VMware RabbitMQ Reviews

My company runs on high availability. It is known for high accuracy in its items that are being shipped.

To do this, drivers/vendors who are shipping these items have to send their location details frequently to the server to update their current location. It all depends on accuracy.

Based on this, the end user can plan to receive shipping items on his end. We wanted a JMS tool that can create 'queues' on the fly and pass messages from one system to another.

• Queues and topics
• Native cloud app support
• Light-weight
• Easy maintenance
• Simple and straightforward admin portals: Made it easy for users and worked out excellently for our requirements

The solution needs improvement on performance.

It was stable enough to process our requests.

We were able to operate multiple nodes and we implemented a load balancer to meet our high traffic requirements.

We have never needed technical support. It was all there in the API documents provided by RabbitMQ and there are numerous blogs available on internet.

We analyzed our requirement thoroughly and were sure that RabbitMQ was the solution for us. We didn’t look at anything else.

It was bundled with PCF, so it was never a problem for us.

Again, it was part of PCF bundle, so that was never a worry for us.

This is a great product. It is lightweight, supports cloud native applications, is easy to implement, is easily manageable, and has excellent support. I would say, just go for it!

We're using this as our central messaging bus. It drives our micro-service architecture.

• Great management UI: The best in its class of messaging products
• Very sophisticated routing control and priority messaging capabilities

• The product should have much better scaling and scalability capabilities. Currently, they're really falling behind some of the competitors such as Kafka and NSQ.
• The installation of the HA version and clustering mechanism should be made much easier.
• The fact that a single queue can't be distributed across multiple instances/nodes is a major disadvantage.

We had multiple issues with stability. The product tends to be highly unstable when under heavy loads.

We had multiple issues with scalability. The product's scalability is rather problematic. It tends to be very complex to maintain with various sharding and high availability options.

I have never used technical support.

We tested some earlier version of Apache Kafka, but it wasn't stable enough at the time. At the moment, we're considering switching back to Apache Kafka.

The non-sharded/clustered setup is very easy and straightforward. The clustered solution setup is much more complicated.

We have only used the open source version.

We evaluated Apache Kafka, NSQ, and ActiveMQ.

Check the scaling issues. If scale is not an issue and you're just looking for a stable messaging queue, I would highly suggest it.

If scale is an issue, I would suggest using Apache Kafka.

We use this product for general purpose messaging in cloud-based environments and as an implementation to MTP spec. We are customers of VMware and I'm a senior technical consultant.

One of the key benefits for us has been the ability to use this solution for microservice architecture communications because it provides great flexibility. One of our clients was able to push messages from the source which were replicated and forwarded to all the other brokers nationwide. Everyone who needed it, received it, and it's very cost-effective. 

The high availability and not having to replicate is valuable as is the message consumer. It can be configured depending on the use case to be a very fast message broker. I like the stability, the built-in admin tools and the plugin architecture. One of the things that makes it unique is that all of the components for messaging can be created programmatically, meaning you can have services or applications that get spun up or have auto incrementing instances. If you're in an elastic environment, you don't have to pre-configure the messaging system and the keys don't have to be known ahead of time. 

One of the issues is that as soon as you go outside of a switch or not in IP address range, the clustering no longer has all the wonderful features so clustering outside of network boundaries is a problem. I'd like to see stream processing as an additional feature. Kafka has a streaming API and I'd like Rabbit to have that too.

I've been using this solution for nine years. 

This solution is very stable, no problems there. 

This solution is very scalable and the number of users really depends on the organization. 

Technical support is good, very good. But because the underlying implementation technology is Erlang, sometimes the technical problems are at that level, in which case there's one major technical solution provider called Erlang Solutions. They're okay but if the problem goes past the product level and into the technology level, then there can be a delay in getting support because you're dealing with two companies and two technical support services. 

These days the initial setup is moderately complex because it uses a technology that is worldwide, Erlang, which is obscure. You have to install Erlang first and that is moderately difficult. Deployment takes about a day. 

They use a credit based system for licensingwhere you purchase credits. People don't like it.

My advice would be to have the messaging topology mapped out before you deploy to make the process from installation to a functioning solution more efficient. If you start looking at the topology from the revenue perspective, it usually ends up with more iterations to implement the correct topology, whereas if you start off mapping and then install, it's a more efficient way to go about it. 

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

I primarily use the solution for research purposes. I've utilized it for my academic studies for comparing HTTPS protocols. RabbitMQ supported the protocols I needed and I've read also that it's one of the most commonly used broker services.

The solution has really cool features to use. Its management console is excellent. You can utilize plugins to view the performance of the whole service on one network. It's wonderful. I really like it.

I was struggling with installing a few things. It would be good if was somewhat similar to RedHat. There should be more documentation regarding installation troubleshooting.

It's pretty straightforward, the setup, but it would be useful to know what to do if you do face certain challenges. Right now, without more in-depth documentation, it's unclear.

I've been using the solution for about one or two months. It's rather new to me.

The solution is very stable, from what I've witnessed so far. It's also a very fast system.

I haven't scaled the solution myself, so I can't speak from personal experience. I have heard that the solution is not so simple to scale because there is a core node beside the solution. There's some sort of smoothing methodology when it comes to the messaging, so I assume it's not so simple.

I've never contacted technical support for assistance.

The initial setup was simple. The first time I installed it, I installed it on Windows. For me, it took about one hour. If a user was facing a few problems, I'd say it could take up to two hours. Typically it's pretty quick to set up because the recommendations are pretty good.

I handled the initial setup myself.

I was considering using ActiveMQ on AWS, but after some research, I decided RabbitMO was a more complex solution and one that is more commonly used, so I chose RabbitMQ over it.

I'm only really using the solution for the purposes of research. I've just installed and am working on the latest version. My interest in the solution is purely academic, so I can't speak to how it would function within an organization.

I'd definitely recommend the solution, especially over HTTP in the Nico services platform. I've done my research and have discovered it's two times faster and more commonly used. It's also really easy to use on the Nico services platform because all of the components are in the cloud.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

The most valuable feature of RabbitMQ is the ability to set up workflows simply with configuration. We had some very complex problems (logging, auditing, sequential and parallel operations) that have been easily solved by inserting a queue in the middle of an existing workflow.

Our software has evolved dramatically over the past 18 months of development.

Major modifications to business logic have been handled easily. This is because each operation that the software performs has been atomic. That was then wired up with other operations via RabbitMQ exchanges/queues,

• RabbitMQ is great, but it depends on the Erlang VM.
• I understand that Erlang is the reason why RabbitMQ is what it is. However, having to install and maintain yet another VM product has been annoying.
• The configuration for RabbitMQ borders on the esoteric. Once we got all of the moving parts working, it’s been a dream. However, it was an effort just to get it going.

We’ve been developing with RabbitMQ for about 18 months now. Our product launch is scheduled for April 1, 2017.

There were stability issues. We originally tried to mirror RabbitMQ servers behind a load balancer. (This is not completely recommended, by the way.)

That suffered from stability issues when network hiccups were a problem.

We ended up moving to a central LDAP authentication with completely disconnected servers, which has been stellar for stability.

We have had no scalability issues at all. We have RabbitMQ servers behind a load balancer, with Queue listeners attached to them.

I have estimated that we will be able to scale quite dramatically without any change to network topology.

RabbitMQ is an open-source project, so the level of tech support is relatively low. The documentation is adequate. There is a decent amount of activity on Stack Overflow and that has answered most of my questions.

I did actually use an open-source plugin and had a lot of communication with the developer. He was responsive and helped me significantly.

Our initial solution was a simple web API. We quickly realized that it would be difficult to maintain.

Scalability and reliability were my primary concerns. HTTP has no reliable delivery built-in, like AMQP does. Changing API versions would have been more difficult if we had stuck with HTTP.

The initial setup was fairly complex. Installation was not difficult, but configuration of the server itself took some work.

I ended up creating code that does the RabbitMQ setup based on a configuration file. This eased the setup dramatically. I also set up a central LDAP server for authentication, which helped. Otherwise, configuration of RabbitMQ was not very straightforward.

Being free and open-source, I have no advice here! Free is a good price!

I looked at other service bus/message queue solutions. In particular, I investigated:

• Azure’s Queue Storage: No real service bus ability without plugins
• AWS’s Simple Notification Service: Not much in the way of service bus capability. It did not allow private queues on the fly.
• A few other open-source message brokers

RabbitMQ seemed the most full-featured option for what we needed.

By all means, try to reduce the amount of up-front configuration of RabbitMQ as much as possible.

At this point, we can spin up a very generic VM with RabbitMQ on it and get it in use immediately. However, that was not the case at the beginning.

RabbitMQ is very flexible, which is good and bad. Once the flexibility is understood, it’s great. Before that, you may be in for a little bit of head-scratching.

We use RabbitMQ for tasks that need to communicate in real-time. I have used it as a microservices message broker.

The most valuable feature is that it's really customizable.

When you have simple tasks, it is easy to use.

When you have complex tasks, RabbitMQ is hard to use.

There are several things that you have to do manually, so there should be better tools for that.

I began working with RabbitMQ several years ago.

I have had no issues with stability. It has been perfect.

Scalability is not a problem.

Because we are using the open-source version, we do not use technical support and have been solving problems on our own.

The complexity of the setup depends on the scope of the implementation. For a single node, the initial setup is very easy. On the other hand, for setting up RabbitMQ with a cluster, you really have to know what you're doing.

We are using the open-source version, which can be used free of cost.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to learn the concept of message queuing and study the AMQP 0-9-1 protocol. If you study this then you won't have any problem learning the system and working with it.

In summary, this is a good product that I will continue to use, and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

It allows for asynchronous development and horizontal scalability.

The queuing system is the most valuable feature. It meets our requirements.

After creating a RabbitMQ service, they provide you with a sort of web management dashboard.

The dashboard allows you see things on your queues, purge/delete queues, etc. The dashboard is pseudo-real time, refreshing every N secs/mins, specified with a drop down.

I’d like this dashboard to use web sockets, so it would actually be in real time. It would slightly increase debugging, etc.

We have not had stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues.

We never used technical support.

We did not have a previous solution.

The setup was straightforward. We are implementing using Node.js and the module we are using was easy to use.

I am not the one in charge of licenses and pricing, so I do not know anything about this.

We didn’t have any alternatives. Our company has a contract with PCF, so it was our only option.

For Node.js development, use amqplib. It’s a really good library for RabbitMQ.

Guaranteed message delivery, queuing, and low latency delivery.

This allowed us to create a resilient network and independently scale various parts of the system dynamically as the business needs changed.

The biggest area we struggled with was operations troubleshooting. We were running a pretty big cluster and ended up with some random cluster failures that were difficult to troubleshoot. A good portion of these were self inflicted but occasionally the distributed database would end up corrupted.

I have been using RabbitMQ for six years, from prototype to production.

We had a bit of an issue with stability. The usual initial cause would be a hiccup in IOPS in EC2 but then this would cascade into more instability in our main clusters.

For the most part the product was very scalable. The only times we would have problems were usually related to Amazon hiccups that would cause the cluster to slow down.

We did not use their technical support much.

We evaluated a variety of message products and found that for the feature set RabbitMQ was the best.

Initial setup was relatively simple and then we were able to grow into the product by using more of the features.

We used the open source implementation and did not need to pay for support.

We looked at ZeroMQ, Kafka and Redis.

You really need to have or train Erlang expertise. The Erlang tools will become the best way to troubleshoot misbehaving clusters.