VMware Aria Operations Reviews

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.

Our primary use case for vROps is enabling operational efficiency in the data center from a support perspective. We use it to diagnose problems and look for proactive signs of failure. This makes a big difference on the troubleshooting side.

It's definitely improved the organization by increasing the efficiency in which we can diagnose issues. If a customer were to call in reporting a problem, we've probably already noticed it in vROps and are actually working on resolving it.

It has made a big difference in the time to troubleshoot. It's significantly reduced it. 

As a cloud provider, some of the reports which are available in vRealize Operations enable us to be a partner to the customer and show them there are some workloads which are over-provisioned. While that might mean scaling back some resources, ultimately, it means a better experience for the customer.

The most valuable features for us are some of the trending and analysis on workloads. It doesn't just look to see if something is maximized at 100%. It figures out what the normal is for the application, so it's not just if something is maxed out and causing a problem, but if something is higher than normal or running outside of its normal range. This helps us to identify something that other products might not necessarily note as an issue.

vROps is more user-friendly than some other products that we've seen on the market. It was very easy for our technicians to pick up. The search functionality works well. It makes it easy for our technicians to get down to a workload that they're possibly having an issue with.

If I had to think of one thing that could be improved, I would probably lean towards making it easier to pull dashboards from vRealize Operations into other products (maybe outside of it), like a company-branded dashboard that would display in a NOC. 

The stability in vRealize has been great. We've had no outages nor impacts. The upgrade process has been great so far.

We have 11 data centers. We utilize vRealize Operations at all our data centers. We've really scaled it out. We're at around 16,000 active VMs reporting into vRealize. We've had no scalability issues.

We've used tech support from VMware for pretty much all their products. The vRealize Operations support experience has been pretty good. 

Probably the big one that a lot of people would compare to vROps is Veeam ONE. We looked at Veeam ONE among other products and found that the level of metrics that we got out of vRealize Operations, because it comes from VMware, were pretty much second to none. 

It's a nine out of ten. There's always room for improvement with any product, but it's a solid solution. 

vRealize is easy to stand up. It's very easy to point at your workload. It's not going to be impacting. Put it up there. Take a look at it. Point it at your infrastructure and just see what comes out. I think you'll be surprised.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: As a cloud provider, we have a dedicated team that goes through and evaluates new products. It's what we do day in, day out, and we have a fairly lengthy evaluation process that goes in. We look at everything from the support of the product provided by the vendor, the patching process, the upgrade process, and their roadmap. We really go through every facet of the product to make sure that it's going to be a good fit for our organization before we consider putting it into production.

We use it to monitor our virtualized infrastructure.

So far we're still in the early stages of using it. We've had it in place for about six months but have only been actively pursuing it for about a month. However, it's giving us better ideas about how to be more proactive in our monitoring, rather than being reactive to issues when they arise.

Before we had this in place, typically an issue would arise and we would have no concrete proof as to why it happened or what happened. Now we can go back and look, historically, and see how it performed previous to the event, and then after the event, and where that correlation to other objects actually existed.

We've used it a number of times now when we've had major events occur.

It provides insights that we otherwise wouldn't have.

It is intuitive.

I'd like to see more out-of-the-box dashboards and less customizing of the environment. The interface could be more streamlined. There are still a lot of old dashboards versus the new UI dashboards.

We've had no issue with downtime of the solution.

Scalability has been great.

We have an SE that comes in and is working through a lot of the stuff it does. We don't have a full commitment on money until next year, so right now we own 50 percent of the environment, the other 50 percent is in trial.

Technical support, for what we've needed to use it for, has been great.

We had a number of small-scale monitoring solutions in our environment, but nothing that really tied together what we do, as a whole for our group, which is storage virtualization and the compute side. This product brings all those pieces into one interface and now we can actually correlate data between them.

I've done the initial setup a few times at other companies, so it wasn't too bad. It does have a learning curve to some of the more advanced features.

When I actually did the evaluation there was no shortlist. We had a couple products that were in place and I pushed forward with getting an enterprise solution that captured all the data. We already had this solution halfway in the environment from some other purchases on the Standard edition, so we just built off of that.

We had VMTurbo, and SolarWinds is still in the environment. Cost-wise vROps is probably a little more expensive than the other two products put together, for the advanced piece that we need, where we can do customized dashboards. But the feature set is way more advanced. I think with VMTurbo we were only getting 25 to 30 data points and now we're getting hundreds of data points in the environment.

The best process is to put them all in place, compare the products, and come to the best product that works for your organization. The nice thing about the vROps is that it has all kinds of integration points to all the products that we were using in our environment. So getting all that data into one place and then correlating it together, that was a strong selling point for us.

The only issue we have right now is just time; time to fully use the product. It has a huge number of features and we're using probably 10 percent of them right now.

I rate it a nine out of 10 because it gives us, overall, a really good feel for the environment. I think there is some UI stuff that could be better. They have done that with a lot of the new stuff, but a lot of the old stuff is still there.

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 most common use case for vROps is to monitor infrastructure. Infrastructure includes, for example, your virtual machines. 

If a customer has an on-premises data center, they tend to integrate their adapters with vROps. This means that if there are any issues, alerts, or anything else that goes wrong with the system, vROps will pick it up. 

It will then use an inbuilt algorithm, depending on the events and alert system that you have configured, to trigger an email. This can help you to avoid a lot of problems in the future. 

For example, if there are a few appliances that are being monitored by vROps and their root directory or any other issues are getting beyond thresholds, say 80%, it will automatically trigger an email. If you have any ticketing system integrated with vROps, it will then trigger a severity one or severity two ticket to the respective team so that they are aware that there is something that might go wrong if it is not looked at on time. 

So, it is basically helping customers to avoid those situations where they might get into any issues or trouble. So, it is monitoring your system. 

Another stuff, so it is like if you want to have any visual representation of the data, of the performances, or of the data that has gone through in the last hour, last week, you can create a lot of dashboards on that, which is a visual presentation of the data. 

So, it helps you in a long way to monitor and understand your environment.

One of the things that is really valuable is its ability to help you implement security measures into your organization's standards. It helps you to have full control over more than 90% of the hardware and network infrastructure where you are installing vROps, so that you can have granular control over the infrastructure, which is pretty important these days. 

It's deployed mostly on-premises, but you can deploy it on the cloud as well. So, as most customers today are going for hybrid cloud deployment, they need a tool like vROps to give them a standardized, centralized view to monitor their infrastructure across both on-premises and cloud environments. It provides a single pane of glass to see what is going on across the entire infrastructure. 

vROps is a VMware tool, and most of the applications that our customers are running are virtual machines. So, when you have an infrastructure that mostly uses ESXi hypervisors, vROps really help you to have better control over your infrastructure and what is going on. This can help customers to run their day-to-day operations more smoothly. 

Moreover, in the older days, we used to perform health checks and other stuff manually. vROps automates a lot of these tasks, which lowers the burden on the operations team so that they don't have to worry about keeping an eye on each and every sort of thing. Even in the off business hours, when no one is there to take care of any stuff, vROps is still monitoring all of the data, appliances, and everything else. This helps them out in a big way.

The first area of improvement is cost. VMware licensing is always a bit costly. It has never been an open-source tool or something like that. So there are costs associated with that. 

Another thing is that you somehow need to have high-end people to perform the integrations with vROps as well. It's not as easy as it seems to deploy and integrate it with the different systems you want to monitor. 

It is user-friendly, but everything needs some specific skill sets. For example, if you go for even vRealize Automation, it comes as a bundle. So vROps is just one part of vRealize Automation suite. So, we need to know the product before we can start deploying it or start using it. We need to have people who have experience with specific tools before we can use them in our day-to-day operations.

So, for me, based on my experience, costing is one thing, and then there are the integration challenges that our company faces. And along with that, it does take up a bit of resources as well. It is resource-intensive.

I have not been using it directly because I work as an architect. Whenever there is a project for customers using vRealize Operations in their environment, we are the ones who have been designing the infrastructure with respect to vROps. 

So it has been around 12 months or more that I've been associated with projects where I have been helping customers deploy vROps and how to make proper use of this tool.

The stability of vROps depends on the environment that you are using it in. vROps comes as a suite, and when you're using it with other VMware products, such as vRealize Automation (vRA), vRealize Network Insight (VRNI), and VMware Cloud Foundation modules, it is already compatible with those products and is generally pretty stable. 

For example, when you are using it for virtualized workloads or VMware Virtual Desktop, it's very stable.

It is a scalable solution. You can scale it up depending on your configuration setup. 

There are different options for scaling, such as multi-node setups and collector setups. If you need to collect more information from different tools, you can simply add a collector to your environment. 

vROps is a good choice in terms of scalability. Even when you scale it up, it's not a big hassle to put more load into the system.

As an architect, we mostly design vROps implementations. The day-to-day operations are typically the ones that reach out to the support team. So, the support is mainly for people who are managed in the customer environment. 

We provide guidance on which integrations or adapters to use, and how to get the endpoint systems integrated with vROps. But when it comes to support, it's a matter of cost. VMware offers different levels of support, and the enterprise level of support is quite expensive.

If you're looking for a higher level of support, then it comes with a cost.

When I started working with vROps three years ago, the company mostly used vROps. When I joined, I started with the vRealize Suite. And they have different types of monitors. For example, there are different tools for different monitoring purposes. Like, for security, they'll have different tools for log monitoring.

We use vRealize Operations. We use vRealize Automation (vRA). We use VMware Cloud Foundation. That's vCS. And then, we have been using vRealize Network Insight. Then, we have been using Cisco Insight or Cisco FlashStack. These are the few software that I've been working on in the last twelve months. So, different teams will have different tools which are being used.

The initial setup is quite easy and straightforward.  The majority of the time, implementing vROps is not time-consuming. 

However, if you are migrating from one vROps version to another, you may need to take care of a few things, such as downloading the new configuration and other necessary changes. But overall,  vROps implementation is pretty simple.

So, besides the license overall, you have to pay for the type of support you want. With the license, there is a support cost as well.

Typically, people don't just purchase vROps individually. It's usually part of a larger suite, like the vRealize Suite, which is expensive. So, the suite includes vROps along with other software. 

If a company purchases vCloud Foundation (vCF) or vRealize Suite, vROps comes with it. vCF and the vRealize Suite have been acquired or purchased by large customers who have the financial resources to support the licensing costs. 

For example, I've seen many banking sectors using vROps when they purchase vCS. Recently, I worked on a design for a major European bank, and they were using the entire suite. 

So, no one really goes for the individual product because its value is significantly higher when it's part of the suite. So, there are many customers who use it, but the number of people who use it within a team depends on the company. For example, service-based companies that support multiple customers may have different needs based on the number of customers they support. They may train or onboard more resources to use vROps, depending on their requirements.

The main reason my company goes with VCS is that they already have a current VMware setup. When people go with the VCS suite itself, suppose you have a VMware virtualized network and VMware workloads running on one platform. 

For the network, you may be using different switches, and for storage, you may be using different SANs. So, with this approach, you have to pay different vendors because you're not relying on the same vendor for everything. 

And whenever something goes wrong, you have to open different tickets, which can be costly and time-consuming. So, people go for VCS mostly because they are getting everything in one single setup.

VMware has your networking, your virtualization, vSAN storage, vRealize Automation for automating workloads, vROps for monitoring, and VRNI for monitoring specific networks. So, it comes as a bundle, and it's pretty easy for companies to know that if they buy everything from the same vendor, it streamlines their processes. 

It also leads to operational efficiency because they are dealing with one vendor. And then, when you have two different products bundled in a suite from the same vendor, compatibility is never an issue. That's one of the main things. Because if you have different vendors and products, there is always uncertainty about whether upgrading one product will be compatible with another product from a different vendor. 

And if we look at what VMware has done recently, every year they have validated design guides. So, through that, we'll have everything within that guide, which one is compatible with which, which doesn't work with which, and if there are any limitations with any releases. So, we get everything in one suite. 

So, that's the reason most people go with them because they can foresee their future development in terms of hardware, in terms of their workload, or in terms of their business.

First of all, I would always suggest you go for vROps initially and always go for a temporary trial license. That way, you can check your VMware or any workload stuff you have, how your trial license works, and how it works with your production environment. If you have any workloads that you're going to manage through vROps, always go for a trial license first. Don't straight away go with the production license.

Also, always try to use different workloads, different metrics, and different configurations. This is because it also depends on the specific data center you have and the different products you're using. Ensure you are trying to integrate or get the alert generated for most of the products you are trying to integrate with vROps. A POC (Proof of Concept) kind of thing is always required before you go for the production license.

During the trial period, you can see how your dashboard looks, how the alert system is working, if it's not working, and if it's really meeting your security considerations as well. So, these are the things before you fully decide to go for the production license. Always take a trial license integrated with your current setup, which you have appliances and tests on, before you even decide to go ahead with it.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. The reason is that there are many new advancements coming into the market that are AI-enabled. VMware really needs to do more when it comes to preventing alerts. For example, many security tools use algorithms to detect alerts and give you a whole scenario of the reports that show how you can prevent this action from repeating again. These are a few things they absolutely need to work on more.

Also, security has been a boom for companies in the last few years, and considering how important security is, there have been a lot of tools that do the rating. So, it is more integration-friendly if the current tool can be used for any integrations in any environment, which is something VMware is not yet that efficient at. But I would still give it an eight because most of the workloads currently being used are virtualized ones, VMware workloads. For them, it's perfect.

We have been able to use vROps to optimize our environment and do right-sizing for most of our VMs. vROps has also been able to help us in regards to forecasting and adware procurement. Therefore, we can see our utilization in the next six months and how we have been trending.

The company is multinational. We are still running on-premise with a plan of moving to the public cloud. At the end of the day, it will probably be a hybrid environment.

When it comes to apps and infrastructure, it provides us with valuable insights. 

It has been helpful around capacity planning, which we traditionally did on a yearly basis. However, since last year, I started using vROps to reclaim and save more resources. It has been helpful along those lines.

In the next six months, vROps will hopefully give me an accurate forecast. Also, it will be able to look at my environment and prove some vendor requirements wrong. 

The dashboards are interesting. We have been able to use the dashboard to monitor the environment. There is also a newer feature where we can share dashboards with people. We don't necessarily have to give them access to vROps. That has been great.

The optimization and performance are helpful.

If I could integrate with vCenter with vROps, then I could execute more things by managing vSphere from within vROps. That would be great.

I have been using vROps for about a year. We got the license last year, but it could not be deployed until later in the year. 

It is a stable solution.

vROps has helped decrease downtime by 80 percent because it gives me a lot of visibility into my environment. With its performance optimization, we have been able to see things happening ahead of time. It also works concurrently with some other monitoring tools. For example, I am also using VMware Skyline, which has helped to drastically reduce downtime. 

I haven't had any downtime this year.

If I see the infrastructure grow enough, then I will scale up.

I am the only one using vROps within the organization.

The VMware technical support is helpful.

Before now, we did not really have a tool for capacity planning. This is the first tool that we have used. It has been great.

The initial setup was straightforward. The documentation is online, so I was able to deploy it before the training. The deployment took me three weeks. 

We don't have a test environment, so everything that I deploy has to go straight to production. However, when deploying vROps, I knew that it would not break service nor cost me downtime, so I decided to give it a shot.

I did the deployment. Going through the documentation, I was able to get different options, picking the one that suits my environment.

If you are not that familiar with the deployment and how to do it correctly, then you may need an expert's advice or intervention at some point in time. You should be able to find your way around 75 percent of vROps. Overall, the solution has been great for someone who is technical.

Make sure you get the right advice and documentation for the deployment. So, if a person or customer is unable to deploy on vROps, then they should get the right expert to assist them with the deployment. Because if you have the wrong deployment, then that might put you in a mess and you might not get the value from vROps. If you are going to implement the solution, do it the right way.

At the moment, I am the only person managing vROps.

It is worth its cost. With VMware, you always get your value for your money. 

vROps has saved us a lot because it has reduced our procurement costs. Usually, we would have a rise in procurement costs at the beginning of the first quarter. We haven't seen that going into 2021.

The solution has a huge cost. If we could just have one license covering everything that vROps can do, that would be great. I would prefer it this way.

We need a separate license for vRealize Log Insight, which has not been integrated. However, it's something I'm looking forward to using.

We did not look at any of their competitors.

We are still running vROps in parallel with some products that we are currently using. However, I am seeing the opportunity for it to take over from our other tools in the future.

From what I have read, it is a great tool that you can use across multiple clouds.

We are planning on implementing VMware's Tanzu solution along with vROps for Kubernetes monitoring/management in Q1 2020. I am currently familiarizing myself with it because I know it's something that I will be deploying pretty soon.

I would rate this solution as a nine 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.

• Reports
• Dashboards
• Email notifications
• Health, risks, efficiency badges
• Troubleshooting capabilities
• Auto rotation feature of dashboards for NOC displays

• With the use of dashboards, we can provide Business Units and customers a certain level of self-control over their virtual environments.
• Access can be restricted to only objects relevant for certain users/administrators.
• With the combination of email notifications of health issues and upcoming risks, administrators and engineers can respond in a preventive way instead of reacting after issues.
• The network administrators and engineers can monitor all NSX components with this product.
• The storage administrators and engineers can monitor physical storage components with this product.

Improvement can be achieved in reports automation when creating custom environments and dashboards.

It would be very useful and time saving if this could be included in the process of creating dashboards to generate a report based on the created dashboard. Also it would be handy if it would be possible to export all snapshot images in one click action.

We have been using the system for about 18 months now. We have just upgraded to 6.2 this month.

We have not yet encountered any stability issues.

Unfortunately, we encountered a limitation in version 6.2. In this version it is not possible to import data from another Operations Manager instance already running. The workaround is to first import on version 6.0 and then upgrade that instance to 6.2.

Technical support is good. Inside the vRealize Operations Manager in each section there is a direct link to the document center of VMWare containing technical documentation, and tutorials for that particular section.

We did use other solutions and still do. Especially certain hardware equipment needs to be monitored in an other way or is not yet supported in vRealize Operations Manager.
The reasons we chose this product are:

• Licensing model is the best choice for the way we provide services to our customers.
• Our virtualization platform is VMWare and we are implementing more components (currently LogInsight) to complete our Software Defined Datacenter.
• vRealize Operations Manager can easily integrate with all these components.

I would advise to make a design before starting actual setup.
A few examples of design considerations:

• More than one vCenter to monitor.
• Need for high availability.
• Need to migrate historical data from previous version.

The initial setup is very straightforward and relatively easy. Depending on design you can have certain choices during installation to fit your needs.

There are different versions and licensing models available.
I would advise to read this pdf: https://www.vmware.com/content.

We also considered Veeam One. Our choice for the VMWare SDDC is the best product for us.

Before purchasing this product, I would advise to install the 60-day trial (http://www.vmware.com/try-vmware.html) in a test environment and see if this is a fit for the organization as well as the administrators and engineers. In my opinion the way vRealize operations manager operates (and will be used) is different to most traditional monitoring solutions.