VMware Aria Operations Reviews

I am working for a public cloud provider and am supporting their infrastructure. The company's cloud is deployed on VMware products. Essentially, it is VMware virtualization infrastructure and they are selling public cloud space.

Customers use the service to have access to a public cloud that is local, in their country. If, for example, they don't want to use AWS or Azure, then they can opt to use this service. In return, they have full control of their data and infrastructure.

We use several products in the VMware suite including ESXi, vCloud Director, NSX, vRealize Operations Manager, vRealize Operation Log Insight, vRealize For Business, and vSAN. The company runs 80% of VMware products.

In terms of user-friendliness, it is very good. The features are good and the interface is easy to understand. All of the commonly used functions are easy to access.

This solution has helped improve our organization because we are a successful local cloud provider and the number of customers that have joined our cloud is increasing. Our customers know that we're running on VMware and we haven't faced any issues yet. Moreover, most of our customers' businesses are doing well. Overall, we have done well with VMware.

We do our daily proactive monitoring using vRealize Operations Manager. It provides us full insight in terms of what is happening in our operations, including the details contained in the logs. VMware vCenter also helps us with proactive monitoring.

Proactive monitoring has helped us to avoid downtime, especially because we follow the best practices described by VMware. When you follow best practices, you won't face many problems. The overall downtime depends more on your support and handling of the product, rather than the software. We are running on a cluster to help avoid downtime.

vROps has helped us to place workloads efficiently, although our users do not have very large workloads. We are running two environments and we are able to handle the users and workloads that we have. 

Using vROps has helped to increase our VM density within our clusters. VMware provides a solution where you can create a cluster, whether for storage or compute, and nodes within the cluster are monitored. If there is a node that goes down then it is automatically kicked out of the cluster. Before the host goes down, vRealize creates a replacement. It has three copies of each disk in different host nodes, and it will automatically trigger one of the copies. This makes sure that the system is fault-tolerant and the VMs won't have any problems. Also, if the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) is turned on, the VMs will balance the resources and try to avoid downtime.

We have been able to replace other apps with vROps because it is, pretty much, doing everything. For example, we had another monitoring tool that was running on each of our nodes. Its job was to trigger alerts and display information. vROps replaced it and is even more powerful. If the network goes down between our office and one of our data centers then it is able to detect that. It will provide you ways to get a deeper understanding of the issues, and it will suggest resolutions. There are other products that vROps has replaced, including solutions for resource planning and load management.

All of our products are integrated with vRealize Log Insight. It integrates with the other components including vCenter and NSX and retrieves all of the logs. From there, logs are stored in the system and when you have problems, you can deep dive and perform a log analysis. You just have to know the keywords you are looking for, which components, and the hostname, or the host IP address. It will report all of the information in the log that is related to it.

Troubleshooting works well with vRealize Log Insight, provided that all of the component drivers are updated and the service packs are all installed and running. When we configure the integration, we have to verify where the logs are coming from. As long as it is set up correctly, troubleshooting will not be a problem.

There are four main components that we use. The first is the hypervisor, EXSi. It is the most important part because this is the virtualization medium. Without it, you cannot set up or deploy your virtualization environment.

The next component is NSX, which allows network virtualizations to provide your tenants with the ability to manage their own network.

We have vSAN for storage virtualization, to create clusters.

We also have a tenant portal, vCloud Director, for self-management, including payment. Tenants are able to control and manage their virtual data center by themselves without the involvement of the service provider.

We have faced one problem when integrating with vRealize Log Insight, where the logs are not collected because the component drivers are not updated. Rather than give us the updated logs, the old ones are retrieved. The integration with vRealize should be more seamless.

One area that needs to be improved is vCloud Director, as it has very weird behavior sometimes. All of the other components are stable and you can predict their behavior. However, with vCloud Director, you can't always predict what it's going to do. For example, there are times when we thought that it was collecting information about the network, compute, and storage resources from vCenter, as well as information about the nodes, but it doesn't always work as expected.

The last time we had a problem with vCloud Director, we were unable to get the snapshot of the VM. From the backend, everything appeared to be running fine. This is an instance when we had to contact VMware support in our time zone, and they were able to help us.

You can find information about some of the problems with vCloud Director in the Knowledge Base articles that include various workarounds. VMware advises that when you face these kinds of problems, contact them to raise a ticket and they will come and fix it. The component is very sensitive.

In the past, when we have raised priority one tickets and they have sent us level one engineers. This wasted time because the L1 was only able to perform the troubleshooting steps that we had already completed.

I have been using VMware for two years.

The agility of the software components is fine and there are no complaints so far from us, so far. In general, the stability is good.

The problem that we faced recently was that we were running out of time for support. We were still running on ESXi 6.5, and support was ending at the beginning of this year. We had to upgrade our infrastructure and we had our hands tied. We could not move forward until the upgrade was complete, so it was a marathon of activity. This included adding two different sites and it required that all of our regular activities were interrupted. Ultimately, however, it worked and everything is now good.

Sometimes, there are issues with stability that arise from the hardware. We are located in Kuala Lumpur and our data center is based in Bangkok, Thailand. Although it has been okay, we have encountered a few power interruptions. We are using HP machines, which are good, but there have been troubles with some of the SSDs. When that happens, because I install the operating systems using a USB, sometimes the drive is misplaced. These are the types of issues that we face more often.

In the case of any downtime with a node, the data center operator is there to quickly overcome and resolve the issue. Once we realize that a node is down, a replacement is automatically started and communicates with the other hosts. This allows us to avoid interruptions in the operation and in the business. Once things are repaired, and the original node is put back into the cluster, everything goes back to normal.

So far, the product has been good and we haven't faced much in terms of complications. Our environment is new and we don't have millions of users, yet. We are still growing. I'm not sure if we'll face multiple problems when we reach one million users or even 500,000 users, but so far, everything is okay. We've managed to handle the workloads, and we've managed to satisfy our customers.

We have more than 100 customers using it and at this point, everything is running smoothly and the number of workloads is okay for our resources. As more customers come, we will increase our resources and expand our usage.

Overall, scalability is very good and it's one of the reasons that I like VMware products.

Our experience has been okay because we have received support for any problems that we have had. Also, we were able to get support from anywhere. It is not only available in our time zone, but we can get support from elsewhere if, for example, we need it overnight. Global support is available from anywhere in the world.

I can say that we have had a few bad experiences, but overall, you cannot take two out of 100 and say it's bad. On the contrary, overall it is good.

I don't know how it works in other time zones, but our time zone is supported by India. I have found that sometimes, you have to push them hard. For example, we have raised a P1 ticket and in response, they sent us an L1 engineer. When a ticket is priority one, it means that the situation is critical and the business is impacted. If you send a Level One engineer in a case like that, it will waste time because they will perform the troubleshooting steps that we have already completed. This has happened to us a couple of times.

VMware is the first solution that I used for virtualization.

VMware has introduced the Server Appliance, which allows you to deploy very quickly. We just need to import the appliance VM and deploy it. Traditionally, we had to create a Windows machine, and there were several things to configure, but they now have their own operating system called Photon OS. It shortens the length of time required for deployment.

The initial setup of vCloud Director is a bit complex. Sometimes when we have a problem with it, we can't fix it. VMware themselves suggest raising a ticket when an issue arises, and they will come in to fix it.

When we first implemented this product, we came up with a plan and submitted it to VMware. The VMware team reviewed it and advised us of the best practices. We developed a set of instructions that includes deployment and updating the solution and re-submitted it to them for review. It was finalized and we follow this plan whenever we deploy it. Whenever we encounter problems, we raise a priority one ticket and they come to help us with the problem.

The first time we deployed this solution, the local VMware team assisted us.

This service has been running for approximately four years and they are making a profit. Otherwise, they would discontinue it. They are planning to expand so there has been a return on investment, although I don't have the exact figures.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing VMware.

We offer a variety of services for our customers including Kubernetes monitoring and management. However, at this time, we do not have any customers who opt for it. What we provide depends on the customer's requirements. If they want to include VMware with their machines, we deploy the tenants. We promote all of the products, including that for Kubernetes monitoring and management, but nobody has yet requested Kubernetes. I expect that because we are promoting them, our users will understand the utility and plan to use them in the future.

VMware updates their product every one or two years, and I think that they are ahead of us in terms of what features are needed. Overall, I think that the product is very good. In the future, we'll have experience with the functionality of all of the new features that VMware is coming out with.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this product is that if you want to have a private cloud, VMware is the best option. It is the most stable and the best choice for a private cloud investment.

I am planning to open my own cloud in my country, which will help the local community because many government agencies will not use the public cloud. For this, I'm thinking that I will be using VMware.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use this product for monitoring, resource management, and troubleshooting of our virtualized environments. We have been using Heavy Hitter VM dashboards for oversized and undersized VMs. We use vROps to find the contention in the CPU, RAM, and storage. We evaluate the IOPS and throughput of our storage connectivity with our storage back-end. We receive some alerts about some misconfigurations. Mostly, we are using vROps for two main purposes: monitoring and resource management.

In my current organization, we have two nodes; a master node and an HA node. So, we have two nodes of vROps working in vCenter.

We had an incident where a service owner reported to us that there was a slowness. The services on that VM were not running smoothly and clients were having problems. We moved to vROps and used it to understand the contention and congestion in the CPU, RAM, and storage usage. In the end, based on the metrics that were provided by vROps and the datastore at the VM level, we understood that there was a latency in the usage. Based on the recommendations that vROps gave us at that time, we moved our VM into a much faster datastore and were able to solve that problem.

We have been using vROps for the DRS of our clusters. We send metrics that allow analysis provided by vROps to vCenter to better manage and schedule the DRS operations. So, it has really helped us in that particular field.

It has helped us to better manage our resources. Especially right now as we are in the nick of resources, it has really helped us to find oversized VMs and better manage the resources.

I love the resource management and ability to find oversized and undersized VMs. 

The dashboards are really good. They give you a glimpse of what is really going on in your virtualized environment. The ability to create customized dashboards based on your needs is also great. 

The Troubleshooting Workbench, which is for deeper troubleshooting and understanding of your virtualized environment, is really good. We have been using it to monitor vSAN.

The forecast feature of vROps is really good. By understanding the forecast, we can possibly mitigate some challenges and the threat of running out of resources, then having downtime or a disaster. 

VMware has added more default dashboards, which are really good, intuitive, and informational.

We have been able to find the density in multiple layers, e.g., the storage layer and the computational layer. The resource management of finding those bottlenecks as well as oversized and undersized VMs has helped us with managing resources better and improving the overall performance of our data center.

The problem with vROps is that I personally didn't find a lot of knowledge base resources on the Internet. This is a very comprehensive and complicated product. In order to be able to use it, I expected them to have more resources and documents on the VMware website. Or, as an example, they have books available for other products, like vCenter and vSphere. We don't have that level of information available for vROps. It would be great to have a better, deeper, and more comprehensive knowledge base for vROps or even have some resources for learning.

vROps has a hypervisor level of monitoring going on in our data center. We are using other products, like SolarWinds, to have a service and OS-level of monitoring. Because we are using two solutions simultaneously for different levels of monitoring, it would be really nice in the future to have a service monitoring or OS-level of monitoring in vROps, e.g., adding the support online for monitoring services, like Linux services, Linux Databases, and Linux servers as well as Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Active Directory, or other Microsoft services, since we use them a lot. It would definitely help us in the future if vROps implemented this feature.

We have integrated vRealize Log Insight with vROps. We received logs from vRealize for the VMs and ESXi hosts inside the dashboard of vROps, and it was good. However, there was a problem with that. It worked at first for two or three months. Then, I think there was a problem with the certificate of vRealize Log Insight. We haven't had a lot of time to troubleshoot this problem.

I have been using vROps for a year.

There is a team of multiple people at my company working with vROps.

In the nine months that we have been using it at my current company, we haven't faced any sort of problems in regard to crashes, the integrity of the data, or dashboards not showing. We don't have any problems like that. It is really stable.

We don't have any plans to scale this out. If there is a new feature or service implemented in vROps for future versions that VMware will publish, we might jump onto that. Right now, we don't have any plans to extend and increase the scalability of our vROps solution.

We have a team of five people who work with vROps. We have almost 1,500 VMs as well as 70 to 80 physical/ESXi servers. 

A user would have read-only access.

A colleague and I do the maintenance for vROps, e.g., troubleshooting, customizing it, or building a dashboard.

We have not used the technical support because we haven't faced complicated or problematic kinds of issues. We have been using the online documentation, which has helped us a lot.

My current company was using Veeam ONE. After implementing vROps, the company decided not to use Veeam ONE anymore because vROps was more extensive and comprehensive when it comes to monitoring.

The initial setup was straightforward at my previous company. We downloaded the OVF, then implemented the integration with vCenter and other products, such as vRealize Log Insight, and that was really straightforward. 

I personally didn't face any problems. The tricky part is there are two ways of implementing vROps. The first way is using vCenter. There is a part of vCenter where you can specify, "I want to implement this in vROps." If you go that way, it will be a little different than implementing the OVF yourself, then going through the wizard and using the VMware documentation.

Once, when I had a problem with vCenter, I went to vCenter, and I said, "Okay, I want to implement vROps." The problem was that vCenter and vROps were not integrating. The usernames and passwords were not synced, so I couldn't log into vROps. However, that was the only problem. Later on, I switched to implementing the OVF directly. In that way, the problem was solved. Generally, the implementation was straightforward and the VMware documentation, for this part, was good.

It took an hour or two to implement one node and integrate it with vCenter. It was just a simple implementation for vROps without customizations. 

Our implementation strategy: We wanted to test this feature. At first, we wanted to make sure that we needed this product. We then went into a testing and researching phase. We implemented it because we found it really useful. Then, we began customizing it, making sure that the dashboards and everything else worked best for us.

I did the implementation at my previous company. I personally went through the implementation step, then I used VMware and other resources on the Internet to implement the service.

I have worked with this product at two companies. At the first one, I used to implement it, then I moved to another company. In that company, we had vROps implemented and installed. We are using it for monitoring and resource management purposes. In the first company, I implemented it, and in the second company, I have just been a user.

We have definitely seen ROI by removing unnecessary servers and VMs. By having vROps as an assistant when it comes to monitoring and managing resources, it has helped us a lot with cost savings and managing expenses.

On multiple occasions, we were having slow performance, performance issues, or resource management issues. vROps has really helped us to understand the problems or issues much faster. It has improved our performance for finding these type of problems and mitigating them by about 50%,

The solution's capacity allocation and management has helped us save on hardware costs by 25% to 50%. We have also saved on power and other data centers by 15% to 20%.

By using vROps, we have found resources and VMs that were not damaged and in use. We have been able to reclaim those resources. When it comes to licensing, it has helped us save about 15%.

If you have a large-scale enterprise environment with hundreds of servers and thousands of VMs, it will definitely help you a lot when managing your resources.

I have been told that the company tried SolarWinds Virtualization Manager. While they tried SolarWinds, the winner was vROps in the end because the level of integration, comprehensiveness, and extensive data provided by vROps was much better than SolarWinds and Veeam ONE.

At first, vROps might be really intimidating due to the amount of information that you get. from vROps. You might say, "Okay, this is so huge, big, and complicated." However, after using vROps for a couple of weeks, you will understand the value of this product much better. I think a lot of people might jump into the UI, then its level of complication and complexity, they would say, "SolarWinds or Veeam ONE is a better solution because it is really simple." I would say to them, "Challenge yourself with it. Involve and engage yourself to work with the UI. After a couple of weeks, you will understand that vROps is definitely the best choice when it comes to monitoring VMware solutions."

If you have an enterprise-level environment or work in a large-scale data center, I would definitely recommend using vROps. It helps a lot with resource management as well as understanding the congestion and bottlenecks of virtualized environments. It is the number one solution for monitoring virtualized environments, especially if you are using VMware.

Generally, it is a very comprehensive, good product.

The user-friendliness of the UI is really good. It is better every year. I haven't used a previous version of vROps. I have only used version 8. I saw some screenshots of the UI before, and this version is much better. 

With the integration with vRealize Log Insight, we were able to view logs in one dashboard. So, we were not going back and forth to vRealize Log Insight. It improved the performance and efficiency of personnel, like myself, to better troubleshoot problems.

Right now, we don't have any performance issues, especially with the help of vROps. We have more of a lack of resources for future projects.

In the future, we might use the vendor’s Tanzu solution along with vROps for Kubernetes monitoring or management.

I would give vROps a nine out of 10.

We monitor workloads with vROps. For example, if a new customer wants our services, we need to know the impact if you put their workloads in our platform, i.e., if this new workload will have any impact on the product or platform. We need to know the increase in percentage relative to CPU, memory, and disk. So, it is important to know how a new project or workload can impact the product or platform.

It can decrease the downtime of a client who recently has experienced performance issues by 10% to 15%. This tool can help you decrease those kinds of circumstances. Downtime is also about the design of the solution and how you put workloads in your infrastructure. If you put in more VMs than your infrastructure can support, you will have a big problem with all your clients. That is the reason that it is very important to check the performance every day of the ESXi host and vCenter from maintenance mode. If you periodically check if you have had a security issue, then you can resolve it as soon as possible from a security perspective.

vROps is selling because we have a lot of customers who need to know their usage of VMs, e.g., is the sizing of our VM good or should I decrease it? Or, in reverse, I need to increase the size of the VMs. All this is about the performance and what VMs resources you can liberate from the platform.

It is a very good tool for day-to-day troubleshooting. For example, if you have CPU-ready VMs, you can build a report of VMs who recently had an issue. It is useful for making decisions and troubleshooting issues. I think it is the most powerful option on the market.

You can schedule reports on the platform that are very useful day-to-day. 

For project management and new clients, the What-If Analysis is very good. You can use it for workloads. When you are adding new workloads to your platform, it helps you avoid impacting your production.

There is another useful tool for undersizing or downsizing VMs, which has more resources than they can handle. 

We have a dashboard for the latency of the datastore on the storage side. For new architectures, we have a vSAN dashboard for latency based on the usage of vSAN, because you need to regularly see the used space.

The newer versions (5, 6, and 7) are more user-friendly. There are tabs upfront where you can see if you need a dashboard, for example. You also have a building option, if you want to build in the infrastructure and how. It is very customizable from that point of view.

It is a very good tool for efficiency. From an ESXi host perspective, you can see the CPU rate on a dashboard. For example, if the relationship is 5:1, then it is a good standard. If you exceed this, you can get into problems with VM performance. If you have a host with a VM inside of a host using the CPU, you can balance that manually. It can also help you move the VMs into clusters. 

The older versions are not user-friendly.

If you have an operations center, you can put a big monitor with its dashboards so you can see what is going on in your platforms. However, there is no real-time. It takes about five minutes to refresh info. It is a good option if you need to see the entire landscape of the solution, e.g., the CPU, memory, and disks. For example, if you have plugins for VxRail, and there is a problem, will you be notified?

They could mix in parts of VMware Skyline into vROps to make it more efficient.

In a previous version, you could click on a cluster to see a lot of information about efficiency, e.g., when you will run out of memory, CPU usage, and RAM in percentages. In newer versions, you see this information in megahertz and kilobytes, not percentage. I don't like this change so much. If you need to present information to your boss or Director of IT, the information would be better with a percentage. Now, you have only a big number and don't know the percentage of use that you are getting from the VMs. I don't know why they changed it, but I liked the percentage version more than getting the numbers for megahertz of memory. Also, kilobytes of memory is a very large number. For a simple view, gigabytes or terabytes is better.

With the What-If Analysis, if you put some information in, and then add another workload, it is not possible to view the two workloads in the What-If Analysis. For example, if you have a customer who wants to up your sizing by 30% more, and then you have another customer tool which needs sizing, how can you leverage resources? If you add these two customers, then your sizing might be 70%, but you only have 30% of your resources free.

I would like to see more information about public cloud plugins with Amazon, Google Cloud, and Azure. This is really important in the future. Companies are moving to public clouds to maintain their workloads since they don't have downtime, which makes for very stable platforms.

In the future, they could add a central administrator for vROps. For example, if you have a large environment from multiple countries, then you need to look at the landscape for performance and forecasting.

I have been using it since 2017.

Version 6.7 is more stable than the previous version. There is no real problem with the purchase of upgrades. So, it is a very stable platform if you get good sizing of the tool. If the VMs do not have the appropriate memory and CPU, then you can probably get performance issues. So, this is important for the tool. From the disk size, it is better to choose the thicker VMDK to maintain a good performance if you had a lot of vCenters.

It is a scalable solution. If you need more vCenters or information, you can simply add VMs onto the cluster. From the vROps cluster, you can get more resources from the VMs. You only need to deploy a new VM for the cluster of vROps, and this automatically moves the workloads. If you put an IP, then the server will recognize this new node from the cluster and the job automatically. So, it has very good scalability.

There are a lot of plugins. For example, I use the vCloud Director plugin for private cloud. We also have VxRail. VMware and Dell EMC work very well together. From the VxRail side, there are plugins that can help show you more information for your platform.

Their support team is very good. They will explain things to you. You are very involved with the problem. I think the Latin America team works out of Costa Rica.

We had some problems with the views in version 6.5. It would show me 110% usage, which doesn't make sense. We opened a case with VMware. I worked with their development team in Bulgaria. We resolved the problem. 

I had a problem with a vROps plugin because we upgraded our vCloud Director. The plugin didn't recognize the upgrade. At that moment, we are doing a workaround for this while they apply a new update from this plugin to resolve this problem.

We had a demo for Tanzu from VMware for vCloud Director. We needed to show a customer how vCloud Director works with Tanzu and the Kubernetes solution. From that demo, we built a solution with VMware that links with vCloud Director as a platform.

VMware Skyline detects a problem in your platform. It has the ability to create a ticket to VMware directly, then you will receive a call from VMware, "Oh, you had this problem." It also monitors security issues.

The initial setup for the demo is very easy. You have 60 days to use the trial version and see what the tool has to offer to you. You only download the URL, then configure some parameters, IP, and sizing. Also, in the wizard, you have an option where you can see VMs with more CPU, memory, and disk. 

The deployment was first a demo version, which was standalone with one VM. Then, we needed to add more vCenters to vROps, so we needed to add more VMs. Finally, we had three VMs to maintain the database of vROps.

We started with a demo version to see what the tool has to offer our organization in regards to the VM's efficiency and health. This is very common for our company. They ask you, "What if you put more workload in our infrastructure? How will this impact a new workload in our environment?"

You have two options to deploy VMs. 

1. You have thin space. If you use VMs, then there is space to increase. However, if you decide to choose VMs with thin space, probably for an SQL database, there is no other good option from a performance perspective.
2. You have thick space. For example, you have a disk of 100 GB, and you say, "All" in the first deployment.

The billing is complicated because every country has a different option. Here in Chile, we don't pay for this kind of service with the Chilean pesos. We use another currency. In the future, I think vROps needs to work with governments for a native solution.

It is useful for determining whether to make decisions. Also, for our troubleshooting issues, it is the most powerful option in the market.

vROps provides a good native solution if you are using multiple VMware tools.

The design and what you sell to customers will impact your infrastructure.

There is a new version, but I haven't used it yet.

I would rate this solution as an eight out of 10.

My primary use case is infrastructure monitoring. This is a very in-depth monitoring tool and the use cases have been to monitor multiple hardware platforms like Dell and UCS. This includes network hardware as well as the storage solutions like Unity boxes. We've also monitored the entire SDDC stack by leveraging the different management packs.

vROps provides us with visibility from apps to infrastructure and across multiple clouds. It has immense monitoring capabilities when we talk about the vCenter, which includes clusters that host virtual machines and data stores. Not only that, but with vROps version 8, you have in-built management packs for AWS and Azure. This means that you can monitor these public clouds from the same solution and you do not have to purchase any other management packs.

With vROps emerging into the application field, we can now deploy the Telegraf agent and have the application monitoring done in vROps as well. From infrastructure to application monitoring, vROps has a wide range of visibility into the monitoring spectrum.

One of the most useful features that this product provides is proactive monitoring with the help of alert optimization. It detects anomalies and I know when something is about to go wrong in my inflow, or even that something could already be happening. The alerts are available by default and this helps with early detection. Other than the alerting, the capacity planning functionality is also a proactive measure that is very useful.

Proactive monitoring is something that takes time to stabilize because once you download vROps, it will take three months for the tool to stabilize and create a baseline. Once that is complete, it can perform proactive monitoring and will help to analyze the underlying issues.

It has absolutely helped us to reduce downtime. When we talk about the infrastructure and detecting problems, the notifications and alerts provided by vROps have allowed us to avoid application failures resulting from the infrastructure not working correctly. It is difficult to estimate how much time it saves because different customers have different environments and different timelines.

With respect to workload placement, it is a feature we use and it's incredibly useful. That said, there are a few things that can still be enhanced because certain customizations are missing. If we are referring only to VMware workload placement then the functionality works great. It works well on-premises but not for the public cloud.

Using vROps has led to improved data center efficiency, which has, in turn, reduced the cost of our infrastructure. Specifically, the VMs were on different ESXi hosts and now we've consolidated some and distributed others. The cost savings come from a reduction in hardware requirements as well as licenses.

We have integrated vROps with vRealize Log Insight and it's a great thing, firstly, because the integration is very easy. The best part is that you can easily create alerts within Log Insight, and then push them to vROps. Unfortunately, we do have a problem with getting the triggered object when we send alerts from Log Insight to vROps but other than that, the integration works seamlessly. The system is best utilized if whatever integrations you have with vROps are integrated into Log Insight as well. That is when it starts giving you value.

The integration with Log Insight has improved our troubleshooting capabilities. For example, there are certain events like a disk consolidation failure where there was an alert, but we weren't able to capture it with vROps because it isn't able to capture everything. However, we were able to find it using Log Insight, which then allowed us to capture the event that triggered the alert. This helped us to save the application that was running on the virtual machine.

Implementing vROps and the right sizing has really helped the customers to save a lot of resources with respect to CPU and memory. We were able to identify what resources and VMs were idle versus what was powered up and in use. The reports helped to highlight where it was oversized and we were able to downsize accordingly, ultimately saving money.

The most valuable features are capacity planning and predictive analysis. These are some of the most outstanding features that vROps has as a monitoring tool.

The ease of usability, interactive dashboards, and graphs are features that are different when we talk about the other monitoring tools. The dashboards and the interface are very easy to understand, very lively, and very dynamic.

This product is very user-friendly. It is also very easy to deploy and because it's a VMware product, we always have access to VMware support.

The workload placement can be improved. It can be more diversified because it does not provide many options with respect to segregating the workload.

The what-if analysis section is not very advanced and there is a lot of room for improvement. For example, it should include a wider spectrum when we talk about the data center cost assessments and the data center workload assessments. It should be able to consider a use case and predict what the capacity will be after a specified period of time.

I have been working with VMware vRealize Operations for more than five years.

This product is really stable when we talk about monitoring. The only condition is that it has to be sized well. If vROps is sized properly, it will give you a value with respect to monitoring. If it is not sized well, where it has too few nodes and the number of objects is really large, or the workload is not placed properly across all nodes, we might face issues. It happens because the workload is not correctly distributed. Importantly, we do have options for properly sizing everything.

Other than this single issue, it works fine.

Scaling is easy to do. For example, adding an extra node is easy and can be done in 30 to 40 minutes. All you need to do is add a data node and the vROps internal architecture will automatically replicate and share the data across nodes.

There are between 50 and 60 people on my team. The roles vary from engineers to consultants to architects, all of whom work on the product. We have implemented this product for more than 50 clients, some of which had huge environments. For example, we have worked to implement environments with more than 40,000 virtual machines.

Technical support is pretty good. Most of the time, I've been able to get solutions to my problems. There have been times when we had trouble that they were not able to find a solution for but other than that, the support is okay.

I have knowledge of other products that are similar but I'm biased toward vROps because that is the only one that I have been working on.

This solution is very easy to deploy.

It is deployed on-premises but with the latest version, they introduced vROps on the cloud as well. This means that they now have a SaaS offering in addition to the on-premises solution.

When deploying in a production environment, it will take between one and two hours to complete. The implementation plan depends on the SMEs that are working on the project and how stable your insight is. The timeline is very personal and it can really vary.

When we talk about deployment, there is no fixed plan when we talk about vROps. The reason is that it's a very customizable tool and the entire sizing depends upon the sizing chart that is provided by VMware. Essentially, whatever the requirements of customers are, we plan according to that, and then we follow the deployment rules or the deployment process that is given by VMware to deploy the tool.

Our clients have seen a return on investment by way of cost savings through both proper sizing and efficient workload placement. What they get from this solution is absolutely worth the cost. It's a monitoring tool, so return on investment doesn't happen on day one.

When you deploy the tool, it takes three months before you start monitoring the data. Then, you start getting into the metrics, and then after that, maybe after a year or so, you will start realizing how useful it is. This will be the case with all of the monitoring tools.

This is an enterprise-level product and everything is included in the VMware Suite license. 

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to size the environment very well. This is the first analysis that we do; we look at how big the environment is that we want to monitor and how many objects will be there, and compare this to the VMware sizing guide. You really have to analyze that and size your environment well because if it is done properly then it will give you a lot of value in monitoring.

Overall, this is a good monitoring tool and I think it's the best one for me. That said, there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our customers use the solution to monitor the health of the cloud platform and ensure everything is okay.

Heat maps are valuable. The alerting feature has been the most beneficial in managing virtualized environments.

The solution must provide better training options to help us make the most of the tool. The learning curve is fairly high. It's a deceptively easy product when we first look at it, but it has tremendous depth. There's a lot to it.

I have been using the solution for five years.

The tool is stable.

The tool is scalable. We use a lot of different installations of the product. Our customers are small, medium, and large enterprises.

The support is good. We often wonder whether the support team will meet the SLAs. I'm very reluctant to make all of our support issues P1. VMware is reasonably good at fixing problems. They probably don't have enough qualified engineers in Aria Operations’ support. When you get them on the phone, they are very knowledgeable.

Positive

We used Turbonomic. We do not use it anymore because it isn’t as useful. It didn't have all the features that we needed in an MSP solution.

The solution is easy to deploy. We have a lot of configuration, so it takes a lot longer. However, the basic installation takes 20 to 30 minutes. One engineer is more than enough to deploy the tool. It is reasonably easy to maintain the product.

The return on investment is reasonable. However, the features we would most want from an MSP perspective are those we can't afford because we can't pass on the costs to the customers. We will have an issue if we need more hosts and storage. Our customers cannot afford it.

Reducing the cost would be the most beneficial. The product is too expensive to implement. We can't afford the extra features because it's simply too expensive.

We are cloud providers. We use the solution as a part of our support for the customers. We should be able to model our requirements and purchase in advance. Modeling would be very useful if our platform is growing. If a customer has a particular amount of CPU, storage, and memory requirements, we'd like to model it and get ahead of the storage availability and CPU memory availability issues. We could also model the upgrades when there is a need for maintenance. Such modeling is very useful to an MSP. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

The most valuable features of the solution are the effectiveness of hardware availability and flexibility.

The deployment of the solution can be improved by making it less complex.

The licensing cost is high and needs to be reduced.

I have been using the solution for 20 years.

VMware Aria Operations is a great product that is very stable.

The solution is scalable and we currently have 800 people using VMware Aria Operations.

I previously used other solutions and switched to VMware Aria Operations because of its functionality.

The initial setup of this solution is complex and takes a couple of weeks to deploy in our environment. We require six administrators for the deployment and maintenance.

The implementation was completed through a vendor.

The solution requires an annual license which is very expensive.

Before choosing VMware Aria Operations I evaluated other solutions. 

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

I would recommend the solution to others.

I was previously working remotely and using vRealize Operations in a virtual environment. Now I'm working in person, so we use vROps to monitor our critical systems. We didn't use all of the product's features. We mainly use vROps for monitoring and automation. In addition to my team, the 20-person management team also monitors this environment, so it's about 30 people in total.

Mainly we are working on the vSphere monitoring, orchestration, and automation.

We are trying to consolidate our data centers, so the monitoring could always be improved. VMware could improve the way VROps forwards critical alerts to Microsoft Teams. I can't give feedback about anything else because we are not using all the features. 

We haven't had any issues with vROps. 

I think vROps is scalable and suitable for our environment.

VMware technical support is good. 

I also work with ControlUp when our customers need a specific metric. We only use ControlUp for that single feature. 

The initial setup isn't complex.

I rate VMware VROps nine out of 10. It's an excellent product for monitoring a VMware virtual environment.

We can monitor all of our relevant hosts that are stored from the same single pane of glass. We use it for daily routine operations.

The scalability options are quite good with VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), and all of the features are useful and relevant to us.

If this tool can integrate with other products, for example, those that monitor the network devices or any other storage devices, it will be very beneficial.

I have more than eight years of experience with this solution.

I am absolutely satisfied with the stability of the solution.

With regard to scalability, when you deploy it you are given different categories. You can deploy it in a tiny environment or a small, large, or enterprise level environment. You have the option to deploy it in different levels so that it fits the database accordingly.

We have a system team of around four to five employees who use this solution.

The technical support from VMware is very good. We have been using this product for more than five years now, and their support is very good. We are pretty satisfied with it.

The initial setup is easy, and it can be deployed by a single person. It's not a very difficult tool. It's a pre-configured appliance provided by VMware, and you just deploy it in your existing VMware cluster and assign the license. You can have it deployed in your environment in two to three hours or four hours at the most.

To maintain the solution, you will need two people at most.

It is a very good investment because in the long run, it's all about the uptime. As far as we are concerned, it has given us that 100% of the time. We are very satisfied with the product.

The license is a one time cost, and you pay for support on a yearly basis. It is a bit expensive, but if you consider the product support and its reliability, it's justifiable.

It is a very comprehensive tool, and it gives you detailed information. I would rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.