VMware vSphere Reviews

I use vSphere for general server virtualization. I am not doing anything spectacular with it.

vSphere has absolutely improved the way our organization functions. This is because of the ease of management and the number of servers that we are able to virtualize. When we first went to VMware, we took 200 physical servers and converted them to virtual. Instead of running on 200 pieces of hardware, they were running on 8.

Obviously, this is much easier to manage from a hardware perspective, power perspective, and reliability perspective.

The vSphere is very good at advanced things like memory sharing between VMs, and CPU scheduling between VMs.

I use the automation tools that they have today.

Their command-line tools integrate well with other Microsoft products like PowerShell, so I can manipulate VMs using it.

The capability to add on new features like site recovery and monitoring is helpful.

The web user interface can be a bit clunky from time to time, so there may be some room for improvement in that regard.  I was a fan of the C# client for as long as I could use it.  The move from flash to HTML5 for the web interface is an improvement but still not a good as C# was.

I have been working with VMware vSphere for approximately 12 years.  Since VI 3.5 days.

In 12 years, I can think of one time that we've had a server crash. It was one of our host servers and the problem was hardware-related. It was attributed to bad memory on the physical host server, itself.

The VMware operating system is stable and I've never had it crash.

Scaling is very easy. Just build it, acquire a license from them and add it to vCenter.

We have about 2,000 people in our organization, and everybody has some server on there that they do something with. It may be file services, file servers, or Citrix XenApp servers.  Most of our VMware environment is our legacy servers because they still support older operating systems that I can't put on Hyper-V or AHV. For example, we have a couple of Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 servers. VMware is the only hypervisor that I can run those on.

It has probably been 10 years since I've had to call support for anything but from what I can remember, they were helpful and they solved our problems. It has been so long that I've had to use them that I would hesitate to give them a perfect rating, since I don't know what they're like today, so I think that rating them a nine out of ten is appropriate.

vSphere was our first hypervisor.

Since then we have added additional hypervisors in our environment. We have AHV from Nutanix and Hyper-V from Microsoft.

AHV doesn't support things like memory sharing, at all, and Hyper-V is just not very good at it.

I knew what I was doing, so I found that the initial setup was very straightforward. If an inexperienced user's initial setup involves a little bit of searching in Google then I would think that it wouldn't be very difficult.

We did use a vendor for our initial implementation, 12 years ago.  Since then we have done multiple upgrades and I have done several new implementations for other orgs.  They were competent at their work and I learned a lot from them that I used in my future implementations.

Basic vSphere, without centralized management, is free. When you get into the centralized management vCenter server, it starts adding cost. Then, it's license-based upon the number of CPUs in your host servers.

VMware vSphere is my preferred hypervisor. It always has been, and always will be. I suggest using it, and not hesitating. I'm sure that they're working on great stuff to enhance this product that I can't even think of, but from my perspective, everything that they do today is great. I don't know what they could possibly do to make my life easier, but I'm sure they'll come up with something.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Using this solution, we have virtualized 90% of servers used by a tier-one automotive supplier.

We have reduced maintenance and power consumption, as well as the recovery time that is required for any failures.

The most valuable feature is the VDP Backup solution. It just works.

The Disaster Recovery solution is easy to implement.

I would like to see better fault and performance reporting in the GUI. I should not have to resort to using the command line to see what is going on.

I have been using VMware vSphere for five years.

We use this solution for hardware consolidation and improved infrastructure resiliency.

It has allowed us to be more resilient to infrastructure and hardware failure, reduced hardware costs, and decreased recovery time from failures.

The most valuable features are cloning, snapshots, vMotion, and replication. All of these have increased our ability to recover from failure and balance workloads.

Reducing the cost of vSphere would be an improvement.

We have been using VMware vSphere for five years.

Our primary use case is controlling our virtual machines, as well as our host machines.

We are able to create virtual machines and move them from one host to another, controlling the resources.

I love all of the features in this solution, but moving VMs between host machines is one that stands out.

The solution should be more user-friendly for upgrading host ESXi units, bringing them into the control unit of vSphere.

Generally, the user interface needs to be improved for non-technical people. A technical person can hover around and find the right tool or task that needs to be done. But, for people who are new, they require guidance because it is not intuitive. They have to ask for help from here and there to get it right.

The solution has been very stable up to now, and we are very happy with that.

I cannot make a prediction about the scalability, but I can tell you that we have close to five hundred users at this time. We must keep up with technology so we do plan on expanding the use of this solution.

Until now, I have not used their technical support.

The deployment of this solution was completed before I joined the company, although I don't think that it was complex.

In terms of maintenance, it depends on the task that you are doing. Normally, it doesn't take too much time. There are two of us that handle the maintenance.

There were consultants who assisted with the deployment.

It took quite a long time, but in the end, I think that it benefits us in terms of ROI.

The licensing fees are on a yearly basis.

When I hear that somebody is willing to deploy a similar solution, I suggest this product to them and even help with the deployment. I love this product.

Once this solution is deployed, only fine tuning needs to be done. Once complete and everything is in place, you don't have to do much. From the technical end, the product is great.

I would rate this product a ten out of ten.

We use it to manage our VM servers, everything we have. We're about 98 percent virtualized and we're using VMware vSphere and it works great. It performs great.

In terms of mission-critical apps, we mainly host a lot of our accountants, so we have a lot of accounting software. It's really mission-critical to where we have to have these apps running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. With vSphere, we're able to use VMotion, HA, and Fault Tolerance to keep our apps up and running for them.

We don't use VM Encryption or support for TPM or VBS. We don't yet use VMware Cloud on AWS but we're looking forward to it.

Getting rid of our physical servers and going virtual is saving us some money in overall rack space.

Server consolidation.

It's extremely simple. Installing the ESXi is a piece of cake and then putting servers on there is really simple, as is having HA and building a cluster for our VM servers. It's very easy.

The UI is great with the new HTML.

In terms of stability, so far it's been really simple. We've been running it for a few years now and it has been flawless. We haven't looked back.

It's really simple to scale. Just add another server, add it to the cluster and, bingo bango, you're done.

Our experience with technical support has not been the greatest. We currently have a ticket open and it's been open for a few months now, for our VDI solution. I can't complain. In other situations, it has been fine.

A big thing for us, and the reason we went with VDI, was for security. We didn't want folks having laptops or taking them out of our environment, out of our building, and not having them secured, where somebody could just pick one up and take it. This way, we keep it all in-house and it's more secure. It's in our hands and not theirs.

We went with VMware because we were all more familiar with VMware and our vendors, our reps. We all have a great relationship with them, so we decided to go that route.

The setup was pretty straightforward.

I honestly don't know what our ROI is, but it's a lot.

We looked at Citrix and we looked at Azure.

Give it a shot, check it out how easy it is. It just works.

I rate it a ten out of ten. I'm a big advocate of VMware.

Use case is to manage virtuals; spin them up, bring them down, create them, and a little maintenance on them. It performs okay for me.

We do DRS for load-balancing. We're looking at doing Microsoft SQL virtual on it, probably without clustering; replacing physical clusters with it; and job scheduling; all probably in Q1.

The most valuable feature is that it's not a Windows license. It's also good that it finally has the patch manager included in it. And it's simple and efficient to use.

It will be nice when it's all HTML 5.

It would be nice if it had auto-scaling, no need to select CPU or select database size. Let it auto-scale, let it use the features that VMware has, instead of having to preselect.

It's solid. Other than a host crashing, we haven't really had any downtime.

For us, the scalability is good. We haven't hit any limitations.

Technical support is a little slow to get back to you. We haven't had any mission-critical outages but we play some phone-tag. It could be better.

The initial setup could be a little convoluted. You've got the PSC or you've got something else, plus you've got to the vSphere, and then you want to do Server Linked Mode. You have different environments, you have different storages. Some support the plugin, some don't. That's a pain.

Hyper-V sucks, some of the other stuff isn't good. Cloud solutions are too expensive, if you're actually going to use them. We did a side-by-side comparison of Hyper-V and VMware and VMware was substantially better for performance and usability.

Do a side-by-side comparison. Try it, stay away from Microsoft. The Microsoft solution of being everything to everybody does not fit. Never fits.

Everything that we do is strictly within our own company. So we don't do encryption, although we might look at that. We don't really have a need for TPM. It's a pretty controlled environment.

I would rate vSphere an eight out of 10. To make it a 10 they need to get rid of Flash and then apologize for having used Flash, have it auto-scale, and no Java.

It's a virtualization service.

The product is performing well. We are quite satisfied with it.

We are looking into using VMware on AWS in the future.

We have seen an improvement in uptime. The whole hardware lifecycle process is easier, which was previously a pain.

I find the solution simple and efficient to manage. It is not rocket science. It is easy to install and maintain. I didn't need to read a lot of books. The solution is quite handy.

• The high availability (HA)
• VMotion
• The seamless 24-hour uptime

We have a lot of databases running on mission critical apps which control our end production line: Exchange, virtualize, and the main controller. We are at about a 85 percent virtualization rate. We also have mission critical apps which conform our factory.

On Vista, there should be a lot more new features. We would like to see more security features to harden our environment in the future.

From a technical point, there is not much room for new innovation in the hypervisor. It is more about improving the environment or the landscape, not the product.

The licensing should be more competitive based on its price. There should be more features for the licensing that you own. Money is a factor, because our management is looking right now at its money. The most annoying thing is to tell people that I would like to continue using VMware, and have them argue the other solutions are free.

Maybe 80 percent of the time, our issues were hardware problems caused by HPE. Crappy driver issues leading to a blue screen of death. If you have a corrupt driver, is it the fault of the VMware or is it the fault of the vendor who should support it? These were mostly our outages.

This was due to the product cycles being too quick. Neither VMware nor HPE could test the stuff properly. The cycles were too quick and they had to push out the software, then errors happened. Both software companies needed to fix or address issues in their old versions, but then they also implemented new bugs in their newer versions. Software will never be error-free, because the product cycle frequency is too high. 

We are version 6.0, but these issues happened on 5.0, 5.1, and 5.5. We haven't seen them on the current version. It is annoying because we work with clusters, and we can't really have one node fail.

It can scale linearly. At some locations though, we are using HPE SimpliVity to scale.

The technical support is very good. I have nothing to complain about, as they are quick and try to respond quickly. Sometimes, they don't have a solution right away, but that's reasonable. 

If you track down an issue and you don't have a solution or work around, you have to give it to the engineers who will take sometime fixing it. That's fair.

We have PCS support. It has better support compared to HPE. Maybe Cisco is better, but it is still good.

We were not previously using anything from a virtualization perspective.

If you figure out how to do it, it's quite easy. 

There are so many options on the market, and if you switch from a SAN to an S environment, you have to look for white papers and guidelines from Windows. It is also hyper-converged. Yet, if you can follow the guidelines, it's easy. 

We did the implementation on our own.

The business is able to gain in faster services because you are provisioning the ends more quickly due to templates. Thus, the provisioning is quite good. 

The pricing is too expensive. The reason why we implemented Hyper-V is because of the licensing costs. 

They are way too high. This is tough when you have to present to management with a flat budget, and everything will be more expensive. 

We are currently using VMware and Hyper-V.

Our shortlist consisted of KVM, Hyper-V, and VMware. We went with VMware back then because of its reporting, it was market leader, it has good support, and the price was previously fair. 

I would recommend trying the solution.

We use it for call centers and providing server applications.

It's awesome. It works. It does exactly what we want it.

Code: They need to stop pushing it out so fast. Nobody in the real world is really using it yet, because it's not ready for prime time. It needs to be more stable. They need to get their product more stable before they push more code out. 

An example, in vCenter 6.5, they pushed HA, but it doesn't work. I've worked with so many engineers who finally said, "Give up! It doesn't work." 

I asked a question to one of the guys who did a demo with us on 6.7, and said, "Did you guys fix it?" 

They immediately skirted around the question. I said, "I'll take that as a no."

We don't have any downtime, because I built it right. I work a lot with VMware's engineers.

Though, it is not stable. The product was pushed out too quick, and now, there are a lot of bugs. We have seen bugs in vSphere, NSX, and ADDVOLUME, which we haven't even been able to have installed yet because of bugs. Also, with Horizon, we are constantly running into problems.

We are a bleeding edge company. We push it. Yet, we're not even touching 6.7 because it's too buggy.

It is easy to add stuff to the product.

Technical support is not that great. It is too slow. When you get them, they are honest, and about what is going on, which is helpful. Because if they lie to you, then you're even more screwed. So once you get somebody, but it's too slow. We've had Level 1 support where it can take hours (maybe a day) to talk to somebody, and our company can affect millions of customers.

I find the initial setup easy, but it has been becoming more difficult and technical.

Pricing is insanely expensive. We spent millions of dollars on NSX. If you want anything, it costs you more. The pricing model is constantly changing. We wanted to look at HCX, but we had to get it bundled with NSX and vRNI. We already have vRNI. I will be installing, architecting, and rolling it out. However, how does it affect the cost for HCX? We still haven't received a real answer.

I'm anxious for 7.0 to come out because I'm curious to see how the HTML will function. We keep hearing the web client will be better, and it's not. Bring back the fat client!