VMware Aria Operations Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have vSAN for storage virtualization, to create clusters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using VMware for two years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VMware is the first solution that I used for virtualization.

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

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

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

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

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

We did not evaluate other options before choosing VMware.

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We 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.

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 wanted a tool for monitoring the entire virtualization infrastructure. In addition to infrastructure monitoring, a second use case was application monitoring. At the time we were looking, they had a tool called EPOps through which you could do application monitoring. We also heard about some other components, partner integrations for VMware, through which we could monitor the SAP landscape and storage performance.

There was a team of five or six members. Only one member implemented the vROps, but the visibility was provided to all five of the core infrastructure members. They have been able to use the tool effectively to monitor all the applications from an infrastructure point of view.

We also created an application-specific dashboard, from an infra point of view, which was released to end application teams, so that they can then monitor the performance of their applications: How is the CPU and memory? How is the software: working or not working? It is a one-of-a-kind solution where we have onboarded application teams and given them logins for their specific areas.

vROps also provides proactive monitoring, at some level. It's not practical to keep on logging in to the tool to look at it. So you can create alerts and it will alert you if memory utilization is going beyond 80 or CPU utilization is going above 90. It significantly improves the monitoring, because we are able to act on it beforehand, before the system goes down. It has decreased our downtime by 20 percent. We are more proactive in anticipating and solving problems, and it has also reduced our mean time to resolution for infrastructure by about 10 percent.

We also use it for capacity management, for buying new capacity. It has saved us on hardware costs because we're able to plan properly and we're able to buy the necessary hardware. It has saved us around 50 lakh in Indian rupees [about $70,000 at the time of this review]. And because we are not buying as much infrastructure, the licensing requirements and costs have also been reduced. And it has saved us about 5 to 10 lakh [about $7,000 to $14,000 at the time of this review] in power and other data center costs.

For VMware monitoring, it gives a good amount of data, which can be circled back with the IT hierarchy, or application owner, to have a discussion. 

VM rightsizing is another very good feature and capacity planning is something else that I like about it.

In addition, over time it has become more user-friendly. When we deployed, it was only three-years-old. Recently, it has matured enough to monitor cloud infra also, but we have not tried that yet. But it has matured over the time. The GUI has become more user-friendly and it is very lightweight now.

It shows end-to-end visibility for infrastructure: CPU, memory, and all the processes that are running on the server. It will provide you everything. It will provide you some information about applications, depending on the tool capability, but it is not an application performance monitoring solution.

We integrated vROps with vRealize Log Insight, but it was not helpful to me. It was not giving me any good data.

Another area where there is room for improvement is an area which I've not looked at: cloud management and how efficiently it can do it. 

Also, while it is able to do VMware management very effectively, if you have any other hypervisor solution, I don't know how effectively it would work. It should scale to other infrastructure also.

We have been using VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) for the last five to six years now.

The product is more or less stable. We may find a database-related issue once in a year because it uses the open source Cassandra DB, so sometimes that does not work the way it should. 

Also, high-availability within the product is not so good. They have tried to improve it over the time. We have created a two-node cluster where, if one cluster goes down, the other node will take over. Whenever we have tried, it was not that seamless, and we had to involve their support.

It is scalable. It is easy to scale. We also implemented it in a remote location, where we just had to install a remote connector. All you need is good connectivity.

In a given week we were using vROps three to four times. That frequency has been reduced and now we use it about twice a week. I look at it in my role as manager of IT infrastructure and data center. On my team there are three people and they also look at vROps from time to time. They create VMs. They are database, software, and backup administrators. Above me there is our leadership team that also looks at it on a case-by-case basis.

Technical support is very good, no doubt about it. If you raise a very high-priority case, you will get an immediate response. And most of the people are able to solve the problems. You don't have to roll the case over to the next available or superior agent.

We didn't have any tools before vROps, but it provides a single tool for virtualized infrastructure monitoring.

The initial setup was a complex process, and it is still a complex process. There are too many products: the UI, database, and you have to properly size it according to your requirements, otherwise it does not work well.

Our deployment was a one-year project.

We took a full suite of licenses for all the VMs which we had. And that time we had some 600 VMs. We took two types of licensing, advanced and enterprise, where we were trying to achieve our application monitoring in the enterprise licensing. The advanced was used to create dashboards and other kinds of reporting.

Besides this, we used one more product, VMware Compliance Manager, which they have now stopped. That is one area which they have now integrated into vROps, but we have not tried it so far.

We used VMware professional services. Our experience with them was okay. We thought we would implement way further, with VMware onboarding, but it took a year to complete the project.

We haven't really seen ROI. That was not the idea at the time. We wanted a monitoring platform. Return on investment on such a product is also fairly difficult to calculate.

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.

We looked at SolarWinds and BMC. One of the primary reasons we went with vROps was that we had a large VMware infrastructure. Also, at that time, the dashboards were very good. Also, at some level, it was an agentless solution. In all the other cases you had to install an agent in the end VMs. But because vROps is tightly integrated with VMware, it monitors without agents. That was a factor. Cost was also a factor.

My advice would be to look at it holistically, meaning look at what you want to achieve in the final endgame. Also, evaluate a couple of products to get a feel for them and which product suits you. In addition, create roles within your company, because this needs dedicated attention when you implement it and attention to sustain it. There should also be alignment with an application team or leadership team when implementing this kind of solution.

I've been using this for managing our company's infrastructure. We have a cluster of somewhere around six nodes. 

We're using it in a hybrid mode. We have our on-premise data centers and we are operating on AWS as well. We have multiple legacy apps which require a certain type of monitoring to be enabled and we kept that enabled from the on-premise, but the advanced features for monitoring are being explored on AWS.

Primarily I have found it very useful from the compliance perspective and for control and agility. These are the three main things which are helping us to have a more proactive approach in managing the infrastructure.

We used to have COTS products for monitoring our ESXi hosts. We had a team that would check on alerts and then go on to our approach for remediating the problems. vROps has helped us to reduce the costs and increase the efficiency, because it has a lot of features that tell you where things are going wrong. We have been able to cut down on the cost of resources and we have a smaller team to manage the infrastructure now. The solution helped us to reach a level where we have low resources but high efficiency. Its gives you the most accurate alerts and remediation processes for closing problems.

We have a support operations center where we have a dashboard running 24/7 and that is where vROps manages things and tells us about the health of the infrastructure. If something is going wrong, if it picks up any anomalies, the team takes care of it, remediating based on the recommendation of vROps in the dashboard.

Since incorporating vRealize Operations over the last two years, I don't recollect there being a big concern in regards to downtime. We have not had any downtime happening in the last two years, since we put vROps in place. If we correlate it to the other models we were using earlier, we had certain incidents where we were not even aware of what was going on, on the ESX level. vROps has helped us to reduce our downtime by 90 percent. I'm taking the 10 percent off to account for planned maintenance, because sometimes we need to go offline for maintenance done for our entire infrastructure. But downtime has been reduced 90 or 95 percent since we incorporated vROps.

It has also increased our efficiency and decreased our mean time to resolution. Infrastructure agility has gone up and we're much more efficiently handling the infrastructure now, whether on-premise or Amazon. It provides the agility to do the deployments, but even then, deployment has to be initiated at a user level. Overall, it has increased our efficiency by 30 to 40 percent, in terms of deployment.

The solution has also played a very vital role in workload placements and we have been able to manage workloads and capacity planning, among other things, in a very efficient manner. We are 70 to 80 percent more efficient in regards to management and capacity planning. It gives you visibility into the infrastructure so that you never go beyond the sources that you have and it has helped increase our VM density by around 70 percent. In addition, performance has definitely increased by a similar rate of 70 to 75 percent compared to the previous product we used. There was a leap forward when we used vROps.

Regarding hardware costs, what we used to do before we had vRealize Operations was to buy things in chunks. If we needed storage or additional memory, we might procure 10 TB of storage at one go and then start using it, despite the fact that only 4 of the 10 TB was being used. That's how we would do hardware resource allocation: we would have to buy that item and put it into the system. But now, because of the visibility with vROps, we know how much storage we will require six months down the line. That means we do procurement in smaller chunks. We save hardware costs and, at the same time, resources are planned in such a way that we never run out of resources. Because we have six- or seven-node cluster, from the power perspective, we are not seeing that much in savings, but definitely due to the capacity planning and the visibility, we have seen a cost benefit.

There's a feature known as Smart Alerts in vRealize Operations, which I have found to be useful if there's anything going wrong in the infrastructure. What usually happens is that you get so many alerts that you become confused. Smart Alerts give you visibility into your infrastructure and also recommend how to fix the situation. That's a feature which I'm really a fan of.

Control, from the compliance perspective, is also helpful because we are a PCI DSS-certified company. It keeps us in compliance so that all of our servers and other things are not breaching any of the baseline protocols and baseline policies which we have laid down for the company. That's another thing which I like about the VMware vROps.

For the initial setup, there should be some sort of auto discovery of the environment. That should be enabled. It has the ability to discover a main node, but it could still be made easier, to reduce the initial configuration and setup time.

We have been using VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) for the last two years.

After incorporating it during the initial phase, there was a discovery period for the infrastructure and for vROps to adopt our set of configurations and advanced policies. Since then, it has been pretty stable. We haven't had any issues.

The scalability is fine. When we started using vROps, we only had a three-node cluster. Over the last two years, we have gone up to a six-node cluster. It is pretty scalable. The good part is that adding nodes to vRealize Ops is a pretty straightforward thing. It has given us the visibility to plan and to scale to the level we are at now.

We have over 3,000 people, out of an employee base of 10,000, using the apps that are running on the ESXi that is managed by vROps.

In terms of increasing our usage, as of now there are no plans because it widely depends on the expectations of the business. It's a global thing now because of COVID-19. We still don't know how we are going to grow this over time because the business is in a "back seat" right now. But I'm positive, down the line, of the possibility that we will go further with this.

We have had a couple of cases where we have reached out to VMware support and the tech support has always been awesome from all perspectives. Their problem-solving attitude has always helped. We have been using VMware for seven to eight years now and we have gradually grown but support has been awesome during that time.

In the past we used Paessler PRTG as well as other tools.

The initial setup is straightforward, not complex.

Initially, because we were not familiar with vRealize Operations, it took us a while to get it set up. Our infrastructure is dependent on multiple volumes, ESX clusters and the storage. It took us seven to 10 days to have a fully functional deployment of the solution. The initial setup took us less time, but setting out and defining the policies, the baseline and advanced policies, happened within 15 days of the deployment.

For deployment, we used a team of four onboard resources and we got in touch with local consultants who are VMware Certified partners for doing the deployment. The initial deployment was done by the certified partner and then a knowledge transfer to the resource team took place. After a month or two, our team was able to be 100 percent hands-on with it and started using it.

I rate VMware vRealize Operations very highly because it gives you multiple features such as compliance, agility, and staying hybrid, although if you want you can do it on-prem or on the cloud. I would recommend it regardless of the deployment, whether it's on-prem or AWS or hybrid.

It is user-friendly, but it definitely requires a little tweaking in the environment when you're doing the installation to set it per your requirements, your infrastructure, and per your expectations. What are you trying to monitor? Once you're done with setting up vROps for your cluster or nodes, then it's very easy to use. It will really help you out to get to the stage of automation for your infrastructure, so you don't need to depend on manual processes at all. 

We are not using Kubernetes or Tanzu as of now, but we are planning to incorporate it down the line, maybe in three to six months.

Overall, I would rate vROps as a nine out of 10. The one point I'm leaving out is because there is room for improvement, as I mentioned earlier.

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

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

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

I have been using the solution for five years.

The tool is stable.

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

We use VMware Aria Operations for complete visibility of the configurations. It provides us with predictive analysis of the capacity, helping us plan the scalability of resources.

The product has business intelligence features. We can view daily reports of the cloud products.

The product's support services need improvement.

We have been using VMware Aria Operations for more than four years.

I rate the product's stability a nine out of ten.

I rate VMware Aria Operations a nine and a half out of ten.

The technical support services could be better. We need to know the business requirements to get the reports. It is a time-consuming process. Sometimes, we have to search for every detail to make a holistic report.

The initial setup is easy. It can be deployed in any environment. It's a very dynamic product.

It is a very good product. We can download and integrate features from the portal using templates instead of creating them. I rate it a nine out of ten.

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.

We use this solution to monitor the virtual infrastructure health with deep-dive analytics ensuring hypervisors, VMs, network, and storage health. We can also use it for future forecasts for virtual machines, and allocate additional resources for where contention occurs.

Efficient use of resources/planning has helped my organization.

We like that we are able to combine all infrastructure monitoring using this solution, meaning we receive analytics from across our whole network.

We would like to see an improved licensing model to be set up for this solution. The current model charges per CPU, as opposed to being product-based, which would allow us to monitor our complete virtual infrastructure under a single license.

I have been using this product for two years.

We would rate this solution a seven out of ten.