core virtualized data center solution and based on their feedback. This is a dashboard providing a single pane of glass view for health, risk and efficiency views for the whole vSphere estate. This makes it easier to keep on top of reactive support requirements

Advanced customization of the product is somewhat complicated, though understandably, that’s due to its flexibility.

The UI could be redesigned to make this easier. Multi-tenancy configuration, especially when integrated with vCloud Director, definitely needs more improvement to be used effectively.

We have used this solution, including previous versions, for over two years.

The previous versions with dual appliances had some stability issues. Since the move to a single appliance, it has been pretty solid.

There have been no scalability issues. Especially with Version 6.2, scale out architecture is pretty good and has been more than sufficient for most of my customers.

We used a previous solution. We switched because vROps is naturally more integrated to vSphere and other VMware products.

It is a simple appliance deployment and a simple one-off configuration for a standalone setup. It takes slightly more effort to scale out deployment configurations.

Start small with standard/advanced or a vSOM bundle. Once you are happy, upgrade to enterprise which is where you get the true benefits of being able to monitor everything.

Always use professional services assistance from either VMware or your resellers with the configuration. It is important to get the configuration correct. Initial deployment and native vCenter/vSphere integration is straightforward enough that users are encouraged to do it themselves.

• Custom dashboard
• Out-band (get alert in a text file)
• Capacity planner

• Capacity planning
• Alerts dashboard
• Get all the alerts from the external network and use ELK to show them in the production environment.

There was a collection bug and some alert bugs (didn’t show all the alerts and popped up fake alarms).

I’ve used this for four years: three years with vCOps 5.x and one year with vROps 6.x.

We have encountered stability issues. I redeployed the cluster twice.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 8/10.

Installation is simple.

We checked three solutions and we chose vROps for our environment.

Read the installation guide and tech blogs.

We were trying to create a virtual routing setup with a cluster of Ericsson equipment. We were setting up vApps for that and multiple NICs were used to route the traffic within the cluster. We tried for a year and there were a lot of tickets with VMware regarding that. It was an ongoing struggle, but we could not make it happen until we used vROps.

Deployment was pretty quick. Once you start up your templates, it was pretty quick to deploy. That was the biggest advantage. Otherwise, this takes many days.

I think they can look into some features that they're missing, like OpenStack. This is there, but not in the vApps. We were trying to get that from them, but we could not.

Overall, our project was kind of average, but we were trying something totally different than what our current product was able to do. So we looked at some features of vApps and what our software can do. We were trying to hook that up.

You can scale them quickly and easily. We had around 20-30 hosts containing all these vApps and they were really huge. We were trying to create a PoC for one of our departments. It's kind of an ongoing process.

We did call technical support quite a lot. They tried many solutions to resolve issues and create product updates. I think they're going to get better.

We were using VMware for a long time so we just kept going. It was easier to have one platform and one vendor.

Advice I would give depends on what you're really trying to do. If you're really scaling out the environment and vApps, this is a tool you can look into doing that.

• Reports
• Dashboards
• Email notifications
• Health, risks, efficiency badges
• Troubleshooting capabilities
• Auto rotation feature of dashboards for NOC displays

• With the use of dashboards, we can provide Business Units and customers a certain level of self-control over their virtual environments.
• Access can be restricted to only objects relevant for certain users/administrators.
• With the combination of email notifications of health issues and upcoming risks, administrators and engineers can respond in a preventive way instead of reacting after issues.
• The network administrators and engineers can monitor all NSX components with this product.
• The storage administrators and engineers can monitor physical storage components with this product.

Improvement can be achieved in reports automation when creating custom environments and dashboards.

It would be very useful and time saving if this could be included in the process of creating dashboards to generate a report based on the created dashboard. Also it would be handy if it would be possible to export all snapshot images in one click action.

We have been using the system for about 18 months now. We have just upgraded to 6.2 this month.

We have not yet encountered any stability issues.

Unfortunately, we encountered a limitation in version 6.2. In this version it is not possible to import data from another Operations Manager instance already running. The workaround is to first import on version 6.0 and then upgrade that instance to 6.2.

Technical support is good. Inside the vRealize Operations Manager in each section there is a direct link to the document center of VMWare containing technical documentation, and tutorials for that particular section.

We did use other solutions and still do. Especially certain hardware equipment needs to be monitored in an other way or is not yet supported in vRealize Operations Manager.
The reasons we chose this product are:

• Licensing model is the best choice for the way we provide services to our customers.
• Our virtualization platform is VMWare and we are implementing more components (currently LogInsight) to complete our Software Defined Datacenter.
• vRealize Operations Manager can easily integrate with all these components.

I would advise to make a design before starting actual setup.
A few examples of design considerations:

• More than one vCenter to monitor.
• Need for high availability.
• Need to migrate historical data from previous version.

The initial setup is very straightforward and relatively easy. Depending on design you can have certain choices during installation to fit your needs.

There are different versions and licensing models available.
I would advise to read this pdf: https://www.vmware.com/content.

We also considered Veeam One. Our choice for the VMWare SDDC is the best product for us.

Before purchasing this product, I would advise to install the 60-day trial (http://www.vmware.com/try-vmware.html) in a test environment and see if this is a fit for the organization as well as the administrators and engineers. In my opinion the way vRealize operations manager operates (and will be used) is different to most traditional monitoring solutions.