VMware Aria Operations (formerly vRealize Operations Manager) is VMware’s platform for performance monitoring, capacity management, and troubleshooting across your vSphere environment. If you’ve never deployed it, the initial setup can feel like a lot of moving parts. This post walks through a clean deployment from OVA to a functioning monitoring environment, including connecting vCenter and configuring the basics that make it actually useful from day one.
What Aria Operations Does
The short version: it gives you visibility that the vSphere Client doesn’t. Where vCenter shows you current performance metrics, Aria Operations tracks historical trends, builds baselines, predicts capacity exhaustion, identifies oversized and undersized VMs, surfaces anomalies, and generates actionable alerts. Once it’s running and has a week or two of data, the capacity and rightsizing views alone justify the deployment effort.
Current production deployment versioning as of mid-2026 follows the unified platform generation, labeled as VMware VCF Operations 9.0 (or modern Aria Operations subscription baselines, depending on your VVF/VCF licensing tier).
Deployment Options
There are three ways to deploy Aria Operations:
- OVA deployment. Direct deploy from the OVA/OVF file into vSphere. The simplest path for standalone or small environments.
- Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager. Preferred for larger deployments or when you’re also running Aria Operations for Logs, Aria Automation, or other Aria Suite products. Handles licencing, certificates, and upgrades centrally.
- SaaS / Cloud. VMware Cloud (now Broadcom Cloud) hosted version. No infrastructure to manage, but requires cloud connectivity and subscription licensing.
This post covers the OVA deployment since it’s the most common self-managed path.
Sizing Requirements
Aria Operations is deployed as a Linux virtual appliance. Sizing depends on your environment:
| Deployment Size | vCPU | RAM | Disk | Objects |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tiny (lab) | 4 | 16 GB | 250 GB | Up to 500 |
| Small | 8 | 32 GB | 500 GB | Up to 3,500 |
| Medium | 16 | 48 GB | 750 GB | Up to 10,000 |
| Large | 24 | 64 GB | 1 TB | Up to 25,000 |
For production, use at least Small. The “objects” count includes VMs, hosts, datastores, clusters, networks, and any other resources being monitored, not just VM count.
Deploying the OVA
- Download the Aria Operations OVA from Broadcom’s download portal
- In the vSphere Client, right-click a cluster or host → Deploy OVF Template
- Follow the wizard: name the VM, select compute resource, choose storage (put it on your fastest datastore), select the deployment size
- Configure the network: give it a static IP, subnet, gateway, and DNS servers during deployment
- Set the admin and root passwords in the OVF properties
- Review and finish, deployment takes 10–15 minutes
Power on the VM. Initial boot takes 5–10 minutes as services initialise. When it’s ready, the console will show a login prompt and the management URL.
Initial Configuration Wizard
Browse to https://<aria-ops-ip-or-fqdn>. The first-run wizard walks you through:
- Express or Custom setup. Choose Express for a standalone node, Custom if you’re building a cluster or connecting to an existing deployment
- Certificate. Either accept the self-signed cert or replace it with one from your CA at this step
- Licensing. Enter your licence key or connect to a licence server
- Initial authentication source. Configure your identity source (local, vCenter SSO, LDAP, or Active Directory)
After the wizard completes, you’ll land on the main Aria Operations dashboard. It looks empty at first, that’s expected. You need to add data sources.
Connecting to vCenter
This is the most important step. Go to Data Sources → Integrations → Add Account. Select VMware vSphere.
You’ll need:
- vCenter FQDN or IP
- A service account with read-only access to vCenter (create a dedicated account, don’t use administrator@vsphere.local)
- Whether to accept the vCenter certificate (validate it or add the thumbprint)
After saving, Aria Operations begins collecting data from vCenter. The initial collection takes 15–30 minutes. Once it’s done, you’ll see all your hosts, clusters, VMs, and datastores appearing in the inventory.
Configuring Alerts and Notifications
Out of the box, Aria Operations ships with hundreds of pre-built alert definitions. The ones worth reviewing first:
- VM CPU or memory contention alerts
- Datastore capacity thresholds
- Host hardware health alerts
- vSAN health degradation
To get email notifications, go to Administration → Config → Outbound Settings and configure an SMTP outbound plugin. Then go to Alerts → Alert Settings → Notification Rules to define which alerts trigger email, and to whom.
Capacity Management and Rightsizing
Once Aria Operations has two to four weeks of data, the capacity views become genuinely useful. Navigate to Optimize → Reclaim to find:
- Idle VMs. VMs consuming resources but doing very little work
- Oversized VMs. VMs with more vCPU/RAM than they actually use
- Undersized VMs. VMs that are consistently hitting resource limits
- Powered-off VMs. VMs sitting powered off that may no longer be needed
The “Time Remaining” view under Optimize → Capacity shows how many days until your clusters run out of compute capacity based on current growth trends. Set this as a regular review for your ops cadence.
Management Packs
Aria Operations can monitor more than just vSphere. Management Packs extend monitoring to other platforms:
- Aria Operations for Logs. Integrates log data with performance metrics
- vSAN. Built-in, detailed vSAN health and performance views
- NSX. Network visibility for NSX-T environments
- Storage adapters. Pure Storage, NetApp, Dell EMC, Hitachi
- AWS, Azure, GCP. Multi-cloud monitoring from the same console
Install Management Packs via Data Sources → Integrations → Repository. Some are included, advanced third-party storage adapters and additional integrations can be pulled via Data Sources → Integrations → Repository inside the application, or downloaded from the Broadcom Support Portal under Entitlements and Downloads.
Connecting Aria Operations for Logs
If you also have Aria Operations for Logs deployed (covered in the next post), connect them by going to Administration → Management Pack → VMware Aria Operations for Logs. Enter the Aria Logs hostname and credentials. Once connected, log events from your vSphere environment appear alongside performance metrics, letting you correlate “the VM slowed down at 14:32” with “there was a kernel error in the guest at 14:31.”