VMware vSphere Reviews

We are using vSphere as a multi-tenant platform. We are hosting VMs for a few of our customers.

We are utilizing all of the features and they are good.

I don't see any challenges in using this product. 

We have been using VMware vSphere for between three and four years.

This is a stable product and I haven't heard any negative feedback from my implementation team about it.

We implement this product for medium and large-sized companies. It is easy to scale.

I have not personally been in touch with VMware support.

We have not used another similar solution.

The implementation is an easy process for us, which is why we're using VMware cloud as a product. The length of time required for deployment depends on the customer. We need to know their requirements, and then we proposed timelines and inform them accordingly. It is defined by the number of nodes and the number of workloads.

We deploy vSphere for our customers. We also offer maintenance and support as part of a managed service.

This is quite an expensive product, although everything is included in the standard licensing fee.

Overall, for me, everything with this product looks good and I can recommend it.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We are using VMware vSphere and virtualization infrastructure for IT functions in my company. It is also used in other companies or industries, such as automobile factories, energy and gas factories, and State Universities.

Valuable features really depend on different projects. We are using the traditional infrastructure based on VMware vSphere. We are also using the high availability (HA) and Distributed Switch features to extend our network and switch between different hosts. 

The VMotion and SVMotion features are very essential for us to relocate the storage of virtual machines to different storage or vSANs. We are using VMotion and SVMotion features several times of the day. We are also using another VMware product to replicate a lot of solutions to a second replication site.

The biggest problem in this solution is the incompatibility of some of the features with some of the drivers installed on servers. For example, if I want to install vSphere on an HPE server, the driver is really different from a Dell server or a Fujitsu server. I need to download different drivers and install them manually, which can be improved by VMware. They can offer a special image to match different servers. We face different problems when we install vSphere on an ESXi server and have different drivers on the storage. ESXi cannot detect different kinds of storage, and they should improve this. 

We updated our existing version to vSphere 7 in a private environment, but it seems that this version is not very stable. We are facing issues with restarting the host. In earlier versions, such as vSphere 6 or 6.5, we didn't have any such problems.

It would be good if VMware can offer specific applications for mobiles to enable us to control the management of all servers by mobile. They should also improve the vCenter GUI because it is currently not compatible, and there are a lot of problems. Some of the options do not appear well in the browser. VMware should spend more time resolving the problems in the GUI.

I have been using this solution for five years.

It is very stable. However, we are facing some issues in a private environment after upgrading to vSphere 7. We are facing issues with restarting the host. In earlier versions, such as vSphere 6 or 6.5, we didn't have any such problems, and it has been very stable.

It is scalable. In my company, we have a lot of end-users, but around 16 users are involved with VMware products. We have different projects, and each project has around 10 users. 

Our teams have a specific structure. We have an operational manager. After that, we have different technical teams. I am a Senior Infrastructure Architect, and in my team, there are around eight engineers. Out of these, five engineers are involved with VMware products, and two or three engineers are involved with the network and storage concepts.

In my country, we cannot use direct support, although the direct support and technical support from VMware is very essential and influential to help and solve many problems. 

Its installation was very simple. Because we need to install vSphere on different servers, we do customized installations by using a script. It doesn't take more than 13 minutes to install each server and configure different settings.

I did it myself. I have worked as a VMware consultant with different companies, and I am certified in VMware. We cannot use direct support and specific consultants in our country.

I recommend this solution to most of my customers because it is very stable, and it has a lot of good features. In comparison to other solutions, I prefer to use VMware. I also recommend Hyper-V, but VMware vSphere is my first choice.

I would rate VMware vSphere an eight out of ten.

We use VMware vSphere for virtualization and to deliver VDI.

The  vSphere plataform allow us to consolidate our datacenter and give us more availability.

The most valuable features are the vCenter, and SRM. 

Technically speaking, there is nothing that I don't like. I think that the solution is perfect. It's the best on the market.

I have not used all of the features but the features that are provided are perfect. There is nothing that this solution doesn't have.

I don't think that the solution must be improved.

I have been using VMware vSphere since 2007.

We have the latest version and 6.7. 6.5, and 6.0.

It's stable, we have not had any issues with stability.

We have 100,000 employees in our organization.

it's very scalable. It's easy to scale.

I would rate the technical support an eight out of ten. They need to improve the time it takes to resolve a case.

Response time could be improved.

Yes, a used Microsoft Hyper-V, I switched because vSphere is more mature and stable.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's easy.

It takes can take 10 to 15 minutes to deploy a new server into the vSphere platform. It's so easy.

It may take more time for testing and implementation.

Deployment varies, if you are referring to the deployment of the full solution, it includes deploying the vCenter, deploying the servers, the host, and creating our clusters can take up to three hours.

The implementation were with VMware consultant team.

I don't like the price because it's too expensive.

No, I evaluated just vSphere and Hyper-V.

It's important to contract a good level of support from VMware.

I would rate VMware vSphere a nine out of ten.

I use it as systems administrative management tool. I use VMware vSphere, vCenter, and vSphere ESXi.

We do not use VMWare cloud on AWS.

vSphere has improved our organization by far, and it's hard to even quantify. The ability to to virtualize systems and run those virtual workloads with a fewer number of servers is tremendous. We are still in the process of converting physical to virtual, but we are getting there.

The mission critical apps that we use for our system are for monitoring different meters throughout households in the greater area in which we operate.

The most valuable feature is the single pane of glass management. There are a number of things which vSphere offers in terms of consolidating infrastructure onto single pieces of hardware. This is instead of having multiple systems running on the OSs that we need. I like the capability of logging into one system, then being able to shift over to another system within that single pane of glass.

vSphere is simple to manage. Some of the best parts of managing it is vCenter. I use that to provide entry points for different administrators to login from different environments to manage either physical or virtual servers and resources on the network in our storage site.

vSphere is going in a good direction already with its improvement. The one area where I would love to see an improvement is the HTML5 client. It's great, but it could get better. I know it can.

It has been fairly stable in 6.7. I have not had any major issues. 

I've come up on older versions from 3.5 until 6.7. This version has been the best experience so far.

I can build out hundreds of hosts, but my environment's not that big. It is not as big as most of the larger companies out there, so I've not hit a bottleneck yet in terms of scalability.

Every now and then, I have to use vSphere technical support. My experience with them has been a positive one overall. Usually, if I don't get an answer from one tech support engineer, I can get another answer from another engineer who will help me out with my particular issue.

I wouldn't say that I invested in a new solution to get to where I'm right now. I just really have been upgrading upon what's already there. I'm pretty much in bed with VM. I'm staying with VM, and that's where I want to be. I don't want to go anywhere else. VMware is top of the line.

I've done setups of different versions of vSphere. The latest one was more complex than 6.5, which had an external platform services controller. Now with 6.7, you have an embedded platform services controller, much like 6.5, but you also get the enhanced link mode capability. That was a big shift for me. 

ROI is tough to quantify once you are already in bed with VMware. However, I did a comparison between physical server to virtual. There was a point in time where we would size out a virtual server to be a massive size, then we'd buy a physical server of the equivalence. We saved somewhere around 20 percent going virtual, as opposed to the physical equivalent.

I have seen a performance boost in a sense that we have provided better utilization of system resources within vSphere. However, I don't have an actual percentage to provide.

Before I started with VMware, I did not have any other vendors on my shortlist.

I would rate it at a nine, because I don't believe any type of technology is a ten. There is always room for improvement. However, this is a solid nine.

Spend time researching, investing, and testing for months. Spend a few months testing the product before implementing it to production.

I don't have too much experience with the encryption or secure features of the new vSphere version.

We use vSphere for our production and DR infrastructure. We have all our critical machines on there: domain controllers, monitoring systems, ticketing systems, financial systems, billing systems, Test and Dev environments. For the most part, as far as vSphere is concerned, it's performed pretty awesomely. Sometimes the hardware doesn't work as well.

Once we got VMware vCenter, once we got all that setup - did a PoC, proved that it worked - we did a big push. I led the project to move our entire internal infrastructure from physical to virtual.

We haven't worked with VM Encryption or support for TPM and VBS.

Between vMotion and all the HA, it has made my life a lot easier, and similarly for a lot of my colleagues, and my boss.

The most valuable features are the seamless HA with vMotion and being able to run vCenters in HA mode. We use a company called SimpliVity, it's a hyperconverged system that sits on top of VMware. They have a product called RapidDR which automates the entire DR process for us. So in a DR event, we just run a script, and that's it. Between vMotion and vCenter, everything moves over to the DR environment.

Also, once you start using it and you get your hands dirty with it, it's very intuitive. I find the menus make sense. Other UIs, specifically Salesforce, for example, can sometimes be weird. Things are in weird places, there are a lot of menus, a lot of dropdowns. Especially, in the new HTML5 Client with vSphere and vCenter, everything is pretty straightforward and easy to find and easy to use.

I'd like to get rid of the Flash Client. There are still some things that require us to go into it and use it, some plugins and other things aren't supported in the HTML5. I love the HTML5 Client. I think it's a lot smoother, a lot faster. Version 6.5 was kind of slow. From our testing, from what I've seen, 6.7 is supposed to be better. That would be my biggest complaint right now: that the 6.5 Flash Client is slow. It takes a while to load.

It's very stable. We had one "pink screen," which is basically equivalent to the "blue screen" in Windows, and that was hardware-related.

The scalability has been good, as far as the vSphere and vCenter go. We've had to add more hardware, but it's scaled pretty well. We haven't really had any issues with it.

The move to vSphere was really just a business-continuity initiative. Vestmark makes a financial platform. It's important that we are able to be up as much as possible.

I work on the internals teams, so none of the stuff that I work with is customer-facing, but for our customer-facing teams to be able to correctly support customers, our internal side has to be up as much as possible. It was really just business-continuity, coming down from the executive level, saying, "We need as much HA as possible. We want our systems to be up as much as possible because we need to support our customers as best we can."

When you're looking at HA and seamless DR and the like, there's really one decision, and that's going virtual, whether it's on-prem or in the Cloud. VMware has been a leader in the virtual industry for years. It was a pretty simple decision to go with VMware.

It took some time to really research vSphere as a whole, as far as what the best setup would be for our company, for both the present and the future growth of the company, and to correctly size it. There was a lot of research beforehand that needed to be done to get to the appropriate solution. Once that work was done, the actual install and implementation of it were very smooth, for the most part.

When I first started at Vestmark, a little over four years ago, everything was physical. We had a row of about seven to ten racks - I forget the exact number - of just physical machines. After going virtual, using VMware, vCenter on Cisco UCS, we dropped that down to two racks.

Take your time to do the appropriate research and planning, so that it's sized appropriately. A lot of issues that I've seen are from either underlying hardware or resource constraints that aren't necessarily related to vSphere or VMware, rather that things weren't implemented appropriately.

We do not you use VMware Cloud on AWS. Right now we just have on-prem for both production and DR. We are starting to move some small Dev environments to AWS. I haven't been a part of that project. From what I hear, there have been some ups and downs but, for the most part, I believe there has been positive feedback.

I would rate vSphere a nine out of ten. Ten means everything is perfect. As much as everyone tries to strive for that goal, it's unattainable because there are just so many moving parts, hardware, software, user input, end-users. It's the best that it can be in a nonperfect world.

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.

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.

• 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.