There's lots of whitepapers out there and installation guides. They also offer installation services for you. I highly recommend having them by your side to do it or else you'll be missing out on a couple things.

No, it's a very simple installation with OFV available from VMware.

No issues encountered.

No pretty straight forward deployment via OVA wizard roll-out to get the x2 appliances up and running on the network. From there, it's just a matter of configuring the remainder of the software to talk to your IT infrastructure via the ops manager web console interface. This includes adding your Virtual and Physical hardware that you want to include for monitoring and analytics.

Lots of coffee and lots of donuts.

Just a thorough plan, which definitely needs to be had in making a deployment like this.

Make sure your environment is scaled correctly. That it can handle whatever specifications are needed in your environment before you go and deploy it.

It's an easy appliance to deploy.

It was all over the place. I think VMware and our Technical Account Manager (TAM) were a big help.

The initial issue was we downloaded it, then installed it ourselves. We didn't really talk to anybody. We probably should have kept tabs with the people who know the product from VMware.

You can change versions of vSphere, but you'll also need to upgrade your product. There were a few times where we actually had to start all over collecting more data. It's one of those tools where it needs to be running for a while. It collects a lot of the analytics before you can actually start using the information it's providing you. There were a few times where we had to start over. We just couldn't do an upgrade and take the data forward.

I have deployed it at least 10 times from scratch and upgraded it many times. I have had zero problems!

No

No, it’s an OVA and is now only one machine so it’s very simple to deploy.

Read the documentation first before trying to deploy solution.

Get all of your access roles enabled so that you can use them in both places.

Recommendation to anyone implementing and deploying this solution: Review the sizing guidelines, then deploy from that using the best practice guides provided.

I wish the documentation was better for the solution. When we first deployed it, there were very few resources online. That's why we don't use it that much.