VMware Aria Operations Reviews

vRealize Operations Manager is mostly used for troubleshooting and doing health checks for virtual machines, to make sure that they're running efficiently and that there are no performance problems for the customers' uses.

The performance of the solution is sufficient. It has gotten much better as the program has developed. I know that the new version 7, which was just announced, is supposed to be even better than the last version, and that version was awesome.

It speeds up time for troubleshooting and it gives simple-to-use dashboarding for executives and managers to be able to see what the issues are in an easy way, so they can escalate or question. From an operations side it lets you get to the core of the apple and figure out the problem quickly.

Valuable features include the PowerCLI module and the ability to do scripting, to pull information out, to simplify reporting and troubleshooting. Being able to gather metrics, or to gather information to alert on it, or to be able to present it in a report, is crucial because, even if the interface is fast, we want to be able to do everything faster through automation. The fact that that's being developed more and more is very important.

I would like to see a full RESTful API for everything, and PowerCLI modules that interact with more of the different features. It doesn't have a complete API set and it's not a complete PowerCLI module yet. I'd love to see that developed more, to be able to interact with other applications and automation.

It's stable. I've never really had any issues with it.

If you design your environment with scalability in mind, it works well. Going back and refactoring, adding scaling into the cluster, isn't hard, but it takes a lot of reconfiguration and planning, changing load-balancing and the like.

Technical support is good. We have the highest level of support contract so we are able to get dedicated resources that help in resolving any issues. The Knowledge Base is very up to date for vRealize Operations Manager as well.

The initial setup is complex. There's a lot of planning that goes into it. You could go through the wizard really fast and install it, but to really get a validated and resilient design, it takes a lot of practice in going through and making sure everything is hooked in right.

This has great value. I feel it should be a default for every installation. Having the monitoring and analytics developed by VMware, so that it understands the kernel better than anything else, is really valuable. I'm not really sure how an enterprise could work without it.

Go for it. Be willing to go through some growing pains to get it going, but once it's going it's beautiful. It's worth the effort.

For a new user, it's not intuitive and user-friendly. But once you get the hang of it, it becomes very logical. When you're first sitting and looking at it you can get information out of it, but to really use it and get to the meat of the program, it takes a little bit of learning, a little bit of familiarity.

It gives us good information when there's an issue of where to pinpoint the source of the issue within the virtual infrastructure.

A lot of the stuff we need assistance with is trying to get us help on our internal process of actually implementing stuff. So the right sizing of VMs and things like that. If there was some way in which it could identify the amount of resources in use, and scale them up and down on the fly, that would be fantastic.

No, it's very stable. It's part of the VMR Stack, so it's protected by all the core VMR features, like HA, vMotion, and DRS. You can put SRM on it.

You can put it on the whole VM infrastructure. Anywhere your VMs are, you have vROps that can act on that space.

They're knowledgeable. Sometimes, you have through the first level to get to the next level of engineering. Once you get past that, they're very knowledgeable with the products, usually able to help us in a short amount of time.

We also have someone on site to help us with the more advanced stuff on an ongoing basis as well, in addition to our TAM who can help escalate stuff and find the right answers.

It's fairly straightforward.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Everything is important.

• Reputation is certainly good for us, being a bank.
• The relationship is huge.
• We have to partner with someone that we trust, who we think is going to do a good job for us, and responds to the issues that we have.

We're running a couple of different flavors of vRealize Operations. vRealize Operations gives us the ability and the insight to be able to see what our VMs are actually doing.

• Who's the hungriest?
• Have we got any runaways?
• Have we got any noisy neighbors?

We can address those things. We can separate our test from our production, and make sure our production workloads are getting the launch share of the resources.

I think some of the improvements should be to the adapters, and the adapters which are available to customers. I know there's a lot in the marketplace, but we're looking for more, because we are a pretty large-scale company throughout the State of Louisiana. We've got a lot of different products, and we're looking for a lot of visibility from those other products that we have inside of vRealize Operations.

vROps has gone through a maturation process, and we've grown along with it. We've come to appreciate the things which are offered.

It is a very stable product.

It's quite scalable. We're adding additional vCenters at different regions to a single instance of our vRealize Operations for our virtual server management.

vROps tech support is super. Any issue that we've had, even in a how-to perspective, they've been able to assist us. We've had some things happen late at night or early in the morning where we've needed to open a preemptive service request, for an upgrade, support for a module, or a plugin that we needed to do, and they've been right there for us.

The vRealize Operations setup, installation, and configurations are pretty straightforward. We, as a customer, actually did two of our environments ourselves. We used an implementation service for the first. Then, we used that as a blueprint and a pattern to deploy our other two environments.

It's great from a scalability perspective, and it gives us all of the metrics that we need. Our configuration, or dashboard configuration, and deployment are quite easy.

• Ability to predict the need for harder resources.
• An alerting system for ongoing things not caught by other monitoring tools, which we have in place.

It needs more than the current attention it receives from management, then it will have more value, but it's good even now. It gives us good visibility on what we have.

Adding and configuring add-ons is not straightforward.

Additional features that I would like to see for the next release: Simplify the PAC files. When you download something for your vendor, for your particular solution outside of VMware, or even with the view client, the view PAC file is quite a pain to configure right.

It is stable.

It is scalable. We haven't needed to scale up. It's working great for us so far.

They are great. We have used them a few times to clarify how their update process works. But now that we know the process, it is very easy.

When we need them, we just dial the queue.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Just follow the documentation.

The cost is a major factor here. The VMware solution is much more expensive than all others.

Turbonomic.

We chose VMware because we have all the other VMware products.

If you are looking at this solution, research its ease of use and integration with other products. These days, also look at the login side.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: a good relationship at the beginning.

From a manager's standpoint it's the dashboards. To be able to quickly and easily see what's going on in our environment, from my perspective. But it's able to find the hot spots and things that are happening in the environment and helps to be more proactive about troubleshooting and getting to the root cause.

As a manager, I'm a big user of dashboards and reporting, so I love vROps. I'm always trying to have them create different dashboards. Even I get in there at times and create my own dashboards and my guys will look in and say, what is that? And I'll say, "I just created this one on my own because I needed to have this other thing. You know, not to bother you guys with that one," and I'll dabble with it. I love the reporting, and it's visual. To be able to set that up on your bulletin board or electronic bulletin board, and have people come by and go, hey what's that all about? And I can tell them, this is where your sessions are, this is what's happening in your environment.

We're just really starting the journey into virtualization work. It's been about two and a half years, so the benefit really has been that my team, and the desktop engineering team as well, can see as they're developing a product what's going on, almost real-time, so they can figure out where we need to do optimization.

Honestly I don't know. It's just really good. Maybe the interface is a little bit archaic. It needs to be updated and again we're on view 6.2, we're not even on 7 yet. So maybe it's changed, but a more modern look and approach.

I'm not sure about exportability of data, and I haven't really toyed with that, I'm not even sure if it exists. Being able to find something and then export the needed data into something that's reusable for the team too. Visually, it looks great but what will you be able to do with it? You have to bring people over to your bulletin board and say look at this thing, or to your device and say look at this thing; versus being able to report out or maybe send out reports. So giving dashboards to people or even giving them periodic reports.

The stability part has probably contributed to what's going on in our environment. We've had a couple of ups and downs with our product, but overall it's good. The ups and downs in our environment are probably based on our configuration more so than the product itself.

We're trying to get it out to our help desk, dashboards for that kind of stuff. We haven't really done that yet but I envision us being able to do that. And then, from the management layer, being able to give people an idea of where their users are, how they're interacting with it, and giving them a dashboard so they can put some validity behind when their users are saying that there's an issue. Is it really an issue or is it a user issue? The biggest thing I see about vROps is it gives you a truth perspective in terms of, as I said, is it a user issue, a training issue, or is it truly a technology issue.

Our technical support is great. We have a TAM so we have a pretty good line in with finding the right technical resources, so it's a really good service.

I was not really hands on in the setup but I was there. I think it was pretty straightforward. Although, my guys are really smart, so what they make look easy may not be as easy as I would think.

VMware did come out for us, they did help us. We have a pretty good relationship with them. But I thought it was pretty straightforward.

No. We invested in the overall package and we got vROps as part of it.

Look for the partnership when choosing a vendor. We're in a pretty tough environment, healthcare, so we have some unique challenges. If things don't happen right, patient care is affected. So they have to be able to partner with us and understand the urgency behind some of the things we're trying to do. As long as they're flexible and can understand where we're coming from, that's fine. We've had some vendors that just don't get it. VMware has been excellent.

Utilize VMware. Let them come and help you. Utilize them to get some kind of canned reports or some kind of templates so you don't have to create them all from scratch.

That's probably the biggest thing: find other peers that have done that and then draw upon what they've already created so you don't have to recreate it.

It gives a broad view of my environment, which I can basically see from one dashboard. My servers, storage, etc. That would be the most important one.

It doesn't. No benefits.

The biggest item that I would want to see is instant capture of data from storage. One second or even less than a one-second period, of capturing data. I think one minute is too long. There are too many things which can happen in one minute on storage devices.

It's stable, in a way. It crashes every eight months and I have to reboot it. And that's about it.

I only have 60 hosts, so I can't really say if it's scalable to a lot of environments.

I haven't used technical support, nor do I have a contact that might be able to help if needed. I'm a self-learner, so I go into the application and learn on my own. It didn't crash in a bad way that I had to call tech support.

I was using vCenter. I thought that vROps would give me benefits and I bought it.

I thought I needed a solution which would allow me and about five other team members to monitor the host, but unfortunately my team members are not monitoring anything so I'm stuck by myself. I know my environment, because I deal with it, so I don't need to monitor socially.

There was another solution that I though was the best because it allowed me to see what I wanted in the storage. But I went with VMware because it was one supplier of everything. I went for simplicity and that's what I paid for.

Straightforward. I did it myself.

Most important when considering vendors is price, that's the first one. And the ability to contact them in a timely fashion.

If you have less than 100 hosts, don't buy it, depending on what the pain in the environment is for you. My pain was storage and I researched storage. And that was my biggest obstacle. It depends on people, on their issues. Sometimes it's a CPU, sometimes the memory. I was going for the storage and, as I said, one minute for me in the storage environment is not enough. It needs to be much quicker.

Analytics, reporting, and visibility into the expansive virtual datacenter. We get a lot of data that normally you wouldn't be able to see without it.

Gives you a single pane of glass for your virtual infrastructure, as far as capacity planning, analytics, and even custom dashboards are available.

It's helped a lot with our capacity planning and it helps a lot with our "what if" scenarios.

I would like to see a larger online library and a more expansive YouTube presence of how-to's. A lot of the stuff you have to look up, to go to multiple third-party sites on how to do it. VirtuallyGhetto.com is a really popular one but it should be one-stop shopping. If I want to know how to do something inside a VMware tool, I should be able to find that inside a VMware community on a VMware website.

It's very stable.

It scales incredibly well. At the initial installation we put "large" because we just didn't know how large it was going to be. But from all the documentation, what we did is big enough to support the most expansive enterprises.

Six out of 10.

First-call resolution is low. You have to call back a lot and get another tech agent who is a little bit more knowledgeable and, unfortunately, at the enterprise we don't have the time to be calling back.

I was using Excel. We switched because I had no idea what was going on in my data center. I couldn't get any key metrics to anyone.

It was very complex. That were a lot of the calls to tech support. A lot of the documentation wasn't accurate or it was outdated. And a lot of dead-ends, so we ended up calling support to get the installation complete.

We had a third-party on site to help us with the installation.

Turbonomic, VMTurbo, and Splunk. But I don't think Splunk does the same thing, so, the first two. We chose VMware because they gave us the best price and because of the enterprise association we already have with them.

When selecting a vendor, stability is one of the big things for us. Also, cost is another big thing. We don't do a lot of bleeding edge companies, we're more conservative so stability is important.

Regarding cost, it's especially important to look at forecasting the cost in the future. The per-socket model's okay but SNS services and solutions or maintenance is what really drives up your budget.

I would suggest going to the VMware website, downloading that 30-day key, and kick the tires on it. Check it out.

And for implementation, bring in a third-party vendor to help your internal team. But allow your internal team to actually do the implementation.

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.