VMware vSphere Reviews

Our primary use case of this solution is for server consolidation and high availability. We are customers of VMware and I'm a senior systems engineer. 

The solution is highly reliable and suits our needs - it's highly popular. Support and the overall community are great. You can find a solution to any issues you have. 

I think what they need to improve on is their pricing. They're starting to get a little high-end in terms of price compared to other solutions and the other solutions are catching up. Everything with VMware is very modularized and you can't just buy one piece and be done with it.

In my opinion, they would be wise to include a high availability out of the box type set up and not just for cloud, but site to site.

I've been using this solution for close to 15 years. 

Technical support is excellent. They stay on the line and track down the problem. Usually it's on the first call. I have had some complex issues that took a day or two to resolve but for the most part, they're resolved in the first call.

For the most part, the initial setup is pretty straightforward. If you start getting into the more complex setups, it can get more complex. For most use cases, it's just stick the disk in, let it run, and it sets most of itself up. It's almost out of the box ready.

As far as I know, there is a standard licensing fee. It all depends on the options that you choose and what you need for each business. Every company that I've worked for has had a different pricing model and a different set of use cases. So pricing can range anywhere from $700-$800 per server core, all the way up $2,000-$3,000 per core.

It's important to do your homework and make sure that it's the right solution for you. It's the same with anything, there are other options out there and you need to figure out what fits your business use case at the time.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

It is primarily for virtualization. 

As an enduser, I would say it has allowed us to have the flexibility of moving around our workloads on different machines, and not having to worry if anything is down. Since we are a small organization, we don't have a lot of hardware resources to spare. So, this consolidation helps us to aggregate a lot more services and solutions utilizing the same hardware. Of course, it also allowed us to upgrade our skills, which helped us when deploying other solutions.

We truly value the security of the solution. We also value the consolidation, which can be done in terms of releasing the hardware footprint, and the service call. Furthermore, the automation and ease, as well as source utilization are key features of this product.

I think the cost should be reconsidered. VMware is not the cheapest solution out there, despite the fact that it may be one of the best.

In addition, I think some of the backup features or the prediction features can be improved. The legacy workloads are not prone to be virtualized. Some users may want to see a common deduction product across the physical service.

It has been a very stable solution for us. We have not had any downtime in the past three years. 

The scalability is excellent. I do not see any other solution that comes close to this product.

The response time from tech support is efficient. The tech support team there is very knowledgeable. 

The initial setup is straightforward, and not complex at all. 

The cost is a bit high.

Another solution in the same sphere is Hyper-V, which is quite good in terms of basic plain virtualization software. However, vSphere offers a scaled-up version. 

Our primary use case is for labs, development workloads, and engineering. I use it for our processing development on our product. Our company does printing technologies for gaming, particularly for gaming casinos in the gaming industry.

It's working great.

We are looking at going to VMware Cloud on AWS. I'm familiar with the SDDC software solutions, but cost always comes in to play. I would like to find out more, as it sounds a lot cheaper now. We already use Azure for our deployment packages. Right now, it is just FTP, but we could use somewhere to actually manage the infrastructure ourselves. It is much easier to manage it than relying on customer infrastructure to do the hosting for us. We are mostly on-premise, but we are looking to move to the cloud since there are more opportunities there. It should help us gain more customers and expand the market share for our company.  

We are able to replicate and create customer environments. We can do an upgrade path in production and see what the expectations of the upgrade will be on production by testing it in the lab internally first. Then, once everything is approved by the customer and it works well, we can roll it out to production. Therefore, the downtime is planned.

The solution is simple and efficient to manage. With VMotion, I don't have to worry about resources. It can move things around. For example, I use Confluence and JIRA as part of our documentation to establish a process within the app. 

• The hypervisor
• I use the ESXi a lot for my users to create their own templates and control their own VMs without my interaction. 
• The stability of the networking site
• I can automate deployments.
• I use customization to prevent any network and DNS collisions to the router.

Our mission critical apps are mostly database servers. We are pretty much a Windows platform company.

Flexible pricing would be nice. Some of the pricing models are fairly big.

We take whatever the customer has and make sure we use our application to upgrade them. If there is anything unexpected, we already know internally instead of doing it during production or go live. It is bad for business to extend planned downtime more than expected.

It is very scalable. Soon as I switched to a vSphere environment, ESXi, and vCenter, I was able to buy hardware and add it in. I just had to buy another license, since the infrastructure is there. It takes me a short amount of time to add something that benefits everybody.

It scales vertically. In terms of horizonal scaling, it depends on what the requirements are for it.

The VMware community is always there and it is a valuable resource. Just go to support.vmware.com, type in your question, and one or two users probably have experienced the same problem. 

I haven't called them. I mostly go online.

The previous development team at my company used Workstation. When I joined the company, I didn't like the product. So as soon as I joined, I transformed our entire infrastructure to vSphere along with vCenter. This made things easier with our directory and for other users in the company to deploy and perform their own VM development. Managing users has become more streamlined.

As soon as we switched over from Workstation to ESXi and vCenter, the downtime was very minimized. Growth and flexibility are now there. If I want to add more hosts, servers, and devices, it is not a big deal. The infrastructure is there. As far as having more job requirements, we wanted to explore our development lifecycle more without making major changes.

I started the setup from scratch. The hardware was already there, and it is just a matter of getting software in. It is straightforward to set up. I have built many infrastructure environments.

I worked with my internal team who did the installation. Mostly, my responsibility was to the VMware infrastructure, lining up the VMs, and what applications that needed to be installed.

Most of our current customers are pretty happy. They don't utilize VMware, but we just sell the software for them. Internally, we use VMware for support.

We would like it to be affordable to use the manage services on the cloud, then let VMware manage it and have AWS a part of it. This would make the easier transition from on-premise to cloud and be of value. We don't want to go through a third-party vendor.

Some of our customers use Hyper-V because it is much cheaper (free). I've seen it and it has the features. It does its job if there's a problem to solve for a small company. However, if you're going to grow, I am not totally impressed with it. There's no support. I didn't see any add-on development features in the pipeline. 

Go for it. It's easy to use and manage.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: support.

We use vMotion a lot and use vCenter to manage the entire set-up.

Our entire banking operation is virtualized-- the application and data centers are all virtualized. It’s become easy for us to switch between servers if there's latency or slow responsive. We can switch to servers with more resources.

We’ve been using it for last six years.

We bought NetApp FAS storage and vSphere together, and it’s worked well. All our critical applications run on vSphere and FAS.

It goes hand in hand with growth of our business. We've used the enterprise edition and moved from 5.5 to 6.0 with no issues.

It’s a more stabilized product. Once configured properly, you don’t need support. In the last six years, we haven’t had to call them at all except for the initial setup.

It was complex because we experimented by keeping data and system volumes separate. We don’t replicate the system volumes frequently. We were able to do it though, and we used only 1/10 of the bandwidth with the combination of FAS and vSphere.

Microsoft Hyper-V is giving them a run for the money as vSphere is more expensive. I’m already on enterprise version of Hyper-V, running both it and vSphere.

VMware is not as proactive. They’re not willing to correct some problems I've faced. So VMware should be a bit more flexible in their engineering. I always tell them that with the architecture I've put in place, I can’t use SRM at all, but whatever SRM does, I can do manually, yet I can’t automate it.

I use it for my infrastructure, and we can also use it for our simulation environment and training. We can use VMware in a simulation environment to test the environment we need.

It makes my environment very reliable.

It is a very dependable solution. Its performance is very good, and it is also easy to manage and implement.

They can lower the price of its license.

I have been working with this solution for more than six months.

Its stability is very good.

It is scalable. In my organization, we have about 2,000 users. Its usage is very extensive. We use it daily.

Their technical support has been very good.

I have used Microsoft Hyper-V.

It is easy to implement. It is a very good solution.

I can implement it myself. On one server, it takes a maximum of one hour. We have a technical team of three people for deployment and maintenance. We have one manager and two engineers.

Its price could be lower. There is the cost of one license, and then there is the subscription cost for support.

It is a very fine and reliable solution. I would rate it a nine out of 10.

It is used for some databases to the application server and any load that you can think about.

There are many features that are valuable and that excites me. However, it totally depends upon the customer. I'm working on the behalf of a service provider, who supports a customer. How useful it depends on what kind of licensing the customer carries.

The initial setup is straightforward and not overly complex.

Its scalability potential is good.

The solution is quite stable. 

Technical support has been good.

I can't speak to any missing features. It has everything I need.

I've been using the solution for ten years.

We have found the solution to be stable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The solution can scale and expands well. If a company needs to expand, it can do so.

The solution offers helpful and responsive technical support. We're quite satisfied with eh level of service on offer. 

We have found the setup process to be simple and straightforward. There wasn't too much complexity or difficulty.

We are with one of the service providers. I'm managing VMware.

We are not working with the latest version of the solution. We're working with, for example, N-1.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We are very happy with its capabilities and don't have anything negative to say.

Currently, our whole infrastructure stack is residing on the VMware hypervisor. Everything we use is running on VMware. We have multi-site vCenter data centers. We have four sites, but they are two separate pairs of sites that provide redundancy. We will shortly also use VMware Site Recovery Manager for the two to four hours disaster recovery strategy. 

We are on version 6.5 or 6.7, and we are moving to version 7.0 shortly.

It is a very stable solution. It performs well for our requirements. It has been running for a long time, so we are very knowledgeable about this solution.

It is a very well-supported solution, and it is very flexible. The expansion of its functionality is dynamic.

Its cost needs to be improved. It is very expensive as compared to other solutions.

I have been around VMware and vSphere for the last ten years.

In terms of stability, it is very well-established and very stable. For any problems or issues that we've encountered in the past, their support was quite dynamic. We've had very good success in resolving any issues or problems. None of these issues or problems had a direct impact to live services. They have built it in a way so that it provides redundancy and flexibility. It ensures that your production environments remain available at all times, even in the case of problems or issues that could be encountered. I would give it an A for stability. 

It is easily scalable, and it can be scaled without any impact on the availability of the production environment.

Their support is very good. I would give them good grades. For any problems or issues that we've encountered in the past, their support was quite dynamic. We've had very good success in resolving any issues or problems. Because there are many different products in the stack, you need to ensure that you reach the right person for the product you're looking at, but it is always fairly simple and easy to reach the right person.

The learning curve to actually get used to the product and know the product properly is fairly steep. I have been working with this solution for the last ten years, so it is not a new solution for me. I couldn't speak to today's onboarding process because I haven't onboarded in the last year. It has been many years.

It is very expensive as compared to other competitive hypervisor solutions in the market today. Its competitors are actually more aggressive. Even though most of them are less established solutions, they have started to catch up in functionality and capacity, and their pricing is extremely aggressive.

If someone is starting new with VMware, it is important that you either onboard someone who has experience with it or you ramp up the knowledge of your IT operations staff. It is far-reaching and complex and requires a good understanding to manage it properly. If you don't have a good understanding at the beginning, you could find yourself in situations where you're not getting the actual return on the solution because you're not managing it properly. The knowledge gap at the beginning has to be covered quite thoroughly.

I would rate VMware vSphere an eight out of ten.

We use it mainly to host virtual machines. We have the standard version, so we do VMotion. Sometimes it's easier when you need to do some maintenance on a whole server to be able to move the virtual machine from one host to another, so there is no downtime for the users. For virtual machine management, it's more fluent to dynamically set the resources on the servers, for example, if we need to increase the storage volume on a virtual machine or increase the RAM or adjust the CPU cores. It's easier to handle this on vSphere or any other hypervisor than on bare metal.

The VMotion feature is the solution's most valuable aspect. The fact that you can move the load without service interruption to the users is great.

The initial setup is easy.

The container management could be improved. It's far from perfect right now.

I've been using the solution for the last eight years. It's been a while.

The solution is very stable. It's quite mature. There used to be a more pink screen of this in version five, however, since then, since maybe version 5.5 or version six, it's very stable and it's very rare that the application hangs.

The solution should be scalable. However, I've never managed one of the node clusters, so it's hard for me to comment. It's easy from a small cluster to add nodes. How well they behave when you go beyond the 20, 30 nodes, I don't know.

It's been too long since I've contacted them, so I don't have any meaningful comment on this.

The initial setup is not complex at all. It's relatively easy. It's a fairly basic process for pretty much any network administrator.

In terms of deployment, the environment we have is not that big. We have less than 10 physical servers, so we tend to still do it manually instead of automating everything. This will change eventually, however, right now we set up everything manually. In regards to the time it takes to set up a vSphere cluster, you're looking at maybe two hours overall if you include all the hosts and the license configuration and the cluster configuration.

Everything is always too expensive. Of course, they could improve on that side and then probably they will have to. I know they revisited the licensing costs of the user charge. Now they charge per core instead of per socket. 

This will make them more expensive than they were and maybe it will make them also less price competitive with some other solution on the market. On a Windows environment, Hyper-V is pretty much free, however, you need to license all the cores anyway if you're going to install any Windows on the physical server. Therefore, when you use Windows servers and virtual machines, you have to pay an additional tax, let's say, for vSphere if you want to use vSphere for the hypervisor. That's something that you don't need to do with Microsoft Hyper-V. Of course, there are other hypervisors that are free - like KVM. On the cost, right now, they pretty much are the most expensive solution Ion the market.

We don't have a business relationship with the product. We're just customers.

If we speak about version five or plus five, I'm pretty knowledgeable about those as I was a network administrator back then. However, version six, version seven, I deal with these versions maybe two times per year, so I'm not very good on them.

Overall, I'd rate them at an eight out of ten, mostly due to the high pricing and container management.