VMware vSphere Reviews

• Virtualization
• Ability to vMotion and create servers on LAN
• HA
• DRS

The ability to build machines on the LAN as the business needs them, and the ability to have good DR and HA, with no hardware that can cause issues. If we go down, we have another host with very little downtime.

I would like them to keep the client-based system, even though they are going towards web client.

It's extremely stable rarely any issues.

It's very scalable. We currently have 10,000+ servers, and 80% virtualized, so scalability has to be there.

VMware tech support is excellent. It’s one of the best vendor tech support I’ve found.

It's extremely easy, very straightforward, and good documentation.

We are just beginning on vSphere. In the next two and three years, I would like to explore the virtualized automation.

Virtualised automation is a useful feature.

The pipeline feature can be improved, as it doesn't allow for specific situations.

We have been using vSphere for about 2 years. 

Because vSphere is a minimal interface, it tends to be stable.

As you can set up various environments, vSphere is very scalable. In the future, we may consider switching from vSphere to Hyper-V.

We purchased the OEM, but not from VMware. We bought it from HPE. The first year of support provided by HPE is okay for now.

IBM Power. We switched to vSphere from IBM Power because the hardware is cheaper.

The setup of vSphere is straight forward. I have set up a few vSphere environments.

vSphere is very expensive.

I would give vSphere 9 out of 10, as it is easy to use, and there is good support available.

We deploy this solution for our clients, from small to large enterprise. We are resellers and I'm the company's principal engineer. 

A valuable feature is the provisioning setup of VMs. It's the most common feature used by our clients. 

I'd like to see a simplified integration with services automation. At the moment it requires a lot of network from partners and solution providers to do this - there are a lot of third party components that require integration. If they could improve this it would mean less integration for some key products and services.

I've been using this solution for five years. 

This is a stable solution. 

We have no complaints about the technical support. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

Licensing costs aren't too expensive, although you pay extra for additional features. 

It's important to understand your requirements before choosing a solution. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

Firstly, we use it to provide an infrastructure for a development environment. Secondly, we use it to provide services to end-users. A kind of clustered services, where underneath, there are plenty of virtual machines. Thirdly, these solutions were chosen because of the easy way of providing backups and zero downtime between accidents and issues. 

VMware vSphere provides an easy way of providing near-zero downtime services, the operation of the instances between clustered services, and providing the projected SLA for our customers. 

Mostly, we use a gap solution for PaaS and IaaS levels of solutions. We also use Kubernetes on the application layer and downtime to move to a different layer of workloads. 

However, we still use plain virtual machine platform environments because we are leveraging just on-premise servers. We can't, or we don't want to fully move into clouds. That's why it's important for us to use a solution like VMware vSphere. 

I'm not aware of every option that our solution provides, but I see mostly two things. Provide a better solution for hybrid clouds and migration to the cloud. That could be one thing. The second one is providing some integration with different solutions at the application level, such as Kubernetes.

There is always a problem that the application level solutions are not aware of lower levels of infrastructure, of architecture. Some bundled applications with a stack of new VMs with better templates, including the deployment of such things. Monitoring could also be improved.

I have been using VMware vSphere for more than 10 years.

I think it's stable. We have encountered a major issue twice during the last four or five years. But it was not related only to vSphere but solutions like extensions to the software we use. 

However, there was no downtime, there was some issue, but I would say that the solution is quite stable. We have been using it for a few years without any major incidents that I am aware of.

To my knowledge, it's quite scalable and elastic in terms of providing bigger throughputs and managing higher volumes of requests at the end, but our cases currently are not like the biggest. 

I think most of the solutions available right now are set up for the infrastructure. The hardware is enough for the performance level we want to have. It's enough, and if we wanted to improve it, there is space for that. 

However, I can tell you that this solution was stable in my first project. Between 2010 and 2014, at a different company, the solution provided everything that I needed at that moment. There were no problems with scaling this solution.

However, we had problems with the hardware limits. We reached the limit, but it was quite good with vSphere solutions because even if we reached the point of having no hardware, like memory and computers, we managed to provide stable workloads for our customers. We gained the level of performance we wanted to have.

We were dealing with a complex situation dynamically, and the solution provided us with the tools, and the scalability was not an issue. However, we had problems with the hardware limits.

The support could be better when it comes to opening and responding to a ticket. But it was within a reasonable time. However, I'm don't have direct contact with the support, and my team's not giving me information about any issues.

My experience was with the public sector. That was rather complex from the start. In my previous experiences, if we wanted to use vSphere, that was after we tried some different techniques, and we had reached the limit of it or the complexity of the setup. 

That's why we wanted to move to simplify it. The setup was immature, and we needed to provide better service for customers. That's why we choose to use vSphere. The complex one was the other option.

The setup takes about one or two days or something in-between.

VMware vSphere is a top enterprise solution, so we pay the price for a major product.  We use vSphere because when we get the project, the customers were already using it. But currently, for example, if we have a new project and we are setting up our environment, and we have no constraints about the technology, like using vSphere, we rather go for Proxmox.

We are using it because it was already there before. The cost of migration, for example, is too high to move into different solutions, and the cost of keeping it is enough, and so we accept it. 

Overall, I would like to have cheaper licensing costs and maybe a different policy for licensing. However, we don't see that as a big issue because we are paying for a good solution. 

That's why I think it's a fair price. We are using it on the production side, and everything is good from our experience. That's why I would say that the cost isn't too high. However, it would always be nice if it was cheaper.

Proxmox is cost-effective and good. For example, if we have some projects where the hardware is provided by our customers, and we can use any technology we want.

Proxmox, in most cases, is good for creating some development and staging environment. Because it's cost-effective, we can afford to have a solution based on that technology. 

In most cases, I know that it's not limiting us in terms of the operating systems we use, and my team is quite happy when using such solutions. But it's not the production solution that we use at the end. It's mostly temporary for a few months, and we are using it because of the cost and because there will be an easy way to deploy. We can start to use it and move our environment between the projects. It's quite easy and quite quick.

With different technologies like Grafana, we gain information from infrastructure and application-level from different sources, and we integrate it into a different solution.

However, monitoring information could always be improved. Integrating with the application level could be improved, and monitoring could also be extended to that. Providing us with a more complex and just a one-click solution for seeing everything, how the infrastructure and how integrations are behaving, and the levels of infrastructure and application services would be a nice solution to have.

I think the decision needs to be made by the architects of the solution. They need to be aware of the cost of such solutions, their requirements, and the constraints of such technologies. From a technological point, it's always a good solution. However, it might not be the best solution in terms of the total cost of ownership, and maybe there are better solutions like Proxmox.

I would give VMware vSphere a solid eight out of ten. 

We use vSphere to manage VMs, route our infrastructure, changing settings, remote desktopping, and providing services for the university.

In terms of mission-critical apps, we use it for our Student Information System (SIS) to manage all student records and financial aid for all students on campus, along with databases and other web servers on campus.

I would think there has been a performance boost. I don't know exactly what percentage, but maybe five to ten percent.

For benefits for the organization, I don't know if they see a big difference, other than that performance boost, but I do know that it helps the engineers who work on the back-end to be able to manage the VMs; and improved access and experience for the engineers is a big improvement.

This version has added a lot more features to the HTML5 interface and that helps us monitor and manage the system better and faster than with the old interface.

I also think it is very easy to manage. When it moved over to HTML5, bringing all those new features into the HTML5 interface, that improved it a lot. I don't know specific performance data points, but I would say it has helped tremendously in being able to stay in one interface and not having to manage multiple, different interfaces in connecting to it.

There are still a few features that have been left out as far as updating and sending firmware to the host. You still have to go into the Flash interface to do that. But, for the most part, there are just those few missing features from the HTML5 interface.

At the beginning, it was a little rough because it was a beta. They put out some updates and it has been really stable. We haven't had any outages or downtime, as far as stability goes.

I assume it scales really well. We tested it on a few VMs at the beginning and we've rolled it out to a lot of hosts and everything has been working great.

I have not used technical support.

When I came on, they were using vSphere.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was pretty straightforward, pretty simple to set up.

I'm not very good at ROIs, but I know that it has improved the management of the VMs, and being able to help customers more easily and faster has been an improvement with this release.

In terms of advice, I've looked at many different solutions out there and, right now, VMware is the only one that can provide all the different things that we needed it to do.

When selecting a vendor, the most important criteria would be the ease of use, the benefits it has, the features. If we were to switch to someone else, they would have to have all the different features that VMware has currently. And then, price would come in last.

I give it a nine out of ten because it has almost all the features we've needed and it's pretty much simple keeping it under control.

We use it for VMware AirWatch/Workspace ONE: managing mobile devices.

We haven't seen a performance boost at all because we haven't been using the product long enough to be able to fairly evaluate it. But I have no complaints with the performance at this point.

The roadmap VMware has for Workspace ONE is on target with what we want to do. A year from now I might have a different opinion, but right now, I'm good. I see no negatives at this point.

It is a stable product. It has been stable since we installed it eight months ago.

It's a scalable solution. We went from 200 test devices to 11,000 devices in three weeks, without any issues.

So far, we haven't used technical support a lot but I would rate it a three out of five. They have to earn my trust.

The setup is not difficult but there a lot of details that may or may not be documented clearly in the installation guides. What made it difficult for us was that we had to keep asking questions that should have been documented but were not.

Our ROI is the ease of use for users.

We abandoned one vendor and looked at two others but I can't name them. We dealt with one vendor for five years and we bailed as quickly as possible.

I would recommend it highly. I have no complaints. We did a PoC with them and we have been using other products from VMware for years.

The important criteria involved in choosing it were flexibility and ease of use for our user base.

My advice, if you are going to implement it, is: Read the documentation and question the vendor carefully when doing the install.

We use vSphere to manage the various vCenters that my group is responsible for. We use it for the main controllers. We have VMs that that manage access to buildings. Until there's a problem you don't realize, necessarily, how many key systems have been virtualized. If we shut everything down, then maybe people would realize how virtualization has really changed things.

We don't do anything active with the built-in security features, such as VM Encryption and support for TPM and VBS.

It's a big difference compared to having everything on hardware. In that situation, if you want to change memory, you have to bring your system down, open up the box, put new memory in - or a new processor, or any other hardware changes you want to make. With VMware, you may have to bring it down to make some changes, but then it's right back up again in a few minutes. It's a lot easier than if it was hardware.

There are various clients, for the environment that we have, that can be used. There's the thick client, there's the web client, there are obviously new clients when we upgrade to vSphere 6.7. One of the things I like with the web client, versus the thick client, is that we're able to access all the vCenters that we manage. With the thick client, you have to log in to one vCenter at a time.

As far as the web client goes, one of the frustrating things is that it's dependent on different browsers. One day it may work with only a given browser or there may be issues with Flash. So I look forward to being able to use the HTML 5 client. Hopefully, it will be a lot more stable and not have the kind of issues that I necessarily run into with the web client today.

One thing that is a little frustrating for me is that you have the network side with bandwidth and, if it's a system that's virtualized, obviously, you have VMware vSphere in the mix. There are all the different components. If someone has a VM and they don't like the performance or they see something that causes them to say, "Oh, this seems a little sluggish," they contact us and say, "Hey, what's going on?" And that becomes a kind of "magical mystery tour," a black box sometimes. I think, "Okay, where do I need to look? Is it even a problem within the virtualization infrastructure or is it somewhere else?" So that's what I'm hoping to find out about in some of the sessions, here at VMworld 2018, and maybe get some answers.

I haven't seen the new client with vSphere 6.7, so it's hard for me to say what additional features I would like to see.

The stability is pretty good. If there is a stability issue it's probably something else, for instance, the power for the building or something like that. It's usually not an issue with VMware.

As long as you got the ESXi hosts with the resources necessary, scalability isn't a big problem. We don't really lock down a lot of our clients which are still within our organization. We don't really limit the resources. If it becomes an issue we'll look at that, but for the most part, it hasn't been a problem. If we look like we're getting a little tight on resources, then we look at getting and setting up a new ESXi host.

I've had pretty good results with VMware technical support. It's not uncommon for us, if we're doing some kind of an upgrade that we're not necessarily familiar with, to open up an incident and tell them we're going to upgrade this to this version on this hardware. We just want to have an incident open. If something does happen, they're more than willing to work with us. I've had positive results.

I was not involved with the initial setup but I've been involved the last couple years or so with setting up some new ESXi hosts and I've gone through some practice in our test environment to upgrade to 6.7.

Overall, it's okay. There are some good resources out on the web or through VMUG that you can go through.

I don't really deal with the budget so it would be hard for me to say what our ROI is, but my boss does the budget and he seems happy. We keep getting more resources and more things are being virtualized.

I would tell colleagues to take a look at vSphere, if it makes sense for their organization. I've been working with VMware products in one way, shape, or form since the late 90s. Originally, I used it for training purposes and I wasn't even thinking about production. But I have no qualms today, if it's a production system, virtualizing it, as opposed to keeping it on hardware. 

There is always a learning curve and there are also functionality differences between the clients.

For the most part, if everything is working fine, it's efficient to manage. But if you have people say, "Hey, I see performance issues," that's where it becomes a little more of a problem. That's one issue that we're trying to address right now: being able to capture more logging for longer periods of time. Perhaps we need to use a Syslog Server to be able to help troubleshoot some issues by being able to look at particular periods of time.

I rate this solution as a seven out of 10 because of the issues with the clients, especially the web client, at times. And there is also the "black box" nature of understanding what's going on when there is a problem.

SAAS, SAAS, IAAS using Virtualisation of infrastructure

Work life balance as systems administrators got flexibility, robustness, scalability of current infrastructure.

The licensing part. VMware must simplify the licensing mode to help selling to business and additional products.

Almost 10years

Nope. Smooth all the way.

Never. Vmware was the easiest system i ever deployed. Did it without training.

Not yet. As long as i have the infrastructure, the system works like magic. I can add hardware and servers as i want.

I only have the online website customer service. Otherwise i have no support from anyone. Tho i love the product.

once i had to upgrade and i was adding some new hardware from DELL the company in Kenya sent very good guys to work on them directly. We have been good friends with the guys tho they are no longer in DELL.

I was deploying servers from bare metal. Once i got VMware, i have never looked back.

It was smooth. I had bought symanted brightmail and it could only deploy from VMDX. So i had to learn the hard way. I likes it. Once i learnt about VMware, i have helped no less than 20 administrators to deploy VMware in Kenya.

Dell M1000 full blade power edge, deployed by the manufacturer.

It is superb. Level of hardware investment went down. Scalability and power is superb. Next am deploying BI and warehousing on DELL poweredge using VMware and later a 4 tier (a true 4 tier) datacenter in Kenya.

This is a place VMware have to work on. Bringing in products or upgrading is difficult to sell to the finance guys.

I fell into VMware. I so far like the marriage.

Keep going guys. Best thing under the sun.