I advise others to buy the solution only if they have a large environment and multiple clusters. It is not a beneficial investment for small businesses. I rate the solution as a seven.

I would rate it eight out of ten.

VMware Aria Operations is deployed on the cloud in our organization. If users have a valid case, they should go for the solution. Users need to pay more if they go for the premium support.

The solution's integration with other tools is good. Sometimes, we need to connect the solution with different tools, and all the tools are easily integrable.

Overall, I rate VMware Aria Operations ten out of ten.

VMware Aria Operations has many hands-on plug-ins that can help you monitor all the elements in your infrastructure, such as storage, networks, and more, beyond VMware infrastructure itself.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I've mostly used VMware vRealize Operations (vROps).

My rating for VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is seven out of ten.

My advice to others who want to start using VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is to use its full capability. It doesn't just do analytics and cost optimizations. It can do a whole lot more. You should use it in depth and try to integrate it into other IT processes. For example, my company only used a third of the full capability of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) over the time I was on the team. I would recommend it to anyone, specifically to explore what it can do and then work out how it can benefit you. People should also pay attention to scale as well, because the bigger your estate, the more instances you will need to sustain that scale. Just pay attention to upgrading VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) as well because that's also a journey to upgrade instances, in particular maintenance and lifecycle management.

My previous company had a partnership with VMware. It had an enterprise license agreement, which means it was getting different services and different products from VMware.

Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. There is only one area of improvement for me.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

If you're going to go full VMware, then the compatibility is there. If you're going to have multiple, different versions of systems, then you could run into some issues. There are other products out there depending on the size of your environment.
We were at the top. We were originally using AWS, which I still don't like because they charge you for everything. I used the multi-cloud and that caused some issues. We carry out a lot of testing, so we look at how well the solution performs with Google, Azure, and AWS. It seems to work better in AWS than most other providers, the problem was that I was trying to make it work with so many different versions.

If you have an enterprise-level environment or work in a large-scale data center, I would definitely recommend using vROps. It helps a lot with resource management as well as understanding the congestion and bottlenecks of virtualized environments. It is the number one solution for monitoring virtualized environments, especially if you are using VMware.

Generally, it is a very comprehensive, good product.

The user-friendliness of the UI is really good. It is better every year. I haven't used a previous version of vROps. I have only used version 8. I saw some screenshots of the UI before, and this version is much better. 

With the integration with vRealize Log Insight, we were able to view logs in one dashboard. So, we were not going back and forth to vRealize Log Insight. It improved the performance and efficiency of personnel, like myself, to better troubleshoot problems.

Right now, we don't have any performance issues, especially with the help of vROps. We have more of a lack of resources for future projects.

In the future, we might use the vendor’s Tanzu solution along with vROps for Kubernetes monitoring or management.

I would give vROps a nine out of 10.

I would rate it overall an eight out of ten. 

It's a stable product and is recognized worldwide. It is much more expensive than other products, but it is stable. Therefore, I would rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.

I rate VMware VROps nine out of 10. It's an excellent product for monitoring a VMware virtual environment.

It is a cloud-friendly application. Compared to other platforms, it is more stable, scalable, and easy to configure and deploy.

I rate it a nine out of ten, leaving one mark for more improvements or enhancements.

The solution is a little bit complicated to use at the beginning. When you get how it works, it is simple. You can easily make or use dashboards, notifications, and alarms.

vROps capacity allocation and management has helped us save on hardware costs, unneeded licenses, power, or other data center costs. It is not the only solution or system that we use for these purposes, but it helps.

I would rate this solution as an eight out of 10.

My advice would be to look at it holistically, meaning look at what you want to achieve in the final endgame. Also, evaluate a couple of products to get a feel for them and which product suits you. In addition, create roles within your company, because this needs dedicated attention when you implement it and attention to sustain it. There should also be alignment with an application team or leadership team when implementing this kind of solution.

I rate VMware vRealize Operations very highly because it gives you multiple features such as compliance, agility, and staying hybrid, although if you want you can do it on-prem or on the cloud. I would recommend it regardless of the deployment, whether it's on-prem or AWS or hybrid.

It is user-friendly, but it definitely requires a little tweaking in the environment when you're doing the installation to set it per your requirements, your infrastructure, and per your expectations. What are you trying to monitor? Once you're done with setting up vROps for your cluster or nodes, then it's very easy to use. It will really help you out to get to the stage of automation for your infrastructure, so you don't need to depend on manual processes at all. 

We are not using Kubernetes or Tanzu as of now, but we are planning to incorporate it down the line, maybe in three to six months.

Overall, I would rate vROps as a nine out of 10. The one point I'm leaving out is because there is room for improvement, as I mentioned earlier.

vROps is a ten out of ten. It's a really good product, I'm excited about it, I like using it. It's also one of those products that I like engaging with on a daily basis. It's easy to use, it's kind of fun and insightful to look at all your different environments and be able to get the answers you need. Honestly, it makes my leadership happy when they see the stuff that I generate out of it. That's always a plus too.

I recommend implementing vROps by first setting up a pilot environment. You need to become a master in vROps to make the best use of its features. If you don't have any experience with a lot of the features provided by vROps, you can't easily use them, and you can't understand the difference between vROps and SolarWinds and other products.

So I would recommend studying it in detail. After that, you can make use of it, because vROps is a bit complex.

I always recommend this solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Brand name
• The vendor's skill set
• The technical support.

I don't think there's anything that's deserves a perfect rating. There's just not, so I'm a little skeptical of that. I could give it a higher rating after I've had a chance to really use it, but right now, we just have not been able to really engage with VMware. I'm probably rating VMware more than I'm rating the product, so the complexity part kind of hurts right now.

I think you've got to go and look at it first. If it just doesn't look like it's going to do what you want it to, then you can look at other places, but you've got to at least talk to them about it, because it's VMware. It does what it's supposed to do. It's geared for this environment and it can also manage and monitor the physical stuff. For me, that's my suggestion.

We are cloud providers. We use the solution as a part of our support for the customers. We should be able to model our requirements and purchase in advance. Modeling would be very useful if our platform is growing. If a customer has a particular amount of CPU, storage, and memory requirements, we'd like to model it and get ahead of the storage availability and CPU memory availability issues. We could also model the upgrades when there is a need for maintenance. Such modeling is very useful to an MSP. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

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.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

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.

I would rate this solution an eight. 

I have seen the demos and what it can provide is fantastic. It more than makes it worth it to use the product. I would rate it between a nine to ten.

I would rate this solution a seven or an eight. We are starting to see the benefits and we are starting to use its recommendations and starting to tweak it down. We still need somebody to look at this data, analyze it, and make decisions. Once some of the automation orchestration goes in, then it will move up again up to a nine or something like that.

Pick something very simple and very intuitive and very efficient for operations. As an engineer, just basically simplify. It's a simplified product and vROps is the product that I would highly suggest and recommend.

In terms of how the product itself has improved, the first one I've seen is the UI, the dashboard, and the intuitiveness of the product, how it works with the web browser, it's very efficient and fast. That's one of the improvements I've seen.

Right now, I strongly feel the product is a solid eight. I haven't got the exposure to the vROps products, I would give it a ten, but the way I feel right now once I feel that it's a solid ten I'll give it.

You'd want the ease of use to be the primary draw to the product. Somebody who is evaluating vROps - when I didn't know anything about it and I was looking at it for the first time - it is very daunting. It's very complex and very confusing and especially, back then, there wasn't really any good training. I would tell a colleague not to try to do it alone. It's worth the effort, but you need to get help, either from your TAM or from somebody else, a colleague of yours who uses the product. Get some guidance because it's a very difficult product to get into and master on your own.

As good as it is, it's not perfect so I would have to rate it a nine out of 10. I would love to see something that I could turn over to a junior administrator who hasn't had my level of involvement with the product and say, "Here you go," and have it be, from a certain perspective, clear enough and intuitive enough for him to at least start getting some information out of it.

Like I said, it's a very complex product and you can get a lot of stuff out of it and I like that, for myself, but it's hard getting other people involved with it when it takes so long to figure out what's going on. I think that the engineers who created it are on the same page as me. As soon as it opens up, I see a wealth of information. But it's very daunting to somebody who is new to the product.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. The solution is good, but administration and growth can be improved.

For us, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor are that we look for a company that's going to support our business cases, that has an established track record of stability, and performance. Someone that's going to stand behind us and support us as we utilize their product. Those things are extremely important as we're evaluating whether to make a purchase.

I rate vRealize Operations as a nine out of 10 today. There are still some areas to improve around the initial user experience. But, the product has improved significantly with the more recent releases.

• Dig into your requirements.
• Put a list together.
• Then, start taking a look at vCOPS, because it's a great product. It most likely will fit your requirements. 

I would highly recommend the product to anybody who is out there. It has saved us a lot of money.

I would give it a nine out of ten. It's an excellent product, but there's always room for improvement. I never give anything a ten.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We usually put together a list of requirements about what we are looking for within the product. One was the extensibility; the ability to kind of have a single pane of glass. This has been one thing which benefited us with vCOPS, as we can snap in almost any other vendor's hardware, whether it be UCS, Dell, or Cisco switches. This was a big requirement for us.

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

For the initial set up, you have to meet the minimum hardware requirement to avoid issues.

I would advise others to start using this because they will not regret it. I would rate this solution and eight out of ten.

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.

My advice is to take a good look at vROps. When you have a big infrastructure with a large volume of instances, monitoring everything in a single dashboard is very difficult, but with this solution, it's pretty easy. It's like a Swiss Army knife. You can troubleshoot and monitor in a single place. It's pretty convenient.

Overall, this is a very good product. We are using lots of VMware technologies, including Log Insights, VMware ESXi, vCenter, and NSX. There were a lot of improvements with version 8. They integrated AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. It is improving day by day. If some of your instances are situated in AWS and some are on Azure, and you have to monitor all the systems in a single place, that's where they're improving on things. Now, they are providing the cloud-provider stuff.

We are planning to deploy Kubernetes in our data centers, because Kubernetes is a very new technology, but in our country it is not that popular yet. We will look at integrating that kind of offering later.

Previously we integrated this solution with vRealize Log Insight as a trial. But later on, we stopped using vRealize Log Insight because we were using Splunk for analytics. vRealize Log Insight is a different product. When you have a lot of stuff in your data center and you need to archive and manipulate things, you need to use different tools. vRealize Log Insight is not useful for our use case.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to size the environment very well. This is the first analysis that we do; we look at how big the environment is that we want to monitor and how many objects will be there, and compare this to the VMware sizing guide. You really have to analyze that and size your environment well because if it is done properly then it will give you a lot of value in monitoring.

Overall, this is a good monitoring tool and I think it's the best one for me. That said, there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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

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

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

I would definitely encourage colleagues to look at vRealize Operations. I would tell them the experience I have had with it and help them see the differences, how vRealize Operations works with other components, depending on how they are using VMware. I would strongly recommend it.

I would rate this solution at nine out of 10 because there is nothing negative about it but I would, again, like to see it able to collect more metrics on things outside my virtual center.

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.

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

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

I recommend others use the solution and rate it as a nine.

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

I rate VMware vRealize Operations an eight out of ten.

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.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

I would recommend the solution to others.

My advice for anybody who is implementing vROps is to first learn how to troubleshoot. If any issue should arise, the first point of contact is L1 and L2. From there, instead of going to vCenter and checking the logs, use vROps. It will allow you to easily find problems and monitor them.

As we are technical people, we need to develop a solution as soon as possible, instead of delaying. My preference is to log in to vROps and monitor everything. Once we locate exactly where the problem is, we can give a solution for it. Only if we do not find the cause here then we go to the logs.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.

• 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

It's a good starter. If there is a company who has a small to medium business (or enrollment), it really works. If you have a large organization running 30,000 to 40,000 VMs, your network is very heterogeneous, your company has acquired lot of other companies, and enrollment is very scattered, it might not fit in well with the existing version.

Flowchart your dashboards first before you do anything technical within the tool itself. It's much easier to take what you have on paper and transpose that off to an actual flowchart or a diagram. It's always easier to clone a dashboard than create one yourself.

It'd be easier if you had a repository of dashboards from a VMware perspective. Whereas, as a user, I can go to that repository and clone one, then customize it for my environment. Clone is your friend.

Give yourself enough time to do it. It's going to take a little while. It took us a good six months to get it off the ground and functional. Probably another three to six months to get into the advanced features of it.

I would rate this solution a five. There's a lot of stuff that we'd like to do that we can't. 

I would advise someone considering this solution to take classes and get a lot of information because this solution may look simple but it's a lot harder than it seems.

I would rate this solution an eight. 

I would definitely recommend having VMware come in and do a demo about all of the features it has, because a lot of places don't use all the features that are baked in. Thus, they're missing a lot of data that could be useful.

Definitely look how it helps their company and what the product does, because it's not a one size fits all. So definitely understand what the business requirements are and how vROps helps.

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.

I would advise others that VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is a good tool to manage VMware application components, for sending storage on RPMs. For example, if we have a basic hypervisor or storage based on VMware files, such as VMFS. It is a great tool for that.

I rate VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) a nine out of ten.

There is a newer version available which will have better features.

I would recommend VMware vROps for those with a VMware infrastructure and would rate it as nine out of ten.

I would recommend vROps for an Enterprise environment. Based on my experience, it is a great tool to work with. Rather than having a big vCenter and then installing vROps, it is good to have it when you're starting with a vCenter. That's because data collection takes time, and it would become an overhead for vROps. In such a case, you might need a load balancer and multiple vROps. So, I would recommend having a vROps when you start building a vCenter. It will really help in scaling up the environment, and you'll also know if you'll need to replicate vROps or not.

We didn't use it for workload placement because we didn't have the load balancer for that. It didn't help much in decreasing the overall downtime, and it also didn't affect our operations when it comes to overall downtime due to performance issues.

I would rate vROps an eight out of 10.

We have tested some other solutions and they are not as integrated and as easy to manage. I would advise someone looking into this solution that one vendor is always a better option than three or four.

I would rate this solution a nine because normally I wouldn't give a ten. We do not have any problems with the product. It solves our problems. We now know if something is on the console and if there really is a problem. Before this, we had a lot of false positives. It digs into the problems and then at the end it just drops it. 

I rate vROps at nine out of ten. To get to a ten it goes back to better explaining the badge labeling for batches.

I would definitely suggest to colleagues that they use this solution. I would encourage them to take a training class on it so they can get more out of it, get their money's worth.

I rated it an eight out of 10. I like it. I think it could be a 10. There are things I'm not doing in there, so any difference between my score and a 10 is probably my own fault for not utilizing it fully.

We've been using it for approximately two years now. We originally upgraded from vCOps to vROps. We have also expanded our platform to include vRealize Log Insight which further helped us to understand and perform RCAs as needed, when events occur.

Get involved in the community. Get involved in performing hands-on labs. And, quite frankly, deploy it. Create use cases, create your test cases, and validate them.

The reasons I rate vROps at eight out of 10 are because there are always areas for improvement. In addition, the limited amount of management packs natively available through vROps is a huge factor. As you can imagine, as with most companies, we do use a gambit of other solutions and other hardware, and the ability to use vROps as a single pane of glass would allow us to have one solution for all, and make for easier integration.

Advice for anyone looking at VM solutions:

• Stay abreast of the changing technology, because it is moving fast. Simple is better for time to market.
• Do some PoCs and train your engineers.
• Research total cost of ownership, deployment time, and the complexity of their applications.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Reliability
• Peer reviews
• Technical support
• Their willingness to work with us.

I recommend vROps. I recommend professional services engagement, as well, especially for the tuning of the alerts, because it comes out of the box with just a lot of information. It takes a bit to get through that and kind of narrow it down. Your team either needs to really understand and be able to spend the time to do that, or get somebody to help you that's been through that experience before.

When selecting a vendor like VMware, the most important criteria is whether it works.

Best tool for Capacity Planning and getting the best use of resources.

I would absolutely recommend the product and would give it an eight out of ten.

When it comes to efficient workload placement, vROps works with vCenter for workload placement, and vCenter carries most of the burden for that, so I'm not sure that's something that vROps itself does.

If you're running an evaluation or testing on VMware environments, vROps is really the only tool that makes sense.

My advice would be to find a specialist. 

vROps will point you to where to look for the problem. When you actually dig into doing diagnosis and so on, you really need a good log processing facility to be able to dig through the logs and identify where the problems have arisen. vROps will notify you of a problem and will point you to where the location is. But to get down and identify the problems, you really need the log processing part.

Against other products, I'd rate vROps a nine out of ten. 

Look for ease of use. The first program you should have is one that you find easy to use. Today, vROps is easy to use. Back in the time, the first time we looked at it, it was fairly complicated to set up; the rules, etc. But today it's very easy.

I recommend it. I think it's a great solution. I think it's a great product as far as vSphere environments, because it is geared towards vSphere; made by the people who created vSphere.

When I decide to work with a vendor, I think longevity is an important criteria. I like to make sure that I'm partnering with a vendor that's going to be around tomorrow. I like to see a large footprint. That way I know there's widespread adoption for their product. I like responsiveness, when I have a demand, or a need.

I would say that it will be easier for any team to investigate patterns of CPU/memory use of any VM and the drive utilization.

In addition, you can add many options like memory ballooning, ESX memory utilization, etc. in your own way.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I think this is a good solution and rate it nine out of 10. 

In the future I'd like to use the plug-in and the APM. In the future, using the APM, things will be better. Nowadays, applications have under-utilization of hardware.

I'm happy with the solution. There are many options for using it because of the features vROps has.

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. 

I would rate this solution an eight. It's a good solution and I like it. I haven't explored it enough to be able to say that it's a perfect ten. 

I would advise someone looking into this or a similar solution to consider vROps. Have a look, try it out, and try some demos. I think it's a really good product. 

Try it. Or, you can start small and use it.

It makes our life so much easier.

I would recommend vROps.

Use it! It makes perfect sense.

It is very intuitive and user-friendly. The solution is a lot more intuitive and user-friendly these days than it was before.

Install it and give it a shot. Know that it's not so easy to configure or learn. You need to invest some time to get to know the product, but it can be very helpful.

In some places, it is easy to use, and in other places, not so much. The prebuilt dashboards are easy to use, but if you want to create your own, it is not so easy. It is the same for reports.

I don't really have anything to compare it to right now, but on a scale from one to ten, it's about an eight. I expect to see some things getting better down the road, so I'm sure that number will go up.

If you're planning to do a Horizon deployment I would definitely recommend vROps. It seems to be the best. In the past, when we were doing PCoIP exclusively, it was the only tool that gave you excellent PCoIP metrics. I assume that that is moving forward as well. For a Horizon deployment, you almost have to have vROps if you want that kind of data.

I rate the solution at eight out of 10. To get it to a 10, I would like to see some training on the Horizon-specific pieces and, somehow, they should make it easier to find those granular things that you're always looking for. You're always running into a situation where you want to use the tool to figure out a problem, but the amount of effort needed to delve into vROps and find the exact metric you're looking for is always so difficult.

Take a look at the whole vRealize suite. They all interactive with each other. It can provide you with streamlined automation. It can get your company to where it needs to be.

Always use professional services assistance from either VMware or your resellers with the configuration. It is important to get the configuration correct. Initial deployment and native vCenter/vSphere integration is straightforward enough that users are encouraged to do it themselves.

Advice I would give depends on what you're really trying to do. If you're really scaling out the environment and vApps, this is a tool you can look into doing that.

I recommend it. I highly recommend that you check it out. It's just amazing. VMware is an amazing product. It gives you great insight into how your infrastructure's doing. There are thousands of reports that you can run. It gives you data inside of how your infrastructure is doing. So I highly recommend it.

It's one of the best products that does the job. It hooks into the VMware suites. From that angle, I believe it's more preferable than the others.

I would say that the above score is based on the level of licensing which you use within your Infrastructure. I use the Advanced edition which is designed more for use in a enterprise level environments. This will look at both the virtual and physical sides of Infrastructure Operations which includes Predictive Analytics, Policy Management, Automated and guided remediation as well as customizable dashboards and reports. On the performance monitoring and analytics advanced can examine your vSphere performance and Health beyond what the standard vCenter monitoring tools has to offer, it can provide SAN storage analytics, application discovery and dependency mapping, OS Monitoring (Windows, Linux, Solaris, etc for both Physical and Virtual servers). Advanced also includes additional features for configuration and compliance management for vSphere Harding. Last but not least there is some additional Extensibility with 3rd party management packs for server, storage and network monitoring tools. Some example of packs are Brocade SAN Analytics, EMC Storage Analytics, NetApp Storage, Oracle OEM, SAP Hana, HP OneView, Microsoft Hyper-V.

If your virtualized infrastructure is primarily VMware and you are having issues with monitoring, analyzing and planning from an operational perspective this is the software to use. It will save you time and money in various areas of your IT infrastructures operations

It is useful for determining whether to make decisions. Also, for our troubleshooting issues, it is the most powerful option in the market.

vROps provides a good native solution if you are using multiple VMware tools.

The design and what you sell to customers will impact your infrastructure.

There is a new version, but I haven't used it yet.

I would rate this solution as an eight out of 10.

As we are still in the beginning phase, we have not yet worked with all of the features. For example, I know that it can connect with vROps Log Insight, but we have not integrated it.

Given my experience, I'm not sure at this point whether this solution is applicable to other technologies such as AWS or Azure. However, if the support exists, it is very good because future environments and implementations will rely on multiple technologies. It will not be VMware alone, but rather, it will include AWS, Azure, and others. Support for all of these options is very nice. It appears that VMware has this vision because they already have support for the NSX and NSX-T network technology.

I expect that it will save us money in the future, but still being in the implementation phase, we have not yet had this experience.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to plan for integration with your entire platform and VMware products, such as Cloud Director.

Overall, this is a good product that is easy to install and use, and integration with other products is smooth. Although we have not used all of the features, it does provide us with good visibility.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

This solution offers a sixty-day free trial so I would advise someone considering this solution to give it a go. At the end of the day, you won't lose anything, you get to play with the product. Make sure to get your technical guy in early to help support you.  

I would rate this solution a solid nine because there's always room for improvement. It's a very good product, very easy to use and it has great integration points with other VMware products. 

I would rate this solution a seven because it's not the best it can be yet. It has room for improvement but it has definitely evolved to become above average. 

I would of course recommend this solution to someone considering it. The new versions are simple, useful, and expandable.

I would rate this solution an eight. I wouldn't give it a ten, but I know that vRealize Operations provides API. You can get anything you need from API, not only from the dashboards.

I'm happy with it. It does all what it promises and helps us.

We are a VMware partner and integrator, so we deploy it to a lot of our customers. We love promoting this product to all of our customers.

Do it. Just start off small. Add one vCenter, then add the rest as you go.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Straightforward use; I don't want complex. 
• Reliability. 
• If it snaps into something, the better. Because our team is very small for our environment. The fewer consoles that we need to know (or access), the better.

I would definitely suggest you use it. It's a really good tool for what we use it for, for troubleshooting machines. The Troubleshooting Dashboard really highlights things pretty well.

I rate vROps a seven out of ten. It might be a ten if they made it a bit more user-friendly, a little bit more intuitive.

I would rate this solution at about eight out of ten. To get to a ten it would have to have more ease of configuration and maybe some wizards in there to help configure more typical scenarios that people want to do in there. It's still fairly complicated to really get the full use out of it.

My advice would be, just go ahead and buy it. It's going to be leaps and bounds ahead of doing it the hard way. It puts it all in one place, gives you a little bit of capacity planning, a better idea of what your actual capacity is, versus just looking at the spot values you get right out of VMware at a given point in time. In terms of looking at a VM, you can see how much RAM it is actually using over a period of time versus whatever the user claims: "Oh it's completely out of memory." We can say, "Is it? Is it really? Let's check it out."

I rate it at nine out of 10. It would be a 10 with just a little bit more arm-twisting on the people that are supplying their little add-ins, to make sure that they're of a sufficient quality to match whatever else is in VMware. They need third-party quality control, less so the actual VMware parts.

After training, it is worth the effort.

Pluralsight is a good start, to get an overview of it. Research it, PoC it, stick it out, have it monitor production for a couple of weeks and see what kind of results you get.

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.

It's an absolute must to get the information that you want out of your VMs and to be able to help application people pinpoint problems. You just don't run a big VMware shop without vROps.

It is intuitive but in terms of "friendly", it takes a lot to learn how to use it. You can get really granular, so it takes education to really effectively use it.

I would rate it an eight out of 10, and the reason for that is, as I mentioned, they've taken some features away that I want back. They're telling me they're going to give them back but I'm going to have to teach myself how to use them again. But it has done everything that we've asked it to do. It can do more and my rating could go up if we actually got in and used it better than we do now.

It's a very good product. It's really given us a lot of insight.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The partnerships with other vendors and integration with other products that we have, therefore their reputation in that, and their support.

It's a good product. It definitely helps troubleshooting, and helps you find things a lot faster than just trying to dig for a needle in a haystack. It's definitely a reliable product, and it's definitely helped us save a lot of time.

When selecting a vendor to go with, it goes down to total cost of ownership pretty quickly. The product has to work, it's got to be reliable, and obviously it's got to provide benefits that are worth whatever investment in, time, money, licenses, you have to make.

Every solution we add to the environment adds complexity to the environment, so it's now under the product we advocated to use or maintain. You can only have so many products in your environment before there's just too much information so you need to keep it simple, to a certain extent.

Set it up and test it. It's really not hard to do. One day, two days, depending on how complex your environment is, and then just let it sit. It will pull in a lot of information, and you can see very quickly if it's telling you things you need to know.

There are some nice VMware session videos on it. Also read up. There's plenty of guides online. Really, it's not a complex thing to implement.

I would highly recommend others to take a look at the vROps tool. It will definitely help them manage their infrastructure.

When evaluating vROps, they need to make sure all the plugins are working, and that it's the solution for them. Sometimes people evaluate a lot of products, and it's just an evaluation which really doesn't fit what their business needs are. Having a good understanding of what you're looking for and what you need is the most important part of evaluating a product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Their education
• Their product knowledge
• Ability to get support.

The most important criteria is that the solution must understand the overall software, defined as it is in your architecture; not only the hypervisor layer but the VMs run on it, the storage, the computing that will be running, and the network as well.

Research integration with any other portal that you want to monitor along with your hypervisor.

I would highly recommend going forward with this solution.

Definitely give vROps a shot; at least if you can get a PoC to see if it works and if it's the right solution for you.

I think it works good. I'm not as experienced with it as some of the other people on my team, so they might have a few more things they dislike or like more about it. But so far from what I've seen, it works great.

Definitely get training on it. Of course I represent that, but it's a very complex product. Out of the box, you can get a lot out of it, but there's so much more customization available with vROps. If you'll take the time, you'll get much more out of the product, but it usually requires a bit of training. It's probably taken me a good part of the year to understand a lot of the ins and outs to the product.

Try it out. Yeah. Just spin up.

We have access to the software. I don't know how easy it is for somebody else that doesn't have an account with VMware or doesn't have an existing contract with VMware, to get the software, but for me, my solution, for everything that I have questions about, spin it out. They're all virtuals; why not? Worst-case scenario, you erase it. Move on to the next one.

When I select a vendor like VMware, the decision comes down to customer requirements, and that's what we go from, from the beginning. We go in, we discover, we understand what the customer’s requirements are, and then we use that as a basis of what meets their business needs.

It's a great product. It offers a lot of great benefits. It's something that they should definitely look into.

If you have all the core pieces of VMware, vROps is a no-brainer. If you want a little more level of agility, there are other products at play, but it all depends on your requirements. You can't go wrong with vROps. Are there things that are always going to be better? There would be. Would vROps catch up? It would. Would it evolve into something new? It might. Right now, it's there. It does everything you want it to do.

We would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

My advice is to test the product.

I am monitoring VxRail from vROps.

Our average time for resolution depends on the issue. For example, if I receive a notification, and there is a large latency or the hard disk is filling up too fast, it will depend on the end administrator who is monitoring it.

I rate VMware vROps vRealize Operations an eight out of 10.

If your infrastructure is VMware-based, meaning you are using vSphere, vSAN, and vCenter, and if you are a large-scale cloud service provider, you should consider vROps as your monitoring and operations solution.

I rated this solution a nine because I haven't had any issues with it and it has been intuitive and easy to use. I don't know it well enough to give it a ten.

If you're considering this solution, I would advise you to consider it and to look at your environment to see how it can assist with troubleshooting. 

Use VMware to support the solution. Don't go at it alone.

If you are running an infrastructure with a variety of components from various different vendors, and want to get monitoring all in one place, this is the solution to go with.

The important criteria when selecting a vendor for any solution:

1. How stable the product is.
2. The ease of usage.
3. Support's availability.

I would rate the solution somewhere between an eight and nine, because it has worked like a charm for me over the years.

It is a little bloated right now. I would like to see it broken out into microservices, so the overall footprint of the application is reduced. That would get it to a ten in my eyes.

If you're running VMware, implement vRealize Operations as soon as possible.

I would rate the solution and eight out of ten. The only reason why (it's not a ten) is because of that graphical interface (issue) that I just described.

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.

Try to stay with something that is going to monitor your entire environment. Don't go with one solution that will monitor your virtual infrastructure and another that will monitor the Window Servers or applications. Get that single pane of glass view so it has that entire overview of your environment in one spot.

I would rate the solution as an eight out of 10. It is a set it and forget it product. We are not constantly having to babysit or troubleshoot it. It does what it is designed to do, and it does a very good job of it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: supportability. Everything is going to break sooner or later, and how they support or fix it says a lot about a company.

Go for it. Be willing to go through some growing pains to get it going, but once it's going it's beautiful. It's worth the effort.

For a new user, it's not intuitive and user-friendly. But once you get the hang of it, it becomes very logical. When you're first sitting and looking at it you can get information out of it, but to really use it and get to the meat of the program, it takes a little bit of learning, a little bit of familiarity.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Everything is important.

• Reputation is certainly good for us, being a bank.
• The relationship is huge.
• We have to partner with someone that we trust, who we think is going to do a good job for us, and responds to the issues that we have.

It's great from a scalability perspective, and it gives us all of the metrics that we need. Our configuration, or dashboard configuration, and deployment are quite easy.

If you are looking at this solution, research its ease of use and integration with other products. These days, also look at the login side.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: a good relationship at the beginning.

Utilize VMware. Let them come and help you. Utilize them to get some kind of canned reports or some kind of templates so you don't have to create them all from scratch.

That's probably the biggest thing: find other peers that have done that and then draw upon what they've already created so you don't have to recreate it.

Most important when considering vendors is price, that's the first one. And the ability to contact them in a timely fashion.

If you have less than 100 hosts, don't buy it, depending on what the pain in the environment is for you. My pain was storage and I researched storage. And that was my biggest obstacle. It depends on people, on their issues. Sometimes it's a CPU, sometimes the memory. I was going for the storage and, as I said, one minute for me in the storage environment is not enough. It needs to be much quicker.

When selecting a vendor, stability is one of the big things for us. Also, cost is another big thing. We don't do a lot of bleeding edge companies, we're more conservative so stability is important.

Regarding cost, it's especially important to look at forecasting the cost in the future. The per-socket model's okay but SNS services and solutions or maintenance is what really drives up your budget.

I would suggest going to the VMware website, downloading that 30-day key, and kick the tires on it. Check it out.

And for implementation, bring in a third-party vendor to help your internal team. But allow your internal team to actually do the implementation.

When selecting a vendor be sure to look at reliability, uptime, and make sure that they're available for you. Because we work for hospitals, hospitals can't be down, they can't be down at all, even for a minute or two.

Definitely find a couple of use cases to make sure that vROps is what you need. vROps, can do pretty much everything up to capacity planning. It comes with different licensing levels, Standard, Enterprise, Advanced. Find out what you need, which version and edition.

Do your research. Research it, research all your products which are similar, and see that it fits the mold of your company. If it's cost effective, or if it's going to give you the most bang for your buck.

When selecting a vendor:

1. They should know what they're talking about. 
2. If I don't know what I'm talking about, then I shouldn't fumble them up. 

But the number one thing is that they know what they're talking about and it's easy to use, also its setup is easy. If they can show me how to use it during their presentation and I can explain it to my manager or my boss, then that's one of the most important things.

Definitely give vROps a fair shot. The other products out there aren't as deep. When you're looking for something beyond the high-level 4-5 metrics that would indicate an issue, well, you're not going to get the depth from other products like VM server or whatever. You can get past the GUI and just live in the metrics section and the charts. It's going to give you a lot of value.

It's probably one of the better ones out there. Just put your time in to researching it and setting it up correctly with the right data.

It's a pretty big product. From our perspective, it does a lot for you. You just need to do your homework and try to understand what you're looking for. It has all the answers in there. It does. You just have to know what you're looking for and know where to go to look for it because it can be a very complex product for a first time user. It can be.

Give it the good 30-day time frame to mess with it and see what it has to offer. Take advantage of the free trial.

It is definitely a really reliable solution that completely integrates with VMware.

Make sure you read the release notes.

I would usually try and deploy the very latest version. I ran into issues where there was a bug and the reporting was broken.

We use vROps because it just makes sense. vROps is being included in most bundles that our sales team is selling. It's nice. I like to stay within the same family of products; one throat to choke if something goes wrong.

My rating reflects the improvements I've been seeing over the years. As far as being able to get that data analyzed, it started out as a good product but it's really made some good strides in helping me, and doing thing in different environment.

Definitely, take it for a spin. Analyze your environment, look at what it can tell you. Look at the custom reports and dashboards that can really quickly give you a daily view of what your environments performance and their capacity is. That's it.

It is a very good product. We can download and integrate features from the portal using templates instead of creating them. I rate it a nine out of ten.

The implementation is easy. You just need to assign resources to install all the virtual machine requirements, but the process is straightforward. My biggest advice is to check the dashboard marketplace because you can find dashboards that are useful to you too. The dashboards are produced by the community. They are free, although some of them need container packs that you need to pay for, or you may need a licensee to use some of them.

I would rate this solution a solid nine because there's always room for improvement. I would highly suggest using the product. Its benefits vastly outweigh the price that it costs, the time it takes to implement, and what it can do for your SaS is unbelievable.

I would tell somebody looking into vROps or a similar solution that it's a good product. I haven't had any problems with it. I want to continue using this product moving forward and I would definitely recommend it to a colleague.

I rated this solution a nine because we haven't had any problems with it. It has provided me with the information that I've needed to make sure that our environment stays stable and it provides our users with the needed applications.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• product availability
• interoperability with our current environment
• ease of use.

We like to have a really nice GUI interface, something that people can be trained on very quickly, especially when we have new staff come in who are not familiar with the product. We like to get them up and running as quickly as possible. For us, having that flexibility is a real game-changer.

I would give it a thumbs up. I'm not certain there are too many solutions that integrate on the level it does with the data that it does. As I mentioned, our previous implementation, or previous corporate solution, was SolarWinds, and it just interfaces differently, and the data is not the same. This is the easiest way.

I rate it at about eight out of 10. That's primarily because there are always improvements. Technically, I don't see anything wrong that would drag it down quite a bit. I would like it to have a little more responsiveness. I know we are not running the latest vCenter environment that it's integrated with, but there are times that some of the data lags and sometimes the screens will somewhat freeze for a little bit, to repopulate. But that is really the biggest inconvenience that we've seen with it.

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. What would make it a 10 are improved features for the endpoint operations agent and the ability to more easily monitor solutions other than just VMware. We have a mixed environment that includes VMware, some oVirt and KVM, and some other things. The main goal of our management is a single pane of glass, if possible, and that is something that I would like to see.

From my standpoint, when selecting a vendor, we look at support, their customer service, what is their responsiveness to any of the problems we have. Scalability, "ease-ability" in the product. Is the solution fully integrated into what we need it to do?

I rate it a seven right now just because it's a little bit complex in its setup. But, I think, like I said, as they improve it, get a little bit better, then it'll make it easier to use.

We invested in this solution because monitoring was really important for us.

I would definitely recommend this solution.

It's worth giving it a shot. I think there's a lot of benefit with it. It does pretty much everything you should need it to do.

Also, I find being part of the VMware community useful.

Whatever you go with, make sure you are able to get good support.

Look very strongly at vROps. Some of the other solutions that I'm aware of – such as VMTurbo - will offer things like automatic shifting of resources, etc. That's, in my opinion, not necessarily the best idea.

I gave it four stars because it is very, very complex. Again, I get the feeling that to use it properly, you almost need a dedicated person for vROps. That being said, it's a great tool.

When selecting a vendor like VMware, my most important criteria are reliability, service, and reputation. There are other virtualization companies out there; I'm not impressed with any of them except VMware.

Definitely look into your other products, along with vROps as well. We were short on time, so we made a decision when we should have probably researched more. See what's out there. See how well it compares to other products. I'm sure there are other products that'll do just as well. That would be my number one recommendation. Try to do a PoC with multiple products.

See what fits best for your environment, and what fits best for your staff as well. If you have a dedicated VMware guy, maybe vROps is great. Or maybe, if you need that level of trainability, vROps is great. If you want something right out of the box that just works and just tells you the high-level information and the kind of nuts and bolts of what's wrong with your environment, without having to do too much modifications or tweaking, then maybe something out there is maybe better.

Is it worth the money? That would be the question.

Spend some really good time with it. If you can, get an expert to help you through a PoC. I think what we did, we did on our own; there are a lot of gaps in there. So having somebody who's a professional go through that PoC and possibly even initial deployment would be a good way to go.

Plan it out, because a lot of IT guys want to bring it up, install it, see what's going on, and then they realize, "I need to build it this way now, instead of that way." Do the research ahead of time, plan it out and size it properly from the outside.

Take a class. I think there are videos we watched online, where people were going through some features and so on. If you try to just understand it right out of the box without reading a lot or going online and looking at something like that, you might have some troubles with it. But I definitely think it's good to have; it's certainly better than not having a solution in that area.

For me, from what I've seen, just go with the vendor’s monitoring product. It seems to be that they always know the product best. If you go for somebody else, I think for the most part you might not be seeing the information presented the same way.

I would give this solution a nine. One for the future improvement. 

I would recommend it, and especially if you have a huge environment, it will easily give you a complete view of what's inside and what configuration is in it. 

I would definitely recommend the solution.

It is next, next, and next to use. You don't need to have much high tech knowledge. It is very intuitive.

I rate vROps at eight out of ten. I don't think any platform will ever be a ten because there's always that little bit of room to grow. But they do what they do fairly well. Maybe there are other products that can do it a little bit better, but for the balance of cost, the ease of use, and how well it integrates into our environment, it is a good fit for a lot of places. If you have specific needs it doesn't fill, there may be better options. But for us, in our environment, it just works well.

The most important criterion in selecting a vendor is intuitive interfaces, the ease of management going forward. I don't want my reporting and management platform to be hard to manage. It's not something you should have to look after. It's something that should be looking after your infrastructure, not your having to look after it to look after your infrastructure. The most important thing is a good user experience, something that's very intuitive. If you bring some new person into the environment, you don't want them to take weeks to understand how the tool works and what it does for them.

I rate this solution at eight out of ten. It would become a ten if it were easier to scale out licensing and easier to use dashboards. Those are is my two top points.

If you're heavily invested in VMware already, go this way. It's going to be a lot better in the long run.

I rate it a nine out of 10. To get to a 10, I would like to see those improvements around the UI and making things a little more user-friendly.

I would recommend this solution to a colleague if they have a VMware shop and need something to provide visibility in their environment.

I would definitely give it around a nine out of 10 because sometimes, in terms of the user experience, people find stuff difficult to use. But obviously, the more dashboards you create that are relevant to you, the better it will be.

Work with your VMware TAM, work with your VMware support group to get it installed the first go-round, get used to it. Definitely do a PoC, don't just try to roll it into production. Assess it first.

The most important points in vendor selection are

• the vendor's reputation
• how good their products truly are
• how long they've been around
• the features supported
• the capabilities of their product
• how user friendly it is
• the comfort of the interface
• the overall stability of the product.

When looking at vendors, cost is the number one factor but, of course, the product has to function.

I would definitely say give it a try. It's growing incrementally better, it's really user friendly, the user interface is easy to manage.

I would advise you to go with it. vRealize is all about monitoring and automating things. So, if you are getting what you want, then it's a great solution. We have tried it, we are still using it and plan to use it so you should go for it.

Definitely use it, especially if you need to carry out predictive analytics.

For knowing how to scale your environment, I think it's a priceless tool.

Make sure you've got enough room and resources for the installation.

I would definitely advise others to have a look at vROps. It's definitely good. The analytics engine is very powerful and the management feature is pretty good. Also, if you have other portfolios like VRA, VRB, it seamlessly operates with the VMware component. I would definitely recommend it.

In our case, all our hardware is Dell, our storage is EMC and our software is VMware, so it's a one point of contact for all of our support.

Definitely take a look at Operations Manager. It seems to fit really well within the environment.

vROps is definitely something you would want to look at because of the tight integration with vSphere. I don't know whether I would want to look at another product to do this type of information gathering and alerting. I've had some of my engineers look at some other solutions. They come back, share what they found, show it to me and I think, I don't know why we need to look at that. We have vROps and it works a lot better than that.

Do yourself a favor and look at vROps.

You have to play with the thresholds and make sure they meet your needs. If you see something red, don't freak out because it could just be an abnormal spike from 10% to 20%.

You need to stick with it. You're not going to see immediate return on value. You have to trust the product and you have listen to it. You can't think that you know more than it, because it definitely knows more than you do. Whether it's making intelligent decisions, you have to evaluate what it's recommending, but they're utilizing information from across thousands of customers, so trusting the product is very important.

Always look at the competition first, obviously. That's part of our job. PoC it first. Make an informed decision after that.

We use vROps in our VMware environment, but we have Zabbix to monitor other environments. It's a challenge to consolidate all that into one tool. I don't know if that will be possible, even in some months or years.

I recommend following the vROps documentation and, in some cases, it may be necessary to use a VMware partner.

I would rate this solution a seven because it's complex. The new versions are a lot better.

If you're considering vROps I would tell you do first do your homework. Make sure that you're ready and that it's going to fit your needs. Make sure there are full-time employees to manage it because it's not something that you just set up and go. It's got to have someone to babysit it and maintain it. Somebody needs to take care of the many different dashboards and functionalities. 

The deployment can be complex so I would advise someone looking into this solution to engage professional services to set up a proof of concept environment and to evaluate it. 

I rated this solution an eight because we've had issues with the stability and the appliances. Other than that, it's a solid product. It does exactly what we need it to do and we're happy with it. 

Don't knock it because it's a vendor-specific solution. It does do what it says on the tin and helps us on a day-to-day basis.

IT sees a lot of benefit from this solution, mainly regarding troubleshooting, identifying issues, and retrospective trouble-shooting. It offers a timeline in which you can go in and see how the machine was behaving. It identifies deep issues at high levels. 

I would tell someone looking into this solution that you need high-level tools. You can't be relying on the free tools or on vCenter free questions. You need a step up to aggregate that information. I would look at all of the available solutions. 

It is easy to use from its deployment architecture to use cases. It is straightforward for customers to use. It's a good product and better than the earlier versions.

My recommendation would be to look at your use case and look at what exactly your requirements are and, from there, if your use case fits the model then you can reduce the amount of administrative overhead that's associated with managing the hyperconverged system.

I would give it about an eight out of ten. The reason is that we still see challenges with bugs. But we're also looking at the long-term feasibility of the product and looking at long-term changes within our architecture to reduce our administrative overhead.

Overall, it's a great solution. It's really easy to use, really easy to set up, and especially for reporting, it's really good.

Make sure it does what you want it to do. For me, when selecting a vendor, the most important criterion is, does the product do what it's supposed to do?

I would rate vROps at seven out of 10, mostly because it needs a better user interface.

In choosing a vendor, obviously we have to look at their ability to answer all of our questions, make sure that their solution is in fact going to meet our needs and their tech support later on.

It was real simple, and once you get involved with it, it's just a matter of getting some hands on time and playing with it.

I would recommend the solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Brand reputation
• Brand name
• Support.

What's important when looking at vendors is

• Ease of talking to them
• Ease of working with their sales team
• Availability

Also their presentation of the products. Having trial versions available to be able to try it out before so you know if it's like, "Oh yeah. I want to use it more." That's the most important.

I would definitely be looking at long term solution, at a way to get better insight into your controlled environment. I don't have too much experience with the different monitoring tools but vROps has been, hands down, the best thing I've reviewed so far.

When you look at the VMware infrastructure and software piece, they're more or less offering what vROps is offering you right now. It is comparable to any other third-party solution for the VMware. So it's always better to go with the best one.

To prepare for implementation, first and foremost you need to make sure that you inventory all the hardware and the stakes. And it's important that everything is on the same version. Multiple versions will make your life more complex because all the versions are in additional dashboards. It's not like a motherboard version and then a dashboard. Each version has different dashboards.

If you are looking at vROps, take your time researching it. Make sure you get with vROps. Make sure you do all the recommended settings and don't rush it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor (for our company):

• Discount prices
• If they can handle the scale of our business, because we are a large scale.
• The support behind it. That we can access it 24/7.

Big things. Scale is the biggest, usually because handling our scale is hard.

I would say customer service is important. It's one of the higher things in terms of priority. My systems guys would say the product itself is most important - what it does. But I think customer service is key. If you can't get service when you have a problem, it's not even worth having the product.

VMware has been solid. Stable. I say hands down, VMware. There are other solutions out there, but VMware works.

If interested in the product, try to prearrange a training as quickly as you can. Get a lot of training. It's a big product.

Main criteria for selecting a vendor:

• Full scalability
• Price
• Vendor relationship.

VMware does a really good job of integrating all of their tools together, whereas you get some third parties where they kind of haphazardly integrate in, and they may or may not stay well-integrated. Or, they have difficulty getting integrated. You have to a lot API calls, WMI, and that kind of stuff.

Make sure initially you set it up properly. Don't try taking shortcuts.

It's not always the easiest product to work around in, and build (meaningful) dashboards. I think the UI has improved greatly over the years, but I think there's definitely room for improvements to make it overall easier to manage the product without having to be a specialist in the product.

Do your due diligence. Evaluate all of the products, and make sure what you're buying is going to meet your needs and criteria. Whatever that may be.

Things to look out for:

• Definitely functionality
• Ease of use
• Scalability
• Cost value

Make sure you get training. Do the proper training. You need to have your folks trained to be able to manage it on an on-going question.

Throw it in the lab. Use it. I don't know. Nothing special.

It's a good solution. A warning: You probably need to make sure you can give it the proper amount of attention and time. You're just not going to throw it out there, hit the wizard and just walk away and say "Well, it's done." You're not going to be fair to the product or to yourself if you don't do that.

My personal requirements for a vendor are:

• Obviously, integration with our current tools, with the hypervisor and so on, which helps VMware a lot.
• Ease of maintenance, so far as updates and so on. I don't really want to spend a whole lot of time on that. Actually, vROps performs properly. We've had products before that just didn't perform very well. When that happens, the users just won't use it. It's very important.

First, ask yourself what you're trying to accomplish. If that's what the product gives you, then go for it.

Plan it well.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor like VMWare are quality of the product and support. We had some issues with past releases and with vSphere. But, generally speaking, the products of VMware are really well engineered, and you can count on support if you have an issue.

It's not that straightforward to get in. If they start troubleshooting, it is a bit complex. It's huge, but it takes some time to get into it. That's the reason for my rating.

It's a really good product. I like using it. I like the feedback I receive from my customers.

I would definitely recommend checking out vROps because of the whole package, the overview of the whole infrastructure.

Do the proof of concept. I think that'll tell you what you need to know; if it's going to be a good fit for your environment. I would say that's probably applicable for anything you're going to look at.

With the foundation version being included with vSphere software, it doesn't hurt to have it in there. So usually at least deploy that because then, if you upgrade, all that data comes with it.

If I was using the standard version with all the additional features, I might have rated it a little bit higher.

Give it a shot.

Earlier versions were working fine and helping a lot, but the latest version simplified the management view. I can get to the view I want much easier. That's why I gave it 4.5 stars; probably, previous versions would be less than that.

Go for it. Don't think about it. It will save you a lot of time.

I have given it a perfect rating because it has helped me a lot in the past; that's the reason why, I will be sincere.

Evaluate it. Run the PoC. There are plenty of opportunities out there to put it into your environment. Let it pull some metrics in and really see what the power of it is.
It's a really robust product. We've had really good luck with it. It definitely helps out in the environment, so it's definitely four stars. Not quite five because there are a couple of things that would be nice to have smoothed out a little bit, but definitely not bad.

Validate your environment in terms of how large you plan to grow, and ensure that the environment is going to give you what you need.

Put your critical workloads on enterprise software.

I rated this solution an eight because it's a good product but it's a bit complicated. I'm rating it based on my expectations of this kind of product. Once you install it you can expect it to help predict issues. In order to understand all of these metrics, you have to delve and dig into them yourself. If you don't know where you're looking for a problem and need it to be more specific then you have to customize it on your own.

I would advise somebody looking into this product that you have to know exactly what you're looking to get; what kind of metrics and what they involve. It is quite expensive and if you just implement it just because you can then you won't get any benefit from it. You have to think through and plan ahead. You have to understand what the issues are that you want to solve with this solution. Otherwise, this solution is a waste of money. 

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. It's not a ten because there is no clear definition of the metrics. That is something I would like to see.

Among the most important criteria when selecting a vendor is money, that is definitely a big factor; but also their dependability or their reputation. We need to know that the product is going to do what we're looking for it to do. We're a small shop, so we have a lot of work to go around. We want the product to do what they say it will do.

Plan ahead. Know exactly what it is you want to monitor. There's a lot of things you can report on. It can be a little overwhelming. So, have a plan.

It makes sense to go with VMware. They know better than probably any other vendor what exactly goes on with their Virtual Machines.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: If we already have solutions by that same vendor in-house. That's usually a better way to go, because we don't have to do as much research, then there's the cost. We usually get a better cost if it's just adding onto a part of what we already have instead of buying a new solution outright.

Go with vROops, because it's easy to use.

Definitely take a look at it. Go to training, for sure.

I find it to be a very powerful tool. There's a lot of information. I like the way that it's set up. I like the little videos that are inside, so when you're trying to figure out what you're doing. It's very easy to try and navigate. There's a lot to learn, but I feel like it's not overwhelming. You can take a piece at a time, and build on it. It's a great tool so far.

I would rate this solution a nine because I think that the tool is very powerful and we are very happy with the product. I couldn't imagine finding a similar product that would have the same abilities as this one. 

If you're looking into this or a similar solution I would advise you to do VMware's training on it because it's the best training I have had with VMware. I always refer back to the information I got from the training.

Cost savings isn't a problem for us because we have enough resources with the cloud provider.

If you're looking into vROps and similar solutions, I would recommend vROps because it's a good program.

I can recommend the solution for VDI.

It creates simple dashboards. Let it run for a couple of weeks, then it collect all the data you need and you can start to play with it. It is easy to use.

Its first versions were a bit less user-friendly. However, in its latest versions, everything is done with the wizard. We just follow the wizard, and not much knowledge is needed to start directly with the product.

Definitely utilize any training resources you can find so you understand the product's power and what it can do. Trying to figure it out on your own is not so easy.

It's mostly user-friendly and intuitive. They're improving their dashboards which makes it a lot easier. Sometimes, drilling down and trying to find the exact thing you're looking for can prove challenging at first, but it's getting better.

Regarding cost savings through higher capacity utilization, we haven't seen that so much, but we're running pretty lean. It even tells us that now, so we didn't have a lot of capacity over-use.

I think it's a good product. I'm sure there's room for improvement: integration with some of the other things. I can't really say it's the best product that I've ever seen, but it's doing what we need it to do right now.

Compare the solutions and see which one is going to give you the best bang for your buck, the best functionality, and help your environment.

The most important criteria when working with a vendor are the

• service they provide
• ease of use of the product.

It's not perfect but it's a good solution. It was implemented before I joined the company. I wish I had known more about it, such as: How does it cost-compare to other solutions and how does it compare to solutions like Turbonomic; how does it compare in terms of functionality?

My advice would be to purchase the product because it definitely helps troubleshoot issues in probably one-tenth of the time that it would take without it. It's something I wouldn't live without, at this point.

The biggest piece of advice is definitely to learn your environment, know your metrics and, prior to implementing, have a baseline of where you'd like to be. That way, when you implement it, it's easier to measure based on your metrics, as opposed to trying and figure it out later on.

I rate vROps a 10 out of 10. We've definitely seen the advantages of utilizing vROps. There's tons of stuff that we're not really utilizing through vROps that I think would help an environment.

I will definitely be referring this solution to others.

You should weigh the pros and cons; I am sure that VMware will provide PoCs as and when required.

It's a very good product. You can't go wrong.

The UI is great, and it's fairly intuitive to use.

We're still learning about this solution.

You should really have a detailed definition of what you're looking for, from the requirements point of view and match that up with how/what vROPS is offering. Overall, VM Solutions are tying to your requirements better.

It is complex when you first set it up. It depends on how quickly you want to be able to get good and actionable information out of it. Obviously, there are things that are in it that are actionable from the start, but it's probably a subset of what you're actually looking for. If you do want to have custom dashboards and items like that quickly, you need to have a professional services organization, whether that's VMware themselves or a vendor that's familiar with vROps, just because of that learning curve.

There aren’t a lot of – at least there haven’t been – good resources for vROps. I don't know what it is about vROps, because for just about everything else in VMware, you can find lots of information. It's hard to find specific information on how to do things. Maybe I just haven't found the right places, but it seems to me that it's harder to find information – walkthroughs and things like that – on vROps than it is for some of the other products.

If you're running a VM, it's necessary that you get the Operations Manager. You can use third-party tools, but the data won't be that accurate, as far as monitoring using a native tool versus a third party.

Make sure you understand the difference between the standard, advanced and enterprise editions, what you can and cannot do with each edition. Make sure what you're going to get and what you're not going to get. For example, they present the enterprise edition to you, but the only thing you might be able to get is the standard edition, which doesn't let you customize dashboards and doesn’t have other functionality.

I completely recommend vROps to other users as it will make their lives much easier, and I would rate it nine out of ten.

When we speak to clients about it they often say, "I'll think about it." I think the best thing for them to do would be to actually use it, with the 60-day trial. They should play around with the tool and then come back and say, "This is what I can do in the product." That way, they would see what the product is about. I'd rather they experience something than somebody else telling them about it. Clients have access to VMware. They can download the solution from wherever they are and then start playing with it. They need to see what it can do and realize, "Wow, what an amazing tool." They need to see the benefits of the tool. It's the best monitoring tool. It is expensive, but expensive is relative. It's a matter of the client having a play with the tool and realizing what an amazing tool we have.

My clients are quite small so when they do use it, it's when I'm with them. They don't understand what the product does. For me it's a big thing, but for them, it's neither here nor there. They say, "We'll deal with it when we can. We'll look into it whenever we've got the time." It's never the situation where I've come back and my client is saying "Wow, that is brilliant!" They say it's brilliant when I do it but they don't go back and start utilizing the tool. So I don't really always get the feedback that I desire.

One of my colleagues is busy with a deployment at one of our clients and he's also doing the Blue Medora integration. I talk to him on a daily basis just to get an update, and he's amazed at what vRealize can do. From that perspective I think that we're quite happy with the product.

I would rate this solution a six.

I would rate this solution somewhere between a seven and eight. Not a ten because there's always room for improvement.

The most important thing when looking at vendors is long term support, that they don't just drop the product.

I would advise you put it in, try it out, put it through its paces.

Again, it gives you good insight on your environment.

The most important thing when selecting a vendor: stability.

For anyone looking at vROps, "Do it."

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Vendor relationship. The VM work has got to be absolutely rock solid for us along with the stability. We have to feel comfortable running the enterprise on it. 

Definitely, use it. Take a look at the licensing model and make sure that it fits what you're trying to do with it. Other than that, I would still recommend it, even though, I think it could use a little bit of improvement.

Since it sits alongside an installation, preparation is as simple as building another VM to put it on, as far as I'm concerned. The installation is pretty straightforward, at least based on the experience that my team had in terms of doing the upgrades and things of that nature.

If you have the technical experience and time to basically understand the user interface, then go for it. However, if you don't have the time, then don't.

vROps and vSphere integrate well together.

The community is huge. We're really big into open source. We rely on the community for just about anything and everything.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Reputation
• Brand
• Accessibility.

vROps would be my advice because it's simple to use, you have a panel to very quickly identify trouble, eventual problems; and it's easy to troubleshoot.

Make sure you have a good understanding of the infrastructure. Define the product you need to monitor.

If you're looking to size your physical hardware or you're looking to rightsize your virtual infrastructure, then definitely take a look at vROps. It's a great tool for it. One of the easiest on the market to use and it'll provide you with a lot of good information.

When selecting a vendor it's important to look at the product roadmap; the underlying platform is VMware anyway. They go hand in hand when it comes to monitoring the infrastructure.

I would definitely suggest evaluating vROps. It's particularly valuable for anybody who is on the VMware platform.

We were trying to follow the validated design, which is part of VMware, and we needed some way of monitoring, which is one of the biggest problems.

We can't allow vCenter to do all the monitoring, to alert us. It doesn't give us enough information. There are a lot of products out there, and we just figured we'd use what they have in place, because it integrates much better than some of the others. I don't know about now, but originally the other ones didn't really integrate as well, with all the components including NSX and vSphere (and all the components underneath that), so that's why we decided to go with this.

The important things to look for are name recognition, reliability, and support. It's important that the support people have the knowledge to support the environment. Documentation and education, because you don't want to always be calling support for every little thing.

Test it out, put the demo in, or create a proof of concept.

It's a good product, but it's gotta be a partnership.

We made them switch our sales guys.

Because I really didn't like our last sales guy, he was really about pushing the product, not about relationship. He didn't care what business we're in. He didn't really care about me as a customer. Our current salesperson is fantastic. She's great. She cares about us. She's invested in what we do. She's local and familiar with that area. I love that. It creates a personal touch. It means a lot.

Take a good look at it. It integrates well with the vSphere environment. There are other products that do integrate well, and supposedly give you much more granular detail than this product does. I don't know. It's just a matter of preference, I'd say. It depends on how grand you want to go and how aggressive you want to go in your approach to fixing issues within your environment.

I would look at all the products and see exactly how grand you wanna get and how much information you're looking for, then make the decision. Right out the box, you install it, once it's set up, it's already collecting data, and that was as much setup as we needed.

Integration is very important, support, and also there wasn't any product on the market at the time that worked directly with vSphere. We were one of the early adopters of vSphere. Once our product came out, I wanted, from the start, what it's doing now. In other words, it was a good choice.

We spoke to quite a few other vendors that actually had other products with similar functions of dashboard very similar, or dashboards that were suppose to be better, and they gave you much more analytics of the data. But again we stuck with this product, and the reason why we stuck with it, it gave us what we were looking for. There are some other products that are more proactive, but we decided not to take that approach.

Definitely go with it, if you're looking for a centralized management point, as far as being able to monitor everything, without having to manually go in and get sizing reports for VMs. It even reports on networking issues.

I'm waiting to see when we go into VDI and NSX; I think we'll really open it up then with a lot more monitoring options.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor like VMware is pretty much support. We've had some vendors where it's not that the product’s bad, but when it does go south, the support hasn't been there. We definitely research, whether it's going online, looking at message boards, just kind of getting a feel for what other customers’ expectations are, if the vendor is meeting them or not. That's one of the things that we are really big on, the support perspective.

I recommend it because, as I’ve mentioned, I think it's a good product. It's valuable. I guess the only thing is, like with everything at VMware, they have the different licensing structures. Look at whether you can use some of the features such as, I think, Chargeback.

I think it's definitely valuable. If you have a small environment, maybe not, but for any environment over 8 or 10 hosts, I think it's definitely worth taking a look at because you could save some money.

I recommend it. I think it’s a good choice. I know there are other tools out there. Those people are knocking on my door all the time. I don't know. I’ve had lots of pushback from different IT shops in the province saying, “Well, why do we need to use this tool or that tool? You shouldn't use VMware’s tool because they might be lying to you, or whatever, for monitoring or those kinds of things.”

I’m more of the mindset, Why would I buy a Ferrari and put a Ford engine in it? Why am I going to buy a third party? There is definitely a spot for third party. We use lots of third-party applications. Obviously, VMware is going to have the best insight into how their stuff works. Obviously, they’re going to support all the features within there.

With third-party vendors, maybe that solution works great today, but when the new features in the VMware solution come out, there is a lag. You can't use those features because they don’t support it yet because they have to play catch up. On the other hand, obviously, VMware development teams are going to work together and try and coordinate: We have this new feature. Now, you can leverage it, maybe, into a new feature in vROps. Now, we can leverage it in vRA or however that works.

For us, of course, we’re an ELA customer, so we’re licensed for pretty much everything anyway. For us, my preference is always to use the VMware stack unless it’s not the best solution.

It's a great tool. You should buy it.

Install it, configure it to look at your environment and just watch and see what it's reporting back to you. It does have a lot of canned, built-in dashboards that are very helpful and you can develop; build from those if you need to. But really, you just have to use it. It's very easy to get started with it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

I would rate this solution as an eight and a half. I would tell a colleague who is considering this solution that it's worth investing in. 

I would rate this solution an eight because we don't know how to maximize all of the features. Once we do, maybe it'll go up to a nine.

I would advise someone looking into this or a similar solution to first analyze your infrastructure. Take a look at what you need and then directly focus on your objective. This way you can maximize the solution.

If you're not using it, certainly go out and get it. And if it's part of your licensing, certainly install it, because it really is a great product.

I need to use it more to see what I can do with it. There are additional features, which would require additional licenses, and we'd have to make the case for that. But it's certainly a great product.

It is a biased answer since we are a partner, but VMware is, to us, the top virtualization company. On a scale of one to ten, I give it a 12 because it has never failed us.

I don't know how to move past where I am. I feel like I'm only scratching the top 20 percent.

When looking to work with a vendor, I look for one that is knowledgeable, that understands my problems and the way I work, and that will be there when I need help.

We will be implementing NSX next month.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

vSphere and VMware, of course, is a foundation technology that's been great for dozens of years. What we look for is the advanced features, for example, we just adopted vSAN. It was great. I went from zero to half a petabyte in just a few hours after we got the server setup.

We also look for advice on more advanced products, which are not the base vSphere, by looking to our integrators and our buyers for help. They have been very effective at providing us the information that we need.

This solution seems to be good. I've used vCOPS in the past, so it's certainly better than that.

Before investing in this product, you should talk to a lot of people and get a demo.

When looking at vendors, support is important. We like to have good support. And then I would say ease of setup and ease of use. The more complex, the less interested we are.

Regarding vROps I would say to a colleague, "Totally do it." I think it would benefit your organization. You get a lot of good insight into what's going on very quickly and the cost of vROps is totally worth it.

There are different things to look for when choosing a vendor. From an engineering standpoint, it's the administration. From an organizational standpoint, it could be cost. So it has to come in between those and it has to be a stable product as well. Those three factors.

As engineers, we're the decision influencers but at the end of the day we are not cutting the check for the organization. So, we have to do our job to sell it to the organization if we think it should be recommended. They have to have total buy-in.

I think the decision depends on your server infrastructure. If you're hyper converged, your solution may already have those analytics built in to it. So first check if your infrastructure or server provider already has that. A Nutanix may have that. If you are a traditional shop with blade or rack and you know you don't have it then there's really no competition besides Turbonomic.

We invested in a new solution because we have issues with people asking for things and not necessarily using them, or people getting distracted by other problems that come down from upper management. The push towards cleaning up some of that mess was a big part of it. It also gave us the ability to get more in-depth into how workloads were performing and being able to identify where we were having issues before the app consumers and users were seeing major issues. This was something we really wanted to push towards.

If someone is researching this solution: Get an expert in. It is such a big solution that if you walk into it not knowing what you're doing and don't have anybody to lead you along, this is what will happen:

1. You're going to look at it.
2. You're going to buy it.
3. You're going to install it.
4. You're going to look around and see so much information.
5. You're going to have no idea what to do with it.

Know what you want to do with it and make sure it's going to fit that. If you get the chance, talk to other companies that use it or use similar products. Just kind of get an idea of how well it works for them and what pitfalls to avoid with it.

Support is going to be the number one criteria when selecting a vendor like VMware for me because on day two, after I get it set up and the vendor is gone, I want to know what type of support I'm going to have going forward when issues arise and when it's in real-world activity.

If someone asks me for advice, I'll say, Do your homework for one, engage their TAM, their technical team, to help them size it properly and make sure that for what they're going to use it, they're actually scaling it and setting up a way to accomplish that. Also, get involved with the community, go online. There are so many other resources out there: VMware employees that actually have blogs, and plugins. They just make your life much easier.

If they're heavily invested in the vSphere product line, vROps is definitely a product they can't go without.

The most important aspect in regards to selecting a vendor like VMware would basically be the solutions that they provide, whether or not if they actually work, if it can be adopted successfully.

The most important criteria while selecting a vendor like VMware would be features, but just as important for me is price and the value we get out of that.

Look at the big picture and prioritize your needs and business requirements. Always get technical consultancy and ask the correct questions. Those answers that you will see, will show you that VCOPS is the most suitable product for you.

I rate VMware vROps eight out of 10. It's a good solution. I love it.

I would rate this solution a nine. 

My advice would be, do a hands-on lab. Get to grips with it before you deploy it.

I rate it at eight out of ten. It's a great product. It integrates well with the VMware stack. It covers all the VMware technologies. I just need it to be more intuitive, so that's why it's an eight and not a nine or a ten.

Start small. Don't try to put too much stuff in it at one time. This way you won't have information overload when you start receiving data back from it.

I was able to start using it quickly the first time.

I have been working with VMware for forever. It has been a good experience.

Most important information when selecting a vendor: 

• Be responsive.
• Provide good support.
• Have a solid product.

With this particular solution, with vRealize Operations, if you have a reasonable-sized on-prem environment, it's definitely worth investing in. If you're going to be just straight cloud, it may not necessarily be as perfect. But I would definitely recommend it.

It's definitely worth using.

I'd definitely recommend giving it a go. It's a good product. It's one of the best I've seen for future trending, looking forward. Maybe not one of the best or the easiest to use for actual looking at real-time statistics. I know it can do it but it's a little bit difficult to get to some of that data. There are a couple of screens that are really nice for throwing up some graphs and things of that sort.

The top criteria when selecting a vendor would likely be support and reliability. Also, that they're not just trying to sell us a product but, rather, it's something we can actually use and leverage in our day-to-day operations.

We haven't really dipped our toes into what it can do but so far I have been pretty impressed with the analytics we can get out of it. The high-level information we get out of it has been pretty valuable so far. We haven't even gotten into it, so it can do a whole lot more.

Try it out if it's in your licensing and you haven't deployed it. No reason not to.

When choosing a vendor we look at what pain points we have today and then we look if any vendor can kind of satisfy or fulfill all the pain points. vROps was one of them we looked into

I would suggest if you pain points that we had, then go with vROps.

It's already provided by VMware, there are no additional APIs to plug in, so just plan ahead of time, simply plan, plan, plan. You should prepare for the solution's orientation with PoC and testing.

When looking at vendors, it's important to look at technical support and responsiveness.

VCOPs is one of the best products from VMware. It uses internal algorithms to calculate data. Let it collect some data over a period, I would suggest at least one week. Then start real monitoring. VCOPs can pull data from storage as well, you will have configure adapter. Another thing Custom dashboard is somewhat hidden, I have seen many people use VCOPs but they are not aware of it.

As in the screenshot this is small tip for beginners, I have pointed out the brackets, they are the dynamic threshold set by vCOPs, anything going above that range, means you have to look into it, also on the box if you see above the Green bar there is a grey color stacked line that is also a dynamic threshold., above that workload is increased.

I would rate this solution an eight. It serves its purpose but it has room for improvement. For example, vCenter has Flash version and HTML5. HTML5 is really, really good. It's fast and good. If they can make it simple like this it would be perfect. 

Install and use it. It is a very good, though it needs a few tweaks.

I would recommend to try the solution.

It won't work out-of-the-box the way you want it to. As with any product, it will require customization with your organization's environment.

Give it a chance. They have a demo, you can fire it up and actually use it in your environment. That's the best way. That's what everyone wants to see, the product with their data. That's pretty standard but they offer it, and that's the best way to look at it.

I rate the product at eight out of ten because of the need that it fills, it's very specific. I don't know of any other products that fill that need to the same extent.

Get it. It's the best.

No problems. It's a great product. I love it.

In terms of the most important criteria when selecting a vendor, I feel like you have to look at it all. You have equal shares.

I work in an industry that is a very secure environment, and you have to have the long-term stability there. One thing that we're asking all vendors that we're looking at their product lines is, "Are you viable five, 10, 20 years from now?" We don't have that three-year turnover rate that a lot of other industries have. We want to make sure that whoever we partner with is going to be there, to support us for the long haul. We don't want it to be purchased and gobbled up, in an environment that is today.

We know that VMware isn't going to be. It is a very well-maintained product line throughout its life expectancy and will continue to be.

As I said, I would probably give it a 10, or greater if I could, if it had more of those REST APIs. They open it up a little bit more to integration with, honestly, the competition, as well as some of the newer technologies that are coming out. I feel they'll have to, and they'll mature in that respect over the next year to two years, but I wish we had a little bit more today.

If you are looking at this solution, try it out first. Ensure you have enough resources in your environment where you can test all the resources for vROps. Resources like CPU, memory, being able to scale the VM after it's deployed application-wise to see if that's causing issues, or does it need more resources - those type of things.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Does it do what you say it does and more? If you just trying to promote your software, and it's not working, you are wasting my time.

vROps is something that most companies should be using, because you never quite know where you're actually wasting a resource until you start using vROps.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They should be able to keep us informed (the most important aspect) on upcoming technology trends, the new releases, and new features.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Brand name reputation
• Support, how good is it (according to other customers and community forums).

My advice would depend on what you're trying to do with it. Our main goal was more of a monitoring solution, but obviously it does well in analytics, so I would ask what you're trying to do for it and then I could probably go into some of the details on what features would benefit you and if that was something you found useful, then yeah, great.

If someone was to come and ask for my advice on the product, I’d definitely recommend it, for sure. I'd describe what some of the benefits are, and I would do that with all clients. We'd deploy a trial and say, "Let it scan your network for 30 days, and it's going to come up and show you what's wrong." Whenever I do that, it's always able to find things that the client doesn't know about. They really like that.

When I decide to work with certain vendors, I look at what's the best solution for the target. For example, we're a big Cisco partner, so we do a lot of Cisco business. We don't do very much of their firewall business because Palo Alto has a much better firewall. At the end of the day, we choose what the best product is for the client. Typically, that's the main thing we look at; what's the best product. For how we choose the best product: performance, availability, features.

Personally, I steer clear of any product that uses a Java interface, but that's just my preference.

Do it as it’s a brilliant product.

I would recommend this product from VMware. If you need some analytical tools, I would recommend this product.

I would rate this solution a seven. I don't give tens because something could always be better. 

I would rate this solution a ten. I was looking for a solution that would help me do my work and this does exactly that. 

I would tell someone looking into this solution to go for it. 

I would tell somebody looking into vROps or a similar solution to get someone with in-depth knowledge to help you with finding your use case. It's very important to set your expectations, know what your KPIs are. This will help you better navigate the solution.

I rated this solution a seven because it's complex and not intuitive. It has a long learning process. It can be frustrating trying to get the correct information from it. 

If you're using VMware, use the native products that they have because they are great.

It speeds up troubleshooting. Overall, we can see what is happening on our platform. On the other hand, the VMware platform is so stable that there is nothing to maintain.

Attend a training class first, before your boss hands it to you and says, "go."

We're new to it, so it's hard for me to rate it well at this time. In the early days, I'd say it's about a seven out of ten. I wouldn't give it anything higher than that until I get more time to play with the knobs and turn the switches and see how it works. It was easy to install, there's a lot of good documentation, and I'm finding a lot of good free training out there, since I'm constrained on purchasing training this year. This is my training budget for this year, the attending of the VMworld 2018 conference.

I love VMworld. I think it's very useful. That's why I'm here, to look at the vROps. I also came to talk to some experts about SQL questions I have, and some other clustering questions as we move forward with some projects. I have found the conference to be very useful this year.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor for our company is cost.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor is that their product works.

I recommend vRealize Operations for bigger work environments. It is a very helpful tool compared to others.

If you are looking to implement this solution, definitely go to your training course. It's a week long, that's how difficult it is! They've got vSphere, which is VMware's core product and that's a week course. This is just a tiny section compared to that and it's also a week. It just shows you how complex the solution is. You have to do the training. You just have to.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• From my perspective as a tech guy, it's always about support. You need good support from the people that you get it from. It needs to meet all of your functionality.
• You've got your functionality requirements. You need to make sure it meets all of those.
• From the business side of it, price is always a thing. You have to get it signed off by the big boss, but because we are a VMware Partner, it's included in our licensing fees. We don't have to pay a penny for it.

I really look for support, it is extremely important to me. So if there is an issue, how soon are they going to respond? Also, local partners, that's important too. So a strong partner with a strong organization behind them.

Also, look for what's important to you. For us it was the single pane of glass, not another bolt-on vendor to try to have a view into it. It is nice having everything all live right there inside the center.

In terms of preparing for implementation, I didn't think it was too difficult. I don't know if there's a lot of preparation you need to. Maybe just some clean up work on the front end. It's more after it's implemented that you have things to do.

I really like the new version. Better interface.

If you are looking at the solution, I say, "Go for it." It has been good for us.

In terms of criteria when selecting a vendor the important criteria are cost, reliability, and reputation. They're the top three. Perhaps community feedback plays a role as well.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are communication, availability, and the ability to really understand your needs as an organization. Can they put aside some of the business talk and really understand your organization and the solutions that you may need? Whether they're able to work with a higher education institution, in our case, was also important. Those are some of the biggest considerations for us.

There's no solution that's absolutely perfect. It's great for a trend analysis and a growth tool, if you want to do growth projections and things like that. Using it for what it's intended for, it's perfect. Does it give you all of the goodies that you might want in a monitoring software? No, but that's not really what it was designed.

If you have the license for it, install it. Put it together, even if it's in a test environment. Let it gather some data for a couple weeks, and then look at what data has been collected, what it says about your environment. You might be surprised by what it's telling you. You might be able to see some things that you can improve on, or it may just reinforce that your environment is tuned really well. Again, if you're licensed for it, I'd say install it and use it.

You have to look at your current solution, then see if it provides you with what you want it to provide you. As long as VMware is staying on top of development and addressing customer's concerns, and it's doing what you want it to do. It doesn't make a lot of sense to go to another solution.

My big thing is, with VMware, if they have a native product that handles a function, that's the first place you should look as opposed to a third-party. When you have third-party vendors sprawl, it leads into a lot of unnecessary complications in your environment.

Look for support, accessibility, vendor's direction, and vision supporting the kind of things you need to do on an enterprise basis.

I'd use this product. I would definitely direct people this way.

The design is very important for flows and rules. It is better if you have good vSphere skills.

I suggest using VMware with vROps.

I think it's a good product.

Most important criteria when selecting a new vendor:

• Overall support for the product
• Response to support tickets
• Product features
• New feature roll-outs

When considering vendors, the most important issue is support.

Also, be patient. It collects a lot of information

I would recommend the product. I would tell anyone looking to purchase the product to utilize it as much as possible.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Technical support would be our number one reason. If anything does go wrong, it's nice to have a someone who's helping you out.
• Onsite staff is definitely the best.
• It has to be able to work with other applications. It definitely has to be a standalone because most of our machines aren't connected to the internet.

Try to get it to actually install and run.

Have VMware come onsite to help with the install and knowledge transfer. Also, make sure to research all the different features to use with vRealize Operations.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Ease of use in the product you are looking to use.

When selecting a better alternative, look at scalability and support.

Test it out. Make sure you get the dashboards you want.

I definitely recommend vROps. I think it's a complete package, as I’ve mentioned. It integrates well. It gives us a single pane of glass. We can add on different agents for different applications, SQL or whatever we need. It really gives us a lot of insight into what's going on in the environment.

When selecting a vendor, we go on Gartner a lot, and see what quadrant the vendor is in. We're always looking for the best in breed and those kind of things. We also look at somebody that we're going to build a long-term relationship with, and we know that they're going to be stable as a company. Those are probably our biggest factors.

Look at the price and the features together.

When we select a vendor like VMware, the most important criteria are completeness of the product and support. This product is fairly complete and it works.

I like that it's a single pane of glass with a single vendor, with a supportive VMware. It's really easy; it plugs in easy. There’s less to manage because it's all done through the center.

Support is an important criteria for us when selecting a vendor, as well as stability. That's why we like to partner with VMware, because the support is excellent and the stability is second to none.

A lot of my rating is a reflection of me not knowing the product. As I learn more and more, it becomes more valuable to me. I'd say it's not an everyday staple in our environment now, but it's becoming more and more important.

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is a good tool that users can use for reporting purposes, forecasting, performance analysis, and in-depth troubleshooting. It is very useful.

I rate VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) an eight out of ten.

If you are considering vROps, do some demos of vROps before considering something else, just because the latest versions are pretty good.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Support
• Ease of use
• Ease of upgrade setup
• Actual value from the actual product.

If you want to monitor something else, besides VMware, use something else. Use it for monitoring VMware, nothing else.

Just go get it.

I've been using it for a long time. I know the ins and outs about it. I've been happy with it because there's no other solution which can really do end-to-end, that kind of stuff. That's the reason I'm in. This is the only product that's out there that can really do end-to-end monitoring, management, and at the same time, capacity management. That's the simple reason for my perfect rating.

I would recommend NSX. From my experience, the solution is pretty good.

Everybody virtualizes now. It's just the thing you do. It's so efficient. I could go through the list but being able to consolidate infrastructure, you save time, you save money, it's just something you do.

They have done a pretty good job. The new client is really good.

I would definitely recommend this solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: simplicity, functionality, but mainly simplicity. 

I will definitely recommend vROps to others.

Get some training. Get trained on it and make sure that you build it out correctly in the beginning. Size it correctly.

If your infrastructure is VMware-based, you will get the most value out of the solution.

Looking at vendor selection, you want reputability, and make sure that they have a good background and history of support.

The most important areas to research before making your decision are price and scalability of the solution.

This is the whole package, it has everything that you need.

I would rate this solution a seven. We don't use it enough for me to give it a ten. There's a lot of value to it but we don't fully exercise it. It's a great product depending on what everyone's needs are. 

If you scale out the environment and want to use vROps, this is a tool you should look at.

It's solid and gives us the info we need, and are looking for. Learn about it before you implement it.

Figure out what you need, what your requirements are, and see if the product meets that.

Looking for vendors, the most important thing to consider is their support.

Use the community. I find it helpful.

I would tell others to avoid version 6.0.2 and go for 6.6. It seems a lot nicer.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: reputation.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: initial cost.

Important considerations: Support would probably be number one, then how much pertinent information is provided.

I also think it's important working with a partner. We didn't initially, but we did get involved with a partner that helped us to understand the products better.

Demo it out first before you buy it.

I rated this solution an eight because it's intuitive and easy to use. The features that it'll bring us are tremendous. It's going to be like having extra people on hand. Automation is a powerful tool that we're looking to use that'll make everything a lot easier. 

Most important when selecting a vendor are support and performance.

It's a great product if you can get it to work properly and function according to your needs.

The product is useful and it helps, especially going into a conversation with other IT staff and management.

I rate it an eight out of 10, because there's always room for improvement, but overall I'm very happy with it.

When choosing a vendor the most important criteria are experience, maturity and, probably, documentation.

I would advise you get training because it's not so easy to start with and not get lost in vROps. Also, have everything ready the partner tells you to have and have straight expectations about what a solution does and does not do.

Read the installation guide and tech blogs.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten.

I don't think there is another company that makes cables better than VMware.

The most important criteria for choosing a vendor:

• Support
• Reputation of the vendor.

It's really a no-brainer. It really should be deployed in any fairly large VMware environment.