VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We are using vROps for its monitoring and alerting mechanisms, for the entire VMware environment. We use the analytics and recommendations.

It's a monitoring tool. It is very common, but in my last eight years of using it, what I have seen is that it gives detailed monitoring information for your entire VMware infrastructure. It gives recommendations in terms of resource utilization.

A major part of its functionality now is business cases. I can identify them now, meaning if we migrate to the public cloud, what the business case would be.

In addition, the proactive monitoring and recommendations always help you to avoid unwanted downtime. If I see that a machine is heavily loaded, I can apply the recommendation and balance the load across all the nodes. And if the machine is under-utilized or over-utilized, it will tell you whether to optimize or to increase the resources accordingly. It improves the operational experience as well as the performance.

It automatically places workload on the machines where there is any available capacity or more resources are available. You don't need to worry about that. vROps does it. The workload placement has definitely increased VM density. That is part of the VMware DR solution. It enables you to place things automatically on a machine with less load so that you can increase the density, depending upon the resource availability on the machine.

One of the best features is the monitoring. It gives you proactive recommendations, based on the information that you have. It recommends changes. For example, if an ESX service is heavily loaded, it will tell you to make some changes, such as storage optimizations. Every tool does monitoring, but this one gives you more proactive monitoring, with the recommendations and actions that are needed.

VMware products are user-friendly, there is no doubt. That goes for all their products. I use multiple VMware products and I don't see any difference among the products in that context. vROPs, specifically, is easy to handle, even if you don't know anything about VMware. If you have some experience in monitoring, the tool will definitely be easy to learn and to get hands-on with it.

Also, if you want to migrate to public cloud, it helps with the business case. The tool gives some rough estimates about migrating to the public cloud or to another cloud.

vROPs is integrated with vRealize Log Insight by default, but we don't use it in our company. But it allows you to keep the logs and go back and identify what the performance was like a month back. That can help with troubleshooting because if you know what things were like a month back, and an issue comes in, you can get into performance metrics for that month. All the log data will be available for troubleshooting and capacity management.

Three or four years back, regarding business case data, when looking at migrating to public cloud, we had to feed in the pricing of all the public clouds manually. I don't know whether that information is now available automatically, but that would help.

Similarly, if it could help with calculating on-prem costs, based on their experience, it would help customers determine whether to remain on-prem or move to the cloud.

I've been using VMware vRealize Operations for almost eight years.

The stability is good. They keep updating it with the new versions and new features. So many features have been added and so many different licensing models have come in. Variations are available for data center requirements and remote site requirements. But the product looks very stable.

I've never had a problem with the scalability of vROps. It can scale to any level. I've never reached the maximum of what it can do.

The setup of vROps and Log Insight is very easy. It's not intensive or very complex. I did it about four years back when we deployed it in my previous organization and it was very easy for a standard VMware environment.

The amount of time it takes depends on how big your VMware environment is. There's no benchmark value. If you have a small environment it shouldn't take more than one or two days. But in a bigger environment, the scanning of data takes time because it has to talk to vCenter, pull all the data, wait for all the data to come in, and see if there are any recommendations. But that should not take more than a week and you should be able to see everything, even in a much bigger environment.

To deploy, you need to have a VMware guy and it depends on where the data is being integrated to. If it's only a VMware environment, you need only one or two people, max.

If the deployment is being integrated with some enterprise tools or third-party vendors, you may need to work with their separate teams.

In terms of value, it depends on how you look at it. Is there really any other solution for VMware? I don't think so. If you bring in something else then you have to think about the support matrix, compatibility, and you multiple vendors involved. You go with VMware because of the easy integration and support. It's a big product and it costs, but the value depends on your point of view. If you look at it from a cost-perspective, it's costly. If you look at it from a compatibility/support perspective, it meets all your requirements.

Because we are a valued customer, we got a good discount from VMware on the pricing. What they offered and what we have gotten as a return on our investment are reasonable.

Every VMware product is a licensing challenge. It's always costly. It's based on processors. From a technical side, the product is very good. The challenging part is always the licensing.

They should have some kind of alternate pricing models. They have a simple model, CPU-based. They should do something to make it more reasonable there. And they have too many variations. I think there are three different models that depend on different form factors. They should make it easier. With three different versions—standard, advanced, and enterprise—it's confusing.

This tool gives us everything we need. I don't see any alternatives to it.

We don't use VMware's Tanzu solution along with this solution for Kubernetes monitoring and management, but we have had discussions with the VMware team about it. It is still in discussion.

Leaving the issue of cost aside, I would rate vROps at eight out of 10, in terms of the technical side, integration, and support.

We are branching into NSX. This solution was purchased with NSX to give us more insight into our environment. We're looking to do a lot more microsegmentation and figure out what the workflows are or what the data flow is between applications and between hardware so that we can minimize bottlenecks, get a better idea of performance issues, and be able to really lock down what we're doing for security. We're also looking to make sure that our microsegmentation is set up correctly and that we don't have data leakage in places that we don't want.

The most valuable feature would be the ability to plug into the data feeds that we have and pull information from physical hardware as well as the virtual layer. The best feature is the visualization of what's going on, so we can take a very quick look and see if there are any issues that stand out.

In terms of being intuitive and user-friendly, this solution is getting better. When we first installed it they had upgraded a few times, and just the overall layout is better and easier to manage. It's easy to learn, so once you get in there and start looking around, it is fairly intuitive to figure out what you want to do.

As they're able to add in more vendors for hardware to be able to pull information from different firewalls, switches, or other vendors, I would like to see where we can get more of a complete view of what's going on in the network. That would make this solution better.

It's a virtual appliance and it's been rock solid since we installed it. We've had no issues with stability.

We don't have a huge network and a huge environment, so I don't see us having to grow it too much in the future. If we do, I don't think it will be a problem.

Technical support has been good so far. All of our VMware support has been really good and it's easy to get our questions answered. We have a technical account manager as well through VMware which helps. If we need first line support for things and additional help, he will get answers for us faster. It's been great.

We weren't previously using another solution. Other than just general NetFlow products, nothing really shows the visualization of the network flow like what we're seeing with Network Insight.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. There were instructions for it that were easy to follow. There's video tutorials and things like that online, so it was fairly easy to set up. We didn't need any support to get it installed.

We haven't really seen ROI yet. We haven't been using it that long and we're still building out our NSX environment. The visualization of what we're doing and what it provides is a good place to go and see so we don't have to use multiple tools. It consolidates multiple things into one so that makes my staff and the network team's job easier.

I have seen the demos and what it can provide is fantastic. It more than makes it worth it to use the product. I would rate it between a nine to ten.

The primary use case of vROps is to balance our infrastructure, both from a predictive and reactive standpoint, for outage and maintenance.

The solution has allowed us to become more predictive, versus reactive, in terms of our infrastructure management.

It has helped to reduce the time needed to troubleshoot issues, improved quality of service to users, and provided cost savings through higher capacity. The primary benefit we're getting is from an operational standpoint. It has helped us to operationalize our processes and procedures. It has also helped us to stay ahead of our capacity planning so that we become more predictive, versus reactive. And then, the analysis features available with it allow us to do very high-level, enhanced root-cause analysis on events and issues that arise.

One of the most valuable features is the trending analysis of our environment to make capacity-planning decisions, in addition to providing real-time analysis of events.

I find it to also be intuitive and user-friendly. The layout, from a GUI standpoint, is somewhat logical. There are definitely some improvements made in the latest version, but I have not worked with the latest version yet. Overall, we find it relatively straightforward to work with.

One thing we'd like to see, although I think they already have done so, is moving away from Flash.

In terms of additional features, we'd like to see more integration with management packs, because one of the challenges we have is, depending on our third-party, we'll have to go outside of VMware to purchase management packs. If VMware increased the native management packs library, that would obviously help save us money and not have to rely on third-party solutions.

When it comes to stability, we haven't had any issues.

For the most part, the solution is within our initial requirements, although our requirements are changing and evolving. One definite item we would like is the capability to expand the license count per solution. That would help us to ensure we have a single pane of glass for the entire company, versus having various solutions for different environments within the company.

We are BCS (business critical support) customers and, for the most part, they have been able to help us when we do have issues, and escalate as needed. The only concern that we do have, at times, is the availability of that support. There have been times where, when we've needed support, we've had to, unfortunately, wait for that support, for an available engineer. But it's improving, and we'll continue using it.

It became apparent we needed to switch when our tickets-to-resolve timeline was significantly higher. We weren't meeting SLAs as we needed to. With the introduction of this solution, we were able to meet the demand, rather than just meet SLAs. Through the trending analysis that we can do, it allowed us to quickly and easily right-size the capacity from a cluster.

In addition, when issues did arise, it helped us to quickly identify what those problems actually were. The main advantage was time. We got a lot of time back that we could then use to innovate and optimize our environment.

I initially deployed the solution for our company. It's relatively straightforward. There's a lot of good online documentation and there's YouTube.

Our ROI is time. It has reduced the amount of time it takes to troubleshoot an issue.

We looked at a couple of VMware's competitors. One of them was VMTurbo (now called Turbonomic). The main reason we went with vROps was the ease of integration, ease of use, and the support behind it. The community behind vRealize is relatively large and that just made the decision that much simpler for us.

Also, from a cost standpoint, we were able to negotiate with VMware. And, with VMware, the deployment process was a lot simpler for us, and the training-learning curve for vRealize versus the other solution tended to be the easier, so that was also a factor.

We've been using it for approximately two years now. We originally upgraded from vCOps to vROps. We have also expanded our platform to include vRealize Log Insight which further helped us to understand and perform RCAs as needed, when events occur.

Get involved in the community. Get involved in performing hands-on labs. And, quite frankly, deploy it. Create use cases, create your test cases, and validate them.

The reasons I rate vROps at eight out of 10 are because there are always areas for improvement. In addition, the limited amount of management packs natively available through vROps is a huge factor. As you can imagine, as with most companies, we do use a gambit of other solutions and other hardware, and the ability to use vROps as a single pane of glass would allow us to have one solution for all, and make for easier integration.

We use vRealize Operations Manager primarily for capacity management within our environment. To understand the capacity that we're using for vSAN storage, for compute and CPU capacity within our virtualization environment.

vROps is, by its nature, a very complex product. We have seen a lot of improvements around the usability of the product. With each subsequent version, the product is becoming much more user friendly. It's much faster to get up to the speed on the product, to become familiar with it, and to use the built-in dashboards. Especially, the included dashboards around the vSAN Management Pack, that are now integrated into the product, and are available to use immediately upon installation, without any additional configuration.

Those are areas that the product has been improving drastically, and we are working with VMware as a reference customer, and as design partner, based on our experience, to help continue improving the product.

vROps is stable, it's a mature product. We're using the latest release, which is 6.6.1

vROps is extremely scalable. It can size from a small, to a medium, to a large environment. There are options to have HA enabled or disabled, so the product scales extremely well.

VMware has a number of support options related to vROps. It's supported as standard production support. It's also supported out of VCS and MCS support. We are a VCS business-critical support customer, and we have had a good support relationship with the product.

With newer versions of vROps, VMware has improved the setup experience drastically. The new versions of the product install very quickly, very cleanly. Adding additional nodes to the environment is very fast, very easy to do.

For us, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor are that we look for a company that's going to support our business cases, that has an established track record of stability, and performance. Someone that's going to stand behind us and support us as we utilize their product. Those things are extremely important as we're evaluating whether to make a purchase.

I rate vRealize Operations as a nine out of 10 today. There are still some areas to improve around the initial user experience. But, the product has improved significantly with the more recent releases.

The most valuable feature is mainly having a single point where you can see all of the performance of the whole cluster; see the CPU bottlenecks, the memory bottlenecks, apps on the storage side, on the network side.

Right now, we use it mainly for performance management, so we know what's happening, although we use it more reactively; we're not in a proactive mode. Meaning, every day, or every hour, we look at the backend to see what has happened, but it's not like a predictive DRS.

I have heard that vROps 6.3 will be able to integrate with DRS, and I think that will help us automate the DRS from vROps, and make the configuration change from vROps.

Before vROps, we didn't have any view into what's happening inside VMware. We had some monitoring on the OS level. Meaning, we had Zenoss, Hobbit, and other things that monitor the operating system on Windows or Linux, but we didn't have anything on the ESX side.

I do not have any specific cases where it helped us avoid an outage or reduce outage time, but it does provide a good view of root cause analysis, after the fact. It has helped me a lot with root cause analysis. When something happens and I go back and I want to see what exactly went on, I can really clearly get it from vROps.

There have been cases when the capacity management has helped me, but again it's all reactive, not predictive. Meaning, when I get an alert, I then look at vROps and see what it says. From there, I can figure out I have an issue. If I don't address it in a week, it could become a disaster.

The same thing with performance management. For us, everything is in more of a reactive mode; we know after the fact and it helps us with investigation.

I think that user interface needs to change a little bit. It's too technical. You need to be a really technical person who has worked with VMware a lot to really be able to navigate your way through. If you are, say, a junior sys admin, you might get lost. You have to really know your stuff. The user interface needs to be intuitive.

I wasn't impressed with the stability in 5.5. But 6.2 is much better.

We have 1600 VMs, and scalability is good. We used to run two instances in 5.5. With 6.2, I'm running one instance; I'm fine. It does not slow down at all.

I occasionally use VMware technical support, and it is bad, to be honest. Sometimes when I create a ticket sometimes, it takes them 12 hours, 24 hours, to get back to me. I have clearly said that production is down, and they didn’t get back to me. We have to engage the team to get a resource to work on it.

We were previously using Foglight. At some point, we realized that Foglight is too slow; it doesn't give us what we're looking for and we started looking for another solution. The time came to renew VMware licenses, so we just added it. The main reason was to get away from Foglight because it wasn't good.

I am the one that set it up. I followed the documentation that came with it and it was straightforward.

We looked at VMTurbo, and we loved their product, but it's more expensive. The VMTurbo user interface is phenomenal; very easy to move. It gives you everything you're looking for. Plus, whoever did the user interface testing at VMTurbo was the sys admin; for vROps, it might have been a programmer. You need to have a sys admin as one of the guys who tests the product and its suitability. With vROps, I need to know what I'm looking for.

It's one of the best products that does the job. It hooks into the VMware suites. From that angle, I believe it's more preferable than the others.

I use the solution in my company for the virtualization purpose. Basically, the server virtualization is the main purpose. Other purposes are for the cloud part, which is the private cloud. My company has a local telco customer in Pakistan who works on public cloud infrastructure, and they also have VMware Cloud Director product deployed in their environment.

The most valuable feature of the solution revolves around vRealize Operations, which is a good tool. The product is highly reliable, and it is easy to deploy and manage.

There are some challenges with the tool right now after Broadcom's acquisition.

The major challenges associated with the product stem from the fact that after Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, all partners are no longer VMware partners. One has to reapply for Broadcom's partnership, which is a very time-consuming process. Broadcom seems to be confused since it does not have the exact partner strategies that a product needs to have in place. Broadcom does not provide a good pricing mechanism, and it also has some other issues in areas like distribution. Previously, VMware used to use Aptec, an Ingram Micro company. Broadcom has some issues with Aptec, so currently, it does not have a deal with Aptec, and everything is messed up. Broadcom does not have a proper distribution mechanism, so we have delays in getting codes and all that. After so many reminders, once we get the codes, things are still very time-consuming, and the prices are still not good. My colleagues who work with VMware products were opening support cases on VMware's portal, which has now become Broadcom's portal, which does not have enough information like VMware's portal. Although Broadcom has been trying to integrate all of it with its own portal while also attempting the existing VMware portal with the Broadcom portal, the migration does not seem to be successful. Broadcom has missed out on a lot of data, which means that previous service tickets that were generated under VMware won't have any records. You cannot use a learning mechanism from existing information, which makes it a time-consuming process. We have to go back to the existing information from VMware to figure out what the solution is for a problem. With the acquisition of Vmware by Broadcom, we have to do all things from scratch, and all such things are very painful, and customers, partners, and our company feel troubled. Everyone is trying to see how to get rid of the vendor. We are just trying to find an alternate product.

The pricing mechanism is not available here. There are some distribution issues, and there is not enough information on the portal. The migration process from VMware to Broadcom actually messes up a lot of data.

I believe that the scalability area of the product has scope for improvement, and I say this based on the feedback received from my team.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for ten years or more. My company has a partnership with VMware. My company is a customer of VMware.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

I don't think that the product has any mechanism in the area of analytics.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

The product's initial setup phase was easy.

The time required to deploy the product is something that varies from one customer's environment to another customer's environment or site. I can say that the product is not a single table that can cure everything.

The solution is easy to maintain.

For a small environment, only one person is required to maintain the product. If the size of the cluster is big, then a few people are required to maintain the product.

I have experienced an ROI from the use of the solution, but the prices are still not much economical.

If one is low price and ten is high price, I rate the product price a ten.

I don't think that the product has any mechanism in the area of analytics.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

In many cases, I have worked with vCenter within our virtualization environment. Some problems result in vCenter becoming corrupted, making it unusable. Consequently, I resort to utilizing it as a standalone server for each issue. This is the primary problem I've faced over the past two years, and for every problem that arises, I manage to resolve it. I've observed that using each server independently is the standard practice, and I occasionally utilize it for various purposes.

I have found the backup extremely useful in my use cases.               

In this vCenter, my wish is to establish a backup system that doesn't require VIN. It involves creating a backup ticket directly from the vCenter for the virtual machines and performing the backup task for each server, ensuring redundancy without the need for additional software. This would be a preferable solution if all of this could be accomplished within vCenter itself.

I have been using VMware Aria Operations for the last two years.

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten.

I would rate it seven out of ten. Based on my experience, there have been occasional issues with vCenter. One of the recurring problems involves vCenter going offline, and when that happens, I'm unable to resolve it, necessitating the installation and reintegration into the system. This has been an ongoing challenge throughout its entire lifespan. However, when it comes to accessing the servers individually, there's a different issue. While using the solution, there are frequent occurrences where, when I make changes to a machine, such as adjusting RAM or other resources, I sometimes encounter a situation where the data doesn't load properly, resulting in a yellow screen. To rectify this, I have to refresh the page and then make the necessary changes to the machine. While this can be somewhat frustrating, it's not overly difficult for me to manage, and I've learned to handle it without considering it a significant problem.

I haven't taken any formal courses on vCenter, yet I've managed to install and troubleshoot them successfully. I've relied heavily on online resources, and the wealth of information available on the Internet has proven to be a valuable asset. I haven't sought support from any specific company. However, it's possible that in the future, I might encounter a problem that I can't resolve on my own, even with online resources. At that point, reaching out to a company for assistance might be necessary.

It is not difficult but sometimes requires extensive reading and knowledge to install it. It's not a complex task, but I need to fully comprehend everything in order to install it. Sometimes network-related issues can complicate matters, and having a strong background in network infrastructure, including switches and routing, is crucial for successful execution. If there's a preference, I'd appreciate guidance on which one to install. Also, it would be convenient if I didn't have to create everything from scratch on the switch. Some elements may need to be set up physically, and then I can connect them to two switches for network installation, requiring a three-step installation process. The deployment is scheduled for two months to complete the installation and server replacement. This timeframe should encompass all aspects of the solution.

It's not particularly challenging, but it's important to remain close to the users, ensuring that the data is functioning correctly. We need to verify its operation for a week. Out of ten servers, everything is working fine. Then, I'll proceed to another server, following a similar approach, to ensure it is safely set up. We won't be dealing with desktop servers; it's more about efficient and timely execution.  

I would rate it six out of ten.

There's a smaller category that stands out due to its affordability, especially for recent versions, which I rate as four or five in terms of value. However, if you're looking for a vCenter with older, more advanced features, it comes at a significantly higher cost, and I would rate it around ten. They provide us with a choice between a recent version and one integrated, and I lean towards the former.

I would rate it overall an eight out of ten. 

We provide solutions related to VMware, Docker, and Kubernetes for banking data centers. 

We use this product to monitor virtualization infrastructure and different resources that we use in our project. We implement vROps into data centers that are working together to develop vROps solutions with different interfaces. One of them is Dell EMC Adapter which is added to vROps to monitor and collect various logs related to Dell EMC storage. We also add another plugin to monitor HP.

We host around 1,200 to 1,300 virtual machines. Our data centers have more than 50 physical servers.

Before using vROps, we used SolarWinds and ManageEngine, as well as Cisco NCM, to monitor different resources in our infrastructure. But we established a new project for customers and unified all the monitoring solutions in just one platform, vROps. vROps helps us to predict many issues and problems that we may face in the future. It helps us to optimize many configurations because we have good visibility into resource usage.

Because we can predict many issues and problems, we can solve them and provide options for our customers to change configurations and optimize their environments. We are able to fix problems in advance. That helps us to decrease the amount of downtime in a given month. After using vROps, in the second year we were able to offer our customers a new SLA at 99.97 percent. That has proven to be a great benefit for our company.

It is very efficient. By using vROps we have fixed many problems. In terms of the efficiency in operations, monitoring team members are very satisfied because they have dashboards to monitor specific resources and details.

Once we started using vROps, we were able to change out servers and replace them with new versions because we could detect different problems related to the old resources we were using in our environment. With Cisco NCM, you can't detect these problems. Using vROps enables us to detect problems related to the hardware and the issues that arise from hardware error.

After one year of using vROps, we integrated it with vRealize Log Insight and vCenter. vROps and vRealize Log Insight are integrated very well. The integration helps us to gather a lot of event details sent by Log Insight to vROps. The integration between these two products helps us to go into the detail of events. It helps us to monitor problems and detect issues. Then, it provides recommendations to take action and solve problems directly.

One of the most attractive features in vROps is collecting information, logs, and events and, after that, providing proactive predictions about usage of resources. vROps also offers recommendations. For example, in the next two months we might face problems with CPU usage. vROps predicted and forecasted these issues in advance. That's a very useful feature.

In terms of user-friendliness, vROps provides a unified dashboard and you can easily create different dashboards to measure different resources. The UI is very friendly. Our team members are very satisfied with working vROps in comparison to different solutions like ManageEngine and SolarWinds. vROps is very unified and integrates with different solutions.

As a result of using vROps we have easily been able to reduce a lot of unused virtual machines in our infrastructure.

There is room for improvement in asset management and resource usage.

Around two years ago, we installed and configured a vROps project. I'm responsible, as a team leader and the VMware engineer, for different technologies on VMware, like vSphere, vROps, VMware vRealize Suite, as well as container infrastructure.

Because we need high-availability for our solutions and to ensure that our customers have monitoring solutions available, we established a cluster in vROps. vROp provides you a clustering installation for high-availability and sustainability. We had two data centers and we created two vROps that are synced together as Active-Active. If one version is down, the second one is active and provides monitoring.

Because of sanctions in my country, we don't have direct support. We use a partner. Although we can solve most of the issues within our team, we do use our partner for specific problems or issues that we can't solve.

If you study the guidelines, the setup process is very clear. We didn't have any specific problem installing and implementing vROps in our projects. If you have experience in the installation of vROps, there are no problems.

The deployment took about one month. We studied and reviewed the features and implemented a pilot environment in our company. In terms of the specific plan that we provide to customers, we implement vROps and start a one-month period where it is in a test environment. The day after that we move vROps into the production environment.

We make use of just one license for vROps and we don't need other licenses for things like SolarWinds and Cisco NCM.

I recommend implementing vROps by first setting up a pilot environment. You need to become a master in vROps to make the best use of its features. If you don't have any experience with a lot of the features provided by vROps, you can't easily use them, and you can't understand the difference between vROps and SolarWinds and other products.

So I would recommend studying it in detail. After that, you can make use of it, because vROps is a bit complex.