VMware Aria Operations Reviews

One of the things I really liked was being able to use the projects feature, which lets me say that I know in August or September or October, I'm going to need to deploy 20 more VMs on a particular cluster. Am I going to have the capacity for that project? I can actually see if that's going to be okay. Then I can sit there and say, if it's not okay, then when would I add hosts? At what point would that make it okay? Basically, what you project out, it provides all that information at great detail. It's pretty good.

I've been at my company for seven months, and there's no monitoring. They have no monitoring. That's going to be the big thing. Dashboards can be set in front of operational people and then we'll actually be able to respond both proactively for issues such as capacity, and reactively for issues such as, we just filled up a drive, as we build it out.

We also use the logging site, which basically does correlation of logs from hosts. All that's integrated together, so if you have a problem, all of a sudden, you're able to see that maybe the fact that this LUN had a problem and this array had this problem. You start realizing that they're all related because of the way it ties them together. Very specifically for us, when you're not getting phone calls because a drive filled up on a VM inside it, That would be the big thing, right there, guaranteed. That's the one that bites them more than anything.

We'll probably not save on storage. Storage is cheap, but we're going to see if we can right-size, because I've heard mentioned a couple times before, right-sizing isn't a technical problem, it's a political/business problem or a management problem. Going back and getting stuff back after you've given it away in a VM is very difficult. That's where I'm hopeful. Probably utilize less anything about storage, but more about CPU and RAM.

We have not used the performance management features yet, but that'll be more about getting VMs balanced correctly across clusters, that sort of thing, but not yet. We typically don't over-provision.

We're planning on using more of it for several different reasons. We want to do lifecycle management of some of our hosts. We need the capacity planning features, and maybe most important - and the first thing that we're going to do - is the end-point management that's now part of it but used to be separate. It used to be Hyperic. We used to have Hyperic as a separate purchased product and now part of it is end-point management. We'll use that as our monitoring platform.

It is a beast to deal with. To understand it, really takes effort. Several of us have been to a week of VMware classes, and that didn't even scratch the surface. There's so much there. I suppose if there was a nice get-started guide, that’d be an improvement.

I heard them talking about this in a VMworld session. They've got wizards that can be rerun, so you can go back and say, "I really want to change what I did before in terms of my general configuration." That's good. It is complex. I just don't know how you make it simpler. I don't know because it's a complex idea.

Ideally, it'd be nice if it was simpler.

We're running 6.2; 6.3 is out and 7, I guess, just came out. The worst case for us has been, a couple times, we've had to restart it. Otherwise, it’s been pretty stable. It's all virtual appliances, so that's nice.

Scalability's pretty good. I don't remember the limits, but basically, you just start adding what they call data analytics nodes, and you just start scaling out horizontally.

We're way under-speced right now. In other words, we need more data analytics and we're reporting on about six million metrics right now, so once we point all the end point management features back to it, we'll have to do something about it. Plus, we have remote collectors.

We're still going through a statement of work and professional services, so we've deployed it and have started to use it, but we're basically re-engaging with VMware, so we haven't really had to contact technical support.

I did not previously use a different solution. We relied on people, the users. We’d see an outage because a user called, and then say, "Let's go fix it." That's exactly how it was being dealt with.

Initial setup is pretty easy.

A lot of the decision to go with product and the vendor went on before or right when I was hired. They were very close to going with Foglight, very close. They basically were ready to sign and VMware showed up and said, "Whoa, you didn't even look at this." During my interviews, I even encouraged using VMware. I said, "Look, it's got some good stuff." I'd used version 5.8 before a little bit at a previous employer, and they basically looked at it again. It's really the thing to go with if you're using vSphere; it's just what you're going to do.

I don't think there's anything that's deserves a perfect rating. There's just not, so I'm a little skeptical of that. I could give it a higher rating after I've had a chance to really use it, but right now, we just have not been able to really engage with VMware. I'm probably rating VMware more than I'm rating the product, so the complexity part kind of hurts right now.

I think you've got to go and look at it first. If it just doesn't look like it's going to do what you want it to, then you can look at other places, but you've got to at least talk to them about it, because it's VMware. It does what it's supposed to do. It's geared for this environment and it can also manage and monitor the physical stuff. For me, that's my suggestion.

There is a lot of different operations software available and some customers use other vendors instead of Broadcom VMware. My use case primarily involves on-premises installations as I prefer on-premises over cloud setups.

The solution has not really shortened incident response times, though it is a predictive tool that informs when something is about to happen. It has helped in anticipating issues, thereby assisting my team significantly.

One of the most valuable features is the ability to perform 'what-if' scenarios. We have basic solutions already implemented, so with the click of a button, issues can be fixed. It also facilitates easier reporting. The predictive analytics is a great tool for informing the operations manager about imminent requirements like running out of storage.

I can't pinpoint any specific areas for improvement at the moment, though there is always room for better pricing, licensing options, and potential enhancements in the user interface or customization.

I have around ten years of experience working with Aria Operations, as part of my work in various operations spheres.

The stability of this solution is excellent.

The scalability of the solution is good. I rate it an eight or nine out of ten.

I always receive top-notch support from VMware when I call, rating it a ten out of ten.

Positive

Some customers use other vendors not due to the fact their products are necessarily better. They use them to avoid being locked into one vendor for everything. It may be that they have a history with other products like OP5.

The setup process is straightforward. Though it may require a learning curve for the environment with configurations, it is manageable for IT professionals like myself.

The customizable dashboards are notably beneficial, providing flexibility to configure them according to specific needs and requirements.

The cost is included in our vCloud Operations licensing. I am unsure of the exact pricing or if it is available separately nowadays.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

We operate a test lab and we do virtual and physical testing for various clients.

We frequently build out a test sweep that looks like the client's environment and then runs the tests on that. We particularly do it with upgrades and things of that nature. 

vROps is used to do performance measurements. It's in conjunction with two other products. One of them is called vRealize Log Insight and the other one is called vRealize Network Insight. That gives us a reasonably good profile of the performance in one of the systems under test.

Our business is built around testing, measurement, and performance measurement and vROps is the primary tool. We use it in a VMware environment and we do tests in other environments. But in the VMware environment, vROps and the associated products, Log Insight and Network Insight are the primary tools that we use. It's a basic tool. It's very important for our organization. 

vROps provides proactive monitoring up to a point. There are limitations on its visibility. We often use it in conjunction with an operating system-specific monitoring tool. vROps provides not bad visibility into operating systems such as Windows and Linux, but if you want to track down problems in those, you're probably looking for something that runs inside the operating system. vROps is very important for the availability of the test lab.

Surprisingly enough, VMs take much fewer resources than most people think. vROps has enabled us to run 30% to 50% higher in terms of density. A lot of the work that we do is testing workloads, so the process is basically setting up a workload, guessing what the infrastructure's support that workload is, driving a test workload into it, and then manipulating the infrastructure until it begins to break or slow down. vROps provides the monitoring that tells us when those breaks occur, primarily at the hypervisor level.

vROps has enabled us to replace multiple tools. The performance measurement suite from VMware is three basic tools, vROps, Log Insight, and Network Insight. We use that cluster of tools in preference to things like Splunk and various other tools that are out there. It's a core tool for what we do. It is our measurement instrumentation tool, so it's critical to what we do.

In engagements with clients, we will often use vRealize for operational monitoring and that sort of thing. But our facility is primarily a test lab, so we use it for profiling and performance measurement.

For people who know it, vROps is quite user-friendly. It takes a little while to come to grips with it because it has a reasonably complex interface. The newer ones have gotten better in terms of being able to declutter the interface, but even so, there's a lot on the page, particularly in a reasonably sized infrastructure.

We've only just started experimenting with Tanzu to learn how to use monitoring and management. I have worked with Tanzu with a client who's in the process of post-deployment work. But I haven't used vROps specifically with Tanzu.

vROps enabled us to be more proactive in anticipating and solving problems. This has decreased our mean time to resolution by 40% to 60%. 

It's not a huge concern of ours but vROps' workload placement increased VM density.

We integrated vROps with vRealize Log Insight. It provides alerts, correlates metrics, and checks logs across all of the components of our infrastructure. When you're doing this, you get a slew of performance information that comes up in real-time on the vROps console and interface. Much of it comes through logs and Log Insight processes that are in the background and then push back the results from the log processing up to the vROps dashboard. It identifies issues that are showing up in the logs. The integration is very useful to the testing process.

vROps and Log Insight provide us the instrumentation that allows us to identify problems and issues and look at possible solutions.

Deployment is still a little bit of a nuisance but you only do that once. 

If I put on the hat of a client, I would say cost needs improvement. For clients with reasonable-sized infrastructure farms, you're looking at licensing at either per socket or per VM, and if you have an installation of any size, you're doing it per socket, and the per-socket licensing is a little heavy. Per VM license, if they have large numbers of VM, it is just not practical.

I have been using vROps for six years.

We found it to be very stable. 

Keeping in mind that we're a pretty small operation, scalability is not an issue for us. In larger data centers, my experience has been that it scales very well.

In terms of users, there's one person who works probably 50% of his time and 40% of his time as an administrator. We have people who run tests who are test managers of specialists and measurement specialists in testing and so on. Because we're not a production data center, it's not an army of people sitting in the other room, running this. It tends to be a small number of people that move around to various different roles. 

Half of an employee's time is needed for maintenance. 

Because we're a testing unit, the workload that we have in terms of testing will expand with the business. Generally, we run it on around three or four platforms at any given time.

We'll expand usage as our business expands, as we have more requirements, but we don't have a plan that says two months from now, we're going to add some more.

We didn't contact technical support for vROps. When we contacted support for other solutions, they generally provided reasonably good support. They tend to stick with the problem until it gets sorted out, and usually, they're good at identifying what information they need and how to get it to them. Working with them is reasonably good.

We've done the setup a number of times, so from our standpoint, it was pretty straightforward. But for someone just starting out, you really have to spend a lot of time with the documentation and understand the various configuration parameters and how they affect the operation of it. The setup is reasonably complex for a client.

Overall, the quality of VMware's documentation tends to be fairly dreadful. And so, you do a lot of searching around and bouncing back and forth. One of the biggest improvements they could make would be to actually use illustrations in the document so that there is a straightforward way to understand what the documentation is trying to tell you. It's very verbose. Trying to relate what's in the documentation to what's in front of you doesn't always go well. Documentation doesn't seem to move as quickly as the interfaces.

We're certainly not a large data center by any sense of the word. We have about 20 hosts. If we were to do it starting from scratch and moving up, the setup would take about two weeks.

It takes two to three hours per host but there's a lot of carry-on between the time you spend working on the hosts. There's preparation and various other things. Overall, it takes around one to two hours per host.

When we started, we installed vROps, linked it to vCenter, picked a group of hosts, and set up monitoring on that group of hosts and on the VMs in that group of hosts. We worked out all of the kinks from the configuration and setup. Then from there, we just rolled it out to the rest of the hosts and set it up so that at the beginning of a test, we can deploy what we need for a given host. It's not just vROps, but it's also the support things that need to be in place for us to quickly turn around a testing environment.

Most clients see a good return on investment in reduced staff time, they get early warnings about problems that are coming along, reduced time to diagnose and come up with solutions to problems. In my mind, looking at our clients, the people who use it in production operations, there is a return on investment. It depends on the size of the organization and that sort of thing, but typically, I would say you get a 1.5:1 return on investment and perhaps a bit more. It's very client-specific. This is associated specifically with the testing work we do with VMware installations. We do work with other installations that use Microsoft and various other things, vROps is interesting, but not really that useful. There are better tools for those other environments.

There are no additional costs to standard licensing. There's time, material, staff cost, but they are not out of line or unusual.

To really use vROps effectively, you have to have three of VMware's tools. vROps, Log Insight and Network Insight. I'm not sure that would apply to every customer, but certainly would for the kind of work that we do. In a sense, the additional costs are those additional products.

When it comes to efficient workload placement, vROps works with vCenter for workload placement, and vCenter carries most of the burden for that, so I'm not sure that's something that vROps itself does.

If you're running an evaluation or testing on VMware environments, vROps is really the only tool that makes sense.

My advice would be to find a specialist. 

vROps will point you to where to look for the problem. When you actually dig into doing diagnosis and so on, you really need a good log processing facility to be able to dig through the logs and identify where the problems have arisen. vROps will notify you of a problem and will point you to where the location is. But to get down and identify the problems, you really need the log processing part.

Against other products, I'd rate vROps 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.

The primary use case of this product is to essentially integrate third-party applications, as well as appliances, with the vRealize Operations for monitoring and capacity planning purposes.

A lot of benefits of this solution come to my mind. It allows me to see how my entire infrastructure is performing in a simplified manner. It also gives me a waterfall analysis and a lot of custom badges to tell me if there are any health, risk, or efficiency issues that I am running into. This helps me plan better for my IT infrastructure.

The best feature that works in this solution is the ease of pluggability that is provides and analytics engine which runs behind the scenes.

The biggest way it is intuitive to the user is it allows you to create your custom dashboards. There are a number of widgets which are available to represent your data in the way you want, as well as in the priority you want to see them.

I would like to see more applications and out-of-the-box solutions for well-known applications, like Oracle or Microsoft Exchange. Certain out-of-the-box solutions for these applications, as well as containers. If I had a container solution deployed on top of a VMware infrastructure, or outside as well, it would be really helpful.

I have been working with this product since version 5.6. The stability of this product has been good. Through 6.7, there have been multiple improvements in terms of its GUI and performance. By default, support clustered more of its operations to support the skill and all of that works just fine.

The scalability of solution is actually fantastic. It runs in a clustered node. On top of that, the collector modules which are the work horses of collecting all the data, they give me to scale at the collector module level as well. This caters well to a large scale environment.

They are really good, primarily, because they are well-versed with the product and all its new features. From the 5.x series into the 6.0 series, the product has undergone transformation. While we were working with the product for integration, the technical support provided by VMware was fantastic.

I have seen a lot of custom home grown solutions in the industry before people started integrating with VMware Operations. 

I have been attending VMware events and part of the VMware club. Being part of VMware, I know about this product. That is where and how I started integrating with the product.

It's pretty straightforward. In the latest versions, after 6.4, the deployment has improved. It has simplified a lot. It gives me a programmable interface to automate my entire deployment. I can simply run a job and deploy the entire vRealize Operations solution quickly.

In terms of ROI, I have been working as a systems integrator. So, I am helping my customers when doing the integration. For multiple reasons, in terms of saving time and effort involved in identifying real issues and complex problems, that is the cost which has been saved. In terms of infrastructure monitoring, the returns are good.

The way it has helped improve troubleshooting helps me associate a lot of different infrastructure components, right up to the application layer. E.g., any issues coming in because an application is slowing down due to performance. Because of the hierarchy of all the objects labeled for that particular application, I can browse through the entire infrastructure and see where exact problem is. This helps me narrow down the surface area of the problem that I am trying to solve. That's a huge saving in terms of time required for resolving any particular issue. 

It also provides me with a very intuitive way of understanding my capacity usage, whether I'm running out of capacity and how long before I would need to bump up my capacity based on my usage history. So, it's helped me do capacity planning in an intelligent manner.

If you are running an infrastructure with a variety of components from various different vendors, and want to get monitoring all in one place, this is the solution to go with.

The important criteria when selecting a vendor for any solution:

1. How stable the product is.
2. The ease of usage.
3. Support's availability.

I would rate the solution somewhere between an eight and nine, because it has worked like a charm for me over the years.

It is a little bloated right now. I would like to see it broken out into microservices, so the overall footprint of the application is reduced. That would get it to a ten in my eyes.

We mainly use it for analytics, to get insight into what they're doing, to go above and beyond what vCenter does and into actual time-based analytics.

We went through a zombie and rightsizing exercise, we skimmed the surface to get the low-hanging fruit. That was the latest good example of how it has improved our organization.

It has also definitely reduced the time to troubleshoot issues. The fact that it gives us that single pane of glass to look for stuff, that's the first stop whenever we start troubleshooting.

We like the analytics that it does. We can rightsize VMs and look for zombie VMs that are consuming resources but aren't really being used. It's been a great product. Predictive DRS has been a great value-added feature for us as well.

And with the newest updates, with HTML 5, they made it a lot simpler to deploy and to use, so it's definitely intuitive and user-friendly. In particular, I like the Unity UI. That is fantastic. There are a lot of colors, everybody loves colors.

I would like to see multi-cloud support. It would be nice to see analytics not only on-prem but on VMWare Cloud on AWS. I think that's in the roadmap. They should just keep growing it.

More HTML 5 would also be good. I wish vSphere Client would mirror it. I wish they announced it on day one of 6.7. HTML 5 is good. I miss the thick client, but I'm conforming.

The stability is great. We haven't had any major problems stability-wise. It just works.

It scales up to what we have. We have around 65 - 70 hosts that it monitors, and around 2,000 VMs. So it works for us and we can continue to grow and it will keep supporting us.

Regarding technical support, it all depends on who you get. When you call into tier-one, you have to deal with them to get to tier-two and three, so it depends on who you get the first time.

We didn't really have anything before, we were just relying on vCenter. So we needed something. When we did our PoC bakeoff, we liked vROps the best.

The most important criteria we look for in a vendor are

• scalability
• cost
• performance. 

It's really a total-package thing. Cost, performance, scalability, and does it do what we want it to do? Does it fit into our ecosystem, our portfolio? There are a lot of variables there.

We do see an ROI. The rightsize exercise, if we get more aggressive on that, we could actually pay for vRO by rightsizing the VMs. There's definitely an ROI there.

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

We have looked at several different things. We looked at VMTurbo - Turbonomic is what they're called now. We did SolarWinds. We looked at Virtualization Manager because we already have an ELA, so we were just able to add it on to our ELA. But I like keeping everything in the VMware ecosystem. I'm very happy with our choice.

Pluralsight is a good start, to get an overview of it. Research it, PoC it, stick it out, have it monitor production for a couple of weeks and see what kind of results you get.

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 most valuable feature of the product is the ability to watch performance indicators inside of the VM, as well as the indicators outside of VM. It's basically a very deep monitoring tool that gives lots of insight.

It's given us the ability to optimize our ability to allocate resources correctly instead of overallocating. Most vendors shoot for the moon when they give you the recommendations. vROps says, "No. You don't need that. You can get away with less." In the long run, our hardware and software costs are reduced.

We use it for capacity management; that's one of the biggest uses is capacity management. I would say we probably have saved 10-15 percent on storage.

With performance management, while we have not necessarily seen speed improvements due to vROps, in general, we have seen better performance. Again, it gives us the ability to say, "No, you're not making use of this set of resources being CPU memory; I'm going to cut this machine down. It makes the whole system better because now that's available for something that actually does need it."

I would add a capability to easily add new policies. For example, the 6.0 product comes with the vSphere 5.5 hardening guide. I have been digging for months now trying to figure out how to add the 6.0 version of the hardening guide. It looks like I have to write my own policy to do so. That's going to be a pain. That's a very large policy to write, so that would be a policy writer instead of the way they got it. I guess that would be one of the biggest things.

I would just like to see a similar policy be made for the 6.x hardening guide as a prepackaged policy also. The 5.5 guides are quite extensive and the policy is also very detailed and comprehensive.

Starting from scratch to build a policy to reflect the 6.0 guide would be very time consuming. Starting with the 5.5 policy and modifying it would be equally as so. While I am doing just that, because of my regular responsibilities, it is a "side" project that gets attention when I have a few cycles to spare for it, which is not much.

Having a prebuilt policy that is to the current hardening guide would be a great convenience.

It's very stable, once you get to learn it; it is a very complex product.

Scalability’s there. I feel like I could take this up to 1,000 VMs, easily.

I use technical support all the time. :) I rate them 7 or 8 out of 10.

I inherited it. When I came to the job, it was already there. It was basically there, and they said, "Can you get this thing running?" :)

The initial setup was very straightforward. Basically, unpack it, turn it on, and tell it where to start looking. The follow on and ongoing setup is still a bit complex; as I’ve mentioned, it's a very deep product. The more you figure out what you're doing with it, the more you discover what you can do with it; it's an ongoing cycle. It could very easily be a dedicated job for one or two people.

Look very strongly at vROps. Some of the other solutions that I'm aware of – such as VMTurbo - will offer things like automatic shifting of resources, etc. That's, in my opinion, not necessarily the best idea.

I gave it four stars because it is very, very complex. Again, I get the feeling that to use it properly, you almost need a dedicated person for vROps. That being said, it's a great tool.

When selecting a vendor like VMware, my most important criteria are reliability, service, and reputation. There are other virtualization companies out there; I'm not impressed with any of them except VMware.