What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
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For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using vROps for a year.
There is a team of multiple people at my company working with vROps.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
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.
What was our ROI?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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."
What other advice do I have?
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.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.