VMware Aria Operations Reviews

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.

The most valuable features of the solution are the effectiveness of hardware availability and flexibility.

The deployment of the solution can be improved by making it less complex.

The licensing cost is high and needs to be reduced.

I have been using the solution for 20 years.

VMware Aria Operations is a great product that is very stable.

The solution is scalable and we currently have 800 people using VMware Aria Operations.

I previously used other solutions and switched to VMware Aria Operations because of its functionality.

The initial setup of this solution is complex and takes a couple of weeks to deploy in our environment. We require six administrators for the deployment and maintenance.

The implementation was completed through a vendor.

The solution requires an annual license which is very expensive.

Before choosing VMware Aria Operations I evaluated other solutions. 

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

I would recommend the solution to others.

We were using VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) for analyzing virtual machines and using it by host. We didn't use the solution for costing or optimization around costing. We used it predominantly for troubleshooting.

What I like most about VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is how it integrates into the vCenter. You'll get a similar hierarchical view of your host, your VMs, your resource pools, etc. I also like the granularity, particularly the fact that you could go pretty deep into the metrics and data retention as well. You could go far back several months to try and plot performance trends, eventually leading up to an issue or post-incident management.

I also like the plugins in VMware vRealize Operations (vROps). I find the plugins good, especially because you could plug those into Dell. For example, there was a way to visualize how your Dell infrastructure is performing. You could build dashboards, even custom dashboards for your operational teams. You could take a look at what was going on and also look into people doing incident management, troubleshooting, etc. You could customize your experience with VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), and I found that good as well.

I also like the UI of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) because it's nice and very, very fresh.

In terms of what could be improved or added to VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), from my experience, it needs more work in the ITSM space because my company never used it as an IT service management tool.

I've used VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) for about three years, and I've used it for the past twelve months.

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is a stable solution. My company didn't have any issues with it in terms of outages, or severity in terms of the issue. From time to time, the solution would act up, but that was down to underlying issues on from my company's side, not from the VMware side. Overall, it's a stable product.

In terms of scaling VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), it's challenging, especially with all of the data you're putting into the solution, so you do need a lot of infrastructure to sustain a pretty big VMware estate, especially if you're looking at the tens of thousands of virtual machines sending data.

Scalability could still be improved in some ways, or you need to think about how to reduce the amount of data that gets sent to VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) that you don't necessarily need or use.

The technical support for VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), or VMware in general, has been good from my experience. Usually the response time is good. The team gets back to you within a reasonable time frame. The technical support team always asks for logs before carrying out an investigation. Sometimes, you want to expedite solutions to your issues or to get somebody on an issue fairly quickly, but you still have to collect logs, zip those up, and then send those to VMware, and that can take time.

I can't remember exactly, but there was a way to send in logs ahead of time to a VMware engineer through VMware Skyline, so the engineer wouldn't need to collect logs as a pre-requisite before starting the investigations. Other than the log expectation, VMware has good support overall.

The setup for VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) was easy. After getting used to it, setting it up was easy enough. It also became easy to navigate and use. How the solution was set up was that it was connected to the vCenter, then the adapters were set up, then you get the data to synchronize across that, and that's okay.

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.

I've mostly used VMware vRealize Operations (vROps).

My rating for VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is seven out of ten.

My advice to others who want to start using VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is to use its full capability. It doesn't just do analytics and cost optimizations. It can do a whole lot more. You should use it in depth and try to integrate it into other IT processes. For example, my company only used a third of the full capability of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) over the time I was on the team. I would recommend it to anyone, specifically to explore what it can do and then work out how it can benefit you. People should also pay attention to scale as well, because the bigger your estate, the more instances you will need to sustain that scale. Just pay attention to upgrading VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) as well because that's also a journey to upgrade instances, in particular maintenance and lifecycle management.

My previous company had a partnership with VMware. It had an enterprise license agreement, which means it was getting different services and different products from VMware.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have been using VMware for more than seven years.

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This solution is mainly used for the orchestration of servers and for obtaining reports such as utilization reports or load reports.

In decision making, it is very useful to have a nice dashboard. We have also integrated with QlikView, which is an analytic tool.

vRealize has a very nice dashboard.

It integrates well with other products such as those from Oracle.

It would be good to have more detailed reports and more details on the dashboard.

I've been using it for five years.

It is a very stable product.

It is scalable as well. Our system administrators and data center administrators use this product.

VMware provides 24/7 online support, and I would give them a ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is very easy because VMware provides 24/7 online support to us. Everything is much easier for us, because of their support.

The deployment took about one to two days. You would need one or two people, such as IT managers, for deployment and maintenance.

We used a third party team for the deployment.

We have licenses on a three year basis. Licensing costs are much higher, but given the stability of the solution, it is a reasonable price.

It's a stable product and is recognized worldwide. It is much more expensive than other products, but it is stable. Therefore, I would rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.

We use it for data center virtualization and management.

I like the fact that the performance is good and that it makes it easy to consolidate all your servers.

If the cost of the license could be cheaper, it would be good.

We have been dealing with this solution for about three years now.

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is stable.

It is a scalable solution. We have two clients who are using the product.

The technical support is very good. They get it sorted within the SLA.

The initial setup is straightforward. It took about two weeks to deploy it.

We had a team of one or two engineers for the implementation process.

Our customers who have used it have definitely seen an ROI. Instead of using so many physical servers to achieve the same thing, they've reduced it to five physical servers, and they are able to do much more with those five servers.

The licensing model is annual. Compared to the price of other products, VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is a bit on the high side. If it could be cheaper, it would be good.

I would absolutely recommend the product and would give it an eight out of ten.

We can monitor all of our relevant hosts that are stored from the same single pane of glass. We use it for daily routine operations.

The scalability options are quite good with VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), and all of the features are useful and relevant to us.

If this tool can integrate with other products, for example, those that monitor the network devices or any other storage devices, it will be very beneficial.

I have more than eight years of experience with this solution.

I am absolutely satisfied with the stability of the solution.

With regard to scalability, when you deploy it you are given different categories. You can deploy it in a tiny environment or a small, large, or enterprise level environment. You have the option to deploy it in different levels so that it fits the database accordingly.

We have a system team of around four to five employees who use this solution.

The technical support from VMware is very good. We have been using this product for more than five years now, and their support is very good. We are pretty satisfied with it.

The initial setup is easy, and it can be deployed by a single person. It's not a very difficult tool. It's a pre-configured appliance provided by VMware, and you just deploy it in your existing VMware cluster and assign the license. You can have it deployed in your environment in two to three hours or four hours at the most.

To maintain the solution, you will need two people at most.

It is a very good investment because in the long run, it's all about the uptime. As far as we are concerned, it has given us that 100% of the time. We are very satisfied with the product.

The license is a one time cost, and you pay for support on a yearly basis. It is a bit expensive, but if you consider the product support and its reliability, it's justifiable.

It is a very comprehensive tool, and it gives you detailed information. I would rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.

It was helpful in identifying the CPU, memory, and space utilization, which was very much important for us. We needed alerts when the utilization increased a lot, and we were able to inform the customers that we have a particular problem that could be the root cause of the problems that they might face later. They were then able to take some preventative measures in advance, which reduced a lot of problems.

It was very useful for regular monitoring, disk utilization information, and root cause analysis. It was also helpful in identifying why a specific issue is happening or why an error is occurring. 

It enabled us to be more proactive in anticipating and solving problems. We could know beforehand about the machines that might be at risk for high utilization. 

Alerts and monitoring were most valuable. It was also pretty user-friendly and interactive. I was able to generate good reports in PDF and HTML formats, which was really helpful.

The visibility that it provided for our infrastructure was pretty good. The snapshots were also useful.

vROps did a lot of monitoring, but in one case, we had to use Log Insight instead of vROps because vROps was not able to install the agent to enable us to have multi-monitoring. I don't exactly remember the case, but it involved monitoring all applications.

It wasn't exactly proactive. It was supposed to, but there were a lot of delays. It could also be because of our infrastructure and the way our network was set up. If vROps could be more proactive, that would be nice. It is nice to have the information beforehand, but when there is downtime, it takes a lot of time for us to be able to see an issue in real-time, which becomes a bit challenging. If there is a way to improve the data collection for the whole vCenter that would be nice because data collection takes a lot of time.

I used VMware for around five years, from 2015 till January 2021. Except for vCloud Director, I've used most VMware products such as vSphere client, Log Insight, and vRealize Automation.

It was pretty stable. I didn't find many errors while deploying the application and after the deployment.

Our environment didn't scale much, so I cannot comment on its scalability.

We had four vCenters. One was in Santa Clara, US. One was in Beijing, China. One was in Manheim, Europe, and one was in Singapore. We also had test centers, and we integrated vROps for testing there. We had one in King of Prussia and one in Switzerland. So, majorly, we had four vCenters for the production environment, and these vCenters worked with around 4,000 virtual machines.

I have not used VMware's support for vROps.

This was the first tool that we tried to deploy for monitoring.

I was involved in the initial setup of vROps. It was pretty straightforward. Most of the VMware products are pretty straightforward to install.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we have always followed the documentation provided by VMware.

We tried to evaluate many solutions, such as Prometheus, Dynatrace, Nagios, and PRTG. It was best for us to go with vROps because it is a VMware product, and it integrates best with VMware vCenter.

I would recommend vROps for an Enterprise environment. Based on my experience, it is a great tool to work with. Rather than having a big vCenter and then installing vROps, it is good to have it when you're starting with a vCenter. That's because data collection takes time, and it would become an overhead for vROps. In such a case, you might need a load balancer and multiple vROps. So, I would recommend having a vROps when you start building a vCenter. It will really help in scaling up the environment, and you'll also know if you'll need to replicate vROps or not.

We didn't use it for workload placement because we didn't have the load balancer for that. It didn't help much in decreasing the overall downtime, and it also didn't affect our operations when it comes to overall downtime due to performance issues.

I would rate vROps an eight out of 10.

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 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.