VMware vSphere Reviews

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.

My primary use case for this solution is the DRS feature of the solution.

When checking the utilization reports, the operational reporting and matrixes are a little weak.  In terms of what has been the starting growth or trend analysis is something which, currently they have an add-on which we have not used  because it's an add-on product, which we have not bought. As of now, they have this capability but I've not seen these features to be more integrated on the base product itself rather than having as a special add-on.

I really value the DRS feature of the solution. Apart from that, there is a high availability in the feature called VMotion. In addition, the centralized management throughout the V-Center software is useful.

When checking the utilization reports, the operational reporting and matrixes are a little weak.  In terms of what has been the starting growth or trend analysis is something which, currently they have an add-on which we have not used  because it's an add-on product, which we have not bought. As of now, they have this capability but I've not seen these features to be more integrated on the base product itself rather than having as a special add-on.

As I mentioned, the necessary improvement would be to add additional features that would integrate reporting and management in terms of automation. Those are the two things I would say it's a lot of, or the third item could be of some service important to integration. Right now everybody is talking about private clubs, but these are the base foundation so, the effect it has had on embedded software attack, running on the hypervisor for self-provisioning, it definitely has an edge.

Its highly scalable, we have never had to make radical changes to the design to make it more, or to put in more capacity. So, as we are growing we have been adding the servers into the existing pool without even worrying about a need for redesign. As we grow, we find that our company is more dependent upon this product. 

Technical support usually we have online support, where we can log a call if there is any trouble. But so far in the last three years that I have been here, we rarely, or I cannot collect any one instance where we had necessity to log a case with the support team, the forums and the community are, have enough knowledge based articles to make us pass through any technical challenges that we have faced.

We have prior use knowledge of Hyper-V. First, it did not have this automatic scalable capability which are scored to move across from one specific hardware to another without impacting any downtime. And secondly, it did not have a lot of automatic configuration capabilities, based on the utilization of the specific hardware it could re-balance what goes around on top of it. So these two are they key features that I feel were lacking at that point in time and it's hard to use another feature that I feared was lacking. In addition, it relied a lot upon the physical machine.

It was very straightforward setup. 

The way we had done it is it came pre-installed with as part of the hardware stack that we purchased so the new servers that we purchased we bundled that ESXi software on top of it from the hardware vendor itself. So from that perspective, the implementation strategy was to have it as an OEM100 by the hardware vendor itself and then the way we designed it from our side is we designed it into two different data centers. One for production, one for test and development. So just have a logical separation there in terms of the hardware that was used for production and what was used for distribution.

Overall timelines are approximately two to three weeks time-frame. After the hardware was developed, they came in and installed the base software and considered it based on our requirements.

Deployment was done by the hardware vendor itself. The hardware came from HP and there was a HP reseller who shipped us the hardware. The resellers team only came and did all the installation and confirmation after the design was agreed with us.

Pricing is competitive I would say, because usually we buy the software, along with the hardware stock so it's usually a bundle thing that we try to squeeze the hardware windows in to get us proper discounts. So, it is regularly higher than what a Microsoft overall solution turns out to be. But, the capabilities are worth it. The price is justified.

Licensing is pretty standard.

In my previous organization, we used Hyper-V for over eight years.

From my side, the advice would be to design it properly the first time. Have proper capacity planned out, and don't just create over-provision in the production environment. Best you can do with provisioning with production, you definitely need to have some capacity sizing done properly. And, that goes in not for just this product but any virtualization product that a company implements. You do not want to overload the hardware. You have to think about the capabilities of the end-user.

We use it to virtualize our server infrastructure.

Virtualization has made it easier for us to manage our environment. We can manage it from location, the vSphere web client.

We find the solution simple and efficient to manage. 

It provides us cost savings. We are able to virtualize instead of buying many physical servers. Therefore, we can buy one server and add VMs on top of it.

The SQL Servers are our mission critical apps.

• Keep innovating.
• Make it more efficient and stable.

It's very stable. We've had no issues with it.

It's very scalable. You can add different components to it. Moving into the future, as we do different things, we'll be able to stay with VMware.

The technical support is very helpful. VMware's technical support seems to be very knowledgeable.

We did not have a previous solution that we were using.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

It's huge. It has been a big return on investment for us. It saves us money because we don't have to buy as many physical servers. VMware seems to be the future of computing.

It is cost effective. 

We did not look at anything else. We just looked at VMware.

We are just learning about VM Encryption, TPS, and VBS right now. We just moved to VMware ESX 6.7. While I don't have a lot of experience in it yet, but we're looking to implement them.

Since we have had VMware, we've had no problems with it. It's easy to manage. It works very well. Other competitors may not offer as much. You can do a lot with VMware. You get different plugins, so it's a great product. Just go with it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Cost
• Stability.

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.

We had almost 100 servers and we wanted to consolidate them and also make them movable, especially when we have to upgrade hardware. It also allowed us to create more testing environments, because we tended to buy new iron every time. We also want users to be able to “own” servers themselves, so that we would build them for them, hand them over and say, "Have fun".

• Flexibility
• Ease of management

Maybe it's there and I don't know about it, but I would love to be able to build a standard server set and be able to give users, who want to build another server, the ability to click in and have a pool of 20 options for the five groups that are using them. I could just say, “Hey if you want a server click here," and then the server is built for them, tells them how to connect, how to login to it. Done. That would be so cool.

It's stable. It has only crashed once.

We're not a very big shop, so it's not really appropriate for me to answer this question.

I would give technical support about 7.5 out of 10.

I waited until version 5 because, prior to that, I thought it was too difficult to set up. With that version, the setup was fairly easy. And it has gotten a lot easier since.

On the server side, we have definitely seen ROI. If servers fail we just restart them, if a piece of hardware fails we just move it. We haven't saved any money but we have been able to double our load without adding any more staff. That's our ROI.

In real terms, because of the cost of the product, I don't know that we really save anything. We're a public institution and we tend to have very long time frames for holding onto hardware, not like a corporation. I would say it's a wash on a pure ROI, unless we can look into the future and say, “I'm going to be able to do increased stuff without adding any money.”

Pricing is the one "ding" I have against it. Except for VMware vSphere Essentials, it would be pretty challenging for anything but a medium or large size company to use.

If you're managing more than five servers run over and get some vSpere Essentials. I think virtualization is the only way to go, whether you do it on-premise or in the cloud, nowadays. It doesn't make any sense once you get beyond a couple.

I rate the solution an eight. Price would be the main thing, as well as the relative inaccessibility for end-users to be able to touch the product.

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.

Every organization that I know of that has wanted to implement virtualization in their environments wants HA with every virtual server. That's why for us, we've found the most valuable feature is the ability to move VMs between vCenters and fault tolerance within our four vCPUs.

I would also add that the vSAN feature was not useful beforehand but now with Hyper-Converged infrastructure it will simplify vSphere management as well as storage. We may be acquiring xRAIL from EMC which will definitely eliminate needs for storage as well as Fibre Channel switches.

The biggest advantage is that it cuts costs. A few years ago, I worked in an environment of all physical servers. It was very expensive to maintain high availability with them. vSphere cuts that cost.

No more lengthy physical server server restores. When this product is coupled with Veeam Backup and replication restoring whole virtual machine or individual files or active directory objects virtually happen in minutes.

I'd like to see small VMDKs in the next version since Hyper-V provides that option. Right now, that process with vSphere is still manual and requires downtime.

I have used this product for the last five years.

With previous versions, for example in 5.1, it was inconvenient to deploy an SSO database. Now, an SSO database is local and automatically installed.

It's highly stable.

It scales without issues.

The level of technical support depends on who you're talking to. Some people are more experienced than others. Overall, though, I'd rate them well, but they don't respond very quickly during the weekends.

I used Hyper-V, which worked well on a single server running Windows 2008 R2. But as soon as a cluster is configured, there are lots of issues with SCVMM. I've heard that Microsoft made some improvements and the product is now more stable, but VMware ESXi is based on the Linux OS and is much more stable. I've had to learn command-line code in Linux, but VMware is better than Microsoft.

It's very easy to set up because it's a popular product and there are many online articles. VMware articles are a bit dry. Many consultants post their experiences, making deployment of vSphere straightforward so long as it's planned properly.

I have implemented this product either from scratch or as part of an upgrade. One piece of advice that I would give is to make sure that the certificate is minimum 1024 bits (I forgot to check that). Other than that, an upgrade or set-up is very straightforward, especially with v6.

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

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.

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.

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

We've had no issues deploying it.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.