VMware vSphere Reviews

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.

Our main use case for the product is we want to do virtualization. We want to save costs on the physical hardware because we were running some big workloads on the physical hardware that we migrated over to VMware. In terms of the retail applications which we are running on the physical hardware, we have now virtualized them.

The product has improved the organization in terms of the infrastructure stability and security, balancing the resources, and providing cost saving. The cost savings and the TCO with vSphere are very good.

We are using our vSphere for our new workloads in terms of Federation Services as well as for our VDI workloads. These are mission critical for us because they are the customer-facing.

Day-to-day, the most valuable feature on vSphere is its DRS feature: Distributed Resource Scheduler. We don't need to manage or balance resources. As soon as you come to the office in the morning, it's automatically balanced.

We work in a retail company, so you don't know what time the customer will be coming in or what time the work load is high. We are not uniform in terms of our workload. Therefore, it is important for us that when the workload is high, it is automatically optimized.

In terms of the vSphere security, the most important feature is the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), which was launched in 6.7, as well as the encrypted vMotion. These help us to bridge the gap if there is a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack or suspicious activity, so at least our VMware workloads are secure.

The best feature that we like is the Web Client. We just login and there is the data center. We don't have to walk to the data center everyday. We just open our laptops, log into our vCenter, and we have our full data store and data center ready. 

I can see the room for improvement still in the user interface (UI). 

There is still room for improvement with the HTML5 Web Client. They are working on it, as I can see on their blog. However, there is still room for improvement in the newer features that they can push into it.

Stability is perfectly fine. In the past eight months, we have been able to achieve 100 percent uptime. Therefore, the stability is quite impressive.

We are using it on a big scale. vSphere is one of the biggest product of VMware, and we have around five vCenters with around 80 hosts.

Scalability is one of the best things about vSphere. You don't need to change your design if you have a new demand for workloads or if a new product is coming in. Thus, the scalability feature is awesome.

Tech support is sometimes good and sometimes bad. We work in the Southeast Asia region where sometimes we have a language barrier. Therefore, their tech support is 50/50 for us.

With the initial setup, server workloads were running on an open source. When we had planned to go with VMware, we faced a bit of complexity. It was just a one time thing. After that, everything went smoothly. So, there were some complexities that we did face.

In the past six months, we have saved around 110TBs of storage, which is almost equivalent to $200,000 USD. That is a huge savings.

We have seen a tremendous performance boost. From when we started this VMware engagement in 2016 until now, we have seen around a 70 percent performance boost. This is a good number.

When we started with VMware, we also tried Citrix XenServer. We considered them as well as Red Hat's platform.

I will rate vSphere a ten out of ten, as I'm a huge fan of vSphere. 

Please look into this solution. You can have it, test it, and download it for 60 days, then you can test it yourself decide what is best for you.

We don't have VMware cloud on AWS, but we have plan to go on it in six months.

The most important thing when choosing a vendor: We look for performance, return on investment, and tech support. Tech support is very important for us in day-to-day tasks. These are the things that we look for in a vendor.

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.

It saves us a lot of money on physical infrastructure through virtualization. Also, you can roll back in case a machine crashes. That saves a lot of money and time. It also saves physical space, energy, and it removes physical limitations, with virtualization you can go anywhere in the world.

vSphere is very stable, reliable.

In the next release, I would like to see programming. I'd like to see a lot more about customization for people who want to customize programming API, SDK.

So far, so good. So far it's very reliable and stable.

Scalability depends on the infrastructure. The software can handle a heavy load.

Technical support is excellent.

It's not complex but I have a lot of experience.

vSphere is fantastic but the reason I'm doing research is that I deal with different vendors, they use different technology, they use Red Hat KVM. The other one is using Hyper-V, so that's why I want to do some research. vSphere is the most popular virtualization technology worldwide. Ninety percent of the world uses vSphere.

Its compatibility with LUNs and its vMotion, HA, FT and VDS. It works very smooth with LUNs. When we talk about its Cluster feature, then the HA, FT, and DRS features are just great in how they support large scale servers and VMs without any trouble in the production environment.

VMware offers VDS switches which are very efficient and useful regarding network configuration in your virtual environment. The configuration should be the same on your cluster-joined ESXis to improve performance and when running a production environment or VMs on any ESXi.

These features are very good for us.

While using its HA feature, we don’t need to worry about usage of servers. Our VM automatically shifts to another server which has resources using vMotion. VDS provides its NIC which is available on all ESXis. You have to configure it one time at Center level and after that you don't need to worry about any ESXi configuration or its failure. When DRS or HT transfers your VM to another host, then that VM will get the same NIC via VDS.

When we talked about its Vmotion feature so we see we are able to move our Vms in running state from one host to another host within cluster and shared storage but we are unable to move VMs accros cluster and storage in running state so here is vsphere 5.5 suffer little bit.

I guess in vMotion it should have the ability to move VMs across clusters of vCenters and different type of CUPS.

We have been using this solution for many years.

We did not have any issue so far in stability.

We have had scalability issues; we have backup plans if ESXi crashes.

I would rate technical support 5/10.

We didn’t use anything previously. We chose VMware ESXi 5.5 over Hyper V due to its features.

It was complex because you have to prepare for every situation.

Its pricing is affordable for a small company as well.

We evaluated vMotion, HA, FT, and VDS.

I advise you to review your needs and then look into the features. I am sure you will get solution of your needs.

One of the best solutions has got to be the HA and DRS portion of the vCenter where it's kind of an auto-load balancing and auto-recovering of your cluster if one of your hosts happens to die. Luckily it's pretty solid and you don't really have to deal with a lot of the HA stuff, but DRS is definitely very handy.

One of the things that I really wanted to see was the catalog because it came from vCloud Director, and they are adding that in 6.0, so they have that catalog, and they are extending it to where you can really replicate those catalogs out and share them. That was one of the features I would have really liked to see, and fortunately it's there.

One of the other features that we had been wanting to see was the vMotion between clouds, which of course that was announced today, that it's one of the things that's coming. I think that's going to be a game changer really.

We have quite a lot of list of solutions that we use. Primarily we have a product called Server Virtualization, powered by VMware, and what it is, is it's a multi-tenant vCenter, but single-tenant hardware side of things. We have over 9,000 hosts in there and roughly 55,000 VMs worldwide, and six data centers globally. We also have other products called dedicated vCenter which is just that; customers get their dedicated vCenter. We also leverage vCloud Director; we have a dedicated vCloud Director product. We even have some other disaster recovery products that use SRM and vSphere replication.

In our environment -- it's pretty large -- we have roughly just less than 100 vCenters, and these things have to be up 24-7/365, and it's very rare that they actually go down. Out of all 9,000 hosts, I can count off maybe five that have crashed in that last year. That's a very stable VMware environment, in my opinion.

In a global environment with all six data centers, we have so many hosts and VMs, that we work very closely with VMware to help push their maximums, and really push the envelope of how many VMs we can fit in a vCenter, and how many hosts we can fit in a vCenter to really help drive those maximums even higher for VMware.

At Rackspace, we get mission critical support from VMware. If we have any issues, we call directly into VMware, and we usually get a response within four hours. Any major technical issues that we come across, they are very responsive; they work with us to help figure out what the problem is, and a lot of times we've found bugs in their software and helped them release patches to fix them.

Interoperability is one of the things I really like to look for: How well the VMware solution plays with other either hardware vendors, or other solutions, other service providers, other add-ons to make it even better. That's something we really look for. How well does it work in a service provider environment as well, because most service providers are different.

vCenter environment is super simple. Install ESXI; it's very straight forward. Then getting vCenter off the ground and going is extremely straightforward, especially if you use the vCenter server appliance: You can be up and running in a matter of a few hours.

We've set up a vROPS and we've found that it works really well in a service provider environment, that you can point it to multiple vCenters. We've worked with other vendors to do some deeper logging, deeper metrics gathering, and in doing so, we worked close with VMware and that other vendor and really built a full scale out worldwide global monitoring and alerting solution. That's one of the things we look for: Something that to fill a void that we don't have.

There is nothing else enterprise-ready, like they are. If you are considering similar solutions, make sure you take deep dives technically into how well they integrate with other vendors, or how well they integrate with your hardware. Like VSAN for instance, a lot of the storage vendors that are really going for it to be on the VSAN HCL, and unfortunately some of the RAID controllers are not on at that HCL, and a lot of times people don't know that. If you are looking at different solutions, make sure you check compatibility guides, not just for the whole VMware Stack, but including maybe subsets like VSAN, or other tools that you might be using.

We are looking at productizing that and making an offering for our customers, as well as using it internally. We've got it in several labs doing different things, and it's awesome. I really like it. It's resilient, in my opinion. A lot of people say if you only use the three-node minimum recommendation you might have data loss. I had a three-node cluster setup and my switch died, and when I replaced the switch and it came back online, everything was still running just fine, nothing had actually gone down; no data loss, nothing. It's actually really resilient. If you think about your data path, the data locality, it's a lot closer to the CPU, it's right there in that flash recache. It's a resilient storage solution that's cheaper than a dedicated SAN, or something of that sort.

Peer reviews are extremely important to me. I usually start Googling and looking to see, or on Twitter to find other vExperts, or other just subject matter experts that have talked about it: What benefits they've seen, or maybe pitfalls that they've seen. To me, that holds more water than a lot of the White Papers I've seen, because White Papers target maybe a specific use case, but I want to see more broadly: "How does it function? How does it integrate? How stable is it, of all things?" I really value the community involvement and opinion of others when I'm looking at solutions.

Old school stuff - power savings, ability to consolidate, licensing savings, and ease of management. All the new features are great, but they’re just iterations of an already awesome product.

It provides us a global standardization, ease of management on a global level, and helps our remote sites for those who don’t have a sufficient tech level.

The core savings is huge and allows for quick and deep provisioning. It’s getting harder and harder to remember how physical servers work.

Ditch flash-based web client, make it HTML5. Would like more customization of the web client to make it do what I want. I occasionally flip to the old client because I know it. Web client is a better solution, but it's not done right.

Make training more accessible. Right now very expensive and hard to see the value. Lowering cost would be huge.

Extremely stable. There’s occasional bugs, but very rare.

Very scalable, eventually do run into licensing costs, but the platform itself is scalable, almost infinitely. The business around it limits scalability.

Used tech support on couple of occasions, but no system-down type issues, just minor bugs.

Easy to set up, not difficult, but more difficult to implement it the right way, especially for larger organizations, but that’s just knowing the platform. You have to do homework, and know what you’re doing. If you link vCenter, you must make sure, for example, to do it correctly (like MS SQL, you must know to separate logs and data files, etc.).

It loses points on cost, as there are free solutions, but we don’t want to use them.

Depending on the size and budget, if there's a smaller shop with less money, and you could get by with just a couple VMs, vSphere would be difficult to recommend. But if you're larger with more money, it’s the best platform for virtualization and cloud integration. VMware is further along than anyone else in this regard.

• vCenter
• ESXi Host
• Configuring
• Management
• Patch
• Maintenance

It has reduced the space, and power utilization, as well as allowing a much more efficient way to increase/decrease the server inventory.

I think VMware should make it easier to manage different components (ESXi Hosts, vCenter, etc.) through firewalls. Some organizations have to separate the components with firewalls for security purposes, and VMware does not act well when hosts are separated from vCenter by firewalls.

I've used it for two years.

Absolutely, numerous issues in particular HP ESXi VMware images that we utilized created a number of deployment issues. ESXi Hosts would lock up, network configs would malfunction and plenty more. We had issues deploying vCenter on windows 2012, and Windows 2012 r2, such as being unable to successfully integrate vCenter with Active Directory and plenty more.

Technical support was difficult to obtain at time because of the limited number of resources allocated to our program.

The previous solution were individual physical servers, which we replaced by utilizing VMware.

It was straightforward, and physical servers used to host web applications.

We implemented it in-house.

No other options were looked at.