VMware vSphere Reviews

Stability of the Hypervisor, DRS, and HA are some of the more valuable features.

VMWare (and any virtualization platform) completely changes the way an organization functions. The way you investment in hardware is done from a completely different perspective, in that an initial capital investment is required, and the resources would then be available for the organizations' use.

This, of course, allowed the organization to have a ton of flexibility in resource availability. We were then able to create and build high availability across deployed hardware that would've otherwise been much more complex to accomplish using more traditional methods.

Nothing I can think of. For a while, allowing for HA without shared storage was a missing feature, but as of 5.1, VMware introduced that feature.

I have used vSphere v4.0/5.0/5.1 alongside vCenter v5.1, and VMware Vieew v4.0 and v5.2.

There is a lot of know how required to deploy VMWare correctly, especially if it is being architectured to be highly available. A simple deployment is not too hard, but the issues that I had faced initially were mostly related to adequate shared storage connectivity, etc.

As mentioned above, the stability issues have been caused mostly by the inadequacy of the storage (90% of problems have been related storage).

Not at all. Scalability is one of VMware strengths. Running out of resources has really never been an issue, as it is easy to add new hardware, and/or storage, and expand existing infrastructure.

Customer Service:

Customer service has always been available, in a more or less adequate time. VMware is good at responding at critical issues that have a high business impact, though sometimes I had experience less than stellar experience in slightly less urgent issues. This is mostly referring to the timeliness of service. Getting the help needed after getting in touch with support has never been an issue.

Technical Support:

The support is usually pretty good. VMware support is good at making an effort to resolve the problem on first contact, and escalate as necessary. I have always received a solution to my problem.

For an enterprise virtualization platform, I have only used VMware. I have also used Amazon Web Services as an IaaS, but that doesn't exactly sit in the same category as an on premises virtualization platform.

As mentioned above, a simple setup is not hard. However, there are lot of intricacies to the product to set it up correctly with shared storage, so that fail over can function correctly, and DRS, HA, and vMotion to function efficiently.

I initially did the implementation on my own, with some help from VMware on best practices. I did get some help in getting my enterprise storage installed, and got some guidance from them to fine tune configuration of VMware vSwitches, to achieve optimal performance.

The ROI on virtualization platform isn't always necessarily completely obvious at first glance, as the initial cost to implement it is typically fairly high. However, keeping in mind the soft costs, it would easily prove to be more economical than traditional solutions. Not only that, but it also will require less engineers to manage the system, as all the management tools are built-in within vCenter, to create a unified solution that would ultimately reduce management cost.

The original cost of the first set of servers to migrate a whole school district to, was close to $100,000. More recently, an upgrade to an SSD SAN cost an additional $120,000. Keeping in mind software costs of maintaining the product, and all virtualized servers, the day to day cost of the product is essentially the cost of running the hosts, (power, cooling, etc).

No. I had started with VMware very early on, and adopted it when it became a viable enterprise product.

For anyone looking to implement VMware, don't take the initial implementation lightly, and don't cheapen up on the hardware, especially the storage. You will save a ton of headaches by investing in good storage that would be adequate for at least three years.

Also, do your homework on best practices, and how to implement things. It is very easy to get things working and it is more difficult to get things working smoothly. Never had I thought that I had to get familiar with the deep workings of disks, and IOPs, read and write/s ... but these are really necessary if a good implementation is the goal.

Distributed Virtual Switch – you only have to configure it once, and then you can promote it to all the servers, so you have a single switch for all the systems.

Also, the HA system works very well right out of the box.

I’ve been working with VMWare for at least 10 years, so I can say that the loss that you have with virtualization has dropped – you have less loss than if you would run it on real hardware. It went from around 30% to 15%, so basically better by half. And it improves with every version.

A solution for all the different appliances that you now see running would be good. In the past you had VMWare agents, so every manufacturer installed agents on the IIS6 layers but that didn’t work well. Now every supplier has its own virtual appliance, but now some customers have five or six VAs per ESXi host which consumes a lot of processing and memory power. So maybe something like a hypervisor for virtual appliances.

I've been using it since it was released, at least two years.

Never. It just deploys. It works if you use the hardware that’s on the HCL on the VMWare web site. If you don’t do that, you could be in trouble. Some customers do that and expect it to work magically.

Yes, in combination with Broadcom network cards – there was a lot of latency in the storage area through vSphere. So in those situations we had to change the hardware – there was something buggy in the cards.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

Very good. VMWare visits the customers themselves, at least in the Netherlands. Once or twice per year they come on site to talk to the customers to see what they need, anything extra, any support, anything. It’s a very open contact with them.

Technical Support:

It works like every other support agency – it depends on how high you set the priority of your call or contract. If you have a basic support contract it won’t be the same as a 24/7 high priority contract, for example. So it varies depending on your support contract; it also depends on which support engineer you get. Most of the time I get a lot of questions back from the support engineer, so maybe they don’t fully understand the systems. I have a production support contract – so I expect them to take over the system and fix it! Eventually they fix the problems, but with some it takes a lot of time.

No, I've always used VMWare, as I’m not a fan of the other options available.

It depends – mostly it’s complex; first of all, I have a lot of customers that just buy some hardware and expect it to work like magic, but also not all of the configuration information is always easily available. Different components need specific configurations, and so we have to go to the vendors to get configuration information for the hardware which takes a lot of time. Customers don’t understand that and think that one size fits all.

I implement it for customers.

Get an expert with you before you buy something. Most of the customers that I work with have some licenses already; but when they explain what their core business, plans, etc., are we find that the licenses don’t match the mission. That starts with Microsoft a lot of times – the licensing isn’t correct – working with VMWare, and the vendor doesn’t see the combinations. A lot of the time, we see the software vendors maybe are VMWare partners, but they don’t care what licenses they sell. They just want to make a lot of money. So there’s a real gap in the market.

No other options were evaluated.

Look at the total product – if you’re comparing it to Citrix and Microsoft, look at all the features VMWare is hosting in your product and make a comparison. Also, understand your plans – what do you want to do, what’s your vision, and how does it match what you’re looking to buy?

The most common use case for VMware vSphere is, of course, virtualization, specifically operating system virtualization. We also have containers that are running on them.

Essentially, we have the flexibility for a hybrid cloud. We could easily move workloads from on-premises to the cloud and vice versa if we were running on-premises and cloud, which is one of the most important points in the new releases, in particular.

The quality of support could be better.

We have been using VMware vSphere for six to seven years.

We have dealt with various versions that range from 5.5 to 7.

VMware vSphere is a stable solution.

In our organization, we have at least 60,000 users.

It is being used extensively. It is one of the core products in the infrastructure.

Support has not been as good as it once was. It used to be better, but it appears that the quality of support is declining for some reason. I'm not sure why.

Previously, we were using Hyper-V, but I don't have a lot of experience using it.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. It's very simple.

The time it takes to set up will vary, but it will most likely be within a day. You could set up the environment in a day. It is determined by a variety of factors. If it is done by an experienced engineer, it will be done within a day. If not, it will take longer.

We have a team of three engineers to deploy and maintain this solution.

Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis. The license is a one-time payment. You buy it once and own it forever, but you must pay for support, which is provided by the vendor, on a yearly basis.

We are also using NSX and vSAN. We have been using NSX for three years.

It's not strictly a cloud solution; it can be on-premises as well as in the cloud. It is, in essence, a network virtualization solution. It can be used for virtualizing the network, virtual routers, virtual switches, and virtual firewalls.

Virtualization and on-demand networking are two of the benefits. On-demand networking is the best option if I can memorize it. If you need virtual switches, we can create them as well as routers.

Virtualization would be our area of expertise.

VMware vSphere is, in my opinion, one of the best in its class on the market. However, depending on the use cases, we could certainly recommend it.

I would rate VMware vSphere a nine out of ten.

On-premises

We are using this solution to build the AD database for the server.

This solution has been very helpful to our organization. For example, if we need to run 10 servers there is a high cost attached if we buy the physical server, but if we use this solution we can buy a very large server then control everything. The most valuable feature has been the ability to utilize the vMotion when we have a problem. It has been invaluable for us when we had a problem with a broken host that we were able to redirect our traffic to a different host to keep the business operational.

I have found the solution to be flexible, and the vCenter and vMotion useful. When we have a server that is down we can use the vMotion to use another host. Additionally, the backup feature and graphics are very good. The documentations are clear and easy to understand.

There was a time we lost the password for the ESXi and we had to do a hardware reset. At this point, we had to fill up the ESXi from the bottom up. I am not sure if there was another solution to this problem but it took a long time. We were told it would only be a few hours to resolve but in fact, it took one day. Having to explain this downtime to management was not the best experience.

In an upcoming release, there could be a better ability to manage and control the synchronization of the power in the vSphere.

I have been using the solution for approximately five years.

The solution is very stable. 

The scalability is good for everything we have been using the solution for. We have three IT users using this solution, if we upgrade our hardware we might increase usage.

The technical support agents are not clear about the issues that are being discussed. They cannot address the problem or estimate the time correctly. In one particular issue, we needed to raise our ticket to the management level because they told us it would take two hours to be operational but the downtime was one day and one night. They should have first checked the vSphere technical aspects.

The installation is very easy. It was not complicated at all.

This solution has kept our business operating and has saved us money.

There is an annual cost for the use of this solution. 

The price is a little high in developing countries. If they were able to reduce the price they would receive more customers now and even more in the future.

I rate VMware vSphere an eight out of ten.

On-premises

Primary use case: data center virtualization. It's performing well. We're really happy with vSphere as a virtualization platform. 

In terms of the built-in security features, we use none of them. I really couldn't tell you much at all about that.

Mission-critical apps would be our student information system - that one is running on PeopleSoft - student portals, also PeopleSoft. Those are the mission-critical ones that we're running on VMware. There's other stuff that is critical, but I wouldn't say that it's mission-critical.

Benefits of vSphere: It saves me a ton of time, I can really quickly spin up new things to test them out or to respond to a need from the business. The way that it improves the way that the organization functions is that it makes us a lot quicker to respond to the needs of the business.

Most valuable features are 

• quick provisioning
• High Availability
• DRS for balancing workload.

I definitely find vSphere to be simple and efficient to manage. A key feature that enables this is vCenter. It is super simple to stand up, and once you're in there, especially with the new HTML5 client, everything is easy to manage.

I find the stability of vSphere to be pretty great. We've had some issues, like everybody. Most of them were around hardware, so we thought it was really important to check the compatibility lists and make sure that you're running the right driver versions. But once you've got that running, it's solid. We don't have any stability problems.

Scalability is great. It's easy to scale.

I honestly found that I spent too much time in "back-and-forth hell" with help desks that are offshore. I found that VMware Support - it used to located in North America and that's who I would get when I would pick up the phone - the last few support cases that I opened didn't go that well. I ended up finding the solution myself and just telling them, "You know what? Forget it."

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Straying a little bit from vSphere, but on vROps, the ROI that we're getting from that is that we're able to reclaim a lot of idle and oversized VMs, and we're actually saving money or actually giving ourselves more time with the resources we have, before we have to purchase new stuff. So that's an ROI.

Aim for simple, go for fewer hosts with bigger resources, depending of course of on what you need. Don't try to do everything at once. Start with a basic setup and work up from there.

We did not really see a performance boost with version 6.5.

Regarding the most important criteria when selecting a vendor, it needs to be an industry-leading solution, needs to be easy, simple to set up, not an entire ecosystem of things that I need to deploy to get their system working. Ideally, I want something that we can set up in a day.

I'd give vSphere about a nine out of ten. There is still stuff to work on, but it's definitely the best for me. As I said, I find that the support never blows me away, and maybe that's because I don't pay for the most premium level of support, but I find that what we got on the last few tickets that we opened was not great.

Key business drivers and benefits for us: • Co-location data centers environmental costs are greatly reduced (rack space, power, cooling). • Allows better utilization and flexibility to segment physical resources (vCPU & vMemory) • Consolidate / centralize management of all Windows and Linux infrastructure - Administer entire virtual environment via a single pane of glass (vCenter) - Provisioning of VMs is really simple and quick. Allows easy use of templates. - Utilize Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) & VMotion - Optimizes performance of VMs - Allows flexibility for patching cycles to minimize downtime. • VMware product has been very stable • Allows for easier compliance and consistency for meeting IT audit controls • Initial ROI analysis a few years ago did show significant savings over physical model. We are looking at updated ROI and show-back / charge-back models currently.

VMware product challenges / Areas for improvement: • Advanced Capacity Management and Performance Management & Analysis, Disaster Recovery, and private cloud capabilities are lacking out of the box for enterprise-level deployments. - Ability to “right-size” resources on all VMs is needed at enterprise installations. - Add-on / 3rd party products like vCenter Operations / VMturbo, SRM, or vCloud may be needed. - These add-on products add management complexity. They also add licensing and maintenance costs for the overall solution in a tough budget climate. • Difficulty using VMotion with Microsoft Clusters. We utilize clusters for our large SQL Farm, but we are unable to use VMotion during patching efforts. We are now looking at Hyper-V or physical servers for this functionality to minimize downtime. • Granting administrative privileges / roles can be a bit more tedious than are initially apparent.• VMware vSphere 5 is current architectural standard for 2 data centers - VMware was the major virtualization solution provider when first implemented years ago - Microsoft 2012 Hyper-V “proof of concept” is currently in progress for US - Educational discounts from Microsoft are significant - Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 version functionality appears to gain on VMware vSphere • Also have a large Solaris UNIX environment utilizing Solaris Zones. • VMware (or Hyper-V) will enable us to drive a re-platforming effort for Solaris -> Linux

Things to consider before purchasing VMware or Hyper-V: • Understand your virtualization objectives and requirements before purchase. Assess all requirements against VMware or Hyper-V licensing cost and edition functionality • Define a strategy for resource intensive applications (large CPU or memory requirements) and when to stay standalone vs. virtual • Implement processes to control “VM sprawl” as VM provisioning process is so simple. • Consider other process efficiencies that virtualization may drive (i.e. Service Catalog) • Ensure IT staff gets proper training. The learning curve can be steep initially at the enterprise level. • If possible , look at processes for show-back or charge-back model early on to assess costs and ROI.

It is a compute virtualization software. It is mainly used to virtualize physical servers and deploy virtual machines on top of virtual servers. So, instead of having one workload per server, you can have multiple workloads.

The fact that you can use all the CPU and memory power that the server can provide is most valuable. In a physical server, you might end up not using all the physical resources. There are a lot of benefits, such as flexibility and mobility, in virtualizing computes.

The improvement is more from a licensing perspective rather than from a feature functionality perspective. There could be more flexibility and fewer model options to make it easier to sell. Today, there are so many different options available, and sometimes, it is not really clear which one is the right version or the right model to propose. 

We have been providing this solution to our customers for 15 years.

It is definitely stable.

It is scalable. In our country, I believe 50% of the customers are running vSphere virtualization.

I don't have experience with their technical support. 

I never did an installation, but as per my understanding, it is straightforward.

The number of people required for installation and maintenance really depends on the scale of the project. Usually, one engineer can deploy vSphere very easily.

It depends on the contract they have with VMware.

I can recommend this solution. I would rate it at least an eight out of 10.

On-premises

We implement all the standard VMware data solutions. Typically, that's vSphere and sometimes DataCore, the other product we like. We use vSphere for the virtualization of data servers, and other common uses.

Our customers opt for virtualization because it's cheaper and better than non-virtualized solutions. VMware is probably the best on the market now. 

We're implementers and we started using vSphere when it was first released. We've been with VMware since the beginning. There was no ES6 at that time, only GS6 on Microsoft, so we started with Windows-based VMware. It's an old solution. We've been using it for a long time. 

We haven't encountered any limitations with vSphere's scalability. At the same time, we usually do not install huge server farms here in the Slovak Republic, so we only use VMware for small installations with a few host servers. I don't think we'll reach the limits of VMware's scalability since we only work with small organizations. 

We tried Hyper-V a few years back, but there was a problem with the 2012 version of Hyper-V, so we prefer VMware because we know it works. However, I'm not sure about the newer versions of Hyper-V. I can only speak to our experiences with the older one. We weren't satisfied with the features, and the Microsoft code had bugs that they didn't repair those errors. 

Overall, Hyper-V was a highly unstable solution at the time, so we decided to stick with VMware because it was much more reliable. Maybe Microsoft has improved Hyper-V since then. I can't say.

I rate VMware vSphere nine out of 10. It does what we need it to do, and works fine. There aren't any additional features that we need at this time.

On-premises