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VMware vSphere pros and cons

Vendor: VMware
4.4 out of 5
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Pros & Cons summary

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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

VMware vSphere provides high availability and disaster recovery features which ensure redundancy and failover capabilities.
Its scalability allows organizations to meet changing needs by adding resources easily.
VMotion enables seamless migration of virtual machines across different hosts without downtime.
It offers robust backup and recovery options that enhance data protection and disaster recovery strategies.
VMware vSphere's resource optimization allows for better CPU and RAM utilization compared to other hypervisors.

CONS

VMware vSphere pricing is high and poses a challenge for smaller businesses.
Technical support from VMware vSphere needs improvement in response time and quality.
Frequent version updates in VMware vSphere lead to instability.
Licensing complexity in VMware vSphere makes procurement difficult for users.
Improved integration with third-party applications would benefit VMware vSphere users.
 

VMware vSphere Pros review quotes

BS
Mar 24, 2019
The features in VMware vSphere data recovery are excellent. Sometimes I've deleted an entire server before and was able to recover the deleted VM. I just used some command line tools and I was able to restore the deleted VM.
it_user921882 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 28, 2018
We are able to increase the density of the virtualized servers and, with the increased density we have a lot of page sharing as well as memory sharing.
BM
Oct 4, 2018
One of the most valuable features that vSphere has is its HA and DRS protection, where it can simply make sure that all the machines are always where they need to be and how they need to be taken care of. We have a lot of servers and services for emergency services for police, fire, and the like. We have the ability to use DRS as Anti-Affinity Rules to make sure that those redundant server pairs always stay away from each other. But then, if anything would happen to one of them, we have HA to be able to come up and bring it right up and going again.
Learn what your peers think about VMware vSphere. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.
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DG
Oct 4, 2018
vMotion radically changes the way we think about how we can operate a large infrastructure, and notably, in terms of proactive maintenance.
KW
Sep 2, 2018
Ease of support is one of the main features that we have with it. We're able to take Snapshots before doing updates to make it easy to roll back if something does happen to go wrong.
reviewer1441107 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 1, 2020
An easy way of providing near-zero downtime services, the operation of the instances between clustered services, and providing the projected SLA for our customers.
MH
Sep 2, 2018
With the current compliance options that I have to go through, it's very nice to have a lot of the encryption built in. It checks a lot of boxes for the federal level so I don't have to either bolt something on or have something on top of it. Having it native and integrated into the system makes things much easier.
JO
Nov 25, 2020
The solution has high availability.
FK
Feb 11, 2022
We primarily use vRealize to troubleshoot any issues that may arise with our virtual machines, which is the main reason why we believe this solution is excellent.
PL
Sep 5, 2018
The most valuable feature would be the slight changes they've made to VMFork instant cloning, in which they have abstracted out the parent-child relationship in cloning, in which certain features, like HA and DRS, are now usable on that parent virtual machine. That is wildly amazing and something that wasn't available until 6.7.
 

VMware vSphere Cons review quotes

BS
Mar 24, 2019
We want to see improvement from VMware with security. We want minimal downtime. We want automation. We want to deploy more efficiently.
it_user921882 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 28, 2018
In the last couple of years, the breaking apart of specific added benefits and charging license upcharges for them. That would be the only negative thing that I have to say: As a large consumer of the Hypervisor, we have a hard time justifying the cost of utilizing the extra products, especially when it's a couple of grand here and there, a couple of hundred dollars here and there. It's hard for an IT administrator or an architect to sell to upper management. When they're seeing so much ROI from the Hypervisor, it's hard to show them that there is extra value in the additional products that can be tied on top.
BM
Oct 4, 2018
I met with the lead solutions architect for vSphere, and one of the things that I really kind of sat him down on was, "What's the deal between these Custom Attributes and these Tags? What are you trying to do with that?" He said, "So here's the deal. I know that they're halfway done and we have a vision of where they're all going, but we'll get it there." That that would be a great ability, to keep all that metadata about your virtual machines inside the solution and staying with the machines.
Learn what your peers think about VMware vSphere. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.
824,106 professionals have used our research since 2012.
DG
Oct 4, 2018
As we continue to push mission-critical workloads into vSphere, and those workloads are not readily protected at the application layer for availability, continuing to increase the size limitations on FT-protected VMs would be a great advance.
KW
Sep 2, 2018
I would like to see a little bit more visibility regarding errors. When an error does occur, there are times where it says "Unknown error" or something to that effect, and it doesn't necessarily give you a lot of metrics. If you go online and you give a description of it, normally the VMware forums can help you find out what it is, but I'd like to see a little bit more visibility from the software itself regarding what's going on: "This went wrong, this is why."
reviewer1441107 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 1, 2020
Monitoring information could always be improved.
MH
Sep 2, 2018
Not having to buy something from a third-party to scan the actual hardware components, like the hard drives and the port containers and fan speeds; not having to bolt something on and go through another vendor, would be helpful.
JO
Nov 25, 2020
The biggest pain point is probably the firmware management of the underlying hardware. It could be a lot better.
FK
Feb 11, 2022
They must work on the price, as well as the technical support.
PL
Sep 5, 2018
In the past, little changes have broken things in vSphere. Going from 6.0, which worked perfectly fine on the Mac Pro, there were certain changes in hardware drivers, when 6.5 came out. Some were no longer present or had been deprecated. As a result, it didn't work on the Mac Pro anymore, which was business critical.