VMware Software Defined Data Center Reviews

We are using all of the virtualization technology.

Our primary use case is infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

For some clients, we provide backup as a service. In this case, we back up their on-premises data to the cloud.

We are using the cloud deployment model.

The major benefits of this solution are stability and performance.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the infrastructure as a service. Not all of our clients require the backup to the cloud, but the majority demand IaaS, or the migration from an on-premises solution to the cloud. For example, for replication purposes.

The next version of this solution should include more automation.

There should be more visibility in the performance and the configuration.

They are using vRealize Log Insight as the virtualized log platform, but this solution is not well developed and not yet ready to use for advanced optimization and troubleshooting.

This solution is very stable. In fact, stability is the major advantage of this solution. 

We have not yet tested scalability.

My experience with technical support has been varied. It depends on the kinds of hardware because some of them do not have precise knowledge. In general, it is good because they pick up the issue and give you the insight to deal with it.

I have also used Nutanix. There are some differences between VMware and Nutanix, where each has benefits and downsides. The advantage of this solution is stability.

The initial setup of this solution is complex.

We are not well experienced with this solution so we hired a consultant to assist us.

We are not using the latest version, and we plan on doing some upgrades.

This is a solution that I recommend. It is really stable and rewarding.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

It's really valuable because we're expanding our server environment constantly and it helps us manage that effectively. Because we're a company with well over 10,000 employees and offices in over 50 countries, we need a central location for us to manage all of our servers and all of our ESX nodes. It's a great avenue to integrate everything together.

Upgrading from previous versions is tricky, especially when you have an environment that spans over five operating systems, and we're using various types of hardware. So a streamlined updating process would be better than what we're currently doing, which is piece by piece rolling out the updates fairly slowly over the course of a couple years, going from 5.5 to 6.0.

It's been a couple of years. We've been VMware customers since early 2000, so we're constantly evolving what products we use. We're reevaluating what version we should be using, and it's usually a slow trod. But SDDC, in particular, it's been about three years.

Fairly consistently. We do have to open up a few technical tickets every month, but considering the sheer scale of our environment, I would say that's typical or even better than usual.

We scale up all the time. We have an automated deployment system for new servers and it's led to this server sprawl, and it's created a new issue where we have to manage our ability to shutter servers that aren't being used because it is so easily scalable that it can almost be abused.

Like clockwork, but we have a pretty high level of service because we're such a large customer.

If you already know the basics of server virtualization, I would say that it's fairly easy. It's a central hub for integrating all these different products that they use, so for what it is, it's simple enough. As simple as it needs to be.

When looking at vendors, I would say that we wouldn't be working with VMware if they weren't the industry leader in virtualization. So, reputation for one. With that comes service. We have different consulting groups that work with our company, but just to have heard from the vendor, themselves, that's very important just because they are the experts on the subject.

We use this solution to host all of the programs that we need. We have about four hundred VMs that we use for our applications.

We have an on-premises deployment.

There are many features in this solution that are useful. It is difficult to point out any particular feature over another.

It would be an improvement to have more functionality with hardware products. For example, performing routine analytics on a hardware network would be useful because not many network switches can do it.

The stability of this solution is great.

The scalability is ok. I don't have any comment about this.

We rarely speak with technical support, but it is good. We have had no problems with them.

The initial setup of this solution is not complex. It is very simple.

Whether we require assistance for deployment depends on the product, as well as the time that we have. For example, in some cases, we have used vSAN, and we have somebody from IT to install it.

We have been using solutions from VMware for fifteen years.

This is a solution that I absolutely recommend for others.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use this solution for public-private partnership healthcare projects (hospitals).

Our environment includes Dell PowerEdge Servers, Arista Networks Data Center Ethernet Switches, Coraid SRX Block Storage SAN, GeNUA Security Appliances, Xirrus Wi-Fi Arrays, Mushroom Networks BBNA SD-WAN, and MobileNets.

This solution has improved our organization in several ways, including:

• Convergence and Consolidation of Server Hardware
• Data Center Ethernet Switching
• Bare Metal Ethernet SAN "dramatically improved" performance, stability, and reliability of the VMware Healthcare Solution Architecture.

The most valuable feature is the ability to "leverage third-party vendors" disaster recovery/business continuity applications supporting complex VMware SDS deployments, namely Zerto.

The solution needs performance optimization of the VMware IO technology.

VLAN and virtualization are the most valuable features. It is cost saving and effective with the government's money.

We can scale to the needs of the customer and find them solutions that ten years ago would cost them double the price.

Maybe, by just incorporating encryption and making it cheaper are some of the improvements needed. Right now, encryption is still expensive and then encryption is a requirement for DoD, so maybe if encryption got easier and cheaper it would be helpful. That's what I want to see.
The license is sort of confusing, but hopefully, it can get better.

Overall, it's pretty stable. The performance is pretty good as well, i.e., as long as the hardware and everything else is up to par.

Scalability is a big factor of the whole thing, so that's the whole point of consolidating hardware beta center and the footprint is what they are looking for. They don't want to house, hundreds of servers and now just have maybe ten to do the job of about a hundred.

We have onsite support that comes out to our site. Those guys are excellent, they're hardcore professionals.

The DoD requirements, more than everything else, is what drives us to come up with a solution for them so they give us what they want in terms of the requirement; we just reach out to VM and come up with a solution for them.
We were not using another solution before. VM is pretty much the-go-to for anything in the department of defense.

The setup was straightforward. Then, we brought them in to give us a blessing, make sure that the components are properly configured and do an assessment on it.

We had HPE in there but a lot of our hardware is HPE. So, we looked at just VM and HPE.

The reason why we ended up choosing VM is the reputation in the industry; for the last twenty years, VM has been there.

Licensing is the most important criteria while selecting a vendor. We were going to go with Citrix Systems but due to factors such as cost saving, one vendor doing everything, tons of VDI, etc. are why we decided on this solution. VM was a better solution.

Talk to the sales team, have them come and bring their team out, go through what the requirements are and they'll come up with a solution.

Just like anything else in IT, something you must deal with is the limitation. That's why you must have your requirements before you come up with a solution. You have to talk, get all the requirements that you need and you can find your expansion plan so that your requirements don't outgrow your solution.

Reliability, cost effectiveness, integration.

It allows us to deploy faster, more scalable. We get far more use out of the hardware we buy in our datacenters, reducing electrical costs. We own our own datacenters, so electric cost is a big priority, as is space. The more space we can rent out to customers, the more profitable. VMware allows us to virtualize very well. It also allows us to orchestrate and automate, which reduces operating expenses.

I can't keep up with what they're releasing now, to be honest. Certainly, some of the new things they announced recently, like being able to get better intellect about the virtual machines. That's always been a challenge. vRealize Operations Manager is a really good product, but it's a bear to manage. So simplifying some of that would be good; it provides too much information at times. Being able to correlate some of that would help get more intelligence out of the virtual machines. I was glad to see they announced that in the keynote at VMworld 2017.

Exceptional. From a software standpoint, a very reliable product. We're not on the bleeding edge, so we wait a little bit for patches to come out, but it runs consistently.

Excellent. I think that goes without saying. I think I covered that one, but yes it is very scalable.

I've used them mostly for critical issues. We have a lot of smart engineers that can handle most of the normal issues that they deal with. When we have a critical issue they usually get us to someone who is very good and knowledgeable.

We've been using VMware for years. I don't think that it was an actual decision. It was more along the lines of, "Wow this is a cool new product." We go back probably to 3.5, so many years ago. We really did it as most people start out, some management machines, some noncritical workloads, and started to implement it that way, and then realized the value and started to expand to the more critical workload.

So I don't know that it was this awakening that said, "We have to go in this direction." It just kind of morphed, saying, "Hey this is cool, let's try it out on some management. Wow this really works nice," and then started to expand on that, and now we're almost probably 95% virtualized.

Depends on the product. vSphere was simple. ESXi is simple. vRealize Operations is simple to set up, but a little more difficult to make it do something that's useful.

No, we started with VMware very early. We're looking at Hyper-V, but it's just not where VMware is.

When selecting a vendor, the most important aspects would be support and durability, that they stand behind the product. I have been working with EMC for years, and they have always stood behind their products. VMware does the same thing. They're owned by the same people, so that makes sense. Every software product and hardware product is going to have issues. I don't care who they are or how good they are. It's how they stand behind the product. When my sales engineers and sales guys come in and tell me this will do something, if there are some problems, the way they stand behind the product is really what makes a difference for me.

If you're starting out and you're looking to go to a software defined data center, which is really the way of the future, then you have to look at all the aspects of what something like VMware offers. They cover from soup to nuts. So you can have one vendor, one management plane, one orchestration plane. I think that makes a big difference. I think that would be my big driver towards it, because it is going to probably cost you a little more than some other solutions. But I think the combination of all those things, the operational efficiencies, make up for the difference.

If you've never dealt with it then I would get your people trained. That's a good starter. And you could certainly bring in VMware's professional services to help you start out if you don't have any expertise at this point. It's probably the best way to get started. Get your people trained, and bring in some professional services to help you get started because they have packs to help you get started with things.

The ability to automate both provisioning of the environment that you're trying to create as well as operationalizing some of the pieces they happen throughout the day is the most valuable feature. It is important because if you are in an environment that you're trying to scale or do a greenfield deployment, then it's easy to automate that process and remove some of the human errors that occur while deploying these environments.

Also, in terms of the operationalizing of pieces, these tasks that often take up a lot of time of the users, can be automated and taken out of the hands of some of the operational teams. Therefore, freeing them up to do more pressing tasks that may require humans that you can't automate anymore is why it is so valuable.

It improves this whole process because you are no longer locked into solutions that the hardware provides. In other words, you're able to scale things a lot more easily and are able to define things a little more from a fluid type of perspective, so that they can change a lot more quickly.

There are still a lot of pieces that they're working through bugs because it's a new technology. There are things that need to be flushed out to allow customers to be able to troubleshoot the environment a little more easily, so certainly that is one area that I would like to see improve.

Stability is one of those things that people often worry about. So, when it comes to the stability of the VMware software-defined system, it's always growing and always changing with the new pieces which are coming in from many different vendors, third-party pieces that are plugging in. In spite of that, you still have this very secure and very solid core that is the VMware solution.

Scalability is one of the core foundations of this software-defined solution. You're able to easily define all of these things from a software perspective and can plug-in these pieces at a moment's notice. It has already been defined within the software perspective, so it's easy to scale the environment, i.e., based on these policies that are created.

The technical support is very strong and friendly. They are always able to jump into the deepest type of problems and are always looking to help resolve whatever issue that has been brought to them.

Since I'm a partner, my customers are always looking for newer technologies; so for us, it's about trying to stay ahead of what our customers are going to be asking us for. Learning this environment, building and growing it to show-off to the customers, and then also, to be that trusted advisor to the customer when it comes time to get a new one are crucial.

The setup was neither easy nor too difficult, it is somewhere in the middle. There are pieces that are very easy to install. However, when you're talking about that bleeding edge of technology, there are pieces that are complex and sometimes, those pieces that are complex do require either support/professional services to get involved, as they have a deeper knowledge of that process.

Nutanix certainly is a big competitor. Also, SimpliVity is another big one of those competitors in terms of the software-defined and hyper-converged aspect of this environment.

Whilst looking for a vendor, a deep and trusted relationship with that vendor is very important for us.

It's important that you understand who you will consider being the gold standard or the trusted partner in this whole ecosystem. Who are the other people looking to work with this? Who is looking to rule the environment? Who is leading the charge? These are important questions to consider.

The most valuable feature is the constant expansion of virtualization of all things in the datacenter, networking, storage. Overall it's the simplicity, they make things very, very simple and the most complex aspects of a datacenter are simplified down and extracted. That makes it available for any and all who are in administration.

It's battle tested, it's cool. I would say in a lot of cases, bulletproof. It's very simple to use, it's very easy to understand, it's easy to set up and initialize and get going, and it actually provides the enterprise class performance people want.

I would like to see something that stands out. Every year we see new products coming out from VMware and they keep packaging more and more in the software defined data center. But I would like to see something that is very much like how it was with NSX, something that's going to redefine the way that we do datacenter operations from VMware. Don't get me wrong, the product's great, they continue to improve upon it each year, but they're incremental improvements. It's not groundbreaking, it's not something that's completely changing the game.

It's very stable. I've been working with VMware for the last 10 years or so and I've never really had issues with their product as I had prior to actually working with virtualization technology. I would say it's world class, it's leading edge.

It's definitely very scalable. Every year they're coming out with new limits that you are able to push. For most enterprises, it's beyond what they actually need so they're definitely keeping up with the demand. It's beyond what I see most people requiring as far as scalability.

This is one area where I would say they need to continue to improve because unfortunately, as time has gone on, technical support has become more along the lines of: "Have you followed our knowledge base articles online?" To be quite honest, when people call they don't want to be directed to a website. And, in a lot of cases, if I've gone through and I've troubleshot these issues numerous times, I'm calling for real support and I can probably recite the KB articles better than a lot of level 1 support agents.

As far as some of the other resources they have, like BCS support, I push almost all of the customers to that because I don't really care for the support services of the level-1 types.

Given our previous experience with KVM and, say, Citrix hypervisors, honestly the reason that our company moved away from them back when I was an administrator was, again, stability. VMware was far more easy for us to use, implement. We got a whole lot more return on investment from virtualizing our workloads, and we're talking about a time when we were probably 40% virtual and 60% physical. Running and implementing VMware got us to 80% virtualization versus 20% physical.

I've been involved in initial setups, design sessions, architecture.

I've found it to be absolutely straightforward. Ever since it became ESXi and it became a hypervisor itself, and not just an additional server product, it's beyond simple. You literally just load the ISO boot and you can start loading and creating services on top.

No, to be quite honest, at that point in time we had done proof of concepts but were swinging to VMware.

I don't think everything is perfect about it. But it's very simple, very easy to use, it's very straightforward.

As far as advice to another company about implementing this product, I'd ask them what rock they've been hiding under. Learn exactly what you need to be able to do and accomplish from a virtualization standpoint, and just research the pros and the cons of doing this kind of thing. You've got plenty of information online to help out. Also, reach out, there's all kinds of companies and solutions.