VMware vSphere Reviews

The virtualization is set by itself. vSphere is the best way to have a non-host based fixed solution. We always try to find an agnostic environment where we can restore agnostics or just say, "I need resources capacity." That's why VMware vSphere in particular, has been the best in the past but now also with the evolution of their product. Nowadays, you don't have to use any STEM infrastructure anymore because the bandwidth and the LAN speeds are getting steeper. 

If you look at the interconnection if you have a dark fiber connection, you can have data sent between locations. It's getting much cheaper.

If you use Zerto on top of that, then you are protected against any cyber threats or attacks. If you do it right, if you configure it from the hypervisor layer to external storage and then you have always a way back. It's blocked by the application of the journal. You can always go back to a point in time if you want to restore. If the point in time is as short as possible then you have the best solution. You can leave any additional solutions like CrowdStrike.

The only way for it to be a complete product is if you integrate all the functionalities. Then you don't need any backup solution anymore and you can do it by yourself. Integration needs improvement. They should improve a lot of the functionality because normally it's half of a product. You're only protecting yourself against technical failures but not against any cyber threats or any other stuff. It's not about prevention, it's about time to recovery because it's going to happen anyway. 

I have been using vSphere for twelve years. 

It was very easy to install. If you have the right piece of hardware or blade server in place, you can use it in a VM where you try XYZ and then install it. You go forward with that and it's ready to install, so it's not a big problem.

I would rate vSphere and 9.5 out of ten. 

I really like it because it's a storage restoration additional add-on but it's really expensive now. 

One of the best solutions has got to be the HA and DRS portion of the vCenter where it's kind of an auto-load balancing and auto-recovering of your cluster if one of your hosts happens to die. Luckily it's pretty solid and you don't really have to deal with a lot of the HA stuff, but DRS is definitely very handy.

One of the things that I really wanted to see was the catalog because it came from vCloud Director, and they are adding that in 6.0, so they have that catalog, and they are extending it to where you can really replicate those catalogs out and share them. That was one of the features I would have really liked to see, and fortunately it's there.

One of the other features that we had been wanting to see was the vMotion between clouds, which of course that was announced today, that it's one of the things that's coming. I think that's going to be a game changer really.

We have quite a lot of list of solutions that we use. Primarily we have a product called Server Virtualization, powered by VMware, and what it is, is it's a multi-tenant vCenter, but single-tenant hardware side of things. We have over 9,000 hosts in there and roughly 55,000 VMs worldwide, and six data centers globally. We also have other products called dedicated vCenter which is just that; customers get their dedicated vCenter. We also leverage vCloud Director; we have a dedicated vCloud Director product. We even have some other disaster recovery products that use SRM and vSphere replication.

In our environment -- it's pretty large -- we have roughly just less than 100 vCenters, and these things have to be up 24-7/365, and it's very rare that they actually go down. Out of all 9,000 hosts, I can count off maybe five that have crashed in that last year. That's a very stable VMware environment, in my opinion.

In a global environment with all six data centers, we have so many hosts and VMs, that we work very closely with VMware to help push their maximums, and really push the envelope of how many VMs we can fit in a vCenter, and how many hosts we can fit in a vCenter to really help drive those maximums even higher for VMware.

At Rackspace, we get mission critical support from VMware. If we have any issues, we call directly into VMware, and we usually get a response within four hours. Any major technical issues that we come across, they are very responsive; they work with us to help figure out what the problem is, and a lot of times we've found bugs in their software and helped them release patches to fix them.

Interoperability is one of the things I really like to look for: How well the VMware solution plays with other either hardware vendors, or other solutions, other service providers, other add-ons to make it even better. That's something we really look for. How well does it work in a service provider environment as well, because most service providers are different.

vCenter environment is super simple. Install ESXI; it's very straight forward. Then getting vCenter off the ground and going is extremely straightforward, especially if you use the vCenter server appliance: You can be up and running in a matter of a few hours.

We've set up a vROPS and we've found that it works really well in a service provider environment, that you can point it to multiple vCenters. We've worked with other vendors to do some deeper logging, deeper metrics gathering, and in doing so, we worked close with VMware and that other vendor and really built a full scale out worldwide global monitoring and alerting solution. That's one of the things we look for: Something that to fill a void that we don't have.

There is nothing else enterprise-ready, like they are. If you are considering similar solutions, make sure you take deep dives technically into how well they integrate with other vendors, or how well they integrate with your hardware. Like VSAN for instance, a lot of the storage vendors that are really going for it to be on the VSAN HCL, and unfortunately some of the RAID controllers are not on at that HCL, and a lot of times people don't know that. If you are looking at different solutions, make sure you check compatibility guides, not just for the whole VMware Stack, but including maybe subsets like VSAN, or other tools that you might be using.

We are looking at productizing that and making an offering for our customers, as well as using it internally. We've got it in several labs doing different things, and it's awesome. I really like it. It's resilient, in my opinion. A lot of people say if you only use the three-node minimum recommendation you might have data loss. I had a three-node cluster setup and my switch died, and when I replaced the switch and it came back online, everything was still running just fine, nothing had actually gone down; no data loss, nothing. It's actually really resilient. If you think about your data path, the data locality, it's a lot closer to the CPU, it's right there in that flash recache. It's a resilient storage solution that's cheaper than a dedicated SAN, or something of that sort.

Peer reviews are extremely important to me. I usually start Googling and looking to see, or on Twitter to find other vExperts, or other just subject matter experts that have talked about it: What benefits they've seen, or maybe pitfalls that they've seen. To me, that holds more water than a lot of the White Papers I've seen, because White Papers target maybe a specific use case, but I want to see more broadly: "How does it function? How does it integrate? How stable is it, of all things?" I really value the community involvement and opinion of others when I'm looking at solutions.

• HA - for restarting failed VMs on good hosts
• vMotion - ability to migrate between different hosts
• DRS balances data storage and workload of datacenters

Reporting. If I lose a host, I have to report what was on that host, what was affected, and for how long. We create our own power state report providing info on hosts, and I would like reporting for what VMs were affected and what was the fault, what hosts were affected and restarted by HA. You can get third-party reporting, but it would be great to have it built-in.

Extremely stable, only issue is the type of hardware that we run it on. When we get a vendor image (HP, Dell, Cisco), they inject their own drivers into hypervisors, and it is only time we see issues. It’s so resilient, that these problems aren’t even evident and they can go unnoticted.

Very, very good scalability. Four years ago, we had 300 VMs across 32 hosts, now we have 2000 VMs across 132 hosts.

From time to time, we have relied on them, mostly for troublshooeting specific VMs when a vendor wants to blame resources. Whenever we have bad memories or drivers injected by vendors, they’ve helped us remediate those issues.

I was involved in a redesign, which was very straightforward and easy. We just changed the hardware from rack style to blade, expanding all hosts and underlying virtualization layers. It was seemless and customers didn’t notice anything different.

Even with no reporting, it's near perfect, because reporting would just make things easier, and not having it doesn’t impede performance.

Flexibility and inter-operability with other technologies are valuable features.

• Our ability to attain our 100% virtualization goal
• Being able to consolidate and distribute our infrastructure across multiple data centers

One of the biggest thing is support for non-Windows platforms, especially virtualized desktops which is big across Department of Education. It's only just been released so it's one of their most immature offerings and has room to improve and grow. A lot of the recent improvements have been leaning towards small businesses but in government we don’t have those challenges.

I’ve been a VMWare customer for over a decade and we’ve experience more uptime when we were dependent on physical infrastructure.

Scalability is great – it allows us to be more resilient and more disaster resay organization. We can move workloads across the organization and keep uptime high.

Technical support has always been good – extremely responsive especially in the DC area. They are used across government and we are able to even get onsite support when we need it.

Initial setup was easy and any change we make to the environment has been easy. We have made changes to VMWare based on our discoveries. Government usage can be very different than private sector so were able to communicate different feedback from private sector clients.

VMware has been the hypervisor of choice for a while, now we are seeing off-premise cloud technology like AWS, Azure and others. VMware is trying to allow you to move workloads on premise and off premise to those kind of technologies.

Everything is going in the right track so I would ultimately recommend the product. Peer reviews are 10/10 – extremely important.

• The HA functions
• vSphere Distributed Switch

It gives us a good consolidated overview of hundreds or thousands of servers at a time.

It gives us the ability to easily manage those from a centralized point, and a lot more reliability because we can easily migrate between hardware and consolidate workloads.

The web client, the GUI, could use some improvement. It’s pretty clunky and slow. Some things are only available in the web client, some are only available in the fat client so it would be nice to have them in both in one interface.

I've used it for about two years.

No, we’ve been using vSphere for a long time so we’re quite familiar with it, and we have a good relationship with VMWare. Deployment was easy.

We don’t see many crashes, if any, on the vSphere side.

Again, it’s simple as popping extra hosts in. Quite easily scalable.

Customer Service:

They’re very good. We’ve got a good relationship with VMware, and they’re always available - they give us previews on upcoming tech or quickly connect us with someone we need to speak to.

Technical Support:

It’s good. It’s usually quite easy and quick to log calls and get support services. The vSphere client has a built-in means of pulling logs which logs which we can send directly to VMWare technical support. We can get tier two or three support quite readily.

Not since I’ve worked here, so at least 10 years. We started with vSphere.

It kind of depends; we work with a number of different customers. It’s relatively straightforward, but for complex implementations there can be some complications. They publish all of the necessary installation information so it’s quite easy to find support for deployment.

We do it in-house.

It’s not something I really deal with as an engineer. Because of the types of service we offer, we don’t sell customers vSphere licensing.

I’d grab the software from their site - you can deploy it and use it for 60 days free of charge, so whether you’re doing a large or small deployment try it out and see if it works. You can also engage with technical support services. The software is free, so grab it and play with it.

• High Availability
• Distributed resource scheduling & vMotion
• Robust management toolset for automating routine tasks

vSphere provides the infrastructure framework to manage server and client systems in a multitude of user environments, from dedicated virtual workstations to short-term use systems. vSphere makes the provisioning and deployment of virtual servers and clients quick and predictable, centralizing the customization process while removing common hardware problems.

Fault Tolerance, which was introduced in version 5.5 and improved in 6.0, is a promising feature that has potential to ensure highly critical system availability in the enterprise environment. It presently has vCPU limitations which makes its deployment scenarios limited, but VMware has made great strides between the two versions, indicating that its usefulness will continue to improve.

I've used it for four years.

ESXi has some specific hardware requirements that administrators should make sure they are able to meet before deploying. While the platform can run on a considerable range of hardware, various features make use of specialized virtualization instruction sets in the hardware CPU that make the hypervisor suited to only a fraction of the common server hardware on the market. This is not a bad thing, as the benefits from these advanced features are well worth the cost of more advanced hardware. This is the only circumstance in which I have encountered obstacles to deployment.

No. The vSphere hypervisor is exceptionally stable, and the higher-level vSphere environment is quite adaptable to a fluctuating datacenter environment.

No. The ability to expand the capacity of the vSphere environment is one of the core capabilities of the product.

Customer Service:

Efficient and knowledgeable.

Technical Support:

Good value, particularly considering a support contract is required with the purchase of vSphere licenses.

No previous solution was used.

It's straightforward, as vSphere is a mature product with well-rounded documentation, and an easy-to-understand interface.

Our system was installed by a vendor team, but was configured in-house. Our vendor team provided a solid architecture solution, but it was insufficient for our requirements.

Licensing is not a major obstacle to adopting this product in an enterprise environment. VMware does offer some specialized vSphere editions for small business environments in which cost may be a considerable factor. There is a wide range of options provided by VMware with suitable price points for each license.

We did not evaluate other options.

Have a plan for system virtualization before pursuing vSphere. Often, the actual needs of an organization, particularly small and medium sized, are overestimated which leads to spending more for a product or product license than is necessary.

Of course there are several valuable features that have grown in time since the product came out, but the most basic and critical features of this product that I find valuable is the High Availability (HA) and the vmotion technology. vMotion has expanded to the Storage vMotion as well. This is very beneficial for uptime of servers and still maintaining updates on the hardware.

With the ability to create multiple server guests on one physical host platform, we were able to create servers in a faster response time, at a cheaper cost, less operational time and the ability to automate tasks to name a few. Also, this infrastructure gave us the capability to expand into a separate self provisioning development environment by utilizing the vCloud technology.

VMware has a good sight for what businesses are looking for. They have been ahead of the curve since the beginning. They have good support and quick response. I don't see too many improvements with vSphere itself.

I have used this product for 9 years. I have tested the old GSX and ESX version 2 years prior to this.

When I first tested vSphere against other competitors 9 years ago, there was no question on which product our company would use. It was easy to deploy and is easier today than it was back then. With a small OS footprint, the install was quick and configuration was straight to the point.

I have only ran into 2 issues where stability was an issue. One is more of a performance that affected the NUMA nodes and how ESXi handled guests in each NUMA node. (this was isolated to the CPU make/model). The other stability issue was due to a patch that affected some physical hosts causing them to "purple screen" or to not respond.

Again, VMware has been very good with staying ahead of the curve. As the demand grew for virtualization from businesses , VMware increased functionality to cope with growth at the hardware level. The ability to "scale out" or "scale up" physically on the host with zero downtime is very easy or scaling up on the guest is very easy with minimal downtime.

Customer Service: When I first used VMware, I had to use customer service often. They were very quick to resolve the issues. They have a team that knew the "Ins and Outs" of the product. I would give them 4 out of 5 stars. I didn't give 5 due to the fact that VMware grew faster than they were able to keep the support engineers trained to handle the large growth over the years. So the times for resolution went down just a little. But still very good compared to other customer support.Technical Support: I would give them a 4 out of 5 here as well. They have teams for each operational architect and at times a problem may need to have the collaboration of multiple teams to resolve an issue.

I did not use any other product prior to VMware.

The install was quick and the configuration was straight to the point. I was up and running with a working platform in 25 minutes from start to finish once I rack mounted and cabled the server. It would be even faster with a converged infrastructure or blade system.

This was done all in-house.

As an engineer, I don't have those numbers and wasn't part of sharing those numbers to other management and higher.

When I decided to test the virtualization architectures, I ran tests with several architectures to determine important factors that would affect our business and operations in a positive aspect for growth while still maintaining low ROI. Microsoft and Citrix were the other competitors.

Definitely have a plan before implementing. Don't rush. It is crucial to think years out so you don't have to redo any architecture because you didn't plan for growth, DR/BC or working out of the cloud. If resources are tight to gather, it would be beneficial to reach out to your favorite consulting team to gather advice.

- Enterprise class solution - Live Migration (both server and storage) - High Availability and Load Balancing - Disaster Recovery - Lots of 3rd party vendor support - Excellent technical support

- Cost - Lack of support for virtualization (all hypervisors) - Licensing- Started with VMware ESX ver 2.1 in 2004. Currently using vSphere 4.1i and working on upgrade to 5.1 - Chose VMware for several reasons (1) Had experience with Desktop and GSX products (2) Ran on bare metal (3) No other real competitors at the time

Advice: - VMware is not the only game in town anymore - Look at your requirements: - If you are a small to medium shop other server virtualization products may provide what you need - If you are a large shop I would recommendVMware