VMware vSphere Reviews, Competitors and Pricing

it_user516468

Systems Administrator at CityServiceValcon

Mar 7, 2017

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Provides high availability and DRS.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features are high availability and DRS.

High availability: High availability is particularly valuable to my company because I know that if one of my hosts should fail, we will experience minimal interruption. The VMs affected will be booted back up in minutes on another host. This is critical to our business continuity.
DRS: Prevents us from having to micromanage the placement of our VMs. They stay running in optimal spaces on our hosts. If we were to license Fault Tolerance (FT), we could potentially lose a host and have all the VMs continue to run without interruption. However, this is unnecessary in our line of business.

How has it helped my organization?

It allows multiple VM servers to live and move across several hosts, as resources change.

What needs improvement?

I would like to see better licensing and less complexity of use.

Licensing: Any licensing after essentials plus becomes very granular. In turn, it is very expensive to license the features that you want. This is unfortunate, because IT for most companies is perceived as a “black hole” for costs. It becomes hard to justify because you cannot directly pin a value to it. Because of the perception, it is sometimes difficult to approve such large purchases, especially for something you can’t physically hold in your hands.
Complexity: There is a benefit in having granular controls. In many cases, this is largely unnecessary. You may need to look for a feature that maybe you don’t have to change often. Maybe you only have to change it once. You can sometimes spend large amounts of time and effort to find it, which can be fairly frustrating.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have used this solution for about six years.

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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There have been some stability issues. Adding plugins and vendor modules sometimes causes some pretty unexpected results.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

There have been some scalability issues. The Essentials Plus licensing is very restrictive and has no upgrade paths to other licensing models.

How are customer service and support?

Technical support is very good. That is, if you can get a support rep on the phone in a timely manner with whom you can overcome language barriers.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was fairly easy. Adding on and configuring made it complex pretty quickly.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Skip Essentials and Essentials Plus. You will outgrow it, and then you will be stuck with a very expensive jump to Professional.

What other advice do I have?

Consider alternatives like AHV before jumping in feet first.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user320235

Senior System Administrator at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

Feb 29, 2016

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It allows us to perform VM customizations when joining machines with multiple domains, change their names, and clone them.

What is most valuable?

Inventory, vMotion, and cloning are the most valuable for me. Customization of VM's which include joining machines to multiple domains, changing names, IP address information, and post operation using Powershell scripts. I like the single pane of glass view for management

How has it helped my organization?

VM cloning speed is excellent and has allowed me to provide easy of use and speed when cloning one or more VM's using PowerCli.

What needs improvement?

I honestly can’t think of anything right now, it provides the access and management tools I need and keeps them in easy reach.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for five to six years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It’s been very stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No experience of scaling.

How are customer service and technical support?

It’s been great, no issues, they’re fast and straightforward.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

It has always been vCenter, they were in a Rackspace physical environment beforehand.

How was the initial setup?

I wasn’t involved.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I’ve always used VMware ever since the beginning, so I’m biased and I think they have a great product. I’ve played with Hyper-V and it’s just way behind in my opinion. Download them and try them all out and see if you like using the tool daily. Research and troubleshoot well.

What other advice do I have?

It’s rock solid and there’s nothing in its class in terms of alternatives.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Buyer's Guide

VMware vSphere

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it_user386772

Server Manager at a local government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Feb 22, 2016

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The ease of administration and flexibility are the most valuable features for us.

What is most valuable?

The ease of administration and flexibility are the most valuable features for us. Performance, stability, and functionality just keep getting better.

How has it helped my organization?

It enables us to move faster when we're going through the legacy systems. Before vSphere, someone had to wait between one and three months to get service which we can now implement in ten minutes.

What needs improvement?

There are a couple areas for improvement that I can see. First, I'd like to see better performance for vCenter. And, I'd also like to see NSF 4.1 fully supported. There are some NSF features lacking from version 3 to 4.1.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been using it for more than ten years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

We've had no issues deploying it.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability has been great. I have only experienced one point down and that was caused by our system.

There was also an issue with expiring licenses in 2008, but that was fixed pretty quickly and a new implementation was put in place to prevent that from happening again.

The product has been so stable that we keep using it. We also didn't want to change it too much because it would require management team training.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It has scaled for us and the workload that we have that runs on it.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We started using it because there weren't any competitors at the time. There was only VMware.

How was the initial setup?

Complexity depends on how you're implementing it because vSphere has a lot of products. If you're looking looking to install vCenter, it quite easy.

If you're using a lot of the other products, you have to be careful. Today, we use almost every product from VMware and we still have to be careful with the updates.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Start small in a development environment. For $200 per year, you can get access to files VMUGs.

You can get a 60-day free trial with a download from the VMware website, but I recommend using VMUGs and attending local VMUG meetings. They have a lot of really capable technicians who really love to share.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Of course we continue to look at the competitors to see what features are coming. In my opinion, it doesn't matter because VMware is still ahead of the competition.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.

it_user386772Server Manager at a local government with 1,001-5,000 employees

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Mar 25, 2016

This review was from a Phone Interview whereabouts The interviewer unfortunately messed The review up. I was regering to The messing NSF features support between NSF 3 and NSF 4.1 supported in vSphere 6.

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it_user297717

Stevenson University Systems Administrator at a university with 501-1,000 employees

Jan 12, 2016

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Solutions can be tested in all manner of environments before deployment and go through rigorous testing before going live with the Redirect-on-Write snapshot technology.

What is most valuable?

VMware has polished their offerings for High Availability, fault tolerance, and live migration beyond any of their competitors.

How has it helped my organization?

Engineering new solutions in a difficult task. Working for a university, the student experience is our number one priority. Solutions can be tested in all manner of environments before deployment and go through rigorous testing before going live thanks to VMware's Redirect-On-Write snapshot technology.

What needs improvement?

While ESXi 6 brings fault tolerance for VMs with multiple CPU cores, I desperately, passionately need a better Web Client than the Flash-based monstrosity we've grown accustomed to. Having to perform certain tasks in the Web Client and certain tasks in the C# Fat Client make life very frustrating sometimes.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working with VMware in various capacities for close to seven years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

The environment was already deployed when I arrived at each of the institutions where I've worked.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Moving to new releases is a tricky business. I highly recommend staying a version behind. It's bitten us multiple times, most recently with the suite of CBT bugs. We had to temporarily adjust our backup procedures, which involved a lot of communication and justification.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No, however, I have seen scalability issues with each of VMware's direct competitors.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

I have no experience with their customer service.

Technical Support:

I have no experience with their technical support.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I used to work with Hyper-V, but it is a very Microsoft-centric product. It has a long way to mature in terms of stability and cooperating with fringe cases. If you're an all Windows shop, Hyper-V is worth considering, but if you're a Windows/Linux mixed shop, and manage more than 200 servers, there is no good choice but VMware.

How was the initial setup?

It takes a lot of upfront understanding that some shops simply don't have. I went for my VCP Certification, and the level of detail and expertise required is vast. Everybody needs to be on board: from your networking team, to your security team, everybody needs to know how it interacts with their domain and bailiwicks. It's a game changer on every level imaginable, and the implications need to be made clear. There is, without a doubt, increased complexity, but the pros far outweigh the cons.

What about the implementation team?

Implementation was done in-house.

What was our ROI?

Our ROI is incalculable. We are a university and a university is its data. We can only afford to trust the very best. VMware has a reputation for being the "big player" for a reason, they really do the best. Hyper-V has come a long, long way since its first release, but it still has catching up to do.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Always pony up for one level higher than you think you need. It's so worth being able to implement new features and redundancies once your team is comfortable with how it works and what it means.

What other advice do I have?

The Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) is your bible now. Read it, understand it, and do not deviate from it. If you have existing centralized storage you wish to use, it must be on the HCL. See what VAAI primitives it supports. Do not thin provision both Array Side and VMware side; pick one.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Chris ChilderhoseLead Infrastructure Architect at ThinkON

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Jan 14, 2016

The web client has definitely come a long way since it's inception but still needs some work I agree. There is a VMWARE fling out there with an HTML5 client that you install on the host. It is scaled down but might do what you need. Something to check out.

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it_user320199

IS Manager at a pharma/biotech company with 501-1,000 employees

Oct 9, 2015

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We've consolidated our footprint and decreased the number of hardware hosts, although the web client is an area that needs improvement.

What is most valuable?

Accessibility and the ease of use is unparalleled. The clustering and ability to move virtual machines around on the fly has been amazing.

How has it helped my organization?

We’ve been able to consolidate our footprint and decreased the number of hardware hosts we were running.

What needs improvement?

I think everything we’re looking at should be addressed in 6. I don’t like the web client, I’m sure it’s fine, but I believe 6.0 addresses that.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We just switched, but so far it’s been very stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Not yet, we just switched over.

How are customer service and technical support?

I submitted a ticket about four weeks ago, and the guy called me on a Saturday at midnight. It’s been fairly hard to get hold of somebody, and when they get ahold of you, I understood about three of every five words they said. I wished it was better.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We were just running Hyper-V, and the size of our team required more. The need to consolidate our servers, as VMware is a lot better with resource management, we didn’t want a large server cluster, so VMware was needed in order to maintain it well with a smaller staff.

Peer reviews actually a huge point in us switching over from Hyper-V. It’s such an old product that it was hard to find any support for it online, and the change we’ve seen in vSphere is night and day. There’s so many peer resources available that it’s been easy to transition for us.

How was the initial setup?

It's straightforward, and the documentation is nice. It's also got a good footprint on the web, that makes it easy to look for other users for knowledge and advice.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I always look at the price before purchasing technology.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Nope, it was the best from what we heard.

What other advice do I have?

I would say from a 4 of Hyper-V, I would easily give this a 7 or 8, as the support definitely improved drastically.

When selecting a vendor, do your research and develop relationships. If you know the product and can get in contact with POCs, we want to see the product before we buy it.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user91356

Vice President at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

Jul 20, 2015

The Dell PowerEdge M520 is a general purpose server that scales very well.

The Dell PowerEdge M520 is a dual cpu socket, half-height blade server that offers up to 20 processor cores and 12 DIMMs per node with up to 16 other half height blades being deployed in a single M1000e blade enclosure. This powerful yet compact server is a great general purpose machine that offers scalability and performance in any size business.

Like other PowerEdge M series blade servers, the M520 operates independently of other blades in the m1000e and has the ability to mix different types of M series servers in the same enclosure.

The M520 uses the Intel C602 chipset and take up to two Intel Xeon E5-2400 or E5-2400 V2 series chips.

For each blade, a total of 12 DIMM slots are available for a potential total of 384GB of RAM spread between 3 channels for each CPU. Depending on the choice of cpu, it is able to operate memory with speeds of up to 1600 MT/s (megatransfers per second) with module sizes of up to 32 GBs DDR3 registered RAM.

On the front of the bezel are 2 USB ports, power button, blade release handle, and slots for 2 2.5” SATA, SSD, or SAS drives.

This server comes with an embedded PERC 110 SATA software RAID controller and can be upgraded to support SAS drives with the PERC H310, H710, H710p mini RAID controllers featuring 6Gb/s of throughput on a dedicated connection to the system board and RAID 0 and 1 capabilities.

Two mezzanine slots are available in the Fabric B and C I/O ports with options that include 1Gbit, 10Gbit adapters, Infiniband or Fibre Channel interfaces on a PCIe 3.0 bus. The M520 also comes with LOM (LAN on motherboard) in the two Broadcom dual port 1Gbit controllers. You’ll need to populate the rear I/O modules with the right types of switches to utilize your server’s network capabilities.

Up to 16 M520s can be installed in an m1000e. The power and cooling for the M520 is drawn from the M1000e enclosure which can hold up to 6 2700W hot-plug power supplies.

This is a 10U modular chassis capable of being populated with different PowerEdge M series blade servers.

Empty, the chassis weighs 98 lbs., fully loaded this modular can weigh a total of 394 lbs.!

The maximum weight of a M520 server is 12 lbs. and are 7.8” tall 2” wide and 21.5” deep.

Each blade can be remotely managed with iDRAC7 Express for Blades with Lifecycle Controller, or with a software upgrade license, iDRAC7 Enterprise for greater control options.

The M520 can run various Windows Server Editions Operating Systems as well as LINUX Red Hat Enterprise. Here is a lively video overview of the M520:

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user3405Partner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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Mar 15, 2014

Interesting, I wonder how Dell's server solution compares to the following systems:

• IBM Blade Center
• HP C7000 Blade Server
• HP Moonshot

Just curious, especially when we talk about power consumption, total memory & speed, latency, manageability, interoperability with other servers, modular, integrated security features, monitoring software, 10-40Gb switching fabric (NPIV) and extensibility and integration with SAN capability, IPv6 enabled, GPU/Cuda capable.

This would be an interesting conversation.

Todd

it_user5496

Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

Jul 25, 2013

Microsoft Hyper-V vs VMware vSphere

One topic that gets discussed quite often is Microsoft Hyper-V vs VMware vSphere, and a quick Google search for comparisons will return at least several hundred thousand hits. There seems to be a large number of posts and articles trying to make a case that one is better than the other by listing and comparing features of the hypervisors themselves one by one. The purpose of this post is not to claim that one platform is better than the other. Is that the best way to really compare the different virtualization technologies as a whole, or should we take a step back and really look at differences in approach for the virtual infrastructure and/or virtual ecosystems'

Microsoft:

In my opinion, Microsoft is defining and building their virtualization infrastructure as an extension or expansion of their current ecosystem, with System Center at the center of their universe. If you look at the System Center 2012 product page on Microsoft’s website, System Center product details are broken down into two different areas:

Cloud and Datacenter Management
Client Management & Security

Is this really a big surprise' Absolutely not, since it clearly makes more sense to build on what you already have in place than to reinvent the wheel. The majority of virtual machines that are running on the Hyper-V platform are running Windows, and System Center already has a solid foundation of features and capabilities for managing Windows environments. These features include:

Application Delivery
Mobile Device Management
Virtual Desktop Management
Endpoint Protection
Compliance and Setting Management
Software Update Management
Power Management
Operating System Deployment
Client Health and Monitoring
Asset Intelligence
Inventory

VMware:

In my opinion, VMware is looking to create a completely isolated and separated ecosystem that consists of a collection of appliances with different capabilities working independently and making up the features within the infrastructure, including:

vSphere
vCloud Director
vCloud Connector
vCloud Network and Security
vCenter Site Recovery Manager
vCenter Operations Manager Suite
vFabric Application Director
vCloud Automation Center

Conclusions:

One of the main differences that I see in the two approaches is that Microsoft wants virtualization, cloud, and datacenter management to be an extension of the infrastructure, whereas VMware would like the vCloud Suite to be the complete infrastructure. This starts with VMware developing vCloud as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service to fulfill their promise of the software-defined datacenter.

Click here to read my complete review on TheVirtualizationPractice.com

Disclosure: My company The Virtualization Practice is sponsored by some vendors in this market

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Jusiah NoahCo-Founder at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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Jan 3, 2017

we just need expirienced users that can verify and give details more than google.yes rich content but unreliable

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it_user6405

Engineer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

May 6, 2013

vSphere 5.1 – Lesser publicized, neat improvements.

There are a lot of neat improvements in vSphere 5.1, but it’s worth mentioning some of the neat features that may not be getting as much publicity. Below are some of the features in the release documentation that aren’t in the “What’s New in vSphere 5.1” one-pager, and so-far I haven’t seen nearly enough excitement about thus far. These are features that an engineer will enjoy, but the engineer’s boss might not care so much about.

32 Nodes Accessing VMDK Simultaneously on VMFS: This is an important improvement for VMware View workloads using Linked Clones as it allows for higher density clusters. Previously, VMFS only supported 8 nodes accessing a VMDK, and to overcome that then the architect had to use NFS. VMFS and NFS now support the same number of nodes to a read-only file with View 5.1 and greater.
Virtual Machine Hardware Compatibility: Instead of simply relying on the virtual hardware version number, virtual machines are now given a Virtual Machine Compatibility. For example, VM Hardware Version 4 is now labeled as “Compatible with VMware ESX 3.x and later“. In addition, Administrators can select a “Default Compatibility Level,” which will be a great feature in mixed version clusters.
Parallel “Multi-threaded” Storage vMotions: Storage vMotion is now capable of performing four simultaneous disk copies. When migrating a virtual machine with five VMDK files, Storage vMotion copies the first four disks in parallel, then starts the next disk copy as soon as one of the first four finish. This will dramatically increase svMotion processes with many disks.
All Paths Down (APD) Events No Longer Break Hostd: Prior to vSphere 5.1, an APD event could cause hostd to become unresponsive as it would permanently retry failing I/O, which would cause hosts to disconnect from vCenter, etc. A new timeout is now being implemented via the Misc.APDHandlingEnable and Misc.APDTimeout global settings. In the event of an APD, after the default 140 seconds subsequent I/O is met with a quick “No_Connect” response preventing hostd and other processes from hanging.
Better Latency Monitoring within Storage I/O Control: A new metric ‘VmObservedLatency’ is available that replaces the datastore latency metric within SIOC. This metric measures the time between receipt of the I/O by the VMkernel from the virtual machine and receipt of the response from the datastore. Previously, SIOC only measured the latency after the IO had left the ESXi host, but it now measures and controls storage workload latency throughout the whole virtualized storage stack.
vCenter Inventory Tagging: Virtual machines can now be tagged with labels for more granular, advanced grouping. For example, Tier-1 applications can be tagged as such while also being tagged as a ‘Sharepoint’ server. This is a relatively simple additions that gives much better sorting capabilities for Virtual Machines.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.