VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) Reviews

I am working for a public cloud provider and am supporting their infrastructure. The company's cloud is deployed on VMware products. Essentially, it is VMware virtualization infrastructure and they are selling public cloud space.

Customers use the service to have access to a public cloud that is local, in their country. If, for example, they don't want to use AWS or Azure, then they can opt to use this service. In return, they have full control of their data and infrastructure.

We use several products in the VMware suite including ESXi, vCloud Director, NSX, vRealize Operations Manager, vRealize Operation Log Insight, vRealize For Business, and vSAN. The company runs 80% of VMware products.

In terms of user-friendliness, it is very good. The features are good and the interface is easy to understand. All of the commonly used functions are easy to access.

This solution has helped improve our organization because we are a successful local cloud provider and the number of customers that have joined our cloud is increasing. Our customers know that we're running on VMware and we haven't faced any issues yet. Moreover, most of our customers' businesses are doing well. Overall, we have done well with VMware.

We do our daily proactive monitoring using vRealize Operations Manager. It provides us full insight in terms of what is happening in our operations, including the details contained in the logs. VMware vCenter also helps us with proactive monitoring.

Proactive monitoring has helped us to avoid downtime, especially because we follow the best practices described by VMware. When you follow best practices, you won't face many problems. The overall downtime depends more on your support and handling of the product, rather than the software. We are running on a cluster to help avoid downtime.

vROps has helped us to place workloads efficiently, although our users do not have very large workloads. We are running two environments and we are able to handle the users and workloads that we have. 

Using vROps has helped to increase our VM density within our clusters. VMware provides a solution where you can create a cluster, whether for storage or compute, and nodes within the cluster are monitored. If there is a node that goes down then it is automatically kicked out of the cluster. Before the host goes down, vRealize creates a replacement. It has three copies of each disk in different host nodes, and it will automatically trigger one of the copies. This makes sure that the system is fault-tolerant and the VMs won't have any problems. Also, if the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) is turned on, the VMs will balance the resources and try to avoid downtime.

We have been able to replace other apps with vROps because it is, pretty much, doing everything. For example, we had another monitoring tool that was running on each of our nodes. Its job was to trigger alerts and display information. vROps replaced it and is even more powerful. If the network goes down between our office and one of our data centers then it is able to detect that. It will provide you ways to get a deeper understanding of the issues, and it will suggest resolutions. There are other products that vROps has replaced, including solutions for resource planning and load management.

All of our products are integrated with vRealize Log Insight. It integrates with the other components including vCenter and NSX and retrieves all of the logs. From there, logs are stored in the system and when you have problems, you can deep dive and perform a log analysis. You just have to know the keywords you are looking for, which components, and the hostname, or the host IP address. It will report all of the information in the log that is related to it.

Troubleshooting works well with vRealize Log Insight, provided that all of the component drivers are updated and the service packs are all installed and running. When we configure the integration, we have to verify where the logs are coming from. As long as it is set up correctly, troubleshooting will not be a problem.

There are four main components that we use. The first is the hypervisor, EXSi. It is the most important part because this is the virtualization medium. Without it, you cannot set up or deploy your virtualization environment.

The next component is NSX, which allows network virtualizations to provide your tenants with the ability to manage their own network.

We have vSAN for storage virtualization, to create clusters.

We also have a tenant portal, vCloud Director, for self-management, including payment. Tenants are able to control and manage their virtual data center by themselves without the involvement of the service provider.

We have faced one problem when integrating with vRealize Log Insight, where the logs are not collected because the component drivers are not updated. Rather than give us the updated logs, the old ones are retrieved. The integration with vRealize should be more seamless.

One area that needs to be improved is vCloud Director, as it has very weird behavior sometimes. All of the other components are stable and you can predict their behavior. However, with vCloud Director, you can't always predict what it's going to do. For example, there are times when we thought that it was collecting information about the network, compute, and storage resources from vCenter, as well as information about the nodes, but it doesn't always work as expected.

The last time we had a problem with vCloud Director, we were unable to get the snapshot of the VM. From the backend, everything appeared to be running fine. This is an instance when we had to contact VMware support in our time zone, and they were able to help us.

You can find information about some of the problems with vCloud Director in the Knowledge Base articles that include various workarounds. VMware advises that when you face these kinds of problems, contact them to raise a ticket and they will come and fix it. The component is very sensitive.

In the past, when we have raised priority one tickets and they have sent us level one engineers. This wasted time because the L1 was only able to perform the troubleshooting steps that we had already completed.

I have been using VMware for two years.

The agility of the software components is fine and there are no complaints so far from us, so far. In general, the stability is good.

The problem that we faced recently was that we were running out of time for support. We were still running on ESXi 6.5, and support was ending at the beginning of this year. We had to upgrade our infrastructure and we had our hands tied. We could not move forward until the upgrade was complete, so it was a marathon of activity. This included adding two different sites and it required that all of our regular activities were interrupted. Ultimately, however, it worked and everything is now good.

Sometimes, there are issues with stability that arise from the hardware. We are located in Kuala Lumpur and our data center is based in Bangkok, Thailand. Although it has been okay, we have encountered a few power interruptions. We are using HP machines, which are good, but there have been troubles with some of the SSDs. When that happens, because I install the operating systems using a USB, sometimes the drive is misplaced. These are the types of issues that we face more often.

In the case of any downtime with a node, the data center operator is there to quickly overcome and resolve the issue. Once we realize that a node is down, a replacement is automatically started and communicates with the other hosts. This allows us to avoid interruptions in the operation and in the business. Once things are repaired, and the original node is put back into the cluster, everything goes back to normal.

So far, the product has been good and we haven't faced much in terms of complications. Our environment is new and we don't have millions of users, yet. We are still growing. I'm not sure if we'll face multiple problems when we reach one million users or even 500,000 users, but so far, everything is okay. We've managed to handle the workloads, and we've managed to satisfy our customers.

We have more than 100 customers using it and at this point, everything is running smoothly and the number of workloads is okay for our resources. As more customers come, we will increase our resources and expand our usage.

Overall, scalability is very good and it's one of the reasons that I like VMware products.

Our experience has been okay because we have received support for any problems that we have had. Also, we were able to get support from anywhere. It is not only available in our time zone, but we can get support from elsewhere if, for example, we need it overnight. Global support is available from anywhere in the world.

I can say that we have had a few bad experiences, but overall, you cannot take two out of 100 and say it's bad. On the contrary, overall it is good.

I don't know how it works in other time zones, but our time zone is supported by India. I have found that sometimes, you have to push them hard. For example, we have raised a P1 ticket and in response, they sent us an L1 engineer. When a ticket is priority one, it means that the situation is critical and the business is impacted. If you send a Level One engineer in a case like that, it will waste time because they will perform the troubleshooting steps that we have already completed. This has happened to us a couple of times.

VMware is the first solution that I used for virtualization.

VMware has introduced the Server Appliance, which allows you to deploy very quickly. We just need to import the appliance VM and deploy it. Traditionally, we had to create a Windows machine, and there were several things to configure, but they now have their own operating system called Photon OS. It shortens the length of time required for deployment.

The initial setup of vCloud Director is a bit complex. Sometimes when we have a problem with it, we can't fix it. VMware themselves suggest raising a ticket when an issue arises, and they will come in to fix it.

When we first implemented this product, we came up with a plan and submitted it to VMware. The VMware team reviewed it and advised us of the best practices. We developed a set of instructions that includes deployment and updating the solution and re-submitted it to them for review. It was finalized and we follow this plan whenever we deploy it. Whenever we encounter problems, we raise a priority one ticket and they come to help us with the problem.

The first time we deployed this solution, the local VMware team assisted us.

This service has been running for approximately four years and they are making a profit. Otherwise, they would discontinue it. They are planning to expand so there has been a return on investment, although I don't have the exact figures.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing VMware.

We offer a variety of services for our customers including Kubernetes monitoring and management. However, at this time, we do not have any customers who opt for it. What we provide depends on the customer's requirements. If they want to include VMware with their machines, we deploy the tenants. We promote all of the products, including that for Kubernetes monitoring and management, but nobody has yet requested Kubernetes. I expect that because we are promoting them, our users will understand the utility and plan to use them in the future.

VMware updates their product every one or two years, and I think that they are ahead of us in terms of what features are needed. Overall, I think that the product is very good. In the future, we'll have experience with the functionality of all of the new features that VMware is coming out with.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this product is that if you want to have a private cloud, VMware is the best option. It is the most stable and the best choice for a private cloud investment.

I am planning to open my own cloud in my country, which will help the local community because many government agencies will not use the public cloud. For this, I'm thinking that I will be using VMware.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use this product for monitoring, resource management, and troubleshooting of our virtualized environments. We have been using Heavy Hitter VM dashboards for oversized and undersized VMs. We use vROps to find the contention in the CPU, RAM, and storage. We evaluate the IOPS and throughput of our storage connectivity with our storage back-end. We receive some alerts about some misconfigurations. Mostly, we are using vROps for two main purposes: monitoring and resource management.

In my current organization, we have two nodes; a master node and an HA node. So, we have two nodes of vROps working in vCenter.

We had an incident where a service owner reported to us that there was a slowness. The services on that VM were not running smoothly and clients were having problems. We moved to vROps and used it to understand the contention and congestion in the CPU, RAM, and storage usage. In the end, based on the metrics that were provided by vROps and the datastore at the VM level, we understood that there was a latency in the usage. Based on the recommendations that vROps gave us at that time, we moved our VM into a much faster datastore and were able to solve that problem.

We have been using vROps for the DRS of our clusters. We send metrics that allow analysis provided by vROps to vCenter to better manage and schedule the DRS operations. So, it has really helped us in that particular field.

It has helped us to better manage our resources. Especially right now as we are in the nick of resources, it has really helped us to find oversized VMs and better manage the resources.

I love the resource management and ability to find oversized and undersized VMs. 

The dashboards are really good. They give you a glimpse of what is really going on in your virtualized environment. The ability to create customized dashboards based on your needs is also great. 

The Troubleshooting Workbench, which is for deeper troubleshooting and understanding of your virtualized environment, is really good. We have been using it to monitor vSAN.

The forecast feature of vROps is really good. By understanding the forecast, we can possibly mitigate some challenges and the threat of running out of resources, then having downtime or a disaster. 

VMware has added more default dashboards, which are really good, intuitive, and informational.

We have been able to find the density in multiple layers, e.g., the storage layer and the computational layer. The resource management of finding those bottlenecks as well as oversized and undersized VMs has helped us with managing resources better and improving the overall performance of our data center.

The problem with vROps is that I personally didn't find a lot of knowledge base resources on the Internet. This is a very comprehensive and complicated product. In order to be able to use it, I expected them to have more resources and documents on the VMware website. Or, as an example, they have books available for other products, like vCenter and vSphere. We don't have that level of information available for vROps. It would be great to have a better, deeper, and more comprehensive knowledge base for vROps or even have some resources for learning.

vROps has a hypervisor level of monitoring going on in our data center. We are using other products, like SolarWinds, to have a service and OS-level of monitoring. Because we are using two solutions simultaneously for different levels of monitoring, it would be really nice in the future to have a service monitoring or OS-level of monitoring in vROps, e.g., adding the support online for monitoring services, like Linux services, Linux Databases, and Linux servers as well as Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Active Directory, or other Microsoft services, since we use them a lot. It would definitely help us in the future if vROps implemented this feature.

We have integrated vRealize Log Insight with vROps. We received logs from vRealize for the VMs and ESXi hosts inside the dashboard of vROps, and it was good. However, there was a problem with that. It worked at first for two or three months. Then, I think there was a problem with the certificate of vRealize Log Insight. We haven't had a lot of time to troubleshoot this problem.

I have been using vROps for a year.

There is a team of multiple people at my company working with vROps.

In the nine months that we have been using it at my current company, we haven't faced any sort of problems in regard to crashes, the integrity of the data, or dashboards not showing. We don't have any problems like that. It is really stable.

We don't have any plans to scale this out. If there is a new feature or service implemented in vROps for future versions that VMware will publish, we might jump onto that. Right now, we don't have any plans to extend and increase the scalability of our vROps solution.

We have a team of five people who work with vROps. We have almost 1,500 VMs as well as 70 to 80 physical/ESXi servers. 

A user would have read-only access.

A colleague and I do the maintenance for vROps, e.g., troubleshooting, customizing it, or building a dashboard.

We have not used the technical support because we haven't faced complicated or problematic kinds of issues. We have been using the online documentation, which has helped us a lot.

My current company was using Veeam ONE. After implementing vROps, the company decided not to use Veeam ONE anymore because vROps was more extensive and comprehensive when it comes to monitoring.

The initial setup was straightforward at my previous company. We downloaded the OVF, then implemented the integration with vCenter and other products, such as vRealize Log Insight, and that was really straightforward. 

I personally didn't face any problems. The tricky part is there are two ways of implementing vROps. The first way is using vCenter. There is a part of vCenter where you can specify, "I want to implement this in vROps." If you go that way, it will be a little different than implementing the OVF yourself, then going through the wizard and using the VMware documentation.

Once, when I had a problem with vCenter, I went to vCenter, and I said, "Okay, I want to implement vROps." The problem was that vCenter and vROps were not integrating. The usernames and passwords were not synced, so I couldn't log into vROps. However, that was the only problem. Later on, I switched to implementing the OVF directly. In that way, the problem was solved. Generally, the implementation was straightforward and the VMware documentation, for this part, was good.

It took an hour or two to implement one node and integrate it with vCenter. It was just a simple implementation for vROps without customizations. 

Our implementation strategy: We wanted to test this feature. At first, we wanted to make sure that we needed this product. We then went into a testing and researching phase. We implemented it because we found it really useful. Then, we began customizing it, making sure that the dashboards and everything else worked best for us.

I did the implementation at my previous company. I personally went through the implementation step, then I used VMware and other resources on the Internet to implement the service.

I have worked with this product at two companies. At the first one, I used to implement it, then I moved to another company. In that company, we had vROps implemented and installed. We are using it for monitoring and resource management purposes. In the first company, I implemented it, and in the second company, I have just been a user.

We have definitely seen ROI by removing unnecessary servers and VMs. By having vROps as an assistant when it comes to monitoring and managing resources, it has helped us a lot with cost savings and managing expenses.

On multiple occasions, we were having slow performance, performance issues, or resource management issues. vROps has really helped us to understand the problems or issues much faster. It has improved our performance for finding these type of problems and mitigating them by about 50%,

The solution's capacity allocation and management has helped us save on hardware costs by 25% to 50%. We have also saved on power and other data centers by 15% to 20%.

By using vROps, we have found resources and VMs that were not damaged and in use. We have been able to reclaim those resources. When it comes to licensing, it has helped us save about 15%.

If you have a large-scale enterprise environment with hundreds of servers and thousands of VMs, it will definitely help you a lot when managing your resources.

I have been told that the company tried SolarWinds Virtualization Manager. While they tried SolarWinds, the winner was vROps in the end because the level of integration, comprehensiveness, and extensive data provided by vROps was much better than SolarWinds and Veeam ONE.

At first, vROps might be really intimidating due to the amount of information that you get. from vROps. You might say, "Okay, this is so huge, big, and complicated." However, after using vROps for a couple of weeks, you will understand the value of this product much better. I think a lot of people might jump into the UI, then its level of complication and complexity, they would say, "SolarWinds or Veeam ONE is a better solution because it is really simple." I would say to them, "Challenge yourself with it. Involve and engage yourself to work with the UI. After a couple of weeks, you will understand that vROps is definitely the best choice when it comes to monitoring VMware solutions."

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.

We operate a test lab and we do virtual and physical testing for various clients.

We frequently build out a test sweep that looks like the client's environment and then runs the tests on that. We particularly do it with upgrades and things of that nature. 

vROps is used to do performance measurements. It's in conjunction with two other products. One of them is called vRealize Log Insight and the other one is called vRealize Network Insight. That gives us a reasonably good profile of the performance in one of the systems under test.

Our business is built around testing, measurement, and performance measurement and vROps is the primary tool. We use it in a VMware environment and we do tests in other environments. But in the VMware environment, vROps and the associated products, Log Insight and Network Insight are the primary tools that we use. It's a basic tool. It's very important for our organization. 

vROps provides proactive monitoring up to a point. There are limitations on its visibility. We often use it in conjunction with an operating system-specific monitoring tool. vROps provides not bad visibility into operating systems such as Windows and Linux, but if you want to track down problems in those, you're probably looking for something that runs inside the operating system. vROps is very important for the availability of the test lab.

Surprisingly enough, VMs take much fewer resources than most people think. vROps has enabled us to run 30% to 50% higher in terms of density. A lot of the work that we do is testing workloads, so the process is basically setting up a workload, guessing what the infrastructure's support that workload is, driving a test workload into it, and then manipulating the infrastructure until it begins to break or slow down. vROps provides the monitoring that tells us when those breaks occur, primarily at the hypervisor level.

vROps has enabled us to replace multiple tools. The performance measurement suite from VMware is three basic tools, vROps, Log Insight, and Network Insight. We use that cluster of tools in preference to things like Splunk and various other tools that are out there. It's a core tool for what we do. It is our measurement instrumentation tool, so it's critical to what we do.

In engagements with clients, we will often use vRealize for operational monitoring and that sort of thing. But our facility is primarily a test lab, so we use it for profiling and performance measurement.

For people who know it, vROps is quite user-friendly. It takes a little while to come to grips with it because it has a reasonably complex interface. The newer ones have gotten better in terms of being able to declutter the interface, but even so, there's a lot on the page, particularly in a reasonably sized infrastructure.

We've only just started experimenting with Tanzu to learn how to use monitoring and management. I have worked with Tanzu with a client who's in the process of post-deployment work. But I haven't used vROps specifically with Tanzu.

vROps enabled us to be more proactive in anticipating and solving problems. This has decreased our mean time to resolution by 40% to 60%. 

It's not a huge concern of ours but vROps' workload placement increased VM density.

We integrated vROps with vRealize Log Insight. It provides alerts, correlates metrics, and checks logs across all of the components of our infrastructure. When you're doing this, you get a slew of performance information that comes up in real-time on the vROps console and interface. Much of it comes through logs and Log Insight processes that are in the background and then push back the results from the log processing up to the vROps dashboard. It identifies issues that are showing up in the logs. The integration is very useful to the testing process.

vROps and Log Insight provide us the instrumentation that allows us to identify problems and issues and look at possible solutions.

Deployment is still a little bit of a nuisance but you only do that once. 

If I put on the hat of a client, I would say cost needs improvement. For clients with reasonable-sized infrastructure farms, you're looking at licensing at either per socket or per VM, and if you have an installation of any size, you're doing it per socket, and the per-socket licensing is a little heavy. Per VM license, if they have large numbers of VM, it is just not practical.

I have been using vROps for six years.

We found it to be very stable. 

Keeping in mind that we're a pretty small operation, scalability is not an issue for us. In larger data centers, my experience has been that it scales very well.

In terms of users, there's one person who works probably 50% of his time and 40% of his time as an administrator. We have people who run tests who are test managers of specialists and measurement specialists in testing and so on. Because we're not a production data center, it's not an army of people sitting in the other room, running this. It tends to be a small number of people that move around to various different roles. 

Half of an employee's time is needed for maintenance. 

Because we're a testing unit, the workload that we have in terms of testing will expand with the business. Generally, we run it on around three or four platforms at any given time.

We'll expand usage as our business expands, as we have more requirements, but we don't have a plan that says two months from now, we're going to add some more.

We didn't contact technical support for vROps. When we contacted support for other solutions, they generally provided reasonably good support. They tend to stick with the problem until it gets sorted out, and usually, they're good at identifying what information they need and how to get it to them. Working with them is reasonably good.

We've done the setup a number of times, so from our standpoint, it was pretty straightforward. But for someone just starting out, you really have to spend a lot of time with the documentation and understand the various configuration parameters and how they affect the operation of it. The setup is reasonably complex for a client.

Overall, the quality of VMware's documentation tends to be fairly dreadful. And so, you do a lot of searching around and bouncing back and forth. One of the biggest improvements they could make would be to actually use illustrations in the document so that there is a straightforward way to understand what the documentation is trying to tell you. It's very verbose. Trying to relate what's in the documentation to what's in front of you doesn't always go well. Documentation doesn't seem to move as quickly as the interfaces.

We're certainly not a large data center by any sense of the word. We have about 20 hosts. If we were to do it starting from scratch and moving up, the setup would take about two weeks.

It takes two to three hours per host but there's a lot of carry-on between the time you spend working on the hosts. There's preparation and various other things. Overall, it takes around one to two hours per host.

When we started, we installed vROps, linked it to vCenter, picked a group of hosts, and set up monitoring on that group of hosts and on the VMs in that group of hosts. We worked out all of the kinks from the configuration and setup. Then from there, we just rolled it out to the rest of the hosts and set it up so that at the beginning of a test, we can deploy what we need for a given host. It's not just vROps, but it's also the support things that need to be in place for us to quickly turn around a testing environment.

Most clients see a good return on investment in reduced staff time, they get early warnings about problems that are coming along, reduced time to diagnose and come up with solutions to problems. In my mind, looking at our clients, the people who use it in production operations, there is a return on investment. It depends on the size of the organization and that sort of thing, but typically, I would say you get a 1.5:1 return on investment and perhaps a bit more. It's very client-specific. This is associated specifically with the testing work we do with VMware installations. We do work with other installations that use Microsoft and various other things, vROps is interesting, but not really that useful. There are better tools for those other environments.

There are no additional costs to standard licensing. There's time, material, staff cost, but they are not out of line or unusual.

To really use vROps effectively, you have to have three of VMware's tools. vROps, Log Insight and Network Insight. I'm not sure that would apply to every customer, but certainly would for the kind of work that we do. In a sense, the additional costs are those additional products.

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. 

We monitor workloads with vROps. For example, if a new customer wants our services, we need to know the impact if you put their workloads in our platform, i.e., if this new workload will have any impact on the product or platform. We need to know the increase in percentage relative to CPU, memory, and disk. So, it is important to know how a new project or workload can impact the product or platform.

It can decrease the downtime of a client who recently has experienced performance issues by 10% to 15%. This tool can help you decrease those kinds of circumstances. Downtime is also about the design of the solution and how you put workloads in your infrastructure. If you put in more VMs than your infrastructure can support, you will have a big problem with all your clients. That is the reason that it is very important to check the performance every day of the ESXi host and vCenter from maintenance mode. If you periodically check if you have had a security issue, then you can resolve it as soon as possible from a security perspective.

vROps is selling because we have a lot of customers who need to know their usage of VMs, e.g., is the sizing of our VM good or should I decrease it? Or, in reverse, I need to increase the size of the VMs. All this is about the performance and what VMs resources you can liberate from the platform.

It is a very good tool for day-to-day troubleshooting. For example, if you have CPU-ready VMs, you can build a report of VMs who recently had an issue. It is useful for making decisions and troubleshooting issues. I think it is the most powerful option on the market.

You can schedule reports on the platform that are very useful day-to-day. 

For project management and new clients, the What-If Analysis is very good. You can use it for workloads. When you are adding new workloads to your platform, it helps you avoid impacting your production.

There is another useful tool for undersizing or downsizing VMs, which has more resources than they can handle. 

We have a dashboard for the latency of the datastore on the storage side. For new architectures, we have a vSAN dashboard for latency based on the usage of vSAN, because you need to regularly see the used space.

The newer versions (5, 6, and 7) are more user-friendly. There are tabs upfront where you can see if you need a dashboard, for example. You also have a building option, if you want to build in the infrastructure and how. It is very customizable from that point of view.

It is a very good tool for efficiency. From an ESXi host perspective, you can see the CPU rate on a dashboard. For example, if the relationship is 5:1, then it is a good standard. If you exceed this, you can get into problems with VM performance. If you have a host with a VM inside of a host using the CPU, you can balance that manually. It can also help you move the VMs into clusters. 

The older versions are not user-friendly.

If you have an operations center, you can put a big monitor with its dashboards so you can see what is going on in your platforms. However, there is no real-time. It takes about five minutes to refresh info. It is a good option if you need to see the entire landscape of the solution, e.g., the CPU, memory, and disks. For example, if you have plugins for VxRail, and there is a problem, will you be notified?

They could mix in parts of VMware Skyline into vROps to make it more efficient.

In a previous version, you could click on a cluster to see a lot of information about efficiency, e.g., when you will run out of memory, CPU usage, and RAM in percentages. In newer versions, you see this information in megahertz and kilobytes, not percentage. I don't like this change so much. If you need to present information to your boss or Director of IT, the information would be better with a percentage. Now, you have only a big number and don't know the percentage of use that you are getting from the VMs. I don't know why they changed it, but I liked the percentage version more than getting the numbers for megahertz of memory. Also, kilobytes of memory is a very large number. For a simple view, gigabytes or terabytes is better.

With the What-If Analysis, if you put some information in, and then add another workload, it is not possible to view the two workloads in the What-If Analysis. For example, if you have a customer who wants to up your sizing by 30% more, and then you have another customer tool which needs sizing, how can you leverage resources? If you add these two customers, then your sizing might be 70%, but you only have 30% of your resources free.

I would like to see more information about public cloud plugins with Amazon, Google Cloud, and Azure. This is really important in the future. Companies are moving to public clouds to maintain their workloads since they don't have downtime, which makes for very stable platforms.

In the future, they could add a central administrator for vROps. For example, if you have a large environment from multiple countries, then you need to look at the landscape for performance and forecasting.

I have been using it since 2017.

Version 6.7 is more stable than the previous version. There is no real problem with the purchase of upgrades. So, it is a very stable platform if you get good sizing of the tool. If the VMs do not have the appropriate memory and CPU, then you can probably get performance issues. So, this is important for the tool. From the disk size, it is better to choose the thicker VMDK to maintain a good performance if you had a lot of vCenters.

It is a scalable solution. If you need more vCenters or information, you can simply add VMs onto the cluster. From the vROps cluster, you can get more resources from the VMs. You only need to deploy a new VM for the cluster of vROps, and this automatically moves the workloads. If you put an IP, then the server will recognize this new node from the cluster and the job automatically. So, it has very good scalability.

There are a lot of plugins. For example, I use the vCloud Director plugin for private cloud. We also have VxRail. VMware and Dell EMC work very well together. From the VxRail side, there are plugins that can help show you more information for your platform.

Their support team is very good. They will explain things to you. You are very involved with the problem. I think the Latin America team works out of Costa Rica.

We had some problems with the views in version 6.5. It would show me 110% usage, which doesn't make sense. We opened a case with VMware. I worked with their development team in Bulgaria. We resolved the problem. 

I had a problem with a vROps plugin because we upgraded our vCloud Director. The plugin didn't recognize the upgrade. At that moment, we are doing a workaround for this while they apply a new update from this plugin to resolve this problem.

We had a demo for Tanzu from VMware for vCloud Director. We needed to show a customer how vCloud Director works with Tanzu and the Kubernetes solution. From that demo, we built a solution with VMware that links with vCloud Director as a platform.

VMware Skyline detects a problem in your platform. It has the ability to create a ticket to VMware directly, then you will receive a call from VMware, "Oh, you had this problem." It also monitors security issues.

The initial setup for the demo is very easy. You have 60 days to use the trial version and see what the tool has to offer to you. You only download the URL, then configure some parameters, IP, and sizing. Also, in the wizard, you have an option where you can see VMs with more CPU, memory, and disk. 

The deployment was first a demo version, which was standalone with one VM. Then, we needed to add more vCenters to vROps, so we needed to add more VMs. Finally, we had three VMs to maintain the database of vROps.

We started with a demo version to see what the tool has to offer our organization in regards to the VM's efficiency and health. This is very common for our company. They ask you, "What if you put more workload in our infrastructure? How will this impact a new workload in our environment?"

You have two options to deploy VMs. 

1. You have thin space. If you use VMs, then there is space to increase. However, if you decide to choose VMs with thin space, probably for an SQL database, there is no other good option from a performance perspective.
2. You have thick space. For example, you have a disk of 100 GB, and you say, "All" in the first deployment.

The billing is complicated because every country has a different option. Here in Chile, we don't pay for this kind of service with the Chilean pesos. We use another currency. In the future, I think vROps needs to work with governments for a native solution.

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.

I've been using this for managing our company's infrastructure. We have a cluster of somewhere around six nodes. 

We're using it in a hybrid mode. We have our on-premise data centers and we are operating on AWS as well. We have multiple legacy apps which require a certain type of monitoring to be enabled and we kept that enabled from the on-premise, but the advanced features for monitoring are being explored on AWS.

Primarily I have found it very useful from the compliance perspective and for control and agility. These are the three main things which are helping us to have a more proactive approach in managing the infrastructure.

We used to have COTS products for monitoring our ESXi hosts. We had a team that would check on alerts and then go on to our approach for remediating the problems. vROps has helped us to reduce the costs and increase the efficiency, because it has a lot of features that tell you where things are going wrong. We have been able to cut down on the cost of resources and we have a smaller team to manage the infrastructure now. The solution helped us to reach a level where we have low resources but high efficiency. Its gives you the most accurate alerts and remediation processes for closing problems.

We have a support operations center where we have a dashboard running 24/7 and that is where vROps manages things and tells us about the health of the infrastructure. If something is going wrong, if it picks up any anomalies, the team takes care of it, remediating based on the recommendation of vROps in the dashboard.

Since incorporating vRealize Operations over the last two years, I don't recollect there being a big concern in regards to downtime. We have not had any downtime happening in the last two years, since we put vROps in place. If we correlate it to the other models we were using earlier, we had certain incidents where we were not even aware of what was going on, on the ESX level. vROps has helped us to reduce our downtime by 90 percent. I'm taking the 10 percent off to account for planned maintenance, because sometimes we need to go offline for maintenance done for our entire infrastructure. But downtime has been reduced 90 or 95 percent since we incorporated vROps.

It has also increased our efficiency and decreased our mean time to resolution. Infrastructure agility has gone up and we're much more efficiently handling the infrastructure now, whether on-premise or Amazon. It provides the agility to do the deployments, but even then, deployment has to be initiated at a user level. Overall, it has increased our efficiency by 30 to 40 percent, in terms of deployment.

The solution has also played a very vital role in workload placements and we have been able to manage workloads and capacity planning, among other things, in a very efficient manner. We are 70 to 80 percent more efficient in regards to management and capacity planning. It gives you visibility into the infrastructure so that you never go beyond the sources that you have and it has helped increase our VM density by around 70 percent. In addition, performance has definitely increased by a similar rate of 70 to 75 percent compared to the previous product we used. There was a leap forward when we used vROps.

Regarding hardware costs, what we used to do before we had vRealize Operations was to buy things in chunks. If we needed storage or additional memory, we might procure 10 TB of storage at one go and then start using it, despite the fact that only 4 of the 10 TB was being used. That's how we would do hardware resource allocation: we would have to buy that item and put it into the system. But now, because of the visibility with vROps, we know how much storage we will require six months down the line. That means we do procurement in smaller chunks. We save hardware costs and, at the same time, resources are planned in such a way that we never run out of resources. Because we have six- or seven-node cluster, from the power perspective, we are not seeing that much in savings, but definitely due to the capacity planning and the visibility, we have seen a cost benefit.

There's a feature known as Smart Alerts in vRealize Operations, which I have found to be useful if there's anything going wrong in the infrastructure. What usually happens is that you get so many alerts that you become confused. Smart Alerts give you visibility into your infrastructure and also recommend how to fix the situation. That's a feature which I'm really a fan of.

Control, from the compliance perspective, is also helpful because we are a PCI DSS-certified company. It keeps us in compliance so that all of our servers and other things are not breaching any of the baseline protocols and baseline policies which we have laid down for the company. That's another thing which I like about the VMware vROps.

For the initial setup, there should be some sort of auto discovery of the environment. That should be enabled. It has the ability to discover a main node, but it could still be made easier, to reduce the initial configuration and setup time.

We have been using VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) for the last two years.

After incorporating it during the initial phase, there was a discovery period for the infrastructure and for vROps to adopt our set of configurations and advanced policies. Since then, it has been pretty stable. We haven't had any issues.

The scalability is fine. When we started using vROps, we only had a three-node cluster. Over the last two years, we have gone up to a six-node cluster. It is pretty scalable. The good part is that adding nodes to vRealize Ops is a pretty straightforward thing. It has given us the visibility to plan and to scale to the level we are at now.

We have over 3,000 people, out of an employee base of 10,000, using the apps that are running on the ESXi that is managed by vROps.

In terms of increasing our usage, as of now there are no plans because it widely depends on the expectations of the business. It's a global thing now because of COVID-19. We still don't know how we are going to grow this over time because the business is in a "back seat" right now. But I'm positive, down the line, of the possibility that we will go further with this.

We have had a couple of cases where we have reached out to VMware support and the tech support has always been awesome from all perspectives. Their problem-solving attitude has always helped. We have been using VMware for seven to eight years now and we have gradually grown but support has been awesome during that time.

In the past we used Paessler PRTG as well as other tools.

The initial setup is straightforward, not complex.

Initially, because we were not familiar with vRealize Operations, it took us a while to get it set up. Our infrastructure is dependent on multiple volumes, ESX clusters and the storage. It took us seven to 10 days to have a fully functional deployment of the solution. The initial setup took us less time, but setting out and defining the policies, the baseline and advanced policies, happened within 15 days of the deployment.

For deployment, we used a team of four onboard resources and we got in touch with local consultants who are VMware Certified partners for doing the deployment. The initial deployment was done by the certified partner and then a knowledge transfer to the resource team took place. After a month or two, our team was able to be 100 percent hands-on with it and started using it.

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.

My primary use case is infrastructure monitoring. This is a very in-depth monitoring tool and the use cases have been to monitor multiple hardware platforms like Dell and UCS. This includes network hardware as well as the storage solutions like Unity boxes. We've also monitored the entire SDDC stack by leveraging the different management packs.

vROps provides us with visibility from apps to infrastructure and across multiple clouds. It has immense monitoring capabilities when we talk about the vCenter, which includes clusters that host virtual machines and data stores. Not only that, but with vROps version 8, you have in-built management packs for AWS and Azure. This means that you can monitor these public clouds from the same solution and you do not have to purchase any other management packs.

With vROps emerging into the application field, we can now deploy the Telegraf agent and have the application monitoring done in vROps as well. From infrastructure to application monitoring, vROps has a wide range of visibility into the monitoring spectrum.

One of the most useful features that this product provides is proactive monitoring with the help of alert optimization. It detects anomalies and I know when something is about to go wrong in my inflow, or even that something could already be happening. The alerts are available by default and this helps with early detection. Other than the alerting, the capacity planning functionality is also a proactive measure that is very useful.

Proactive monitoring is something that takes time to stabilize because once you download vROps, it will take three months for the tool to stabilize and create a baseline. Once that is complete, it can perform proactive monitoring and will help to analyze the underlying issues.

It has absolutely helped us to reduce downtime. When we talk about the infrastructure and detecting problems, the notifications and alerts provided by vROps have allowed us to avoid application failures resulting from the infrastructure not working correctly. It is difficult to estimate how much time it saves because different customers have different environments and different timelines.

With respect to workload placement, it is a feature we use and it's incredibly useful. That said, there are a few things that can still be enhanced because certain customizations are missing. If we are referring only to VMware workload placement then the functionality works great. It works well on-premises but not for the public cloud.

Using vROps has led to improved data center efficiency, which has, in turn, reduced the cost of our infrastructure. Specifically, the VMs were on different ESXi hosts and now we've consolidated some and distributed others. The cost savings come from a reduction in hardware requirements as well as licenses.

We have integrated vROps with vRealize Log Insight and it's a great thing, firstly, because the integration is very easy. The best part is that you can easily create alerts within Log Insight, and then push them to vROps. Unfortunately, we do have a problem with getting the triggered object when we send alerts from Log Insight to vROps but other than that, the integration works seamlessly. The system is best utilized if whatever integrations you have with vROps are integrated into Log Insight as well. That is when it starts giving you value.

The integration with Log Insight has improved our troubleshooting capabilities. For example, there are certain events like a disk consolidation failure where there was an alert, but we weren't able to capture it with vROps because it isn't able to capture everything. However, we were able to find it using Log Insight, which then allowed us to capture the event that triggered the alert. This helped us to save the application that was running on the virtual machine.

Implementing vROps and the right sizing has really helped the customers to save a lot of resources with respect to CPU and memory. We were able to identify what resources and VMs were idle versus what was powered up and in use. The reports helped to highlight where it was oversized and we were able to downsize accordingly, ultimately saving money.

The most valuable features are capacity planning and predictive analysis. These are some of the most outstanding features that vROps has as a monitoring tool.

The ease of usability, interactive dashboards, and graphs are features that are different when we talk about the other monitoring tools. The dashboards and the interface are very easy to understand, very lively, and very dynamic.

This product is very user-friendly. It is also very easy to deploy and because it's a VMware product, we always have access to VMware support.

The workload placement can be improved. It can be more diversified because it does not provide many options with respect to segregating the workload.

The what-if analysis section is not very advanced and there is a lot of room for improvement. For example, it should include a wider spectrum when we talk about the data center cost assessments and the data center workload assessments. It should be able to consider a use case and predict what the capacity will be after a specified period of time.

I have been working with VMware vRealize Operations for more than five years.

This product is really stable when we talk about monitoring. The only condition is that it has to be sized well. If vROps is sized properly, it will give you a value with respect to monitoring. If it is not sized well, where it has too few nodes and the number of objects is really large, or the workload is not placed properly across all nodes, we might face issues. It happens because the workload is not correctly distributed. Importantly, we do have options for properly sizing everything.

Other than this single issue, it works fine.

Scaling is easy to do. For example, adding an extra node is easy and can be done in 30 to 40 minutes. All you need to do is add a data node and the vROps internal architecture will automatically replicate and share the data across nodes.

There are between 50 and 60 people on my team. The roles vary from engineers to consultants to architects, all of whom work on the product. We have implemented this product for more than 50 clients, some of which had huge environments. For example, we have worked to implement environments with more than 40,000 virtual machines.

Technical support is pretty good. Most of the time, I've been able to get solutions to my problems. There have been times when we had trouble that they were not able to find a solution for but other than that, the support is okay.

I have knowledge of other products that are similar but I'm biased toward vROps because that is the only one that I have been working on.

This solution is very easy to deploy.

It is deployed on-premises but with the latest version, they introduced vROps on the cloud as well. This means that they now have a SaaS offering in addition to the on-premises solution.

When deploying in a production environment, it will take between one and two hours to complete. The implementation plan depends on the SMEs that are working on the project and how stable your insight is. The timeline is very personal and it can really vary.

When we talk about deployment, there is no fixed plan when we talk about vROps. The reason is that it's a very customizable tool and the entire sizing depends upon the sizing chart that is provided by VMware. Essentially, whatever the requirements of customers are, we plan according to that, and then we follow the deployment rules or the deployment process that is given by VMware to deploy the tool.

Our clients have seen a return on investment by way of cost savings through both proper sizing and efficient workload placement. What they get from this solution is absolutely worth the cost. It's a monitoring tool, so return on investment doesn't happen on day one.

When you deploy the tool, it takes three months before you start monitoring the data. Then, you start getting into the metrics, and then after that, maybe after a year or so, you will start realizing how useful it is. This will be the case with all of the monitoring tools.

This is an enterprise-level product and everything is included in the VMware Suite license. 

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.

For our clients, vROps is used for managing their environments, having a single pane of glass, so they can go in and have a view of what's actually going on in their environments. That's especially true when it comes to TCO perspectives. When it comes to the TCO, they get to realize how they can start trimming down VMs that are not working, or cutting down on the resources that those VMs are using. That helps them do better in their environment and to lower their operational costs at the end of the day.

We do have the big enterprises; we've got quite an extensive team that looks after clients. But my clients are SMB clients and are where we see a need for vRealize Operations.

For me and my clients there's a very big benefit from a monitoring perspective. It provides proactive monitoring and helps instantly. It gives you this one dashboard with an overview of everything that you're busy with, within the environment. You can get notifications, on time, to deal with a situation and it also gives you references to what you can do and what you can't do, or what is recommended by VMware. It has links for you to find the resolution to the problem. From that perspective, it's brilliant. I don't think anybody could ever ask for anything over and above that. It's very proactive.

vROps has also enabled us to replace tools. SolarWinds is one.

The capacity planning is one of the most valuable features. That is brilliant. A lot of clients, especially now due to COVID-19, are in a situation where they don't have a lot of money to spend. They're looking at what the best way is to start cutting costs, especially from an IT perspective. A lot of companies look at it from an IT perspective rather than anything else when it comes to business. That's key. 

Also, the integration with Blue Medora is brilliant, especially the way it can let you know if there is a problem in the environment, and various ways to fix the issue.

In addition, for me, it is seamless and easy to get to know. It's quite straightforward and it's a nice product. The user-friendliness is brilliant. At some point you need to just keep kicking and kicking until you get what you really want. But from a user perspective, it's quite straightforward in terms of being able to understand as to what is going on and how to get to specific pages. The first page gives you everything. It highlights everything: your risk, your health, and that kind of stuff, with the dashboard. It is quite easy to use, especially once you've kicked around a little. From there, I don't think you should even encounter an issue.

The integration with vRealize Log Insight is amazing for me. I don't think there's any other monitoring software that I'd choose or sell to a customer. That's especially true now from a vSAN perspective and getting the logging side integrated into the solution. The correspondence and the communication between the two products is great. I would always recommend going down that route.

I've used vROps for about a year.

I have used it a handful of times when it comes to client deployment. But there's time required to get my head in the game with it, because there is a lot when it comes to the product itself. We are going to be installing it in our lab as well, to get more clarity around how it works, especially when it comes to the integration with Blue Medora and those kinds of things.

On a scale of one to 10, I'd say I'm probably a four when it comes to vROps, but I hope that I'll actually get to 10, to be the best in it. It's a very brilliant product. I love it, the way it works, all the functionality. Everything about it is just amazing.

The stability is great. On a scale of one to 10 I would put it at 10.

The scalability is also great. I haven't played with it that extensively but, from my understanding and from what I know, you can scale as much as you need to. As long as you understand the dashboards and how to create them, you should be okay. From that perspective I think it rates quite well.

The initial setup is straightforward. You just download the OBA and—"Bob's your uncle." The installation guide is also very helpful. They give you a step-by-step guide for how to deploy it. If you read the document, you'll be okay from the beginning until the end. You shouldn't have a problem.

If it's just a basic deployment, and if you've already got the OBA, it should only take a good 30 minutes, and that would be a lot. I'm just covering my bases, in case there is anything that may not have been taken into consideration. But plus/minus 30 minutes should be enough to do a basic deployment.

Currently there are five of us in the company who are using the product or who are familiar with the product. From a maintenance perspective, the dashboard does most of the job. One person can have a look at it and there are the rest of the guys on the back-end for support. I don't think it needs 10,000 people looking after the product. The product is an automated, driven process. You just need to look at the dashboard and understand what it says and it should make the job a lot easier. You shouldn't need more than one or two people looking at the product every day.

Overall, the value you get from a vRealize is definitely worth the cost.

vROps is a bit expensive and that's a reason that small clients say, "No, I don't think we need this." From a pricing perspective, it is quite steep. But "expensive" is relative, depending on what you need. Others might say, "It is expensive, but I think we can use it to better our environment." It is quite an expensive product. But if you really require something, you'll do it anyway.

The main difference between vROps and the SolarWinds solution is the integration to the VMware stack in its entirety, and the opportunity to integrate it with different product sets, like Blue Medora. That makes it quite a different solution compared to SolarWinds which, as far as I know, doesn't have that type of integration. Maybe there is something new along those lines with SolarWinds and I just haven't looked at it, but I've never seen those types of integrations when it comes to SolarWinds.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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