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reviewer1451847 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Systems Engineer at a non-profit with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Highly reliable with great support
Pros and Cons
  • "Very reliable with a great community."
  • "Pricing is starting to get a little high-end."

What is our primary use case?

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. 

What is most valuable?

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. 

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

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

Buyer's Guide
VMware vSphere
March 2025
Learn what your peers think about VMware vSphere. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2025.
842,672 professionals have used our research since 2012.

How are customer service and support?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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. 

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Ajay Dand - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder Director at Ninesec Integration Pvt. Ltd
Real User
Top 5
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.
Pros and Cons
  • "As an end-user, 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."
  • "In addition, I think some of the backup features or the prediction features can be improved."

What is our primary use case?

It is primarily for virtualization. 

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

One to three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How is customer service and technical support?

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

How was the initial setup?

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

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The cost is a bit high.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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. 

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
VMware vSphere
March 2025
Learn what your peers think about VMware vSphere. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2025.
842,672 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Systems Engineerineering Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 51-200 employees
Real User
We use its customization to prevent network and DNS collisions to the router
Pros and Cons
  • "The VMware community is always there and it is a valuable resource."
  • "I use the ESXi a lot for my users to create their own templates and control their own VMs without my interaction."
  • "I use customization to prevent any network and DNS collisions to the router."

    What is our primary use case?

    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.  

    How has it helped my organization?

    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. 

    What is most valuable?

    • 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.

    What needs improvement?

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

    For how long have I used the solution?

    More than five years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    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.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    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.

    How are customer service and technical support?

    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.

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    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.

    How was the initial setup?

    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.

    What about the implementation team?

    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.

    What was our ROI?

    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.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    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.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    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. 

    What other advice do I have?

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

    Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: support.

    Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
    PeerSpot user
    it_user331866 - PeerSpot reviewer
    Chief General Manager at SVC Bank
    Vendor
    Our entire banking operation is virtualized and we can switch between servers if there's latency or slow responsiveness.

    Valuable Features

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

    Improvements to My Organization

    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.

    Use of Solution

    We’ve been using it for last six years.

    Stability Issues

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

    Scalability Issues

    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.

    Customer Service and Technical Support

    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.

    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.

    Other Solutions Considered

    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.

    Other Advice

    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.

    Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
    PeerSpot user
    IT Solution Architect at KnowledgeOne
    Real User
    Top 20
    Built to provide redundancy and flexibility and can be scaled without any impact on production availability
    Pros and Cons
    • "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."

    What is our primary use case?

    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.

    What is most valuable?

    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.

    What needs improvement?

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

    For how long have I used the solution?

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

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    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. 

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

    How are customer service and technical support?

    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.

    How was the initial setup?

    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.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    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.

    What other advice do I have?

    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.

    Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
    PeerSpot user
    reviewer1346730 - PeerSpot reviewer
    IT Director at a manufacturing company with 201-500 employees
    Real User
    Stable with an easy initial setup and good VMotion features
    Pros and Cons
    • "The initial setup is easy."
    • "The container management could be improved. It's far from perfect right now."

    What is our primary use case?

    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.

    What is most valuable?

    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.

    What needs improvement?

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

    For how long have I used the solution?

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

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    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.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    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.

    How are customer service and technical support?

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

    How was the initial setup?

    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.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    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.

    What other advice do I have?

    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.

    Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
    PeerSpot user
    DesktopS0c59 - PeerSpot reviewer
    Desktop Support Supervisor at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
    Real User
    VMotion enables us to migrate easily, flexibly move machines around on the host
    Pros and Cons
    • "The most valuable feature is being able to VMotion and migrate easily, moving machines around on the host. I know DRS will take care of a lot about that, but there's still some manual intervention here and there, so the flexibility of it has been really good."
    • "I would like to see DRS for the GPU machines."

    What is our primary use case?

    Primary use-case would be updating our Gold/Masters for the Horizon environment. It works pretty well. We're still getting used to the HTML5 Client versus the old Flash-based Client.

    We use it for all of our servers, we have virtualized everything. The mission-critical things, for a bank like us, are the mainframe - it's the IBM iSeries - and our Saleslogix application. Those would be the two biggest ones, but we use it for all of our databases as well. We're 90 percent VMware, with hundreds of servers.

    It's been a pretty smooth transition. We just upgraded to 6.5. Hopefully, we'll be updated to 6.7 soon. But it's been working really well.

    How has it helped my organization?

    It's hard to say whether we've seen a boost for these apps since we were very much first onboard a long time ago with a VMware. But performance-wise, every upgrade we do, we see it gets better. Everything gets better: the networking gets better, NSX is getting better. Security-wise, that's been a really good thing for us, separating our network out a little bit more, automating our failovers.

    What is most valuable?

    The most valuable feature is being able to VMotion and migrate easily, moving machines around on the host. I know DRS will take care of a lot about that, but there's still some manual intervention here and there, so the flexibility of it has been really good.

    It's pretty simple. It's easy to upgrade.

    What needs improvement?

    I would like to see DRS for the GPU machines.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    More than five years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    It has always been stable. We haven't had any downtime in all the years we've used it.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    It's highly scalable. We've grown, we've doubled our size, and it has been easily scalable for us: slide in a new host and then attach the host to the vSphere client and then push the profile out. It makes it really easy.

    How is customer service and technical support?

    I've never had to use technical support, myself. We have probably used our VMware rep here and there. We usually get our answers through our rep or our TAMs. There hasn't been anything "break-fix" where we had to call technical support and get on the line right away.

    Our customer rep answers all our questions and, if he doesn't know, he comes back the next week and he lets us know. It's been a really big help.

    What was our ROI?

    Our ROI comes from being able to replace a lot of our endpoints, mostly on the Horizon side. But using vSphere with all the endpoints, replacing all of our physical machines as well with Dell EMC's wide clients, it has almost been invaluable to us. The cost savings have been great there: buying $300 machines instead of $1,000 PCs.

    What other advice do I have?

    It is quick to learn, it's not overly complicated. You don't have to spend a lot of time learning about it, at least from the usability perspective, once it has been set up, of course. It's really easy to use, easy to set up, easy to find what you're looking for, easy to manage.

    When selecting a vendor to work with, our biggest issue would be availability. We've had some issues with some vendors in the past where they were just too small. Being in Des Moines, we don't have a lot of options, other than bringing people in from other states, or even other countries, possibly. If we do have something come up - which, luckily, we really haven't had anything too bad - just having that immediate connection and resolution is important.

    This solution has to be a ten out of ten. It's been great. It's easy to use, it's laid out very well, so it's easy to onboard.

    Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
    PeerSpot user
    Systems Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 51-200 employees
    Real User
    Since it is riding inside of a multi-hardware environment, downtime is virtually nothing
    Pros and Cons
    • "We have removed the need for backups and going to the office at three in the morning to change a server. I do everything during my business hours. It gave me my life back."
    • "Since it is riding inside of a multi-hardware environment, downtime is virtually nothing."
    • "I would like them to move into having a containerized application to manage the vCenter."
    • "I would like having something that works on a smaller screen, so we can get to it on our iPads and have it more touch-centric versus having to sit at a laptop."

    What is our primary use case?

    We use it for about 90 percent of our corporate network. 

    We have a separate vSphere for an ISP that we run on a private and public cloud, because we are an anti-cloud company.

    How has it helped my organization?

    It rides our entire corporate network. Everything inside of our corporate Windows domain (e.g., domain controller, database files, etc.) rides inside VMware.

    In the last three years, we have moved from a physical to a virtual environment. We have removed the need for backups and going to the office at three in the morning to change a server. I do everything during my business hours. It gave me my life back.

    What is most valuable?

    • Stability: Since it is riding inside of a multi-hardware environment, downtime is virtually nothing. That is a plus.
    • It is simple to manage. 
    • We use two-factor authentication.

    What needs improvement?

    • It is simple to break. 
    • As far as ease of use and their front end (vCenter), it needs refreshing. They are doing some good things with HTML5. I would like them to move into having a containerized application to manage the vCenter.
    • I would like having something that works on a smaller screen, so we can get to it on our iPads and have it more touch-centric versus having to sit at a laptop.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    Three to five years.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    The product is very scalable. Since it is a virtualized environment where all the compute rides, it doesn't care about what is riding under it. Therefore, you can expand or shrink it as much as you want.

    How are customer service and technical support?

    Most of my support goes through my third-party. The person who helped us integrate VMware is the person who we also contact for support. They have an inside support guy with VMware. While it is a middle man type of thing, it has been pretty good so far.

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    We started out in the Microsoft Hyper-V because it came with everything in their license. After messing with Hyper-V, we always had a small VMware environment. With some of the blade services that came out from Dell and Cisco, we moved over to VMware because they utilize all the back-end interconnects a lot better than Microsoft does. After that, we went full VMware.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    I miss the Enterprise tier. When they went to Enterprise Plus, it increased the price. I was one of the guys that operated well inside the Enterprise tier. I paid a little bit more than standard but I got a lot more features. Enterprise Plus has a lot of things that I'll never use. So when they chopped that tier out, they kneecapped me. 

    If you go with a standard license, it's very affordable. If you start digging into how they price all of their add-ons compared to Hyper-V, you get into the mud, because Hyper-V bundles everything together. So, at least you can customize your pricing to exactly what you need, so that is a plus.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    We evaluated Cisco and Dell. We have been moving more towards Cisco's computing. We did evaluate Micro-Tech for switching since they have cheap switches.

    What other advice do I have?

    Do your homework and build it from the ground up. Set up a plan to replace everything and get started from the beginning as a full virtualized environment. It won't bite you later, which is one thing we were worried about, and we ended up having to do extra work to do small steps into virtualization. 

    Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

    1. Interoperability with what I currently have and its ability to work with others.
    2. Support.
    3. Price.
    Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
    PeerSpot user
    Buyer's Guide
    Download our free VMware vSphere Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
    Updated: March 2025
    Buyer's Guide
    Download our free VMware vSphere Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.