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VMware vSphere pros and cons

Vendor: VMware

4.4 out of 5

449 reviews
95% willing to recommend

8,949 followers

Pros & Cons summary

VMware vSphere offers high availability and flexibility, featuring HA, DRS, SDRS, and vMotion, enhancing system uptime and resource distribution. It supports advanced virtualization management for effective monitoring of virtual environments across data centers. Renowned for scalability and stability, it manages extensive workloads efficiently. Despite its strengths, frequent updates, high licensing costs, and sluggish performance can pose challenges, along with integration and technical support issues requiring attention.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

VMware vSphere offers advanced features like VMotion and SVMotion, facilitating the migration and management of virtual machines and storage with flexibility and ease.

High Availability (HA), Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), and Storage DRS (SDRS) enhance system resilience and optimize resource distribution, ensuring efficient operations and uptime.

The integration of VMware vSphere with various hardware and virtual switches supports multi-site use and enhances its scalability and adaptability across different data centers.

VMware vSphere's built-in encryption supports security compliance, particularly for industries requiring stringent standards such as healthcare for HIPAA compliance.

The ease of management and intuitive operations with VMware vSphere allows for quick training and onboarding of new technicians, further facilitated by community support and comprehensive documentation.

CONS

VMware vSphere suffers from high costs, which is a significant concern for many users.

The licensing costs of VMware vSphere are often seen as expensive, particularly for small businesses.

VMware releases new versions too frequently, leading to instability in the environment.

Pricing strategies of VMware vSphere have reportedly become more challenging, especially after the acquisition by Broadcom.

VMware vSphere often requires numerous paid add-ons, complicating integration and increasing costs for users.

VMware vSphere Pros review quotes

BS

IT Supervisor at APM Terminals, Inc.

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.

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Senior Systems Analyst at Manufacturing Organization

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.

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BM

System Administrator at City of Sioux Falls

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.

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DG

VP of Product Engineering at Navisite

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.

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KW

IT Analyst I at Los Rios Community College District

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.

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reviewer1441107

Owner at a transportation company with 1-10 employees

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.

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MH

Senior Systems Administrator at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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JO

Server Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Nov 25, 2020

The solution has high availability.

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FK

Head of Service and Storage Infrastructure at GS2E

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.

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PL

Preston Lasebikan

Lead Systems Engineer at MacStadium

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.

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VMware vSphere Cons review quotes

BS

IT Supervisor at APM Terminals, Inc.

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.

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Senior Systems Analyst at Manufacturing Organization

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.

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BM

System Administrator at City of Sioux Falls

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.

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Free Report: VMware vSphere Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about VMware vSphere. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2024.

816,562 professionals have used our research since 2012.

DG

VP of Product Engineering at Navisite

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.

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KW

IT Analyst I at Los Rios Community College District

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."

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reviewer1441107

Owner at a transportation company with 1-10 employees

Nov 1, 2020

Monitoring information could always be improved.

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MH

Senior Systems Administrator at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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JO

Server Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Nov 25, 2020

The biggest pain point is probably the firmware management of the underlying hardware. It could be a lot better.

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FK

Head of Service and Storage Infrastructure at GS2E

Feb 11, 2022

They must work on the price, as well as the technical support.

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PL

Preston Lasebikan

Lead Systems Engineer at MacStadium

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.

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