What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Aria Operations?

The solution is slightly expensive.

So, besides the license overall, you have to pay for the type of support you want. With the license, there is a support cost as well. Typically, people don't just purchase vROps individually. It's usually part of a larger suite, like the vRealize Suite, which is expensive. So, the suite includes vROps along with other software. If a company purchases vCloud Foundation (vCF) or vRealize Suite, vROps comes with it. vCF and the vRealize Suite have been acquired or purchased by large customers who have the financial resources to support the licensing costs. For example, I've seen many banking sectors using vROps when they purchase vCS. Recently, I worked on a design for a major European bank, and they were using the entire suite. So, no one really goes for the individual product because its value is significantly higher when it's part of the suite. So, there are many customers who use it, but the number of people who use it within a team depends on the company. For example, service-based companies that support multiple customers may have different needs based on the number of customers they support. They may train or onboard more resources to use vROps, depending on their requirements.

It is an affordable solution that doesn't require any additional costs. I would rate it five out of ten.

There's a smaller category that stands out due to its affordability, especially for recent versions, which I rate as four or five in terms of value. However, if you're looking for a vCenter with older, more advanced features, it comes at a significantly higher cost, and I would rate it around ten. They provide us with a choice between a recent version and one integrated, and I lean towards the former.

The licensing is quite expensive for our company. I would probably give it a rating of seven out of ten, where one being expensive and ten being affordable.

The solution is costly. Its overall cost is around $900,000. Thus, we have only purchased its license for operations. We paid around $800,000 for four years.

The solution requires an annual license which is very expensive.

I do not have information on the licensing costs.

In terms of the pricing for VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), I can't remember exactly how much it costs, but it was included in the VMware vSphere enterprise plus licensing package my company paid for.

VMware offers a suite of products with many licensing options.

I would give the solution a three out of five, with one being cheap and five being expensive. There are some elements of the pricing that are good, and some areas where I feel like I'm being charged for something the product can't provide yet.

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.

We use a one-time license for vROps and have not had any additional costs.

The price of the solution is expensive.

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.

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.

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 cost is simply something we need to pay. We can't evaluate the price because we use a VMware environment, so it makes sense to use a VMware monitoring tool.

The licensing is not clear at the moment if the on-premises pricing is the same as on the cloud. I am checking on the pricing. However, you can save a lot of money with the cloud solution because you need to spend time installing, upgrading, and connecting with the on-premises solution. Also, you don't need to spend time scheduling the maintenance and maintaining the solution when using the cloud version. I recommend it to colleagues and companies, but people have complained that it is expensive. I think the pricing is fair.

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

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.

Over time they have changed the pricing and the licensing model. Five or six years ago, when we took it, it was a very good option. Now, I think I have to reevaluate, to be honest.

When we last did a comparison of solutions, the pricing was equal or similar.

vROps is a bit expensive and that's a reason that small clients say, "No, I don't think we need this." From a pricing perspective, it is quite steep. But "expensive" is relative, depending on what you need. Others might say, "It is expensive, but I think we can use it to better our environment." It is quite an expensive product. But if you really require something, you'll do it anyway.

The pricing is a little bit expensive. Licensing is an issue because there are always changes, and by that I mean cost increases. And that's not only for vROps but for VMware, vSphere, and all the products that are involved.

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.

The solution has a huge cost. If we could just have one license covering everything that vROps can do, that would be great. I would prefer it this way. We need a separate license for vRealize Log Insight, which has not been integrated. However, it's something I'm looking forward to using.

There is a need for training so as to get qualified staff to set up the environment. The initial costs are a bit on the higher side but the licensing is flexible.

This solution is expensive. Businesses don't see the true value of it, whereas IT operations do, which makes it a hard sell.

If the VMs were trimmed, then we wouldn't have to buy as much software/hardware, and this means less licenses. While most of it is VMware licenses, which are relatively cheap, there are SQL licenses for Microsoft, and this is where we could start saving a lot of money.

Our budgets are always tight. We would like to have more features at lower licensing levels for easier access to them.

We would like to build custom dashboards in the standard license. Right now, this is available in the enterprise license, not the standard license.

Cost isn't a problem for us because it's included in our licensing.

We did an enterprise license agreement with our VMware partner and put this in our bundle. We tried it and loved it, so we use it now.

Get the right licensing and increase your licensing as you upgrade and grow. If you get the wrong licensing, it will be expensive, especially if you plan improperly.

Costs could always be lower.

The pricing and licensing structure of this solution weren't so bad. Although the larger scales become more expensive because it's a per-socket model and that's the way VMware prices its stuff out. This particular product could benefit from a different model like a per-VM count rather than a per-socket count. We bought it as part of a bundle and we got a good deal on it.

It's priced competitively.

Bundle it in with your license rather than buying it as a separate product. It saves a lot of money that way.

We got vROps because it was integrated in the platform.

Cost is an issue on vROps. The Standard edition, for an organization our size, is just not useful at all. However, I like the price point of vROps Standard. But as a company, the Advanced is the minimum version that we can use, because we need the customization, we need a lot of the features that Advanced brings. But the price is substantially higher than Standard. It's always been a challenge to try to go in to my leadership and say, "Here's what I want." I've always got to go back and super-justify it and it's not an easy win. Whereas, if the pricing were closer to the Standard model, or maybe even a little bit above that, it's an easier conversation with leadership. But because it really feels like more than double the price, I'm not sure the value, double the money, is there, as an easy-sell to my leadership.

Of course the licensing, if they could make it cheaper, that would help. But they have to build out new features, so I understand.

Whenever a new product comes, the licenses are renewed automatically.

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.

Pricing could always be cheaper, but it's acceptable.

The True Visibility Suite is available in three editions: Standard, Advanced and Enterprise. These packages align with the various infrastructure teams, and offer a convenient way to pick the best package that applies, without being tethered to just one vendor or device type.