VMware Aria Operations Reviews

We mostly use vROps for troubleshooting and forecasting. We take some reports from previous months and years for capacity and future planning.

We mostly use it for infrastructure. I know there are many packages for different apps from other vendors, but we mostly use it for VMware infrastructure. It gives us a good look inside our infrastructure, mostly in terms of capacity and reporting.

We have benefited mostly from capacity planning. During some days of the month, we have huge traffic and workloads on our systems. So, we take the previous month's reports and see the month-to-month growth so we can plan next year's capacity planning.

We have integrations with other monitoring systems, so we mostly use vROps for troubleshooting.

We mostly create our own alarms and dashboards. We use the metrics in vROps with these dashboards. 

It is efficient and easy to manage. We can find what we need from the software's interface.

We did an integration with vROps and Log Insight. We use Log Insight mostly when troubleshooting and creating some alarms to send us notifications

Lately, the chargeback site has improved, but it could be simpler. You need to create your own dashboards. It should be simple to get a virtual machine and break down the compute and storage costs.

It is not real-time. It takes samples every five minutes. Therefore, we are not using it for real-time purposes.

I have been using it for more than five years.

The stability is pretty good. Besides upgrades, we don't have issues with it. There are some issues during upgrades, but I think that is normal. Sometimes, we have some errors during upgrades where we have to start over or fix some things.

Scalability is easy. You can create other vROps machines and add them to the system, making it run like a cluster. It is easy to add more depending on your requirements. 

We have a couple of thousand VMs in our environment. 

About 10 to 12 people in our team are mainly managing vROps demand. From time to time, it changes but other departments also use it. They don't have administration permissions on the system, but they can create their own views, dashboards, and alerts. So, many people are using it,

At my last company, we changed our monitoring system from another tool to vROps because we were not getting actions from it. Therefore, we decided to change it to vROps. Because vROps is a VMware solution, it was easier to integrate and use.

I have used two other monitoring systems. However, I didn't use them for a long time. One was very simple, doing basic monitoring, and the other was a Microsoft tool. They both have many pluses and minuses.

vROps is mainly for virtual infrastructure. The other solutions are for both physical and virtual LAN infrastructure. 

The initial setup was not that complex. It was easy to set up and integrate.

The initial setup was just a couple of virtual machines, so it was a very basic installation. It was very fast. However, the implementation of the infrastructure takes months because we need to see how the system works, then decide what to monitor and report. This takes at least a couple of months.

We talked with VMware to set up a straightforward installation of the vRealize suite: Log Insight and vROps.

vROps has helped to decrease overall downtime by about 10%. We have many other monitoring solutions. This solution is just a part of our underlying infrastructure.

Log Insight has had a good effect on our overall troubleshooting. We have a huge infrastructure and can't always individually monitor it. We also did some automation for alerts.

The value that we get from vROps is okay. It could be cheaper.

I would recommend doing a PoC before using it. You can get a trial license for 30 or 60 days, so you should test it in your environment before implementing it. You should have some hands-on practice because it may not fit with your environment.

The solution is a little bit complicated to use at the beginning. When you get how it works, it is simple. You can easily make or use dashboards, notifications, and alarms.

vROps capacity allocation and management has helped us save on hardware costs, unneeded licenses, power, or other data center costs. It is not the only solution or system that we use for these purposes, but it helps.

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

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.

We use this product for troubleshooting and capacity planning.

Our troubleshooting steps include checking for performance issues, and that is the main concern. Apart from that, the capacity analysis features allow us to forecast capacity planning. We also use it for performance monitoring.

This product is what we use for all of our L1 and L2 tasks, such as increasing the amount of RAM or upgrading the CPU when configuring our VMs. Each and every task is clearly summarized.

If there is an event, such as a spike in disk activity, we are able to use vROps to clearly explain to the DB team what happened. We can look at a particular disk in the storage and determine what happened. Being able to properly explain it will help the DB team to check it on their end.

As a VMware engineer, the visibility of the infrastructure that it provides is something that I am really impressed with. When we are having performance issues, or problems with capacity, or the network, it clearly, easily, and in the quickest way, will show the cause of the problem and how to resolve it. Everything is crystal clear. vCenter is also useful for troubleshooting but I prefer vROps and think that it's the best option.

This product provides us with proactive monitoring. The dashboard gives us a clear picture of everything that is going on. From an operations perspective, we can view how many hosts there are, and whether anything is critical, all in a single view.

It allows us to monitor the entire environment. For example, we can see how many data centers we have and how many clusters are being hosted. The single dashboard shows us other details, as well, including the cumulative uptime for each cluster. Proactive monitoring really helps from a capacity-planning perspective. When we conduct a capacity analysis, we can forecast the future based on how things performed over the previous six months. It allows us to effectively predict capacity.

The capacity analysis will show us details like how many VMs were powered off over a period of time. Knowing this helps us to optimize and reclaim or release those resources.

vROps has helped us to decrease our overall downtime. This is in part because of the visibility with regards to what patches are needed. If any of the hosts need a critical update, we can view it from the dashboard and perform the patch proactively. The issue will be fixed on our schedule ahead of any problems.

With respect to workload placement, proactive monitoring and good integration make this system efficient. Based on the CPU and memory that is available, it will best decide how and where to place workloads. Efficiently also comes from the fact that we can log into vROps and view everything.

Another advantage is that because it covers L1 and L2 tasks completely, we do not have to give L1s or L2s access to vCenter. Instead, we can give them access to vROps. They can perform activities from there. For example, they can configure and generate reports, and forecast capacity based on them. From a VMware perspective, the troubleshooting is quite quick and easy to do.

The most valuable feature is that everything is integrated for monitoring, performance, and troubleshooting.

The interface is quite user-friendly. Regardless of what you are doing, everything is available on the dashboard. There is nothing that is too complicated.

We have integrated with other VMware products including vCenter, VRA, and Log Insight. Normally, we rely on vCenter for alerts, and based on those, we know what to monitor.

I have not used the Kubernetes integration but the feature is good.

Technical support is normally good but there is sometimes a delay in their response.

We have been using VMware vRealize Operations for approximately six years.

We are using version 8.1, which is both stable and efficient.

We provide support to our clients but for critical things that we are not able to resolve, or if they have an RCA, then we contact the VMware technical team. The support is good and I would rate them an eight out of ten.

That said, the support could use some improvement because sometimes, there is a delay before we get a response. If it is a P1 or P2 issue then it will be considered a high priority. Also, if the issue heavily impacts our business then they work quickly and well to resolve it.

They have different support teams to work on different issues. For example, vCenter was down and we didn't know why. After we checked the logs, we discovered that it was an issue related to storage. The network team was involved, as well as a VM team and a storage team. Bringing all of these teams together, they need a single point of contact to fix the issue. We would be grateful for this because when it comes to critical issues, this is L4 support, and we need to fix them.

We have it deployed on-premises but I have also deployed it in a hybrid cloud environment. I was not personally involved in the initial setup.

My advice for anybody who is implementing vROps is to first learn how to troubleshoot. If any issue should arise, the first point of contact is L1 and L2. From there, instead of going to vCenter and checking the logs, use vROps. It will allow you to easily find problems and monitor them.

As we are technical people, we need to develop a solution as soon as possible, instead of delaying. My preference is to log in to vROps and monitor everything. Once we locate exactly where the problem is, we can give a solution for it. Only if we do not find the cause here then we go to the logs.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have a large, enterprise-level VMware virtual infrastructure. We use vROps for private cloud monitoring. We are using vROps for capacity management and audit monitoring. If there is any issue within the infrastructure, within the thresholds, vROps will capture them and trigger alerts. The triggered alerts are sent to our ticketing tool, using the REST API, and the ticket is created according to the priority. The respective first-level teams will handle those incidents.

The incidents we deal with are mainly in things like capacity management. Over a period of time, the virtual infra keeps growing. We measure when we are going to hit the entire capacity and we will always set thresholds 30 days ahead of hitting capacity. vROps will alert on that, and we can procure more hardware proactively and we can keep increasing the capacity well in advance.

VMware has released a feature called Continuous Availability (CA). We have HA within the data center and the CA is across the data centers. We use both services. For most of the infra we are using HA, meaning within a given data center, we have a master and master replica and multiple data. Based on the growth of our virtual infra, or if there is any new deployment, we'll keep increasing our data nodes. It can do analysis and give you beautiful reports. Those reports are very useful for management. What is the status of our memory and CPU? What was the utilization of infra like in the last 30 days? How many workloads were deployed? What are the future requirements? With a simple click we can generate the reports.

It certainly helps us to decrease overall downtime. While we have cluster-level resiliency on the vSphere end, vROps provides an alerting solution. On top of that, we can use workload balancing. vROps will sense that there are multiple clusters running, some that are more utilized and some that are under-utilized, and it will report that to us. If you use it to balance, it will automate that back to the virtual infra, and it will do all the migrations automatically. Workload balancing is a great feature from vROps. Without vROps, we had 80 to 85 percent uptime. With vROps, we improved that at least 10 percent and we are close to 98 or 99 percent uptime.

It has also increased VM density on particular clusters. Based on the memory assigned to the workload, the density on the cluster varies. If we have 50 VMs on a particular cluster, but the resource allocation is greater there, that cluster is heavily used. If we have a second cluster with 100 VMs, but each VM is assigned less memory and CPU, we cannot say that the density of the first cluster is only 50 and the second cluster is 100 VMs. It will calculate based on the demand and allocation model of capacity and resources to the workloads.

With vROps we have saved on hardware costs by at least 5 percent.

In addition, in general, if I want to see the logs for a particular object, I need to log in to vRealize Log Insight and search by framing a query. But because it is integrated with vROps, when I go to the cluster tree, if I click that object and click on the logs, it will automatically provide the output. It is very simple and I don't need to log in and frame the query.

The "what-if" analysis capability is important to us. We can create a report for possible failures. What if we lose one host or two hosts? And if we add two hosts, how does that affect our resources? Or if there is a new project and we need a certain amount of workloads deployed, how many hosts do we need? With the existing capacity, if we add that many workloads what will our remaining capacity be? We can do capacity analysis with this tool.

Policy tuning and the SDDC Management Pack for health monitoring are also important.

It gives us visibility into the virtual infrastructure, and even the physical infrastructure, and into the workloads running. We have visibility even at the level of the appliance services. We can monitor everything. We can also create dependency reports, so if a service is down, it will not impact things. It gives us those dependencies brilliantly.

When it comes to policies, they need to fine tune things to make it easier. It is a bit difficult setting up policies.

We have been using VMware vRealize Operations for six years. We started with version 6.x. We keep upgrading and now we are running on the latest version, 8.1.

With the HA feature it was a stable product, but with the new service, the Continuous Availability, we have seen some issues and we are not recommending that. We are re-deploying that infra to high-availability. CA is a great feature, but we see some issues with our infra, so we are using HA. As soon as we got that new CA feature we implemented it and we learned that it creates a lot of issues for our infrastructure, but it is working fine for other customers. VMware tried to help us and their solution was to move to the HA.

But stability-wise, it's good. It won't create any issues. If there is an issue, just a simple services restart will fix them. We've mostly seen that disk space consumption increases when we keep provisioning and expanding. But that works fine and the product's stability is very good.

We can scale up the infra without any downtime. There have been no issues. 

If there is any issue, they will pitch in and help, based on the severity. They're very helpful and very knowledgeable. We get good support from them. No issues. Their support has been brilliant.

We started applying vROps in parallel with the inception of our VMware infra.

The solution is very user friendly. In one step it is ready to deploy. We don't need to configure anything on the OS level. You just deploy it and power-on. We only need to configure in, vCenter, which infra we are monitoring. When we start to onboard, it's very simple to manage. Anybody can deploy and configure it. It is easy to deploy. There are a lot of publicly available articles that we can refer to. There was a great article on end-to-end setup.

Based on the virtual infrastructure size, we decide which appliance size is needed. Do we need to go for tiny, medium, large, or extra-large. The decision is based on our environment's capacity, how many objects we have within the virtual infra. We first deploy the master, then the master replica, and then the data nodes. We can run with one master node, but if we deploy master and replica and data nodes, it gives us more resilience. So even if we have a failure on the master, the master replica makes it a high-availability solution.

Deployment takes just 15 minutes, and we can have vROps up and running in 30 minutes.

There are five members on our team and everyone has knowledge of vROps. Everyone is certified. There is no segregation of roles. Everyone takes care of the entire product life cycle, whether it's upgrading, troubleshooting, or streamlining. We use it day in and day out. Our key job is tracking of vROps' health and alerts-monitoring, to make sure it's running fine. It's part of our daily work.

They forecast our pricing based on the objects we deploy, but I'm not involved much with that. The licensing part is a bit complicated.

We have not evaluated other solutions since this one is from VMware itself. We prefer to use the proprietary solution.

It provides proactive monitoring, but it is not a real-time monitoring. It is polling every five minutes. If there is an issue in the first minute, but polling happens at the fifth minute, there is a gap of four minutes. It will capture that failure and alert in the fifth minute. It is more reactive monitoring, in that sense. But at least we know there is an issue.

Overall, vROps is maturing, year by year. New versions have a lot of scope. We are not fully utilizing it, but if you understand the product features correctly, it will save you a lot of cost and reduce manual efforts. I would recommend it. If someone is looking for virtual monitoring, vROps is the best solution.

We are using vROps for its monitoring and alerting mechanisms, for the entire VMware environment. We use the analytics and recommendations.

It's a monitoring tool. It is very common, but in my last eight years of using it, what I have seen is that it gives detailed monitoring information for your entire VMware infrastructure. It gives recommendations in terms of resource utilization.

A major part of its functionality now is business cases. I can identify them now, meaning if we migrate to the public cloud, what the business case would be.

In addition, the proactive monitoring and recommendations always help you to avoid unwanted downtime. If I see that a machine is heavily loaded, I can apply the recommendation and balance the load across all the nodes. And if the machine is under-utilized or over-utilized, it will tell you whether to optimize or to increase the resources accordingly. It improves the operational experience as well as the performance.

It automatically places workload on the machines where there is any available capacity or more resources are available. You don't need to worry about that. vROps does it. The workload placement has definitely increased VM density. That is part of the VMware DR solution. It enables you to place things automatically on a machine with less load so that you can increase the density, depending upon the resource availability on the machine.

One of the best features is the monitoring. It gives you proactive recommendations, based on the information that you have. It recommends changes. For example, if an ESX service is heavily loaded, it will tell you to make some changes, such as storage optimizations. Every tool does monitoring, but this one gives you more proactive monitoring, with the recommendations and actions that are needed.

VMware products are user-friendly, there is no doubt. That goes for all their products. I use multiple VMware products and I don't see any difference among the products in that context. vROPs, specifically, is easy to handle, even if you don't know anything about VMware. If you have some experience in monitoring, the tool will definitely be easy to learn and to get hands-on with it.

Also, if you want to migrate to public cloud, it helps with the business case. The tool gives some rough estimates about migrating to the public cloud or to another cloud.

vROPs is integrated with vRealize Log Insight by default, but we don't use it in our company. But it allows you to keep the logs and go back and identify what the performance was like a month back. That can help with troubleshooting because if you know what things were like a month back, and an issue comes in, you can get into performance metrics for that month. All the log data will be available for troubleshooting and capacity management.

Three or four years back, regarding business case data, when looking at migrating to public cloud, we had to feed in the pricing of all the public clouds manually. I don't know whether that information is now available automatically, but that would help.

Similarly, if it could help with calculating on-prem costs, based on their experience, it would help customers determine whether to remain on-prem or move to the cloud.

I've been using VMware vRealize Operations for almost eight years.

The stability is good. They keep updating it with the new versions and new features. So many features have been added and so many different licensing models have come in. Variations are available for data center requirements and remote site requirements. But the product looks very stable.

I've never had a problem with the scalability of vROps. It can scale to any level. I've never reached the maximum of what it can do.

The setup of vROps and Log Insight is very easy. It's not intensive or very complex. I did it about four years back when we deployed it in my previous organization and it was very easy for a standard VMware environment.

The amount of time it takes depends on how big your VMware environment is. There's no benchmark value. If you have a small environment it shouldn't take more than one or two days. But in a bigger environment, the scanning of data takes time because it has to talk to vCenter, pull all the data, wait for all the data to come in, and see if there are any recommendations. But that should not take more than a week and you should be able to see everything, even in a much bigger environment.

To deploy, you need to have a VMware guy and it depends on where the data is being integrated to. If it's only a VMware environment, you need only one or two people, max.

If the deployment is being integrated with some enterprise tools or third-party vendors, you may need to work with their separate teams.

In terms of value, it depends on how you look at it. Is there really any other solution for VMware? I don't think so. If you bring in something else then you have to think about the support matrix, compatibility, and you multiple vendors involved. You go with VMware because of the easy integration and support. It's a big product and it costs, but the value depends on your point of view. If you look at it from a cost-perspective, it's costly. If you look at it from a compatibility/support perspective, it meets all your requirements.

Because we are a valued customer, we got a good discount from VMware on the pricing. What they offered and what we have gotten as a return on our investment are reasonable.

Every VMware product is a licensing challenge. It's always costly. It's based on processors. From a technical side, the product is very good. The challenging part is always the licensing.

They should have some kind of alternate pricing models. They have a simple model, CPU-based. They should do something to make it more reasonable there. And they have too many variations. I think there are three different models that depend on different form factors. They should make it easier. With three different versions—standard, advanced, and enterprise—it's confusing.

This tool gives us everything we need. I don't see any alternatives to it.

We don't use VMware's Tanzu solution along with this solution for Kubernetes monitoring and management, but we have had discussions with the VMware team about it. It is still in discussion.

Leaving the issue of cost aside, I would rate vROps at eight out of 10, in terms of the technical side, integration, and support.

We provide solutions related to VMware, Docker, and Kubernetes for banking data centers. 

We use this product to monitor virtualization infrastructure and different resources that we use in our project. We implement vROps into data centers that are working together to develop vROps solutions with different interfaces. One of them is Dell EMC Adapter which is added to vROps to monitor and collect various logs related to Dell EMC storage. We also add another plugin to monitor HP.

We host around 1,200 to 1,300 virtual machines. Our data centers have more than 50 physical servers.

Before using vROps, we used SolarWinds and ManageEngine, as well as Cisco NCM, to monitor different resources in our infrastructure. But we established a new project for customers and unified all the monitoring solutions in just one platform, vROps. vROps helps us to predict many issues and problems that we may face in the future. It helps us to optimize many configurations because we have good visibility into resource usage.

Because we can predict many issues and problems, we can solve them and provide options for our customers to change configurations and optimize their environments. We are able to fix problems in advance. That helps us to decrease the amount of downtime in a given month. After using vROps, in the second year we were able to offer our customers a new SLA at 99.97 percent. That has proven to be a great benefit for our company.

It is very efficient. By using vROps we have fixed many problems. In terms of the efficiency in operations, monitoring team members are very satisfied because they have dashboards to monitor specific resources and details.

Once we started using vROps, we were able to change out servers and replace them with new versions because we could detect different problems related to the old resources we were using in our environment. With Cisco NCM, you can't detect these problems. Using vROps enables us to detect problems related to the hardware and the issues that arise from hardware error.

After one year of using vROps, we integrated it with vRealize Log Insight and vCenter. vROps and vRealize Log Insight are integrated very well. The integration helps us to gather a lot of event details sent by Log Insight to vROps. The integration between these two products helps us to go into the detail of events. It helps us to monitor problems and detect issues. Then, it provides recommendations to take action and solve problems directly.

One of the most attractive features in vROps is collecting information, logs, and events and, after that, providing proactive predictions about usage of resources. vROps also offers recommendations. For example, in the next two months we might face problems with CPU usage. vROps predicted and forecasted these issues in advance. That's a very useful feature.

In terms of user-friendliness, vROps provides a unified dashboard and you can easily create different dashboards to measure different resources. The UI is very friendly. Our team members are very satisfied with working vROps in comparison to different solutions like ManageEngine and SolarWinds. vROps is very unified and integrates with different solutions.

As a result of using vROps we have easily been able to reduce a lot of unused virtual machines in our infrastructure.

There is room for improvement in asset management and resource usage.

Around two years ago, we installed and configured a vROps project. I'm responsible, as a team leader and the VMware engineer, for different technologies on VMware, like vSphere, vROps, VMware vRealize Suite, as well as container infrastructure.

Because we need high-availability for our solutions and to ensure that our customers have monitoring solutions available, we established a cluster in vROps. vROp provides you a clustering installation for high-availability and sustainability. We had two data centers and we created two vROps that are synced together as Active-Active. If one version is down, the second one is active and provides monitoring.

Because of sanctions in my country, we don't have direct support. We use a partner. Although we can solve most of the issues within our team, we do use our partner for specific problems or issues that we can't solve.

If you study the guidelines, the setup process is very clear. We didn't have any specific problem installing and implementing vROps in our projects. If you have experience in the installation of vROps, there are no problems.

The deployment took about one month. We studied and reviewed the features and implemented a pilot environment in our company. In terms of the specific plan that we provide to customers, we implement vROps and start a one-month period where it is in a test environment. The day after that we move vROps into the production environment.

We make use of just one license for vROps and we don't need other licenses for things like SolarWinds and Cisco NCM.

I recommend implementing vROps by first setting up a pilot environment. You need to become a master in vROps to make the best use of its features. If you don't have any experience with a lot of the features provided by vROps, you can't easily use them, and you can't understand the difference between vROps and SolarWinds and other products.

So I would recommend studying it in detail. After that, you can make use of it, because vROps is a bit complex.

We can manage the virtual environment of our organization with the help of the solution.

They keep improving and updating their apps over time. In each new version, we get lots of good features; thus, I don't have any concerns.

They should include an integration feature through which we can connect to different vendors by installing a small plugin.

We have been using the solution for more than five years. Also, I have been using it for 16-17 years, personally.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable product. We have a couple of 100 users using the solution in our organization. 

We are using VMware as it is a known product that helps to manage companies' virtual environments. Consumers are accustomed to using VMware, and it's a very old product as well. That's the main reason we are using it.

I recommend others use the solution and rate it as a nine.