VMware vSphere Reviews

We use vSphere for production work on defense projects.

There's a lot of things they can improve on, but it's just a matter of where they are at in their development cycle right now. I wish they would have been able to handle Apple at this point, but they can't. So it's just one of those things. They've got features I'm still trying to understand. We haven't gone to containers yet, and I'm trying to find a use for a container.

My company has been using vSphere for four years, but I've been using it since about 2003.

Everything has been stable.

VMware vSphere is easy to scale. We haven't had any problems scaling what we're scaling now.

I have contacted VMware support in the past, but I haven't needed to in a couple of years. They got back to me. Once you actually get in the queue and they actually talk to you, you're fine. It took me 48 hours to get in the queue because it wasn't a life or death issue. It was just a question. I've called them for more urgent stuff before, and they picked right up and answered the questions. They got us back online within a few hours.

This department happens to run VMware. Other departments run VMware and also use Citrix for certain things. We're looking at running BDI rather than Citrix.

It depends on how you're setting vSphere up and deploying it. They've added some products recently like vSAN and a few other things to the base loads. You have to know what you're doing with those, but it works beautifully if you're doing a standard deployment with general IP storage.

On a government contract, everything's just a base price. You don't get much of a choice. We'd always like to see the price drop, but I realize that may not be realistic.

I rate VMware vSphere nine out of 10.

Previously, we were using the conventional physical server but we now use the enterprise version of VMware vSphere to virtualize all of our servers. All of the servers in our company are now virtualized servers. In 2016, we do not know that virtualized servers can be monitored, we have implemented monitoring for the virtualized systems and management allowing us to create DR for the solution.

The most important feature is the ability to balance the servers with Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). It is a very useful feature and should be mandatory for vSphere to have but it is only available in the enterprise edition. It should be available in all versions.

We are provided with a mini dashboard that has been improved in the latest version but it still could be better. The monitoring is now available on the vCenter dashboard and the vROps has been added to the basic version that had to be purchased separately before. A complete dashboard has always been provided with some competitors, such as Nutanix.

I have been using the solution for approximately seven years.

The solution is reliable.

We have purchased the platinum technical support and they are responsive. They answer emails and telephone calls quickly.

I have used Hyper-V previously.

The initial setup is easy but the security configuration is complex.

We are on a perpetual license for VMware vSphere and the price can be expensive compared to other solutions, such as Hyper-V. They should lower their price.

I have evaluated Nutanix.

I would recommend this solution to others. I advise those wanting to use the solution to test it out and compare it to competitors.

I rate VMware vSphere a nine out of ten.

The entire production and development environments are running on VMware vSphere using the 6.0 and 6.5 versions with twelve-node clustered configurations. Two data centers were deployed to separate the production side virtual machines from those of test and development.

The deployment of Enterprise VMware vSphere architecture helps us provide a robust and high availability infrastructure because of the combined features of VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter such as HA, DRS and Fault Tolerance. This base metal virtualization is highly compatible with almost all of the IT hardware.

The vMotion in particular I think is the most valuable because this feature provides migrations of virtual machines in case you want to run do maintenance. This his feature comes hand-in-hand with other features of VMware like the DRS, which automatically load-balances the whole VMware farm based on the usage and recommendation.

Improve the patch and updates online and remove mandatory reboot, or move the virtual machine onto a physical host that needs patching/maintenance.

I would like to see VMware vSphere provide a centralized patch service on the VMware level, regardless of your operating systems.

I have been using this solution for eleven years.

In my long experience, I have a single incident where our whole VMware farm went down. I can say it is very stable as long as the hardware is healthy.

The scalability is great. This solution is highly scalable and compatible with almost all IT hardware on the market.

The support is very responsive and highly knowledgeable.

Prior to this solution, we used Oracle Virtual Machine and Xen Virtualizations.

I  used the profiling feature.

I set up the system myself.

The license of VMware is a one-time payment and you can continue to enroll in support for troubleshooting and also administer the licenses.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

vSphere is managing virtual machines in VMware infrastructure, ESXi, and it has performed very well. It's actually an excellent product.

The benefit of the solution is that you can create template-based servers within minutes. If you were to use a physical server, it would probably take several hours, if not a whole day, to get everything set up the way you need.

The UI is very intuitive, you don't have to spend hours before you figure it out. All in all, compared to other environments, like Hyper-V, we find vSphere a lot more user-friendly and intuitive to use.

One thing that would be helpful is, these days we have an environment where we are often using clouds as well. A solution that would be a little more cloud-aware would be really helpful. I know there is a product from VMware that is more specifically for the cloud, but it would be nice if VMware Cloud Manager would be cloud-aware. It would simplify certain processes. It's all about doing things faster. If it were more cloud-aware it would be easier to work it into a hybrid environment and literally have seamless interfacing with the leading cloud solution. That would be nice.

I've been using it for years. It's super stable. There are a few glitches, but really nothing major. The stability is one of the reasons we selected this solution.

It's scalable. It's comparable to other similar products. 

I do use VMware support but not for vSphere. Full disclosure: I'm a VMware developer. I've been working with VMware for many years. But their support is excellent.

We had straight physical before. Of course, it is clear that when you use physical infrastructure, depending upon the type of application you're implementing on that infrastructure, often you do not use the infrastructure's capability to the maximum. You use anywhere between 10 and 25 percent of the potential of the infrastructure, and that has to do with the specifics of what application you're implementing and how well this application plays with other applications. A typical example is SQL Server and SharePoint. They both try to steal resources from each other so it's very hard to have those components sharing the same hardware. There are many other examples. This is just to illustrate, a little bit, the benefit of the virtualization solution.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are a reasonably priced solution that the vendor maintains well, one they stand behind, so that when we use their solution, we keep up with the state of the art. Some vendors - and I'm not going to cite names - tend to invest in creating a solution, and then they don't stand behind it, and the customer is left to fend for himself. The solution has never been improved, it's no longer a key part of the vendor's line of business. At this point, for us, the important point is that the vendor keeps pushing the state-of-the-art and keeps improving the solution while maintaining a top level of support for the customer.

I would rate this solution at around nine out of 10. There are ups and downs, but essentially it is an excellent solution.

My advice: Just go for it. At this point, I have had a lot of experience with competing products, but in terms of finish, in terms of flexibility, in terms of user-friendliness again, I would say vSphere, in my book, is still about as good as a solution can be. They are near the top. There is always room for improvement, but they are in front of the pack.

A lot of the features of this product are valuable to us such as vMotion, HA, online modify VM specs, etc.

vCenter provides a centralized management interface for ESXi hosts. It's not only a management tool but also a performance monitor. It's easy for us to update hundreds of ESXi hosts in a few weeks. It helps us manage thousands of VMs.

vCenter is much more important than ever. The vCenter HA solution is the area in which VMware should improve. (I know vCenter version 6.5 has a similar feature, but it's not released yet.)

I have used this solution for more than 10 years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

VMware's strategy is a step away from Windows. In the future, they will focus on virtual appliances. The only pain is it's risky to migrate from vCenter Windows to a virtual appliance.

I'm also using Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 along with SCVMM 2012 R2. It's really painful for VMware users since Microsoft's hypervisor solution has a lot of bugs/problems and is hard to fix.

The initial setup is a wizard. You just need to follow default settings to finish the setup, then it is ready to work with. If you are using a virtual appliance, then the only thing you need to do is import to the ESXi host.

vCenter is expensive. It's worse to buy if you have a high volume of ESXi hosts.

We evaluated another solution namely the SCVMM 2012 R2 solution.

For new users, virtual appliance is the best choose as it is saving costs and is much easier to set it up as well.

• Isolation/partitioning of the server hardware
• Support for Latest windows and linux operating systems

• Reduction in hardware/software needs for datacenter
• Elimination of specialized hardware to enable lights out data center
• Improved utilization of purchased hardware (CPU and Memory)
• Increased DR/BC capabilities
• Removed hardware dependency
• Work load portability (vmotion) between on premise – cloud
• Burst to cloud capability

Heterogeneous management of disparate hypervisors.

I've been using it since VMware 2.5.

Minimal issues encountered.

Minimal issues encountered.

Minimal issues encountered.

8.5-9/10

8.5-9/10

I have experience with Microsoft Hyper-V, but production has always been VMware

It's very straightforward for the hypervisor (ESXi/vSphere), but View (Desktop) is more complex, and needs extensive planning in an environment like ours with 15,000+ desktops.

Hybrid. We brought in expertise from the vendor and reseller during the initial setup, and I would strongly suggest consulting. Expertise for initial deployments as the focus of a corporation, is the not the deployment, but the running and extension of the environment. Architecture and design is critical and specialized, and we used external resources.

This is always an issue. The ROI is heavily laden with soft dollar savings on an existing environment. Look two to three years out and make this a strategic decision rather than a tactical one and the ROI will be realized.

Price/License – Free is not free. Review what capabilities you want to have v need to have and then select the appropriate license. With that said, “Good Enough” is a valid stance now. You do not need to get everything you want to make it successful.

Our clients use the product for virtualization. Some of our internal divisions also use the product for virtualization.

The solution saves cost. We can run seven to eight different applications on it. SDDC is the best feature. The data center replication features and high availability are valuable to us. We use the product because of its HA. The HA solution is more comprehensive.

VMware is not efficient. The solution is slower than other tools. We can run applications on other platforms whose VMs are faster than VMware’s. We can also run bare metal on physical servers, but it will be very expensive compared to VMware.

I have been using the solution for seven to eight years.

The tool is stable.

The tool is very scalable.

The support could be better. The team is not very responsive. It keeps sending us to the resellers and distributors. Support is not that good compared to Microsoft’s.

Neutral

The deployment is very complex. We cannot design the tool without VMware-certified architects or professionals. We need at least five people for designing, planning, deployment, and maintenance. Maintenance does not require many people. Our operations personnel can maintain it. The deployment takes at least two weeks. The learning curve for operations is not that steep, but the learning curve for deployment is very steep.

The product is very expensive.

We use the solution internally and externally. We have different virtualization platforms. VMware is a mature solution. It's stable but a bit pricey. It doesn't have any competition. If we compare it to the full solution stack, it's a very mature solution. Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.

The primary use case is to virtualize our physical environment and to decentralize management of the systems themselves. It has been performing very well. We use it for everything. 

About 95 percent of our environment is virtualized at this point. Even our ERP environment, which is AIX, runs on vSphere, ESXi is the host. We have implemented SRM for failing-over and having high availability and disaster recovery in our other data centers.

We have seen a good 20-30 percent performance boost for our apps. Our underlying infrastructure is a full HPE shop. We've gone to full SSD drives at this point, so by doing that we have actually gotten a good performance boost.

The most valuable features are the scalability and the ease of use. The latter makes it most efficient to use. It is very simple, very easy. We've been doing it for a while now. Most of that comes from having the expertise in-house to run it, and that's why we're here at VMworld 2018.

I have just been looking through what vSphere 6.7 has coming, and one of the things I'm most excited about is the fact that we won't need to use multiple Clients any longer, if all the features that are supposed to be available are, in fact, available in the HTML5 Client. That's one of the biggest things because, for me, it's all about management. For the most part, all the other things that have made VMware invaluable in our lives should be working just as well, but a little bit more speed won't hurt.

The stability is okay. For the most part, when we have issues it's because the self-connections or the VPN connections between the cloud space and our internal network go down. It doesn't necessarily mean that access to those applications is cut off from the outside, because the applications are up. It's just the connectivity on the inside. Depending on the use case, if the application is hosted on the outside and it's being used by people on the inside - which in most cases is not the case - it's usually people who manage it who can't get to it. For the most part, we're okay with it.

I rate tech support highly, for the help we get.

Prior to having this, we had physical servers. We've virtualized almost everything that we can virtualize. I wish we could virtualize our IBM iSeries, the mainframe, which is impossible to do. But for everything else, I think we are pretty okay.

When selecting a vendor, I first look at

• proven industry standards
• longevity
• security
• good customer experience
• a robust infrastructure that is scalable and tested. 

Usually, when we make recommendations, which is one of the things we do as infrastructure specialists, we evaluate several vendors and try to see which ones match up most with these criteria. Whichever one comes out ahead, comes out ahead.

The NSX part of the setup was fairly complex: Setting up the networks and setting up the VPCs was a little bit challenging, but there was good support from both sides, from the VMware side and AWS side, to get things up and running the proper way, and that helped a lot.

We see a tremendous return on investment.

If you're not on vSphere, you should get on it as soon as possible because it will only make your life easier. All the different innovations that have been coming out over the years have shown that it's only going to get better, especially with artificial intelligence, IoT, etc. With all the different technologies that are being proposed, VMware is always going to get better. From a technology standpoint, anybody who is in the industry needs to be on this because it just makes everything easier.

We have been using the built-in security features such VM Encryptions and support for TPM and VBS, and it has been hit or miss for us. In some instances we've used it and in some instances we haven't. But for the most part, I think it's okay.

We have started using some cloud technologies with it, partnering with AWS to do that. We have a couple of internet-facing applications that we have used, that we have deployed to the cloud, and the experience has been somewhat okay.

Because of the nature of our business, there is an apprehension toward actually putting information out on the cloud, if it's not a private cloud. So the latter is what we have chosen to do. We have been able to deploy applications into our own private cloud space, with dedicated pipes to the cloud, with firewalls on both sides of it. We do AD Federation Services to authenticate between the cloud space and our internal network, and we have domain controllers in the cloud as well. We have gone through the growing pains of going to the cloud and now we're working through the quirks and nuisances that come along with that.