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 use it for monitoring of the VMware environment. 

It has performed well. Though, I haven't found time to dig deep into it.

Because of the recommendations in the product for configuration changes, bad legacy setups become visible using the tool, which is great.

You receive both the overview and the details.

It's user friendly, but a bit complex, so you need to spend time with it.

As far as I have seen, it is very stable.

We have a small size setup.

I have no experience with the technical support.

We received the product as part of a license upgrade and decided to use it at that time.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We spent a few days setting it up, then it was up and running. We haven't done many changes since then.

We did a basic setup with a large European reseller of VMware. They were great, as it was a quick turn on solution for us.

We have another monitoring tool which we use for physical servers and virtual as well, but vRealize Operations Manager gives us more detail. It's best of breed when it come to monitoring.

Don't underestimate the time for getting it in place and in tune for your business. Even though it's pretty much turnkey, ensure you have enough time to focus on getting it tuned for your environment.

It is a good product, but our company has a lot of tuning to do with the product.

One use case was to get better insights into the infrastructure, to be able to do things like closed-loop automation, based on the data that we're finding within vRealize Operations. But we're also using it to get a better understanding of capacity within our environment. That was the primary use case. We've expanded those use cases through integration with Log Insight as well.

We went from using industry standard KPIs to going to a complete on-demand model based on the algorithms from vRealize Operations. It has enabled us to drive more utilization out of our existing compute infrastructure to the point where, for a period of six months, we didn't purchase a single server or any additional compute. We were able to continue to sweat our existing assets.

The most valuable feature is the seamless integration with the vSphere Client and being able to go quickly back and forth between an incident within the vSphere interface and the actual drilling into it within vROps, to identify problems.

I find it to be intuitive and user-friendly as well.

The integration with Log Insight is a big thing for us. We're hoping to take point-in-time events that are happening within the environment, feed them into incidents within vROps, and then be able to execute a remediation step, through vRealize Orchestrator and the like.  We're looking for that seamless integration.

Stability has been good. There were some issues where we didn't have it scaled out properly, initially. But once we got a handle on that, because of the size of our environment - how to have it handle that much information coming at it - it became stable and has been since.

Scalability has been pretty easy. You just add additional worker nodes into the environment. It has not been a problem for us.

We have had to use technical support extensively. We had a pretty significant engagement to stand up the product and we've been using support as needed to understand certain metrics better and the things that we should be looking at. There's such a breadth of information in there that we needed some help trying to boil it down.

We did see a big change in that with the latest release, not dumbing it down, but consolidating some of the data that you're getting into a little bit more of a consumable format. It is easier to make sense of it without having to drill too far into the weeds.

Be prepared to get it spun up quickly but, to really get the value out of the product, I'm not saying you have to dedicate resources to it, just give it a little care. Don't just make it a shelfware product where you install and use it for one very small thing. It's a powerful product but you do need some expertise and some time and effort spent to actually drive value out of it.

When selecting a vendor, what's important to me is commitment to the customer in terms of supportability and to be with me when I do have issues. I want them to work with me to troubleshoot and understand that it's not always about the price, it's not always about the name, it's about how they react when things aren't going well.

Because of the early struggles we had, I would go with an eight out of ten for vROps at this point. Again, a lot of those things were just figuring out how much infrastructure it needed, to perform in our size of environment.

We're trying to use it for automation purposes, the automation of the process of consolidating hardware. We've had it installed for about 18 months and there's so much more we know it can do, but it's doing everything we know how to do with it right now.

The new features in v6.7 are going to bring a lot of our use case to fruition for us. Right now, we just don't have enough insider training to make that a reality. That was one of the reasons for coming here, to VMworld 2018: To improve our knowledge and figure out exactly what we could do with it. The sky's the limit now. Everything I see in 6.7, we're so looking forward to using it.

There was a course today on optimization and it was absolutely fantastic because everything that we want to do, using tags for SQL licenses and optimizing the hosts; for tiering - we have tier-1 servers, tier-2 servers, and test - so to be able to organize those and keep them on the host that they're supposed to be on, goes a long way. We have a very, I won't say untrained staff, but a young staff and to automate this process so that they can't make the mistakes - or if they make a mistake - it goes a long way towards helping with that.

What we've taken from VMworld is going to help us to push it to the next level.

We can also see things happening before the users do, which is huge. There's nothing worse than getting 50 tickets from the user community and you didn't even know that something was going on. If we start getting the alerts because we've got SLAs and the like on CPU and memory and disk I/O, those are already in place. Now, we know before the users.

Its most valuable features are the automation and the preventive nature that's built into it. For example, for the younger techs who are doing things in vCenter, you can change their security so they can only do certain things, but that doesn't negate them from migrating a production server into test, while keeping them from doing something that they just shouldn't do, storage-wise or CPU-wise. We all make that mistake of, "Oh, I'm going to just give this server 20 CPU," and then all of a sudden you have no resources on your host. This prevents that.

You put the rules in place. You take all of vCenter's built-in items and you've got one pane of glass for the policies: DRS policies, SRM policies, all of those things work well with vROps.

We're on the 6.0 version, so it does lack a little bit of that intuitiveness. You have to have some experience with VMware to get around inside of it. That's one of the reasons that I've loved what I've seen so far with 6.7. We've already downloaded the installation remotely and we're just waiting to get back home so that we can actually do our upgrade. That's the first thing we're doing Monday is upgrading to 6.7.

Stability - never an issue. We haven't had any problems at all.

Regarding scalability, it has done everything for us. Our first install of operations was with about 20 blades and we're now up over 100. It has grown with us. We add licenses, it takes on the new logs and everything else that it needs to. We can go in within a couple days and we already see the benefits of adding those additional hosts. The user interface shows us the information we want to see from them in the dashboards.

We have not used vROps technical support, but VMware support has been top-notch. Any time we call, they take care of it. They take ownership, which is great.

We didn't have anything in place, we were just vCenter. But with vCenter, you don't get the alarms and alerts in an intuitive fashion and you don't have the organization that you have with vROps. It goes a long way with that one pane of glass.

It has provided us some cost savings for the high-capacity and our ability to manage that. We haven't seen the benefits for the users because we don't have enough experience yet. And I think that's what 6.7 is going to allow us to take to the next level.

Across all of our clusters from test through tier-1 and tier-2, we were way over-provisioned. We weren't taking on the features of over-committing and things along those lines, so I went from 45 blades or 45 hosts, down to 35, and I was able to just shut the other 10 off. When it came time for a hardware refresh, I no longer needed those 10, I no longer needed to get support on those 10. Ten blades at $20,000 a piece, that's a $200,000 savings. In its simplest form, that's huge, especially in the healthcare industry, where they're constantly chopping our budgets. So that $200,000 in the course of 18 months helped me.

Install and do an evaluation and you'll be looking for licensing within a few days of your installation. It won't take the whole 30 days to figure it out.

My rating of eight out of 10 is strictly the result of my own experience with version 6.0. If I had to do rate version 6.7 - and I don't even have it installed - I would probably give it a 10.

For vRealize operations, we are using it to manage our entire virtual operations. 

From the beginning, it has improved everything from a management perspective. It has eased our current operations from what we previously used. 

The solution has helped to reduce time to troubleshoot issues, improved quality of service to users, and provided cost savings through higher capacity of utilization.

From an admin and operations perspective, the solution is intuitive and user-friendly. It has a good view. It's easy for technical experts to present a view of where are we standing to management.

It is good from a starter perspective, but when we go to an advanced level, it needs improvement.

Our hands are tied by using this product. It is not as flexible as it could be. In some cases, we have been working with our TAM and account manager plus the support to provide us flexibility in the way we want to customize. However, that has not been happening so far. As the whole world moves towards open source, we would like to see some open source added to the tool. 

Stability is good.

The technical support is unsatisfactory. Some of the tweaks that we were looking for have not happened even though we requested them multiple times. That is one constraint. vROPs is a good tool, but for big organizations when we run over 20,000 to 30,000 VMs, we would like to customize it in our own way to monitor, operate, and connect operations into Continuous Improvement and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). This is not happening.

We did not previously use anything else.

It's a good starter. If there is a company who has a small to medium business (or enrollment), it really works. If you have a large organization running 30,000 to 40,000 VMs, your network is very heterogeneous, your company has acquired lot of other companies, and enrollment is very scattered, it might not fit in well with the existing version.

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.

Currently, the most valuable features of the product are monitoring, capacity management and planning; things of that nature.

We run a SCCM and SCOM. We took all of that and piped it in the back-end. That took a good amount of time; a couple of months to get it cleaned up and working. Once we had that completed, we first used it for capacity management and planning. With that, we were looking at what's over-provisioned, under-provisioned, things of that nature.

Moving forward, we took it to phase two, which is now. We're trying to do more proactive capacity management planning; look at forecasting on disk space, things of that nature. Now, moving forward, we're actually trying to move to a platform where we're going to try to make this our main monitoring base, too. We're going to build out portals. We're mapping everything as a service now, trying to go from individual VMs; we're trying to build everything out as a platform service and then build out portals so that we can publish all of these portals.

The benefits for us, because we're mostly virtualized, it's getting everything under one hood. That's probably the biggest thing for us.

It has most definitely helped us avoid outages or shortened outage time. I think that with forecasting and disk space features, we've easily avoided outages for machines. For example, we had older machines that had BDE partitions on them. With those, even if they're thin-provisioned, you had to take them down and remove that BDE partition before you could re-size them. With that, if you find something that ran out of space quickly, because we have a lot of growth there, we were able to forecast it, and say, "This thing is going to run out in three weeks; let's schedule some down time and get it cleaned up. Get some space added."

We use capacity management a lot and it's been pretty accurate for us.

With performance management, I think that some of the recommendations are a little off, but overall, it's been pretty good. They'll tell you that it's over- or under-provisioned. We've found that when we try to clean up and reclaim some resources, that might not necessarily be the case. Overall, we'll take about 50 to 60 percent of what they're saying we can remove and do that.

Adding it seems a little better with regards to saying that it's under-provisioned. We've found that when it's under-provisioned and we add the resources, what it's telling us is pretty accurate.

We're just getting into the new version 6 features now; more automation, increased integration with DRS for workload balancing and scheduling. We're still behind on some of it. We have not gotten into it yet.

We'd like to see more customizable things, more management packs; the ability to not have to customize the portals and do everything so ad-hoc. If they built more frames and shells into it so that you could deploy things easier and get it built out easier.

For example, and I'm not the primary one doing this, when you're building out the management monitoring portals and piping SCOM in and things of that nature, everything seems to be fully customized. There's no easy way to do that type of stuff. It should automatically be customized, or there should be templates or shells that you could use.

I'd like to see templates and other features built in, for when you're building out a portal and you want to give a portal and map out of all of your objects and services, and not machines themselves. I feel like that should either be built in or cleaned up so that you could build it in.

The UI can be a little laggy, at times; improving that would be nice. It just seems slow when it's loading out.

The organizational layout of it is pretty bad. There's a lot of information and a lot of tabs. When you're going to try and rifle through everything, it's very convoluted.

I have been using it for a year and half or two years.

We've had no stability issues to date. None. I know that it sounds crazy, but we did take it slow though.

Scalability has been good so far. We don't have a huge undertaking on it yet. Right now, we're using it for a couple hundred VMs and then maybe 300 or 400 VDI solutions. We're just starting the VDI side of things.

We have used technical support once or twice, and it hasn't been great; slow, a little inaccurate. We've worked through it; we're able to get the end result. It just wasn't as quick as calling in a BCS ticket. They were knowledgeable, and pretty good. It was just slow getting to the end of what we wanted to get to with resolutions.

We looked at it, we liked it. We talked to our TAM and they pretty much talked us into it. That's pretty much how we went with it.

I was somewhat involved in the initial setup. I have a main guy that does it. I was overseeing the project. I know that initial setup was fairly complex, but I don't think that it was ridiculous.

We looked at a few other vendors. It wasn't a very large offering. Also, for the price, it was very good. It was a very good price, we thought. We're educational too, so there's a different spin on that, as far as looking at third-party vendors versus this, plus we're trying to semi-unify on platforms and management. Trying not to keep putting more and more layers into everything.

Give yourself enough time to do it. It's going to take a little while. It took us a good six months to get it off the ground and functional. Probably another three to six months to get into the advanced features of it.

Our primary use case of this solution is to monitor the server and desktop environment. We've never had a performance issue.

It has helped our organization because we can keep the metrics within our ratios. In this way, if something jumps out we can be on it right away. It has also helped to reduce troubleshooting time. 

The alerting feature would be the most valuable feature for us. It gathers more metrics. In the latest versions, there are metrics that are being exactly captured with vCenter which are a bit better. Aside for that it provides a historical analysis of metrics over time. 

We did not find this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly compared to other options. We actually ended up paying for something else to use in conjunction with vRealize. 

I would like the ability to edit more stuff in the standard version. The way it is now really limits the usability, especially because the dashboards don't fit everybody. Aside for that, creating reports and views needs to be more intuitive. Right now it's too hard without having had a lot of training. 

It's pretty stable, we've never had any issues with it. 

Their technical support is okay, it could be better. 

The main points that we look at are the costs and ease-of-use. Ease-of-use is the main thing for us because if we can't get the data we need it's not going to be helpful to us. 

We looked at Foglight, vRealize, and Veeam. The main reason we chose vRealize is because it's included in our license. 

I would rate this solution a five. There's a lot of stuff that we'd like to do that we can't. 

I would advise someone considering this solution to take classes and get a lot of information because this solution may look simple but it's a lot harder than it seems.