VMware vSphere Reviews

We have three different types of environments: internal cloud, managed hosting, and VDA. We use VMware vSphere as the main product to accomplish this.

VMware is now the main backbone in our company.

We are not using VMware cloud on AWS. We are in PoC mode. We may use it in another six months to a year.

vSphere helps our organization. Initially, we don't have an internal Cloud. We have an internal cloud, which is four years old now. We have 8000 to 9000 VMs standing in our internal cloud. We also implemented VDA using a VMware vSphere. So, it has been an absolutely pleasure having vSphere.

We provide a service to our internal customers for our development center. We have internal cloud developers. If they require 1000 VMs or 500 VMs, and in the background, we're using a vSphere VMware product. 

The most valuable feature is performance, especially the 6.7 version. 

We were looking for content library options for templates and were happy that VMware introduced it in 6.7 version. 

I like the speed and the quickness of the boot in the newest version of vSphere.

The mission-critical applications in our company, like SAP, Siebel, and a lot of financially related applications are running. Our developer uses most of animation, etc., and we are using the vSphere for that.

We have seen a performance boost compared to the previous versions, like a 5.1, five years ago. It has gradually increased. Previously, we hadn't migrated any database, like SQL or Oracle, into VMware. However, we are planning to now. We are moving forward because a lot of new features are now available on 6.7. 

We are doing a PoC, which we are happy about now. We may move over the database into our VMware environment.

It is simple to manage. However, some of our operation teams, they are used to the desktop line, but VMware removed it in the previous version. Initially, we had an issue on the flash, but now we are happy. With VMware moving to HTML, it's really fast. We did a bit of version testing, and it's really fast and easy to use now.

I have seen some sessions for version 6.7 covering its improvements, which I was looking for, mainly the content library. Our requirement is to move our templates from one location to another location. Previously, this was not available. We are happy this was introduced. 

Another thing is the flash. However, in 6.7, they completely removed it and they are bringing in the HTML. Let's see, as I haven't tried the 6.7 update yet. I hope it will satisfy everything from our point of view.

The stability is good. We have different clusters based on the load of the application and requirements. We can slice the cluster.  

Since we have an internal cloud, suddenly people may require 1000 or 2000 VMS in something. We have options to analyze and make sure we have enough scalability. 

We have some issues but so far it has been good.

We use tech support, which is okay. We used to have a hard time, but at this time, we are happy.

Previously, for monitoring, we use other products. Slowly, we are moving to vRealize now. It depends on our requirements and budget. 

When 5.5 went to 6, we found it a bit difficult because they changed the model. 

Now, we are okay. We have gotten used to it, because it is a new platform. Initially, it was difficult, but now we are okay.

Five years ago, we planned to move from a physical to virtualization environment. We evaluated a lot of other hypervisors, did some PoCs, etc. We decided on VMware. For the past six to seven years, it's been a big journey. 

I would rate vSphere as a nine out of 10.

I will recommend the solution, but there are some steps to take first. There are some VMware videos to view and some KB articles to read, which are available, regarding compatibility. I would recommend them to go through everything. Go through the KB articles, then I will recommend them to implement that one.

An important criteria for choosing a vendor is evaluating how a company behaves. We will review their past history, the current market, and the value of that product. Then, we will see whether that product can used for our requirement. Based on that, we choose our vendors.

We haven't started using the VM encryption. We are in the very initial stage, doing a PoC for it and also the UEFI Secure Boot. These are options that we are trying. Let's see how they will work, and we're looking forward to their results.

Our main use case for this is that it's the foundation of our company. What our company, MacStadium, does is provide virtual environments for customers to do iOS development on Apple hardware. And the foundation for that, for creating the private cloud, is vSphere.

In terms of mission-critical apps, it's utilized mainly for iOS development. So customers will use the API for vCenter to automate things. They can do CICD, where they can spin up and spin down virtual machines, rapidly, and provide them to their internal groups or to their customers to do iOS development.

It has actually been performing a lot better than you'd think for an initial release. It's very smooth and I've been pretty impressed with it so far.

As a connection for our business, it goes hand-in-hand. It being the only hypervisor that runs on top of Apple hardware the way we want it, there is no "us" without that.

The most valuable feature would be the slight changes they've made to VMFork instant cloning, in which they have abstracted out the parent-child relationship in cloning, in which certain features, like HA and DRS, are now usable on that parent virtual machine. That is wildly amazing and something that wasn't available until 6.7.

We are actually making a lot of use of the VM Encryption feature. We're using that mainly because it's a customer requirement, especially after all the changes in the European Union for security. And that's a major issue. We've been adding in NSX and that, combined with the ability to have encrypted VMotion as well, has been huge.

In addition, the simplicity and efficiency in managing it has always been one big thing with the entire vSphere suite. It has been very straightforward if you're just using it from the user interface. Hitting the API has always been great, and they're continuing to grow that, which has been really good for us.

I know, coming out in 6.7 Update 1, that the HTML Client is going to reach full parity and have all the same features that they had in the now-deprecated thick client that used to be on Windows. That's one really neat feature I'm actually looking forward to.

There are always little "gotchas." In the past, little changes have broken things in vSphere. Going from 6.0, which worked perfectly fine on the Mac Pro, there were certain changes in hardware drivers, when 6.5 came out. Some were no longer present or had been deprecated. As a result, it didn't work on the Mac Pro anymore, which was business-critical. Okay, everybody could stick on one version and wait until it was fixed. We were able to take drivers out of the 5.5 version, add them to the build package for installation and it worked. It was not the most efficient, and storage I/O was kind of slow. Since 6.5 Update 1 came out, that has been solid, no real issues with that.

The stability has been very good. I've run several builds on 6.7 from pre-release and it's been good.

As far as scalability goes for us, I've run it as far as having up to 100 hosts in the cluster and I haven't noticed any degradation. It's been running well.

I actually have gotten quite a bit of tech support for initial installations. Even though they're on the hardware compatibility list, Mac Pros and Apple hardware are very different than your traditional Dell, Cisco, or HPE Blade. Apple hardware is kind of like a black box, so it's very hard to interact with, but ESXi has been perfect.

My experience with tech support has been pretty good. The response times are really good. If the engineer that I'm working with is not directly knowledgeable on that idea, usually he'll get back to me in a short time and hand me off to a guy knows exactly how to help me out with the problem. And then, the follow-up is good as well.

We've always been using vSphere from the beginning, starting with 5.5. We actually worked with William Lam from VMware on getting ESXi working on Minis at that point in time. It's been a wonderful relationship since then.

One big thing that I know a lot of people talk about, when looking at why go with vSphere, is the ecosystem. You have other products that were built solidly to work with the vSphere product and the integration is always completely solid. The continuous development on the vSphere product and all the other products in the ecosystem, and the community, also play a part. There's pretty much nothing that I have run into where I say, "Hey, I want to do something outside of what vSphere does," and there hasn't been somebody within the community who has been able to say, "Oh yeah, I got that running, it is really easy, this is how you do it." That's not something I have seen in any of the other ecosystems.

It was pretty easy upgrading any of the older hosts from 6.5 to 6.7. Everything was pretty straightforward.

In terms of advice, especially if you are on things like Hyper-V or other products that I've touched, the simplicity and scalability of the vSphere product has been solid. For another individual who is in the IT or engineering fields, I wouldn't go with anything else.

One thing a lot of people don't realize or know about is that Xcode and OS X are closely tied to the versioning of vSphere and what features will be enabled. Coming out this September is MacOS 10.14 and that brings with it the need and requirement to run APFS, which is only supported in 6.7. So we have an abundance of customers, all of which are iOS developers, who require 6.7. So having that coming out was a major need and requirement for us.

I haven't noticed a direct performance boost, but the performance is no less than it was in 6.5, which is always generally a good thing. With the addition of features, nothing slowed down, everything is still exactly where it was.

Our use case is virtualization of hardware infrastructure, for return on investment cases. We have done pretty well with it. I'm really happy with it.

The mission-critical apps we run on them include SQL; there is a lot of file sharing; there are a lot of websites and web servers running on them. There's some big data stuff for big science. We have to be able to digest lots of data and then pull analytics on it at a high-level, and be able to show big data in useful ways.

With the current compliance options that I have to go through, it's very nice to have a lot of the encryption built in. It checks a lot of boxes for the federal level so I don't have to either bolt something on or have something on top of it. Having it native and integrated into the system makes things much easier.

Also, being able to manage a lot of servers in one pane of glass makes things a lot simpler. Basically, a lot of things just happen in one area. You can roll things over, move things around more dynamically, without having to hit multiple systems. Being able to manage it, in its entirety, is easier and better for us.

• VHA
• DRS
• VMotion
• Redundancy, failover, any DR situation
• Reducing the overall physical footprint for electrical needs, heating, cooling
• Money-saving, in general

In terms of management, it's getting better. There were recent changes with the infrastructure and the architecture, going from a physical vSphere vCenter client to the web interface. That has slowed things down a little bit, to be honest. It's getting better. With the 5.7 release they've optimized it, the menus are a little snappier, and it isn't as cumbersome to manage through as it was on the previous website or vSphere Web Client instance.

Also, reading some of the sensors in the hardware itself, that's where VMware does a really great job in the digital infrastructure and being able to scale things and knowing what's going on in vSphere. But not having to buy something from a third-party to scan the actual hardware components, like the hard drives and the port containers and fan speeds; not having to bolt something on and go through another vendor, would be helpful.

Stability has always been really well done with VMware. I have always been very happy with the stability of the system. You can set it up, you can check your optimizations there. But as far as weird issues with being able to convert things from physical to virtual, I've really had no big problems in switching that over. It's been really seamless to the end-user as well, just doing standardized conversions. It's been very stable and easy to manage.

I haven't had any loss of data in quite some time. Data is the key to everything. Downtime and loss of data are almost unacceptable in my current position.

I can always go horizontal, vertical is a little problematic sometimes. Horizontally, being able to add storage on the fly - even hot ad-hoc remove, if we do have some higher workloads or the like - we can always scale that without re-booting, with the newer operating systems. So the scalability portion is always on key.

Technical support is pretty good. I've had to use them a couple times for smaller issues. They've always been very helpful and we've always come to a solution.

The backup solution we were using at the time was Dell's version of IBM's Tape Library with Symantec Backup Exec. We were doing tape backups at the file level, not really any virtual snaps, so incrementals every day, fulls on the weekends.

As data gets bigger it's harder and harder to back up and that's where virtualization comes in, because you can start doing analysis on data changes and deltas a little bit better. Tracking and things that are tied into VMware assist digital backup solutions to be faster, more resilient, and have less downtime in a restore situation.

In my previous job, I was a Senior Systems Administrator for a credit union. We were running VMware 3.0, 12 years ago, and having that experience - and being bleeding edge at that time - helped me really be a catalyst in getting over to virtualization. That knowledge that I had in the past has always helped me, because I've seen VMware grow and do the things that it has done. Having that knowledge was helpful in setting it up from fresh, again: making the redundancies, knowing some of the pitfalls you have when first setting it up, and seeing a lot of the capital that you can lose if you don't understand what you're doing at that time.

I set it up myself. I can get technical support, but I can't have on-prem or anyone else.

Performance is somewhat relative, but an overall return on investment comes from not having multiple physical servers and from helping to aggregate a lot of the processors and RAM, and being able to use them more efficiently. We're not really worried about speed but about more efficiency.

I've been with them for so long, I never looked to much else. I've always been happy with vSphere and seeing what they've done for VMware itself. Intel products weren't really there, and I still don't feel they're there.

I've really enjoyed the Dell partnership because I do Dell on the back-end. The hand-holding between Dell and VMware works relatively well, with their hardware control lists and being sure they stay compatible for long periods of time, without having to spend money on new hardware. You can stay in your swim lane. That partnership is really a key to success.

My advice is "do it".

I rate vSphere at nine out of 10 because the HTML version of things needs to get a little bit better. The vSphere side of things gets a little difficult to manage; right-click, in some browsers, doesn't work as well as it used to. I'm seeing a little bit of general latency that we didn't used to get with the thick client. It's getting there.

Version 6.71 brought some of those performance metrics back, but it's just hard to get from one end to the other. With the ever-changing federal requirements, we need to really strip down and minimize what can be done in the browsers. It is getting more and more difficult, Java being the key thing. Going to HTML 5, that's a great thing because Java is going to be pay-to-play next year. And you don't have the vulnerabilities with HTML 5. It works symbiotically. We're seeing that progress. There are some growing pains, but it's getting there.

I use VMware vSphere for its technical capabilities. It is a pioneer and a very good tool. However, there is an issue with the pricing as many customers claim that it is very expensive.

The essential, advanced, and enterprise versions of VMware vSphere have been very beneficial. We utilize features such as the motion and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) for automatically managing resources. The user interface is very friendly, especially in version eight. It is a strong and high-quality solution.

The pricing of VMware vSphere needs significant improvement. Although the product is very strong and includes all necessary features, the high pricing drives many customers to avoid using it.

I have been working with VMware vSphere for more than ten years.

I would rate the stability of VMware vSphere as eight out of ten. It is generally stable.

I would rate the scalability of VMware vSphere as nine out of ten. It is a highly scalable solution.

Support is difficult to find, and I rate technical support around five out of ten. If we have issues, the support tends to be unreliable.

Neutral

The initial setup is not complex. It is deployed on-premises.

While VMware vSphere is a very strong and complex tool, the pricing should be more visible. Many customers are trying to avoid it due to its high cost.

I recommend VMware vSphere technically, but not due to its pricing. I rate the overall solution as 10 out of 10.

The primary use case is spinning up lab VMs. We can spin up several hundred VMs for students to work with, which could be Windows-based or Linux-based. It's about creating these VMs, then destroying them as soon as they are done. So, there is a lot of creation and destruction. We also spin up VM environments as well. On the vSphere 6.7 product, the optimization is great. The older versions, 6.0 and 6.5 were sluggish. When your spinning and destroying things, it's a big deal to have higher performance.

We don't do a lot with the encryption, but we do have the ability to encrypt something if we send it offsite. We have multiple locations, so we can encrypt our VMs, if necessary. However, we don't have a big need for it, but it's nice that it's there.

Our mission critical is our classroom. If we have college students who can't work, they paid to be there, and are paying us for the environment. Therefore, if we're down for a day, that's a real problem. Given that people have a choice of where they can go for education, we have to be always available. Otherwise, they will go next door. For us, it's about a student's success and you can only do that if you're up and running.

1. A big feature for us was Quick Boot. You don't have to wait for the host to do a recheck on memory. You do an upgrade, and it's not a 10-minute reboot cycle. You can bring your host online and offline. 
2. Database optimization. They did a lot in enhancing the performance. They took down the memory utilization and increased what it brought in. You see more responsiveness, especially now with having the HTML5 client. It feels like a much snappier product.

The biggest feature that everybody wanted was the HTML5 client. This has made everything native where you're able to surf through it. Going into our web page, you're no longer refreshing it. It feels more like an enterprise product now. With Adobe Flash, it didn't feel that way.

The biggest thing to improve is to have more self-service in the portals. I would like to receive more help through the web interface. 

I would like to see continual improvements of the client. It doesn't need to go much larger for support on the number of VMs or its size, because there are pretty high limits already. However, it needs a bit more in the management and the reporting aspect. We have to get a third-party for that. It would be great if it was a bit more integrated.

Stability has been good since the 6.0 days. The biggest issue with stability is the SSO. That is still an issue as far as integrating it with Active Directory, and any large scale of it. That is still a work in progress. However, the core stability aspect of it has been there and hasn't changed. This has just gotten better.

I have no issues with scalability. As large as we have wanted to go with as many VMs, we have never had an issue pushing its limits. 

The majority of the issues are truly integrating it into the Active Directory structures. This doesn't seem to be there yet.

VMware tech support has always been good to us. Our biggest challenge is getting them the logs, but once they have them, the logs are so detailed that any possible issue usually is resolved within a few hours. So, it has always been a positive experience.

Given that we spin up and down hundreds of VMs, we physically couldn't do that with physical hardware. It would just be financially impossible. Having a virtualized infrastructure and being able to bring up Windows, Linux, and VMware within a virtualized environment brings more technology into the classroom. Without it, we couldn't do what we do.

There wasn't a short list. It was the only solution. It's the only thing that made financial sense as far as being able to do what we needed it to do. Nobody out there had it.

I would rate it as a nine out of ten.

Go big with your hardware. You have to be willing to invest in the hardware platform. Storage is key. Make sure you have enough performance with it. When you're looking at the actual overall product, make sure you understand what third party offerings you need to put in. It could be something from VMware or one of the partners, but it's going to be more that just the VMware Suite. There will be one or two things you need to add to it. Specifically, monitoring or reporting will be the big draws.

I don't have a percentage for the performance boost of the apps. However, there is noticeably different speed of how the database is working and how you move through the client. Everything is a bit more responsive. Part of that was getting rid of the flash client as well. We're seeing an overall general performance increase in everything we do, whether it's the monitoring aspect or deploying.

We use the solution in servers for digitalization. Our digital products, like mobile and internet banking, run on them.

We are running critical applications like mobile applications on vSphere.

The tool offers virtualization and monitoring.

Virtual machine snapshots and consolidation need to be improved. Also, there are licensing and subscription issues.

I have been using VMware vSphere for 3 years.

I rate the solution’s stability a 9 out of 10.

The solution is scalable. 5 users are using this solution.

I rate the solution’s scalability an 8 out of 10.

Customer support takes a long time to respond.

Neutral

We have used Nutanix. We opted for VMware because the environment is good.

The initial setup is very easy and takes half an hour to complete, but it is costly since it has training costs and tutorials. The 3 tutorials are included in this package. They somewhat automate, but it's not enough.

Earlier, the solution had a perpetual license, but now, it has a subscription. Also, they have increased the price. The certification is costly.

vSphere has the DRS site. We got the recovery site feature, but we haven't used it. It's good to use the high availability to be more than AWS. We have many weekly metrics running on these.

Overall, I rate the solution an 8 out of 10.

We primarily use the solution for everything Microsoft-related for the most part. I would say our visualization platform is about 99.5% of all our workload from a Microsoft point of view

The solution has high availability. 

The on the fly changing of the resources on a VM is very helpful. 

You've got the underlying capacity, that's greater than what the actual server has, and therefore you have the ability to do on the fly add capacity. I would say that's by far the thing we use the most. 

The VRS, to a lesser degree, is also quite useful to us. It does work in the environment. 

The solution is very good from a recoverability point of view. Everything can be stored much easier on a virtual server than on a physical box. 

The biggest pain point is probably the firmware management of the underlying hardware. It could be a lot better.

We use HP hardware. The biggest thing is the firmware upgrades and other items at the backend. You have to take down the system. It's an in-memory database and that can sometimes cause issues. If you have to do firmware upgrades, it's organizing downtime and all sorts of things, which normally in a VMS space isn't an issue. They have embedded some of this in 7.1, however, I haven't tested it or seen it in action as yet. 

That said, one of the problems is that when we're sort of behind big memory servers and the databases in them if you migrate it, it potentially breaks the system off. That's a big pain point that the firmware management of the underlying hardware should handle. VMware doesn't really cater to it, however, Nutanix to some degree does cater for. It gets pretty expensive, however.

We are always sort of one or two versions behind. We never test the latest version. I would say for me personally, the management aspect with large memory and in-memory databases for the motions and stuff like that is what it needs. That's one of the key things that I need really, from a support perspective. That's caused a number of issues already. 

You do get something called host profiles, which they've also improved slightly, however, I still think it's a bit clunky in terms of the way you can manage it. They can produce something to improve that aspect slightly.

I've been using the solution for more than 12 years. It's been over a decade at this point.

The solution is mostly stable.

We've had issues, however, if you think about it, it's quite complex if you look at stuff like a three-tier architecture with different stories, subsystems, and things like that. It's not really VMware if it's unstable perhaps. 

VMware itself isn't necessarily unstable, however, they might present as a VM-ware issue due to the fact of the storage latency or a driver issue. We did a firmware update and VMware itself I think is quite stable. Every now and again, there's an issue that creeps in, however, it's because we use different vendors for storage and a different vendor for computing. Overall, by and large, VMware is very stable.

From the way we set it up, it is relatively easy to scale as long as you've got the planning in place for where you're going to. We use something called blade technology, and that is relatively easy to scale.

There's a total of ten people that are actually on the solution at any given time.

I've used technical support a couple of times. I'm quite happy with it. We've got an agreement with HP. We offer our support via HP or via Data Centrix with HP. Durin the couple of times I've used it has been quite fast and thorough.

I've never used a different solution. I started using VMware or VMware server, about 20 years ago. vSphere ESX is probably the first visualization tool I've used. Subsequently, yes, we've tested one or two other options, for example, Hyper-V and what used to be called Acropolis. We've also used Oracle VM. However, for production and for everything else we've done, we pretty much speak to VMware. It's tried and tested and we're quite happy with the stability. Therefore, we stick with it.

If all your hardware requirements are met, it is a relatively simple implementation. However, you have to have the boxes ticked in terms of connectivity, capacity, and all that sort of stuff. The actual VMware part of it is not the biggest complication of everything now.

We handle maintenance ourselves. My team consists of five people, and of those, only one of them really works on the maintenance of the hardware and the software. It doesn't take a lot of personnel.

Initially, we did use a vendor for the initial setup. That's even before I started at this company. The company uses their local vendors to output the hardware deployment and with the software deployment, however, it's my understanding that it's been done in-house mostly.

It's not a cheap solution. The maintenance specifically is quite expensive. I also find that it's more expensive than the higher tier products. 

We've looked at buying into something like a vROPS or whatever they call it today. However, when you look at the cost and the benefits, although there is great benefit in the product, it's just never been a cost discussion that we've been able to entertain with management. 

Similar to vSAN, we looked at that a couple of times. It's a great product and it has proven itself. It's brilliant. It's stable. However, as soon as you look at any peripheral products, it becomes quite expensive, as it's licensed per socket or per blade or per server or whatever. 

We're just customers.

We are a little behind the latest version, which I believe is 7.1. We're using 6.5 for the most part. We still have a little bit of a legacy in 5.5, however, that is just hardware related. It doesn't support the newer version. We trying to rectify that as soon as possible.

I would recommend the solution to other companies.

Overall, I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

Our company uses VMware vSphere Versions 6.5, 6.7 and 7.0. My company is trying to deploy all the VMs on VMware vSphere Version 8 since it has some new features. The old versions of the tool don't support some of the VMs, specifically in the area of vMotion.

The most valuable feature of the solution is its performance. Nowadays, people are trying to move on Kubernetes. People prefer deploying services over the Kubernetes.

n areas like coding and microservices, users can find lots of features in Kubernetes. With Kubernetes, if one of your pods is down, then automatically, another pod will be up, so there are no manual tasks or opt for microservices since such a pod will run in the back end automatically.

The integration capabilities of the solution have certain shortcomings, making it an area where improvements are required.

I have been using VMware vSphere for two years.

It is a stable solution. It is only during the production phase involving Kubernetes that our company can determine whether VMware vSphere can remain stable or not.

It is a scalable solution. Many people who use the product in our company work in the back end processes. Around 20 to 30 people in my company work with VMware vSphere and Kubernetes.

Speaking about the application deployment process, I work at the L1 level in my company. In my company, the L3 is a different department that manages the application deployment process, and most of them go for tools apart from the ones under VMware to manage the VMs. I am only creating new VMs and assigning RAM space, and if something comes up, then I create new RHEL-based systems.

When it comes to the application deployment process, my company manually deploys the applications. For automation purposes, our company uses Jenkins to collect the logs and provide a GUI with the help of a username and password to the end user, after which they can collect the logs from Jenkins.

I work at an L1 level in my company. The integrations and infrastructure-related areas of the product are managed by another team in my company.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it.

Nowadays, people don't prefer to go for cloud-based solutions. Most of the companies prefer VMware as they want some level of security in the environment. VMware allows users to have in-house products. Most companies or banks are not moving over to cloud-based tools. VMware is used in banking systems.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.