VMware Aria Operations Reviews

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.

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 have a large, enterprise-level VMware virtual infrastructure. We use vROps for private cloud monitoring. We are using vROps for capacity management and audit monitoring. If there is any issue within the infrastructure, within the thresholds, vROps will capture them and trigger alerts. The triggered alerts are sent to our ticketing tool, using the REST API, and the ticket is created according to the priority. The respective first-level teams will handle those incidents.

The incidents we deal with are mainly in things like capacity management. Over a period of time, the virtual infra keeps growing. We measure when we are going to hit the entire capacity and we will always set thresholds 30 days ahead of hitting capacity. vROps will alert on that, and we can procure more hardware proactively and we can keep increasing the capacity well in advance.

VMware has released a feature called Continuous Availability (CA). We have HA within the data center and the CA is across the data centers. We use both services. For most of the infra we are using HA, meaning within a given data center, we have a master and master replica and multiple data. Based on the growth of our virtual infra, or if there is any new deployment, we'll keep increasing our data nodes. It can do analysis and give you beautiful reports. Those reports are very useful for management. What is the status of our memory and CPU? What was the utilization of infra like in the last 30 days? How many workloads were deployed? What are the future requirements? With a simple click we can generate the reports.

It certainly helps us to decrease overall downtime. While we have cluster-level resiliency on the vSphere end, vROps provides an alerting solution. On top of that, we can use workload balancing. vROps will sense that there are multiple clusters running, some that are more utilized and some that are under-utilized, and it will report that to us. If you use it to balance, it will automate that back to the virtual infra, and it will do all the migrations automatically. Workload balancing is a great feature from vROps. Without vROps, we had 80 to 85 percent uptime. With vROps, we improved that at least 10 percent and we are close to 98 or 99 percent uptime.

It has also increased VM density on particular clusters. Based on the memory assigned to the workload, the density on the cluster varies. If we have 50 VMs on a particular cluster, but the resource allocation is greater there, that cluster is heavily used. If we have a second cluster with 100 VMs, but each VM is assigned less memory and CPU, we cannot say that the density of the first cluster is only 50 and the second cluster is 100 VMs. It will calculate based on the demand and allocation model of capacity and resources to the workloads.

With vROps we have saved on hardware costs by at least 5 percent.

In addition, in general, if I want to see the logs for a particular object, I need to log in to vRealize Log Insight and search by framing a query. But because it is integrated with vROps, when I go to the cluster tree, if I click that object and click on the logs, it will automatically provide the output. It is very simple and I don't need to log in and frame the query.

The "what-if" analysis capability is important to us. We can create a report for possible failures. What if we lose one host or two hosts? And if we add two hosts, how does that affect our resources? Or if there is a new project and we need a certain amount of workloads deployed, how many hosts do we need? With the existing capacity, if we add that many workloads what will our remaining capacity be? We can do capacity analysis with this tool.

Policy tuning and the SDDC Management Pack for health monitoring are also important.

It gives us visibility into the virtual infrastructure, and even the physical infrastructure, and into the workloads running. We have visibility even at the level of the appliance services. We can monitor everything. We can also create dependency reports, so if a service is down, it will not impact things. It gives us those dependencies brilliantly.

When it comes to policies, they need to fine tune things to make it easier. It is a bit difficult setting up policies.

We have been using VMware vRealize Operations for six years. We started with version 6.x. We keep upgrading and now we are running on the latest version, 8.1.

With the HA feature it was a stable product, but with the new service, the Continuous Availability, we have seen some issues and we are not recommending that. We are re-deploying that infra to high-availability. CA is a great feature, but we see some issues with our infra, so we are using HA. As soon as we got that new CA feature we implemented it and we learned that it creates a lot of issues for our infrastructure, but it is working fine for other customers. VMware tried to help us and their solution was to move to the HA.

But stability-wise, it's good. It won't create any issues. If there is an issue, just a simple services restart will fix them. We've mostly seen that disk space consumption increases when we keep provisioning and expanding. But that works fine and the product's stability is very good.

We can scale up the infra without any downtime. There have been no issues. 

If there is any issue, they will pitch in and help, based on the severity. They're very helpful and very knowledgeable. We get good support from them. No issues. Their support has been brilliant.

We started applying vROps in parallel with the inception of our VMware infra.

The solution is very user friendly. In one step it is ready to deploy. We don't need to configure anything on the OS level. You just deploy it and power-on. We only need to configure in, vCenter, which infra we are monitoring. When we start to onboard, it's very simple to manage. Anybody can deploy and configure it. It is easy to deploy. There are a lot of publicly available articles that we can refer to. There was a great article on end-to-end setup.

Based on the virtual infrastructure size, we decide which appliance size is needed. Do we need to go for tiny, medium, large, or extra-large. The decision is based on our environment's capacity, how many objects we have within the virtual infra. We first deploy the master, then the master replica, and then the data nodes. We can run with one master node, but if we deploy master and replica and data nodes, it gives us more resilience. So even if we have a failure on the master, the master replica makes it a high-availability solution.

Deployment takes just 15 minutes, and we can have vROps up and running in 30 minutes.

There are five members on our team and everyone has knowledge of vROps. Everyone is certified. There is no segregation of roles. Everyone takes care of the entire product life cycle, whether it's upgrading, troubleshooting, or streamlining. We use it day in and day out. Our key job is tracking of vROps' health and alerts-monitoring, to make sure it's running fine. It's part of our daily work.

They forecast our pricing based on the objects we deploy, but I'm not involved much with that. The licensing part is a bit complicated.

We have not evaluated other solutions since this one is from VMware itself. We prefer to use the proprietary solution.

It provides proactive monitoring, but it is not a real-time monitoring. It is polling every five minutes. If there is an issue in the first minute, but polling happens at the fifth minute, there is a gap of four minutes. It will capture that failure and alert in the fifth minute. It is more reactive monitoring, in that sense. But at least we know there is an issue.

Overall, vROps is maturing, year by year. New versions have a lot of scope. We are not fully utilizing it, but if you understand the product features correctly, it will save you a lot of cost and reduce manual efforts. I would recommend it. If someone is looking for virtual monitoring, vROps is the best solution.

For most data center operations teams, it is pretty hard to get a comprehensive view of what’s going on in their IT ecosystem. Virtualization and cloud service abstractions have made cross-platform relationships between different layers of the IT stack more complex. Heterogeneous, hybrid environments are the norm. IT pros have found visibility to be the #1 challenge facing operations teams. VMware Blue Medora management packs aggregate operations data from the leading server, storage,compute and database applications into vRealize Operations for rich analytics and helped to achieve full stack view of the environment.

Using VMware vRealize Operations with Blue Medora TVS helped to centralize data center operations monitoring platform. By adding the True Visibility Suite, its helped to monitor  applications, database, virtualization/cloud, compute, network and storage using one monitoring platform.

All the Blue Medora vROps management packs have features like:

· OOTB dashboards

· Collected metrics

· OOTB Reports

· Alerts and recommendations

· External relationships

· Capacity planning

• Reduced cross-team friction by eliminating MTTI hunts through, siloed infrastructure tools.

• True Visibility customers can see up to 50% reduction in time for root cause
  analysis.
• Cleared up alert storms with built-in policies that disable alerts for your dev environment and other less-critical resources.
• Increased tier I app availability up to 50% by pinpointing problems faster and more accurately with dependency-aware dashboards.
• Were able to drill down to native-tool detail to find noisy.

One missing component was the integration of Log Insight and vRealize Business within vROps. But, with the new version of vROps (v6.5 & v6.6), this requirement was also met with, as the other products in vRealize Suite are now fully-integrated.

More than five years.

As such, no stability issues were experienced from vROps during deployment, configuration, and the collection of metrics and data into the platform. 

The client decided to add an additional node to increase the capacity and resources within vROps analytics cluster so it could support the additional metrics collection process. You can scale vertically or horizontally.

I have received excellent support from VMware & Blue Medora support team.

Yes, Engineered by Blue Medora and validated by VMware, the True Visibility Suite included an extensive knowledge portal and includes 24/7/365 individualized technical support

It was implemented in-house

By using vROps plus Blue Medora TVS you can Maximize Performance, Minimize Investment
Reduce the IT tools, eliminate silos and boost IT productivity by up to 67%.

• Deploy in minutes without additional services or expertise.
• Maintain performance, reduce administration with agentless design.

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

There were a couple of options that we considered, like Microsoft SCOM and SolarWinds, but the level of monitoring and dashboard visibility wasn’t there.

• Conduct workshops and capture monitoring requirements at a high level; document and understand the customer's requirements. 
• Study the customer’s infrastructure, as it will be useful during the implementation stage.
• Align the customer's requirements, so that all the required systems are monitored in the vROps platform.
• Work out the network firewall rules that are required to configure vROps.
• Use the vROps sizing guidelines and sizing guide spreadsheet prior to vROps deployment.
• Deploy the remote collectors for bigger environments as it puts less load on the analytics cluster.
• Post deployment of vROps, you should create a full-stack relationship dashboard, as it helps to identify issues at various tiers in a typical 3-2-1 type environment.
• Make use of role-based user account management.
• Avoid taking snapshots or backups of vROps nodes during DT window.

We are using vROps for its monitoring and alerting mechanisms, for the entire VMware environment. We use the analytics and recommendations.

It's a monitoring tool. It is very common, but in my last eight years of using it, what I have seen is that it gives detailed monitoring information for your entire VMware infrastructure. It gives recommendations in terms of resource utilization.

A major part of its functionality now is business cases. I can identify them now, meaning if we migrate to the public cloud, what the business case would be.

In addition, the proactive monitoring and recommendations always help you to avoid unwanted downtime. If I see that a machine is heavily loaded, I can apply the recommendation and balance the load across all the nodes. And if the machine is under-utilized or over-utilized, it will tell you whether to optimize or to increase the resources accordingly. It improves the operational experience as well as the performance.

It automatically places workload on the machines where there is any available capacity or more resources are available. You don't need to worry about that. vROps does it. The workload placement has definitely increased VM density. That is part of the VMware DR solution. It enables you to place things automatically on a machine with less load so that you can increase the density, depending upon the resource availability on the machine.

One of the best features is the monitoring. It gives you proactive recommendations, based on the information that you have. It recommends changes. For example, if an ESX service is heavily loaded, it will tell you to make some changes, such as storage optimizations. Every tool does monitoring, but this one gives you more proactive monitoring, with the recommendations and actions that are needed.

VMware products are user-friendly, there is no doubt. That goes for all their products. I use multiple VMware products and I don't see any difference among the products in that context. vROPs, specifically, is easy to handle, even if you don't know anything about VMware. If you have some experience in monitoring, the tool will definitely be easy to learn and to get hands-on with it.

Also, if you want to migrate to public cloud, it helps with the business case. The tool gives some rough estimates about migrating to the public cloud or to another cloud.

vROPs is integrated with vRealize Log Insight by default, but we don't use it in our company. But it allows you to keep the logs and go back and identify what the performance was like a month back. That can help with troubleshooting because if you know what things were like a month back, and an issue comes in, you can get into performance metrics for that month. All the log data will be available for troubleshooting and capacity management.

Three or four years back, regarding business case data, when looking at migrating to public cloud, we had to feed in the pricing of all the public clouds manually. I don't know whether that information is now available automatically, but that would help.

Similarly, if it could help with calculating on-prem costs, based on their experience, it would help customers determine whether to remain on-prem or move to the cloud.

I've been using VMware vRealize Operations for almost eight years.

The stability is good. They keep updating it with the new versions and new features. So many features have been added and so many different licensing models have come in. Variations are available for data center requirements and remote site requirements. But the product looks very stable.

I've never had a problem with the scalability of vROps. It can scale to any level. I've never reached the maximum of what it can do.

The setup of vROps and Log Insight is very easy. It's not intensive or very complex. I did it about four years back when we deployed it in my previous organization and it was very easy for a standard VMware environment.

The amount of time it takes depends on how big your VMware environment is. There's no benchmark value. If you have a small environment it shouldn't take more than one or two days. But in a bigger environment, the scanning of data takes time because it has to talk to vCenter, pull all the data, wait for all the data to come in, and see if there are any recommendations. But that should not take more than a week and you should be able to see everything, even in a much bigger environment.

To deploy, you need to have a VMware guy and it depends on where the data is being integrated to. If it's only a VMware environment, you need only one or two people, max.

If the deployment is being integrated with some enterprise tools or third-party vendors, you may need to work with their separate teams.

In terms of value, it depends on how you look at it. Is there really any other solution for VMware? I don't think so. If you bring in something else then you have to think about the support matrix, compatibility, and you multiple vendors involved. You go with VMware because of the easy integration and support. It's a big product and it costs, but the value depends on your point of view. If you look at it from a cost-perspective, it's costly. If you look at it from a compatibility/support perspective, it meets all your requirements.

Because we are a valued customer, we got a good discount from VMware on the pricing. What they offered and what we have gotten as a return on our investment are reasonable.

Every VMware product is a licensing challenge. It's always costly. It's based on processors. From a technical side, the product is very good. The challenging part is always the licensing.

They should have some kind of alternate pricing models. They have a simple model, CPU-based. They should do something to make it more reasonable there. And they have too many variations. I think there are three different models that depend on different form factors. They should make it easier. With three different versions—standard, advanced, and enterprise—it's confusing.

This tool gives us everything we need. I don't see any alternatives to it.

We don't use VMware's Tanzu solution along with this solution for Kubernetes monitoring and management, but we have had discussions with the VMware team about it. It is still in discussion.

Leaving the issue of cost aside, I would rate vROps at eight out of 10, in terms of the technical side, integration, and support.

We use it for monitoring of the VMware environment. 

It has performed well. Though, I haven't found time to dig deep into it.

Because of the recommendations in the product for configuration changes, bad legacy setups become visible using the tool, which is great.

You receive both the overview and the details.

It's user friendly, but a bit complex, so you need to spend time with it.

As far as I have seen, it is very stable.

We have a small size setup.

I have no experience with the technical support.

We received the product as part of a license upgrade and decided to use it at that time.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We spent a few days setting it up, then it was up and running. We haven't done many changes since then.

We did a basic setup with a large European reseller of VMware. They were great, as it was a quick turn on solution for us.

We have another monitoring tool which we use for physical servers and virtual as well, but vRealize Operations Manager gives us more detail. It's best of breed when it come to monitoring.

Don't underestimate the time for getting it in place and in tune for your business. Even though it's pretty much turnkey, ensure you have enough time to focus on getting it tuned for your environment.

It is a good product, but our company has a lot of tuning to do with the product.

One use case was to get better insights into the infrastructure, to be able to do things like closed-loop automation, based on the data that we're finding within vRealize Operations. But we're also using it to get a better understanding of capacity within our environment. That was the primary use case. We've expanded those use cases through integration with Log Insight as well.

We went from using industry standard KPIs to going to a complete on-demand model based on the algorithms from vRealize Operations. It has enabled us to drive more utilization out of our existing compute infrastructure to the point where, for a period of six months, we didn't purchase a single server or any additional compute. We were able to continue to sweat our existing assets.

The most valuable feature is the seamless integration with the vSphere Client and being able to go quickly back and forth between an incident within the vSphere interface and the actual drilling into it within vROps, to identify problems.

I find it to be intuitive and user-friendly as well.

The integration with Log Insight is a big thing for us. We're hoping to take point-in-time events that are happening within the environment, feed them into incidents within vROps, and then be able to execute a remediation step, through vRealize Orchestrator and the like.  We're looking for that seamless integration.

Stability has been good. There were some issues where we didn't have it scaled out properly, initially. But once we got a handle on that, because of the size of our environment - how to have it handle that much information coming at it - it became stable and has been since.

Scalability has been pretty easy. You just add additional worker nodes into the environment. It has not been a problem for us.

We have had to use technical support extensively. We had a pretty significant engagement to stand up the product and we've been using support as needed to understand certain metrics better and the things that we should be looking at. There's such a breadth of information in there that we needed some help trying to boil it down.

We did see a big change in that with the latest release, not dumbing it down, but consolidating some of the data that you're getting into a little bit more of a consumable format. It is easier to make sense of it without having to drill too far into the weeds.

Be prepared to get it spun up quickly but, to really get the value out of the product, I'm not saying you have to dedicate resources to it, just give it a little care. Don't just make it a shelfware product where you install and use it for one very small thing. It's a powerful product but you do need some expertise and some time and effort spent to actually drive value out of it.

When selecting a vendor, what's important to me is commitment to the customer in terms of supportability and to be with me when I do have issues. I want them to work with me to troubleshoot and understand that it's not always about the price, it's not always about the name, it's about how they react when things aren't going well.

Because of the early struggles we had, I would go with an eight out of ten for vROps at this point. Again, a lot of those things were just figuring out how much infrastructure it needed, to perform in our size of environment.

We're trying to use it for automation purposes, the automation of the process of consolidating hardware. We've had it installed for about 18 months and there's so much more we know it can do, but it's doing everything we know how to do with it right now.

The new features in v6.7 are going to bring a lot of our use case to fruition for us. Right now, we just don't have enough insider training to make that a reality. That was one of the reasons for coming here, to VMworld 2018: To improve our knowledge and figure out exactly what we could do with it. The sky's the limit now. Everything I see in 6.7, we're so looking forward to using it.

There was a course today on optimization and it was absolutely fantastic because everything that we want to do, using tags for SQL licenses and optimizing the hosts; for tiering - we have tier-1 servers, tier-2 servers, and test - so to be able to organize those and keep them on the host that they're supposed to be on, goes a long way. We have a very, I won't say untrained staff, but a young staff and to automate this process so that they can't make the mistakes - or if they make a mistake - it goes a long way towards helping with that.

What we've taken from VMworld is going to help us to push it to the next level.

We can also see things happening before the users do, which is huge. There's nothing worse than getting 50 tickets from the user community and you didn't even know that something was going on. If we start getting the alerts because we've got SLAs and the like on CPU and memory and disk I/O, those are already in place. Now, we know before the users.

Its most valuable features are the automation and the preventive nature that's built into it. For example, for the younger techs who are doing things in vCenter, you can change their security so they can only do certain things, but that doesn't negate them from migrating a production server into test, while keeping them from doing something that they just shouldn't do, storage-wise or CPU-wise. We all make that mistake of, "Oh, I'm going to just give this server 20 CPU," and then all of a sudden you have no resources on your host. This prevents that.

You put the rules in place. You take all of vCenter's built-in items and you've got one pane of glass for the policies: DRS policies, SRM policies, all of those things work well with vROps.

We're on the 6.0 version, so it does lack a little bit of that intuitiveness. You have to have some experience with VMware to get around inside of it. That's one of the reasons that I've loved what I've seen so far with 6.7. We've already downloaded the installation remotely and we're just waiting to get back home so that we can actually do our upgrade. That's the first thing we're doing Monday is upgrading to 6.7.

Stability - never an issue. We haven't had any problems at all.

Regarding scalability, it has done everything for us. Our first install of operations was with about 20 blades and we're now up over 100. It has grown with us. We add licenses, it takes on the new logs and everything else that it needs to. We can go in within a couple days and we already see the benefits of adding those additional hosts. The user interface shows us the information we want to see from them in the dashboards.

We have not used vROps technical support, but VMware support has been top-notch. Any time we call, they take care of it. They take ownership, which is great.

We didn't have anything in place, we were just vCenter. But with vCenter, you don't get the alarms and alerts in an intuitive fashion and you don't have the organization that you have with vROps. It goes a long way with that one pane of glass.

It has provided us some cost savings for the high-capacity and our ability to manage that. We haven't seen the benefits for the users because we don't have enough experience yet. And I think that's what 6.7 is going to allow us to take to the next level.

Across all of our clusters from test through tier-1 and tier-2, we were way over-provisioned. We weren't taking on the features of over-committing and things along those lines, so I went from 45 blades or 45 hosts, down to 35, and I was able to just shut the other 10 off. When it came time for a hardware refresh, I no longer needed those 10, I no longer needed to get support on those 10. Ten blades at $20,000 a piece, that's a $200,000 savings. In its simplest form, that's huge, especially in the healthcare industry, where they're constantly chopping our budgets. So that $200,000 in the course of 18 months helped me.

Install and do an evaluation and you'll be looking for licensing within a few days of your installation. It won't take the whole 30 days to figure it out.

My rating of eight out of 10 is strictly the result of my own experience with version 6.0. If I had to do rate version 6.7 - and I don't even have it installed - I would probably give it a 10.