VMware Aria Operations Reviews

One of the key things is the ability to integrate data from other sources. That's always a huge issue. I'll give an example: We've got an issue in an Oracle database. We go to the Oracle database team to get data from the Oracle management tools. We go to the virtualization to ensure the data there. The last layer's a whole other thing. vROps brings them all together. Any tool that does that is a useful tool.

Also, the data retention is better compared to what vCenter does by default. vCenter keeps data for only a short window of time, so if it's an hour after a problem manifests, you're out of luck. vROps makes a copy of all the data from vCenter; it keeps its own copy and it can maintain it longer because it's not an actively used database that's trying to manage the system. It's just a copy for reference purposes.

One of the things we're going to look at is experimenting with the integration with DRS. In fact, I attended a session at a conference on that. We're looking at integrating it with our Citrix XenApp environments; we currently have somewhat of a gap on that reporting there as well. That's 2 areas we definitely are looking at using it for.

We have had major outages that we would have caught in advance had vROps been in place.

With both capacity management and performance management, we expect to gain. The outages I mentioned were capacity or performance related. They were in areas of capacity that we could not see with our current tool set without a lot of digging around, which are very easily accessible with vROps.

You can always improve the type of data you can merge in, but there's nothing that we're missing at the moment from it. I'm sure as we dig deeper into it, we'll start finding room for improvement.

The reporting can always be improved. The problem is that no one does reporting well, because no one can know what your company needs out of the tool. I'm sure refinements with the reporting would be great. I'm sure they'll be refining it with every version, but it's not something that's inherent to them; it's an inherent problem with any tool that's trying to report data. I've found no tools that report data the way you need it to be reported.

We’ve been using it for a couple of months now; we've been experimenting. Previous versions were not as strong. The last version before this one was when they started to actually make the tool particularly useful, and then the latest version's even better.

Stability is much better than it used to be. They went to a distributed model, so it's stable and you can expand and grow with it.

Early versions did not use a completely balanced distributed model. As the number of items being collected grew, performance could not be scaled easily by adding additional servers to the vROps infrastructure. The newer versions handle this much better and allow for performance to be maintained at high numbers of items being collected.

You can now expand outwards horizontally, which you think they would've done initially, but you know... If you have an instance, you can build it taller with more CPU and memory, or you can build multiple instances. You can build instances out in remote sites to collect data there. It's a scalable solution now, which it was not completely before.

I don't know what their limits are, but it's certainly scalable enough to accommodate our needs.

It does not get slow; that's why the model's much better.

We haven't used technical support for scaling it yet, but I'm sure we will.

We decided to invest in this type of solution because of gaps in our current reporting. There are certain constraints we're running into in the environment that we cannot attack easily with any other tool.

We currently use a lot of other tools. We use TeamQuest. We use Cirba. We use CA; both their standard monitoring tool and their application performance monitoring tools. Even with all those, there's certain nuances within virtualization that they can't easily capture. We'd either have to automate scripts for ourselves to pull the data and then use something else to do it, or we can use vROps, which is why we're installing it.

The most important criteria when we select apps and vendors is our experience working with VMware and the ability to take data from multiple sources, which a lot of tools cannot easily do.

I’m involved mostly with the engineering of how we're going to use it. Most of their products are really easy to install.

We've looked at VMTurbo and we've talked with the other vendors that I’ve mentioned we use, to see if there are ways of doing what we want to do within their goals.

There's been mass improvements; if they've looked at it previously, like a few years ago, I would look at it again. We looked at it a few years ago, decided it wasn't for us, but it's useful. Particularly if you're dealing with a large-scale enterprise, there are gaps in all the other toying that are hard to get at without this tool because this tool has much more direct access to the right areas of vCenter. You can use the API to get at anything, but VMware knows what to pull better because it's their product.

We use it to run virtual machines where we host our applications, web servers, machine servers, and even database servers, then we have segregation where we even have used it both for tests, and on production virtual machines.

We can easily take backups by integrating with other third-party tools, we are able to take backups and restore them very easily. We can spin up virtual machines almost at the speed of thought.

One of the main features is it's very easy to use. 

It's very intuitive. You go on the web browser and when you log onto the application interface, you can easily see almost anything you need to.

The homepage dashboard shows you your CPU, the memory, and your network utilization, just at a glance. Even when you go to individual virtual machines, you're able to see the same report at a glance, I think that's very helpful.  

You can also have templates that have all the necessary audit compliance, probably at the direct patch level, and then deploy whenever you need it. I think it's a very powerful tool that a business needs for its everyday running.

We have been using VMware for more than seven years.

It is very stable - we always want to watch for stability and, in most cases, we have found that whenever there are vulnerabilities that have been identified they either come up with a workaround or a solution within a short time.

Today we still use virtual machines, but it helps us to scale for when we are ready to move towards consumerized applications. 

It's flexible so you can add more hosts; of course, this is subject to licensing.

Customer support is very helpful, very responsive, and most times, very knowledgeable. If the support doesn't know something, sometimes they will tell you that they'll get back to you, which is awesome because they usually do.

Positive

We switched to VMware because it's easier to manage and easier to run and scale with virtual machines.

The initial setup was fast. I downloaded the standard version from a virtual environment. I had a workstation on my laptop and that was where I tried it out. Ease of setup is awesome. In the production environment, as long as you adhere to the minimum hardware requirement, you won't have an issue.

It was implemented in-house, by a team of four, in conjunction with local support.

The only thing is, we're on Essentials Plus. There are some things we want to do that that particular version of the license will not allow, so we would need to upgrade to a higher one.

We had looked at other OEMs and partner OEMs, but none had as good reviews as this solution.

For the initial set up, you have to meet the minimum hardware requirement to avoid issues.

I would advise others to start using this because they will not regret it. I would rate this solution and eight out of ten.

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.

I am working for a company that provides a cloud computing solution in Bangladesh. We are like an AWS or Azure in Bangladesh. We have a huge infrastructure with different data centers and different availability zones. We need to monitor our customers' VMs and their workloads. Many of them are financial companies and big corporations. We use vROps as a visibility tool to do all this. We also use it for planning and for performance monitoring.

In our country, whenever people are using virtual machines or cloud computing, they want reports, every day or week or month, about how VM instances are working. They want to know about the CPU, memory, and data usage. That's especially true for FinTech companies. We generate those reports from vROps. It provides them with relevant information and helps them to better understand things.

The most challenging part of a data center is the monitoring. You have to see how things work, such as particular instances and workloads, what the ideal VMs are, et cetera. It's important to understand cost optimization and performance tuning. If you have that kind of visibility, when you have a large infrastructure with 10,000 or 20,000 VMs, a product like vROps is great for doing all these things in one place.

The solution has helped us to decrease overall downtime. We have segregated things. We have a master replica in a different segment, and it has helped us to do so. In two years, we have had one hour of downtime, in total. vROps helped achieve that.

It has also enabled us to be more proactive in anticipating and solving problems and that has helped to decrease our mean time to resolution by about one hour.

For efficient workload placement, it's great. It's a multi-purpose solution. If you have multi-purpose workloads in your infrastructure you must use this kind of product.

In terms of cost savings, it's about optimization. When you have lots of hardware in your data center you need to optimize it. If you have lots of workloads running, you need to optimize them. With this kind of solution, you optimize your data center. It has helped to optimize our operations by 15 to 20 percent.

In addition, the solution has replaced multiple monitoring tools. It combines a lot of tools. We are still using SolarWinds and Grafana, but our infrastructure is totally built on VMware, so we are planning to use vRealize Operations Manager with everything because it's a VMware product.

One of the most valuable features is the ability to compare between AWS/Azure and the local cloud. When customers deploy something on the local cloud, with the same configuration that would apply to AWS or Azure, we can calculate the estimated cost difference between the local cloud and the public cloud. We do this kind of analysis for optimization and it is one of the best features of vROps. It is an advanced feature that came out in version 7.5.

The most commonly-used functions are easy to access.

When it comes to the visibility the solution provides, from apps to infrastructure across multiple clouds, it is a great product. If you have a VMware infrastructure, or a multi-cloud infrastructure—including AWS or Azure or Hyper-V—you need visibility and dashboards to monitor everything. vRealize Operations Manager, for managed service providers, makes it easier to understand all the scenarios. It's a good product, providing visibility into everything in a single dashboard. It is an amazing product.

They need to improve the capacity and infrastructure planning side of things. Also, I would like to see them integrate more stuff, with more detailed monitoring and different cloud providers.

I've been using VMware vRealize Operations for two years. Initially, I was using version 7, then we upgraded to 7.5, and now it's 8.0.

Out of five, the stability of the solution is 4.5.

The scalability is 4.6 out of five.

Initially, the tech support was not that good, but now it is very good. They've improved.

We were only using vCenter and ESXi initially and then we started using vRealize Operations Manager.

The initial setup of vROps was pretty straightforward, but I have been working on VMware stuff for the last six or seven years. Deployment takes about 30 minutes.

In our data center, we have a NOC monitoring team and we have a system team. Those are the two departments that are using the solution. And it doesn't require much staff for deployment and maintenance.

The value we get from the solution is worth the cost because it enables us to optimize things.

If you have a big infrastructure, you should calculate the cost for those systems. But if you have a small workload, a small environment, don't go for vROps.

We are using Veeam and SolarWinds, but they are not that efficient.

My advice is to take a good look at vROps. When you have a big infrastructure with a large volume of instances, monitoring everything in a single dashboard is very difficult, but with this solution, it's pretty easy. It's like a Swiss Army knife. You can troubleshoot and monitor in a single place. It's pretty convenient.

Overall, this is a very good product. We are using lots of VMware technologies, including Log Insights, VMware ESXi, vCenter, and NSX. There were a lot of improvements with version 8. They integrated AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. It is improving day by day. If some of your instances are situated in AWS and some are on Azure, and you have to monitor all the systems in a single place, that's where they're improving on things. Now, they are providing the cloud-provider stuff.

We are planning to deploy Kubernetes in our data centers, because Kubernetes is a very new technology, but in our country it is not that popular yet. We will look at integrating that kind of offering later.

Previously we integrated this solution with vRealize Log Insight as a trial. But later on, we stopped using vRealize Log Insight because we were using Splunk for analytics. vRealize Log Insight is a different product. When you have a lot of stuff in your data center and you need to archive and manipulate things, you need to use different tools. vRealize Log Insight is not useful for our use case.

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 primary use case is capacity planning. We do historical metrics gathering to determine if we need to rearrange our hardware resources, expand or contract them.

I like that it's integrated with the vRA. It is helping us, as we're rolling out automation, to do intelligent placement of new servers, based on the vROps metrics that are being created.

They've come up with more canned dashboards, which is great.

Also, it does have hooks into it. I like that it's integrated with the other suite of tools. That's a big plus for the tool. It's well-integrated with Log Insight. We use that integration quite a bit.

There are several additional features I'd like to see. 

For one, the metrics. It collects tons of metrics, but it's very unclear what exactly a metric is. There'll be something like a "CPU Usage" and "Usage of the CPU". What's the difference between those two metrics? It turns out there is a difference, but they should make it intuitive so I can say, “I just want to go find this out in the tool.” You can't really do that because you've ended up spending a lot of time creating a report against a metric which wasn't the metric that you thought it was. So I would like to see, when I have the metrics in any of the screens, when I hover over one, that it pop up at least a sentence, if not a paragraph, saying what the metric is and not just that it's the measurement of the CPU. It should say how it's collecting that metric and what the importance is of that metric. That would be very helpful. 

Also, there are some metrics that are not included in the canned set. They call them super metrics in the tool, where you create your own metric. But the super metrics are not really reliable. It might be because we didn't create them correctly, although we did have help from VMware. They also don't translate into newer versions like a canned metric would. One of them is a vCPU to pCPU ratio. That's one that is missing, which should be very simple for them to collect.

So the help on the metrics is super important because there are so many.

It's a little bit too extensible. I love having that freedom to create. But I, and maybe three other people, understand the math enough to be able to use it. Everybody else says, “But where do I click to get that report?"

The other thing is, when we first bought it, our vision was to use role-based access, give application teams access to view a dashboard for their stuff. We found out that the vROps tool can't handle more than about 20 concurrent sessions. For a company our size, we have some 3000 applications. If all these application teams want to have a dashboard up, that somebody is monitoring all day - we had to say nobody gets that because then everybody wants it. That was another thing that we were buying the tool for that we can't do.

On a specific version, it has been stable. But the whole point of the tool is historical data and, twice now, we have lost all of our historical data, as we've tried to move to the next version of the tool. That really removes a lot of the functionality that we purchased the tool for.

The tool itself is not as scalable as we'd like it to be. We have seven or more data centers and we have collectors deployed throughout the whole environment, but we have capacity and performance issues with the tool. We'd like to expand the product so that we would have more capacity, but it has limitations.

We're a large customer and we have people onsite holding our hand saying, “Sorry. My bad." I think we could have better technical support on this product. We have great technical support on other fronts.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

Pricing is starting to get unmanageable. It used to be a better pricing deal. They were selling us the suite and we were taking advantage of most everything in that suite. 

Something that we're concerned about was in the general session this morning, here at VMworld 2018. They announced the Premier. It's going to be interesting. 

I'm just about ready to send our sales person a text, because we've been VMware shop for a decade and we bought the Enterprise-class license, which was the top-of-the-line, "get everything they have," and we thought we had everything they had. And then they came out with Enterprise Plus. That meant we had to go buy a whole bunch more stuff to convert everything to Enterprise Plus. Well, now they have come out with Premier. They're going to be giving us all sorts of reasons why we need to re-buy everything up to the Premier level. That's getting old with our people with the purses, the supply chain people. That's why they're looking at other options. They just went and bought Turbonomic and they're looking at other options so that we're not so wholly a VMware shop.

From an operations point of view and from an architectural point of view, which is me, it's great to get a whole mess of tools that all integrate together; we've got Lifecycle Manager so that we can make sure they're all at the right versions at the same time. But, on the other hand, you become a one-vendor shop. Nobody likes that. Our leadership is starting to bring in other companies to do various things.

We looked at a couple of other products. We looked at Turbonomic and Veeam. But we have a very large relationship with VMware, so we have a hefty discount. We are also very involved with using Log Insight and with using vRA. So we buy the suite and vROps is free. It would cost us more to buy those other tools individually. Since we have the suite, we have the licenses so it makes sense to use it.

That being said, we did buy Turbonomic about a month ago because operations management says vROps is not working for us for the real-time monitoring and automatically adjusting to the environment. vROps is working for historical work, so are still planning on using it for that. Turbonomic does not have historical, so they work together in a way. But We've had to buy, for a few more million dollars, another product whose function, we thought, vROps was going to do all of.

Depending on your use case, I would caution you to know what it does and what it doesn't do. We bought it with pie-in-the-sky hopes that it would really solve everything.

For this product in particular, it just doesn't seem that it was enterprise-ready for a company of our scale, when we tried to adopt it. It's been going through a lot of changes now. I haven't been as involved in the last year with it but I know that they've moved up another rev in the versioning and, of course, everything gets better with each rev. But it was a rocky start for us.

We're still using it and we still have hopes. We're not going to give it to the application teams, but we might give them a scheduled report that at least gives them a non-instantaneous look at their systems.

Our primary use case is to manage our virtual environment, to see where our hotspots are, to see where we can make improvements. It's a driver for us when it comes to purchasing and TCOs, to make sure that our money is focused on getting the most out of what we have, and utilizing the infrastructure we have in place to make sure it runs as efficiently as possible.

It has helped us with our goal of having a hyperconverged environment where we see workflows running on-prem, we see workflows running in the cloud, and the best place for the workflows to live. vRealize Operations is a key component to the entire infrastructure, helping us automate that whole process.

vRealize Operations and vRealize Automation are key components in making the whole process of automation, and distributing different pieces to the different groups the way we need it done, a lot easier; automating that process to make our infrastructure a lot more agile.

We're also able to bring in IT staff members who don't have to be VMware experts, they don't have to be experts in a particular area. We brought in a few junior guys to manage our environment, provision our infrastructure. We are able to do that with these key pieces to automate that process. They don't have to be a subject-matter expert to be able to figure it out and provision infrastructure.

One of the most valuable features is that it gives us granular insight into how the infrastructure is operating and running, down to the storage level, the hypervisor level, even the hardware level. It really gives us a deep dive into what is going on and lets us see. Instead of our having to figure it out, it figures it out for us.

It is also user-friendly and intuitive.

I would like to see them bring in metrics for other things in the infrastructure, not just the virtual infrastructure: for example, being able to bring in metrics from my arrays themselves or my fiber channel switches or my ethernet switches. Being able to collect that data would help in being able to lay a holistic view on top of how my entire system is functioning, from the hypervisor all the way down to my end-point.

It's a very stable solution. We haven't had any issues with it at all. We rely on it heavily every day so it's something that needs to be up and running. It has been very good for us.

When we need to scale it up it is easily scalable. It fits really well within our organization. As we grow, it can grow along with us, so we don't have any problems seeing our vision through or seeing where we're going to be in a certain period of time.

Personally, I have not had to use VMware's technical support. The products work really well so we haven't had too many issues with them. I haven't heard any complaints about technical support from our guys who get "down and dirty" with it, day-to-day. And if we do have technical support issues, in general, I do hear complaints all the time. VMware is never on that list.

We were using Foglight when Dell purchased Foglight; it was with somebody else before. That solution was very cumbersome, very hard. We needed to have a couple of people who were Foglight experts to make it work within our infrastructure and get any valuable use out of it. It became more of a burden.

When VMware came to us and said, "This is what we have," we PoC'ed it, liked it, purchased it, and have been using it ever since. Once it is set up, it is easy for our guys to use it and get value out of it, without having to be some kind of expert.

The initial setup and configuration take a little work but once it is set up properly it is very intuitive.

Overall, the setup is pretty straightforward. We have been using vRealize Operations for quite some time and, with every iteration of it, when the vRealize product line rolled out, it became easier, took the complexity out of initial setup and configuration. We're very happy with the way it's working right now.

Every time a new version comes out we're upgrading. The process is very easy. It's painless. When an upgrade comes out it's just one of those things that you put on the calendar and do. It's not anything that we need long, drawn-out planning for. We're confident that when there is an update we won't have any problems getting that update done.

ROI is a somewhat difficult question. I haven't sat down and looked, over the years, where the use of vRealize Operations fits within our ROI.

We have looked at other solutions. We purchased Veeam not too long ago. Veeam has a product called Veeam ONE that does somewhat the same thing, but the way vRealize Operations integrates with the functionality of other things - like Insight Manager, and vRealize Automation - makes it the thing that brings all the pieces of the puzzle together. Using a third-party product we would be missing that. And it does it better than other pieces, so for us, it was a no-brainer. It would help us out with our vision of using VMware plus it worked better than the other products we looked at and PoC'ed.

I would definitely encourage colleagues to look at vRealize Operations. I would tell them the experience I have had with it and help them see the differences, how vRealize Operations works with other components, depending on how they are using VMware. I would strongly recommend it.

I would rate this solution at nine out of 10 because there is nothing negative about it but I would, again, like to see it able to collect more metrics on things outside my virtual center.

The analytics and sizing are the most valuable features. We saved over a 1000 virtual CPUs, a few terabytes of storage and memory.

I can actually do the historics on any VM that's being used so we can refuse architects that want to throw too much memory or CPU at something. We can do recommended sizing.

For example, they put the SAP Hana environment in, and they sized it to the moon. They kept throwing more and more resources on it; ate up the majority of one of our FlexPods. We proved them wrong and dialed it down.

A lot of our different tools actually hook into it; they have APIs that actually launch into it. We'll use some Blue Medora or we're going to be putting in a couple bits such as that.

We use UCS for OnCommand Unified Manager, and it has an API that hooks into it. We're installing Log Insight, and then we're also going to be putting in NetApp OnCommand Insight. That's got to hook in there too. All these different products, they always have their own little dashboards. I hate that. I want one, and that's what vROps does.

While we haven’t saved on storage, because of the over-allocation issue I mention elsewhere – we're not going to get two different views – we did save a ton on CPU and memory.

With regards to performance management, over-allocating VMs actually hurts their performance, their computing wait times, so once we started tuning that in, it got a lot better.

I want it to have a better view in the thin provisioning. Right now, it shows us what is over-allocated in all of our graphs. That's great, we need to add more, but I don't want to look at red lines every time I log in; makes me think that we have huge issues, not that we just need to add a rack or a shelf. We're using a hyper-converged infrastructure with FlexBots. I'd like a little bit more granularity there, maybe break it into two different views: one would say that we're over-allocated, and the other one would say, "This is how much disk you currently have remaining." It would show the aggregates, because right now it doesn't; basically two lines: what are you using and what's left.

It gets a little bit kludgy – slow, sluggish, takes a while – when it gets bigger. We've got a bunch of dashboards that show problem VMs; a lot of different metrics. Those take a while to spin up the more that we expose into it. The database can get a little unwieldy after a while. It is in a lot of infrastructure.

The bigger it gets, the slower it moves.

I think once you start tuning your environment, scalability will get better, but in the beginning, when you just try to throw as much into it as you can so you can see what you have, it can appear as if it's not working as well as it should.

We have a Business Critical Support with VMware. I think it's pretty good. In our circumstances – we're currently outsourced, I work with an energy company – our contract only allows the non-international folks to use it, so our folks in India have some difficulties. When we have a problem, if we engage them correctly, it usually gets driven pretty well.

When we came in, we went to VMworld in 2015 and we got sold on the idea. We came in and we had no way to do really good reporting on any of our environment; we had 25 years with IBM. It kind of got really hard to get your arms around and figure out what all you had. This gives us an inventory, and when our outsource partner comes back and says, "We don't know what's wrong," we can just go on the console and say, "Well, this is what's wrong." It helped us all be held accountable.

Actually, we wanted the SDDC, and VMware had it, and then we got the whole vRealize Suite. It's pretty good.

Initial setup was complex. We have a very old environment, so there were a lot of issues – mainly our issues, not the tool itself – getting access to service accounts, the infrastructure stood up, and all of that. We needed a project manager from VMware and a project manager from our company to basically work together and it still took a long damn time; a month.

If you don't have it, you need something like it, so you get more out of your infrastructure, because you waste so much in most companies. Everyone always gives resources, no one ever takes them back and looks at that. There's no reclamation, so you waste resources all day.

No other product basically gives you an eyes-on-glass that says, "You're wasting a 1000 CPUs." Or 700, or whatever.