VMware Aria Operations Reviews

One of the key things is the ability to integrate data from other sources. That's always a huge issue. I'll give an example: We've got an issue in an Oracle database. We go to the Oracle database team to get data from the Oracle management tools. We go to the virtualization to ensure the data there. The last layer's a whole other thing. vROps brings them all together. Any tool that does that is a useful tool.

Also, the data retention is better compared to what vCenter does by default. vCenter keeps data for only a short window of time, so if it's an hour after a problem manifests, you're out of luck. vROps makes a copy of all the data from vCenter; it keeps its own copy and it can maintain it longer because it's not an actively used database that's trying to manage the system. It's just a copy for reference purposes.

One of the things we're going to look at is experimenting with the integration with DRS. In fact, I attended a session at a conference on that. We're looking at integrating it with our Citrix XenApp environments; we currently have somewhat of a gap on that reporting there as well. That's 2 areas we definitely are looking at using it for.

We have had major outages that we would have caught in advance had vROps been in place.

With both capacity management and performance management, we expect to gain. The outages I mentioned were capacity or performance related. They were in areas of capacity that we could not see with our current tool set without a lot of digging around, which are very easily accessible with vROps.

You can always improve the type of data you can merge in, but there's nothing that we're missing at the moment from it. I'm sure as we dig deeper into it, we'll start finding room for improvement.

The reporting can always be improved. The problem is that no one does reporting well, because no one can know what your company needs out of the tool. I'm sure refinements with the reporting would be great. I'm sure they'll be refining it with every version, but it's not something that's inherent to them; it's an inherent problem with any tool that's trying to report data. I've found no tools that report data the way you need it to be reported.

We’ve been using it for a couple of months now; we've been experimenting. Previous versions were not as strong. The last version before this one was when they started to actually make the tool particularly useful, and then the latest version's even better.

Stability is much better than it used to be. They went to a distributed model, so it's stable and you can expand and grow with it.

Early versions did not use a completely balanced distributed model. As the number of items being collected grew, performance could not be scaled easily by adding additional servers to the vROps infrastructure. The newer versions handle this much better and allow for performance to be maintained at high numbers of items being collected.

You can now expand outwards horizontally, which you think they would've done initially, but you know... If you have an instance, you can build it taller with more CPU and memory, or you can build multiple instances. You can build instances out in remote sites to collect data there. It's a scalable solution now, which it was not completely before.

I don't know what their limits are, but it's certainly scalable enough to accommodate our needs.

It does not get slow; that's why the model's much better.

We haven't used technical support for scaling it yet, but I'm sure we will.

We decided to invest in this type of solution because of gaps in our current reporting. There are certain constraints we're running into in the environment that we cannot attack easily with any other tool.

We currently use a lot of other tools. We use TeamQuest. We use Cirba. We use CA; both their standard monitoring tool and their application performance monitoring tools. Even with all those, there's certain nuances within virtualization that they can't easily capture. We'd either have to automate scripts for ourselves to pull the data and then use something else to do it, or we can use vROps, which is why we're installing it.

The most important criteria when we select apps and vendors is our experience working with VMware and the ability to take data from multiple sources, which a lot of tools cannot easily do.

I’m involved mostly with the engineering of how we're going to use it. Most of their products are really easy to install.

We've looked at VMTurbo and we've talked with the other vendors that I’ve mentioned we use, to see if there are ways of doing what we want to do within their goals.

There's been mass improvements; if they've looked at it previously, like a few years ago, I would look at it again. We looked at it a few years ago, decided it wasn't for us, but it's useful. Particularly if you're dealing with a large-scale enterprise, there are gaps in all the other toying that are hard to get at without this tool because this tool has much more direct access to the right areas of vCenter. You can use the API to get at anything, but VMware knows what to pull better because it's their product.

Our primary use case is capacity planning. We do historical metrics gathering to determine if we need to rearrange our hardware resources, expand or contract them.

I like that it's integrated with the vRA. It is helping us, as we're rolling out automation, to do intelligent placement of new servers, based on the vROps metrics that are being created.

They've come up with more canned dashboards, which is great.

Also, it does have hooks into it. I like that it's integrated with the other suite of tools. That's a big plus for the tool. It's well-integrated with Log Insight. We use that integration quite a bit.

There are several additional features I'd like to see. 

For one, the metrics. It collects tons of metrics, but it's very unclear what exactly a metric is. There'll be something like a "CPU Usage" and "Usage of the CPU". What's the difference between those two metrics? It turns out there is a difference, but they should make it intuitive so I can say, “I just want to go find this out in the tool.” You can't really do that because you've ended up spending a lot of time creating a report against a metric which wasn't the metric that you thought it was. So I would like to see, when I have the metrics in any of the screens, when I hover over one, that it pop up at least a sentence, if not a paragraph, saying what the metric is and not just that it's the measurement of the CPU. It should say how it's collecting that metric and what the importance is of that metric. That would be very helpful. 

Also, there are some metrics that are not included in the canned set. They call them super metrics in the tool, where you create your own metric. But the super metrics are not really reliable. It might be because we didn't create them correctly, although we did have help from VMware. They also don't translate into newer versions like a canned metric would. One of them is a vCPU to pCPU ratio. That's one that is missing, which should be very simple for them to collect.

So the help on the metrics is super important because there are so many.

It's a little bit too extensible. I love having that freedom to create. But I, and maybe three other people, understand the math enough to be able to use it. Everybody else says, “But where do I click to get that report?"

The other thing is, when we first bought it, our vision was to use role-based access, give application teams access to view a dashboard for their stuff. We found out that the vROps tool can't handle more than about 20 concurrent sessions. For a company our size, we have some 3000 applications. If all these application teams want to have a dashboard up, that somebody is monitoring all day - we had to say nobody gets that because then everybody wants it. That was another thing that we were buying the tool for that we can't do.

On a specific version, it has been stable. But the whole point of the tool is historical data and, twice now, we have lost all of our historical data, as we've tried to move to the next version of the tool. That really removes a lot of the functionality that we purchased the tool for.

The tool itself is not as scalable as we'd like it to be. We have seven or more data centers and we have collectors deployed throughout the whole environment, but we have capacity and performance issues with the tool. We'd like to expand the product so that we would have more capacity, but it has limitations.

We're a large customer and we have people onsite holding our hand saying, “Sorry. My bad." I think we could have better technical support on this product. We have great technical support on other fronts.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

Pricing is starting to get unmanageable. It used to be a better pricing deal. They were selling us the suite and we were taking advantage of most everything in that suite. 

Something that we're concerned about was in the general session this morning, here at VMworld 2018. They announced the Premier. It's going to be interesting. 

I'm just about ready to send our sales person a text, because we've been VMware shop for a decade and we bought the Enterprise-class license, which was the top-of-the-line, "get everything they have," and we thought we had everything they had. And then they came out with Enterprise Plus. That meant we had to go buy a whole bunch more stuff to convert everything to Enterprise Plus. Well, now they have come out with Premier. They're going to be giving us all sorts of reasons why we need to re-buy everything up to the Premier level. That's getting old with our people with the purses, the supply chain people. That's why they're looking at other options. They just went and bought Turbonomic and they're looking at other options so that we're not so wholly a VMware shop.

From an operations point of view and from an architectural point of view, which is me, it's great to get a whole mess of tools that all integrate together; we've got Lifecycle Manager so that we can make sure they're all at the right versions at the same time. But, on the other hand, you become a one-vendor shop. Nobody likes that. Our leadership is starting to bring in other companies to do various things.

We looked at a couple of other products. We looked at Turbonomic and Veeam. But we have a very large relationship with VMware, so we have a hefty discount. We are also very involved with using Log Insight and with using vRA. So we buy the suite and vROps is free. It would cost us more to buy those other tools individually. Since we have the suite, we have the licenses so it makes sense to use it.

That being said, we did buy Turbonomic about a month ago because operations management says vROps is not working for us for the real-time monitoring and automatically adjusting to the environment. vROps is working for historical work, so are still planning on using it for that. Turbonomic does not have historical, so they work together in a way. But We've had to buy, for a few more million dollars, another product whose function, we thought, vROps was going to do all of.

Depending on your use case, I would caution you to know what it does and what it doesn't do. We bought it with pie-in-the-sky hopes that it would really solve everything.

For this product in particular, it just doesn't seem that it was enterprise-ready for a company of our scale, when we tried to adopt it. It's been going through a lot of changes now. I haven't been as involved in the last year with it but I know that they've moved up another rev in the versioning and, of course, everything gets better with each rev. But it was a rocky start for us.

We're still using it and we still have hopes. We're not going to give it to the application teams, but we might give them a scheduled report that at least gives them a non-instantaneous look at their systems.

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 analytics and sizing are the most valuable features. We saved over a 1000 virtual CPUs, a few terabytes of storage and memory.

I can actually do the historics on any VM that's being used so we can refuse architects that want to throw too much memory or CPU at something. We can do recommended sizing.

For example, they put the SAP Hana environment in, and they sized it to the moon. They kept throwing more and more resources on it; ate up the majority of one of our FlexPods. We proved them wrong and dialed it down.

A lot of our different tools actually hook into it; they have APIs that actually launch into it. We'll use some Blue Medora or we're going to be putting in a couple bits such as that.

We use UCS for OnCommand Unified Manager, and it has an API that hooks into it. We're installing Log Insight, and then we're also going to be putting in NetApp OnCommand Insight. That's got to hook in there too. All these different products, they always have their own little dashboards. I hate that. I want one, and that's what vROps does.

While we haven’t saved on storage, because of the over-allocation issue I mention elsewhere – we're not going to get two different views – we did save a ton on CPU and memory.

With regards to performance management, over-allocating VMs actually hurts their performance, their computing wait times, so once we started tuning that in, it got a lot better.

I want it to have a better view in the thin provisioning. Right now, it shows us what is over-allocated in all of our graphs. That's great, we need to add more, but I don't want to look at red lines every time I log in; makes me think that we have huge issues, not that we just need to add a rack or a shelf. We're using a hyper-converged infrastructure with FlexBots. I'd like a little bit more granularity there, maybe break it into two different views: one would say that we're over-allocated, and the other one would say, "This is how much disk you currently have remaining." It would show the aggregates, because right now it doesn't; basically two lines: what are you using and what's left.

It gets a little bit kludgy – slow, sluggish, takes a while – when it gets bigger. We've got a bunch of dashboards that show problem VMs; a lot of different metrics. Those take a while to spin up the more that we expose into it. The database can get a little unwieldy after a while. It is in a lot of infrastructure.

The bigger it gets, the slower it moves.

I think once you start tuning your environment, scalability will get better, but in the beginning, when you just try to throw as much into it as you can so you can see what you have, it can appear as if it's not working as well as it should.

We have a Business Critical Support with VMware. I think it's pretty good. In our circumstances – we're currently outsourced, I work with an energy company – our contract only allows the non-international folks to use it, so our folks in India have some difficulties. When we have a problem, if we engage them correctly, it usually gets driven pretty well.

When we came in, we went to VMworld in 2015 and we got sold on the idea. We came in and we had no way to do really good reporting on any of our environment; we had 25 years with IBM. It kind of got really hard to get your arms around and figure out what all you had. This gives us an inventory, and when our outsource partner comes back and says, "We don't know what's wrong," we can just go on the console and say, "Well, this is what's wrong." It helped us all be held accountable.

Actually, we wanted the SDDC, and VMware had it, and then we got the whole vRealize Suite. It's pretty good.

Initial setup was complex. We have a very old environment, so there were a lot of issues – mainly our issues, not the tool itself – getting access to service accounts, the infrastructure stood up, and all of that. We needed a project manager from VMware and a project manager from our company to basically work together and it still took a long damn time; a month.

If you don't have it, you need something like it, so you get more out of your infrastructure, because you waste so much in most companies. Everyone always gives resources, no one ever takes them back and looks at that. There's no reclamation, so you waste resources all day.

No other product basically gives you an eyes-on-glass that says, "You're wasting a 1000 CPUs." Or 700, or whatever.

The product is valuable - when we start virtualizing everything, specifically in the compute stack – for looking at the health of the ecosystem. It is very difficult to pinpoint your challenges in terms of performance. It also helps understand where your issues lie. vROps actually demystifies that for you, drilling deep into the infrastructure beyond what vCenter Server gives you. It puts together real metrics that make sense to you. For example, if we look at the metrics inside a vCenter Server, we can look independently at, for example, CPU utilization, processor, networking, but it's not tied together to give you a holistic view of the health of your environment. vROps actually does that for you, and then makes recommendations.

The other thing I love about the product is that, with other products like vRA and Orchestrater, we can actually send that information to an automation platform for self-healing and for mediation. That makes it very, very powerful.

For example, we can actually proactively monitor and anticipate server sprawl, or capacity depletion. We can actually see that coming before it arrives. We can head off issues such as saturation of resources in any particular host, aberrant behavior of applications. We can actually see those issues coming, head them off and manage more proactively, as opposed to reactively.

For example, we have people that have unfettered access to the vSphere environment. They just spin up servers at will, without really any regard for how that's going to have an impact on resources. vROps will give you a health batch, and you can start seeing problems develop before they arrive. It gives you an opportunity to anticipate a problem before it happens, address it and then remediate it before it actually becomes an issue in production.

The main concern, the main dropper right now was capacity planning, capacity management and heading it off.

Storage tends to be something that's always in high demand at our company. We really use this product to get a better forecast of organic growth and new organization. When you're going to look towards your budgeting for future years, you have to have something that's going to provide some type of a benchmark for you in terms of what you need to acquire for that next fiscal year.

One of the things about vROps is that, it's very robust. If you want to set up a notification, it's very, to me, involved. If they can streamline some of that through orchestration into what you’re trying to do with setting up alerts and things of that nature, in groups and policies, and tie those things together in a more seamless manner. I think that would be helpful.

There are multiple elements that need to be set up for a purpose, by contrast. I'll compare it to the installation of a vRA; when you set up vRA, it steps you through everything sequentially, like a workflow. If they can put a workflow into vROps for the types of things that you want to set up for policies, triggering and monitoring, I think that'd be very helpful; as opposed to clicking out of one pane, clicking into another pane, referencing what you just set up in a previous pane, those types of things.

Think about if, when you're setting up your triggers and your alerts, it could be something sequential, like through a wizard, or something of that nature. To help you walk through, take you right to the next screen that you need to go to. You don't click out of one area and then back in.

We’re not yet using any of the new features in version 6; that’s what I'd like to get to.

I think it's very, very stable. When it first came out, I did have some concerns with it. When it first came out, I can understand, as a maiden voyage, that there were some opportunities for improvement. I think VMware has worked very hard, as they typically will do, to remediate those issues. The only issues I had in the beginning was, the amount of information and tuning it required for the information to make sense to the typical admin. It really wasn't there, maturity-wise. I think they've done that now. The health batches now really do make sense to someone who has tuned the environment, or make sure that the application is tuned to their environment.

I think it's incredibly scalable.

We have a small environment. In our production environment we have 60 hosts and only, maybe, 500 VMs. I've not had an opportunity to use it in massive scale but for us, it's been something that we've been able to use.

I haven't used technical support; I haven't had the need to.

We previously the SolarWinds virtualization manager. The way in which it's licensed, the way in which it provides dashboarding is very, very complicated to use. The information is not easily consumable; it's just not easy digestible. We found that we had licensed versions of it sitting out for years without actually using it, because it just wasn't helpful for us.

I love the fact the vROps is tightly integrated with the other VMware families; purpose-built for running on vSphere. It's purpose built from the ground up by VMware architects and engineers who understand their other products and how they're bringing it to the family. For example, I'm looking to use vROps today to coalesce with vR Orchestrator, so that we could do some of the software mediation types of things through messaging to the vRO platform.

vROps is very, very straightforward to stand up. I would say, much more straightforward than some of the previous iterations. That's one of the other things I appreciate about the products VMware is bringing to market. They're making their products easier to deploy.

We looked at VMTurbo, now re-branded as Turbonomic. It didn't bring anything new to the fold for us. The way in which it's licensed is really, I think, a little bit outrageous. I just think VMware continues to do a stellar job in how they put together solutions that are purpose built and threaded together to work as an entire ecosystem.

Give it a chance, put it in a honey pot. I come from a consulting background, so a lot of companies tend to throw something directly into production. They don't actually have the opportunity to spend the time to learn the product first. That gives the product a negative connotation because it doesn't give them the results that they're looking for.

Apply the appropriate principles of project management during your pilot, your proof of concept, proof of technology. Then, pilot it, and then have a clear understanding of what it is, the scope and scale that you're trying to get out of the product. Then tailor your installation for that. I think that'll be something that'll have a higher chance of success.

I use VMware vRealize Operations for troubleshooting, monitoring the storage and network.

VMware vRealize Operations has helped our organization by providing troubleshooting our systems.

The performance for monitoring the VM is very good. Additionally, the solution is flexible.

The solution could improve by having more APIs, customized alerts, and documentation.

In the next release, there should be better integration with microservices.

I have used VMware vRealize Operations within the last 12 months.

The stability is very good.

VMware vRealize Operations is scalable.

We have one team in my organization that uses this solution.

The VMware support is very good. I had a great experience with them, they are the best.

I have used Grafana and Prometheus. Each solution has its use case, you need to know what use case you have to know what solution would be best.

I have previously worked with VMware, the installation was not difficult, I did not have any problems.

We have our partial script to repair and deploy the solution in the environments quickly.

I did the implementation myself.

We have a three-person team that handles the maintenance of the solution.

VMware vRealize Operations has very useful technology. We can deploy it on Amazon, but we didn't use the solution on the cloud yet.

I rate VMware vRealize Operations an eight out of 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.

We use it daily for troubleshooting. We use it for charting, for reports. It's an awesome product. The performance is good.

The most valuable feature is troubleshooting. When somebody comes and says, "I have slow response," and we say, "Really?" And they say, "Yeah, we want double the CPU and RAM." We can take a look at it and say, "Uh, no. Here's what you're using, and this is what you've allocated. Oh, and by the way, you've over-allocated, are you ready to give some back?" So it's been a great tool for us to reclaim resources.

It's user-friendly. When you click on it, everything is spelled out - as long as you understand the basics of how virtualization, CPU, and memory work. Everything you need when you click on it is right there. You just pick the right thing, and it gives you a report immediately. I think it's very intuitive.

I'd like to see more of the advanced reporting without having to go to the advanced product and paying the extra price. Canned reports are great, but you shouldn't have to pay for custom reports.

The stability is, for the most part, most of the time, excellent.

In terms of scalability, as far as I'm concerned, the jury's still out on that. There are some small details but we have a call coming up and we're working on it.

For the contract that we paid for, technical support was okay. For the service we're used to getting, before we downgraded our service, it was not as good. But that was not on them, that was on us.

Unfortunately, we were using vFoglight and that thing was the most complicated solution. You needed to be a rocket scientist to even use it. We were glad to get rid of it after three years, and we've been extremely pleased since we migrated.

The most important criteria, for us, when selecting a vendor are

• reliability
• length of time in the industry
• tech support.
  

The initial setup was not complex but a little hard.

I don't really have the numbers for ROI, but I can tell you it has increased them.

We looked at vFoglight again, but it was too difficult. We looked at a product called VMTurbo (Turbonomic), and it didn't really come up to par during the PoC that we went through. We weren't very happy with it.

In terms of advice to colleagues, I would give them examples of reports to prove that what we're saying is true, but the proof is in the pudding.

I rate it a nine out of 10. If it had more advanced features without having to pay for them it would be a 10.