VMware vSphere Reviews

• Distributed Resource Scheduler
• High Availability
• Storage I/O Control
• vMotion
• Storage vMotion
• Fault tolerance
• vSphere distributed switch

Using vSphere, we have more confidence that the virtual servers are secured with the HA feature.

Party auditing users, as today we do not natively know what each user is doing in the virtual environment.

I've used it for 10 years.

There were no issues as we followed the documentation.

No issues encountered.

The scalability of vSphere is amazing. No other virtualization manufacturer can even come close to the limits of vSphere's standards.

Customer Service:

99.9999%

Technical Support:

99%

I used a different solution, but it was not even close to vSphere. It was a good solution for certain environments, but lacking some features.

Take the time to study vSphere to get to know more about the product. There are a lot of documentation and labs available to help a person develop the skills required to work with vSphere.

Scalability and Efficiency of your environment.

• On a basic level you can have one server perform the functions for a whole small business
• On a scalability level, you can simply setup with the right hardware effective failover functionality

• Honestly it’s the leader of the pack so it just needs to keep innovating while the competition catches up
• Maybe the only thing to improve is the compatibility with non-standard devices. In particular we have issues with SAS Tape drives

5 years

No issues encountered.

vSphere has no issue with software stability, if there is issues it’s because of faulty hardware.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

Excellent, we have a good relationship and they are happy to demo other products with us.

Technical Support:

Excellent

No we didn't.

Straightforward, the key to this working is to ensure you use compatible hardware.

In-house

For clients, they can purchase less hardware than what they would require if they did not take advantage of vSphere. Even a small company would have 4 or 5 required servers for applications (Authentication, Email, SQL/Application, and File & Print). Purchasing a single copy of vSphere Essentials or Essentials Plus is less than a server.

There is licensing cost and there is maintenance cost. Both compared to buying more servers are negligible.

No but we have compared it to Hyper-V and XenServer as they have come out with new versions. Hyper-V we play close attention to but XenServer we no longer follow.

• For companies comparing this to Hyper-V, this is still the gold VM solution. While Hyper-V is catching up, it’s still has a way to go.
• For small companies, I really advise to go for Essentials Plus. This gives you proper small scale HA capabilities and it gives you tech support. Essentials provides no technical support.

Of course there are several valuable features that have grown in time since the product came out, but the most basic and critical features of this product that I find valuable is the High Availability (HA) and the vmotion technology. vMotion has expanded to the Storage vMotion as well. This is very beneficial for uptime of servers and still maintaining updates on the hardware.

With the ability to create multiple server guests on one physical host platform, we were able to create servers in a faster response time, at a cheaper cost, less operational time and the ability to automate tasks to name a few. Also, this infrastructure gave us the capability to expand into a separate self provisioning development environment by utilizing the vCloud technology.

VMware has a good sight for what businesses are looking for. They have been ahead of the curve since the beginning. They have good support and quick response. I don't see too many improvements with vSphere itself.

I have used this product for 9 years. I have tested the old GSX and ESX version 2 years prior to this.

When I first tested vSphere against other competitors 9 years ago, there was no question on which product our company would use. It was easy to deploy and is easier today than it was back then. With a small OS footprint, the install was quick and configuration was straight to the point.

I have only ran into 2 issues where stability was an issue. One is more of a performance that affected the NUMA nodes and how ESXi handled guests in each NUMA node. (this was isolated to the CPU make/model). The other stability issue was due to a patch that affected some physical hosts causing them to "purple screen" or to not respond.

Again, VMware has been very good with staying ahead of the curve. As the demand grew for virtualization from businesses , VMware increased functionality to cope with growth at the hardware level. The ability to "scale out" or "scale up" physically on the host with zero downtime is very easy or scaling up on the guest is very easy with minimal downtime.

Customer Service: When I first used VMware, I had to use customer service often. They were very quick to resolve the issues. They have a team that knew the "Ins and Outs" of the product. I would give them 4 out of 5 stars. I didn't give 5 due to the fact that VMware grew faster than they were able to keep the support engineers trained to handle the large growth over the years. So the times for resolution went down just a little. But still very good compared to other customer support.Technical Support: I would give them a 4 out of 5 here as well. They have teams for each operational architect and at times a problem may need to have the collaboration of multiple teams to resolve an issue.

I did not use any other product prior to VMware.

The install was quick and the configuration was straight to the point. I was up and running with a working platform in 25 minutes from start to finish once I rack mounted and cabled the server. It would be even faster with a converged infrastructure or blade system.

This was done all in-house.

As an engineer, I don't have those numbers and wasn't part of sharing those numbers to other management and higher.

When I decided to test the virtualization architectures, I ran tests with several architectures to determine important factors that would affect our business and operations in a positive aspect for growth while still maintaining low ROI. Microsoft and Citrix were the other competitors.

Definitely have a plan before implementing. Don't rush. It is crucial to think years out so you don't have to redo any architecture because you didn't plan for growth, DR/BC or working out of the cloud. If resources are tight to gather, it would be beneficial to reach out to your favorite consulting team to gather advice.

A lot of people use the VMware vSphere solutions because most operations are virtualized. Small and mid-range companies are using VMware vSphere for all their infrastructure virtualizing applications, this is what the solution is mainly used for.

VMware vSphere has a lot of features that are valuable, such as multiple clusters, VM mobility, VDI, and virtual desktop.

I have been using VMware vSphere for many years.

The stability of VMware vSphere is great. It has high availability. 

VMware vSphere is scalable.

I am in Lithuania and we have approximately 100 customers. Most companies use some kind of virtualization. It can be VMware or Citrix, or something else. Our clients mostly use VMware vSphere.

The support for VMware vSphere can be fast or it can be slow. Recently it has been slow, they need to decrease the wait time and quality of their support.

The initial setup of VMware vSphere is simple. However, I have been using similar solutions for 15 years making the process simple.

The installation took approximately 15 minutes. However, the installation itself is very easy but you need to do the configurations and integrations which can be more difficult depending on the customer's needs and their infrastructure.

We use one person for the implementation of VMware vSphere. For the maintenance and support of the solution, the amount of people needed depends on the infrastructure and size of the customer.

Our customers typically use permanent licenses, not subscription-based. However, there are subscript-based licenses.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate VMware vSphere a nine out of ten.

We're using VMware vSphere for our server services. We're using it primarily for hosting services. As an example, our mail server: Zimbra Mail is hosted on that virtual environment. Our web server, our DNS server, and all our public servers are also hosted in that environment.

An area for improvement for VMware vSphere is the archiving tool, because sometimes we are using the VMware OVF Tool for backups, but archiving is not very fast when we are backing up the virtual machines. It needs improvement.

What we'd like to see in the next release is for the exporting process to be improved, because what we've observed is that when exporting VMware graphically, sometimes the process stops. We have to use the command-line utility: OVF Tool which is more reliable, so we'd like VMware vSphere to have a better and faster exporting process.

I've been using VMware vSphere for five years now.

VMware vSphere is a very stable solution.

VMware vSphere is scalable.

We have not contacted the technical support of VMware, because whenever we found difficulties, we either Google or check forums for solutions.

The initial setup for this solution is simple.

I deployed this solution myself.

Pricing can still be improved for this product.

I've been using the VMware Workstation for eight years, while the VMware vSphere, I've been using for five years.

This solution is deployed on-premises on a physical server for hosting services. Our public server is on a virtual environment.

I'm very satisfied with VMware vSphere.

Deployment of this solution took one day for the supervisor cluster and the virtual machine.

I can't say exactly how many users are using VMware vSphere in our organization, but it's more than 1,000. We have a virtual mail server with 1,000 accounts. We have a website with approximately 200 to 300 visits per day. We also have an internet proxy used regularly by all the internal users to access the internet. We have not measured usage for the DNS server. We have no statistics for it.

We have plans to use other tools from VMware like the vCenter. We have not yet explored it sufficiently, so we use it more. We have plans to use the vMotion to move virtual machines.

My advice to people who plan to use VMware vSphere is to first pay more attention to the materials, e.g. the physical server, because all the virtualization performance resides and depends on that physical server. This means it has to have a good dimension, a good amount of memory and disk space, and a good network controller card. You have to choose a server which is physically robust, strong, and powerful, so you can deploy with the best performance in your virtual environment.

I'm rating VMware vSphere a nine out of ten.

On-premises

vSphere is for virtualizing some real computers, and then they can be used as hot spares. Sometimes you need to complement some functions or perform some work on them.

The connectivity is fantastic, and many functions can run together in one server. If you need to scale, we can continue to add components or modules. It's a beautiful virtual solution that has many advantages over physical hardware, where you have to use devices and wiring to connect all your projects.

I'm using vSphere at a high level. Sometimes, I find it challenging to integrate different networks, but I think it's just my lack of knowledge. For example, some companies have private internal networks, so we must connect to external networks, routers, or switches. 

And the backups are something we have to integrate with one of them because they are just running with what they have. And I don't know why it wasn't considered from the beginning because they believe that they can back up the whole computer, but it's not a good solution. I have taken measures like exporting critical databases that I normally modify and figure out, but I would prefer a centralized system.

I haven't had any problems with stability.

I'm usually able to find solutions for my issues by logging into the blogs and searching for answers. 

When I first got involved with vSphere, I thought it was fantastic to use the default. Once it was deployed, I could check on the rail systems, and everything worked very well. The best thing is that the tests I run to understand the situation can also run parallel. So I found it all straightforward. However, primarily I'm working on a platform already built by the companies that provide them. I do some maintenance and modifications of the customer's applications. Setting up this solution isn't generally part of my job. 

I rate vSphere 10 out of 10. It's perfect. I know some people are very conservative and don't want to even mess with them, but I would argue that it's a way to avoid risking physical installations or making mistakes in real life. You can do all your testing virtually.

We need virtualization for our company, or sometimes our customers leverage virtualization solutions instead of using physical machines.

The fact that vSphere is an on-premise solution is beneficial for the user. It's easier to manage the infrastructure. It's more straightforward to scale and configure virtual machines. 

VMware vSphere is perfect for the on-premise solution, but we are in the cloud era, so I think maybe VMware needs to invest more in the cloud and the microservice chain. It would be better if VMware offered more cloud solutions and continuous applications.

In terms of scalability and stability, vSphere is excellent. We lack volume when we need to bundle a considerable number of physical machines to facilitate virtualization. There are a lot of competitors like Nutanix or others, but VMware is the number one solution for me.

We don't contact VMware support often, but I sometimes have trouble understanding their manuals, so I ask them for help.

It's easier for the user to deploy vSphere or the vCenter, but it's complex when setting up network virtualization.

I think VMware is a good investment. We use VMware to maintain our internal system. 

I rate VMware vSphere seven out of 10. 

On-premises

We use VMware vSphere on our main computer systems and we are using the Center Configuration Manager from VMware for the solution as well as vCenter for replication.

The most valuable feature is the tech manager from the utilization.

The virtualization this solution offers is very complete for the infrastructure. It meets our requirements and our needs.

It is very easy to operate.

The support for the latest version could be improved.

I have been working with VMware vSphere for ten years.

We began with version 4.0 and are now working with the most recent version.

VMware vSphere is a stable solution.

VMware vSphere is a scalable product.

Technical support from VMware is very comprehensive and helpful.

We use several solutions such as Microsoft Azure, Oracle, and we use VMware for our infrastructure.

We also have another solution for disaster recovery.

We used Microsoft Azure for testing with the model phone credit. It was for testing only.

In my opinion, the price is not cheap, nor it is expensive. It's average.

Currently, we are starting on study for implementing the software design network, and I am evaluating options because I want to know the latest information about the products.

We are also evaluating NSX to implement it in the future.

I would rate VMware vSphere a nine out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud