vRealize Operations, or Aria Operations, provided simplified and automated IT Operations Management across private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, and visibility into the entire tech stack, including all physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure components. The product is no longer available for sale.
Cisco FabricPath seems to be well suited for larger datacenters where you need the scalability and flexibility that's provided. We've been able to provide our customers with much more bandwidth than they previously had throughout our datacenter and with applications generating much more east/west traffic now rather than large volumes of north/south traffic FabricPath and the nexus switches have given us the ability to provide our customers with the bandwidth that's needed to serve today's applications.
With the introduction of API-based event alerts, there is no need for a proxy, which is a good option. Its ability to manage infra on a real-time basis is a good option that helps monitor, administer and troubleshoot virtual machines.
It's been fairly easy for people to learn and work with.
It has simplified network administration by utilizing Fabric Extenders which are all configured from the same switch and treated as an extension of the switch rather than as a separate entity.
It has a good GUI to monitor real-time logs for cloud applications. This is quite a useful tool and preferred over most of the competitive applications in the market.
The support is pretty good however some of the KB articles still reference different versions of the product so it can be hard to find answers to common questions
In comparison to Cisco ACI, Cisco Catalyst, and Juniper EX Switches the Nexus switches have stood their ground and we've been fairly happy with them. I like that similar to Cisco's ACI and the Juniper EX switches that I've worked with I can manage multiple chassis from one place. ACI can do this on a much larger scale though. I think Juniper limited the number of devices in a single virtual chassis to 10 or less depending on the device type. ACI can do a few hundred leafs plus their fabric extenders so if you're looking for one place to manage all your devices it can scale well beyond either the Cisco FP or Juniper EX series switches, but it also has a much steeper learning curve and completely different interface. The loop prevention built into FP has been a great improvement vs our old Catalyst switches.
SCOM was quite overwhelming when we first set up a POC for it. There was just too much for one person to handle. With vROPs I can manage the product and provide the support needed for my environment. We also have a Solarwinds environment that provides us with a level of detail and alerting we have come to rely upon. vROPS takes it to another level because it links directly into vCenter to provide you with a complete picture of your virtual environment.
FabricPath is easy enough to learn that the adoption on the team has been fairly quick. This allows us to quickly troubleshoot and allows us to meet and beat SLAs that demand we maintain 99.99%+ uptime for our paying customers.
We believe that the ability to preplan deployments with vRealize has proven its return on investments.
Our troubleshooting time has been reduced with vrealize because its constantly collecting performance data. typically vrealize will tell us cause of fault before we can determine it ourselves.