VMware vSphere Reviews

Using this solution, we have virtualized 90% of servers used by a tier-one automotive supplier.

We have reduced maintenance and power consumption, as well as the recovery time that is required for any failures.

The most valuable feature is the VDP Backup solution. It just works.

The Disaster Recovery solution is easy to implement.

I would like to see better fault and performance reporting in the GUI. I should not have to resort to using the command line to see what is going on.

I have been using VMware vSphere for five years.

The primary use case for us was to virtualize a small data center of about 30 guests. We use it for our Active Directory and Exchange servers. The solution has worked well.

We're not yet using VMware Cloud on AWS or vSphere's built-in security features.

Going from a purely physical environment before, we have seen a performance value boost. It also gives us greater flexibility and it allows us to adapt to our environment much more quickly than a standard hardware solution would.

The most valuable features are the simplicity and ease of use for, a small IT department like ours. It's simple and efficient to manage.

I would like to see continued support of the HTML5-based utilities.

It's been very stable for us.

We have a pretty static environment but, for our needs, it has been very good.

We have had to use technical support a couple of times. It has been very good, a very good experience.

We had outside help from a partner, but the initial setup was pretty straightforward.

We're a small, privately held company, so ROI is not something we concentrate a lot on. But just from the surface appearance, it has really helped us.

Make use of the resources that are there. That's something we failed on when we first started. We started out thinking, "We're going to go with this company for storage, we're going to use Vsphere, etc.," and we just went in with a partner. As I went further along, I learned that there were a lot of built-in resources that I really didn't know I had access to. That was a bit tough.

When selecting a vendor, the most important criterion for us, being a smaller IT department, is the support. Also, to a certain extent, the name is important, because when you're a small department you don't have the opportunity to evaluate as many companies as you'd like to. Sometimes you end up going with the main name brand. When you're a small shop, you need all the help you can get.

I rate vSphere a solid nine out of ten, especially since, with 6.5 and beyond, it has matured and it's full-fledged. It's tough to think of anything I'd want to add to it at this point. I would have rated vSphere 5.5  as an eight out of ten, so it feels like 6.5 is a progression towards ten. There's really no feature that I can explicitly name that would make it a ten. They just need to make more progress, have more stability, and continued simplicity.

We use it to manage our VM servers, everything we have. We're about 98 percent virtualized and we're using VMware vSphere and it works great. It performs great.

In terms of mission-critical apps, we mainly host a lot of our accountants, so we have a lot of accounting software. It's really mission-critical to where we have to have these apps running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. With vSphere, we're able to use VMotion, HA, and Fault Tolerance to keep our apps up and running for them.

We don't use VM Encryption or support for TPM or VBS. We don't yet use VMware Cloud on AWS but we're looking forward to it.

Getting rid of our physical servers and going virtual is saving us some money in overall rack space.

Server consolidation.

It's extremely simple. Installing the ESXi is a piece of cake and then putting servers on there is really simple, as is having HA and building a cluster for our VM servers. It's very easy.

The UI is great with the new HTML.

In terms of stability, so far it's been really simple. We've been running it for a few years now and it has been flawless. We haven't looked back.

It's really simple to scale. Just add another server, add it to the cluster and, bingo bango, you're done.

Our experience with technical support has not been the greatest. We currently have a ticket open and it's been open for a few months now, for our VDI solution. I can't complain. In other situations, it has been fine.

A big thing for us, and the reason we went with VDI, was for security. We didn't want folks having laptops or taking them out of our environment, out of our building, and not having them secured, where somebody could just pick one up and take it. This way, we keep it all in-house and it's more secure. It's in our hands and not theirs.

We went with VMware because we were all more familiar with VMware and our vendors, our reps. We all have a great relationship with them, so we decided to go that route.

The setup was pretty straightforward.

I honestly don't know what our ROI is, but it's a lot.

We looked at Citrix and we looked at Azure.

Give it a shot, check it out how easy it is. It just works.

I rate it a ten out of ten. I'm a big advocate of VMware.

We use it for VMware AirWatch/Workspace ONE: managing mobile devices.

We haven't seen a performance boost at all because we haven't been using the product long enough to be able to fairly evaluate it. But I have no complaints with the performance at this point.

The roadmap VMware has for Workspace ONE is on target with what we want to do. A year from now I might have a different opinion, but right now, I'm good. I see no negatives at this point.

It is a stable product. It has been stable since we installed it eight months ago.

It's a scalable solution. We went from 200 test devices to 11,000 devices in three weeks, without any issues.

So far, we haven't used technical support a lot but I would rate it a three out of five. They have to earn my trust.

The setup is not difficult but there a lot of details that may or may not be documented clearly in the installation guides. What made it difficult for us was that we had to keep asking questions that should have been documented but were not.

Our ROI is the ease of use for users.

We abandoned one vendor and looked at two others but I can't name them. We dealt with one vendor for five years and we bailed as quickly as possible.

I would recommend it highly. I have no complaints. We did a PoC with them and we have been using other products from VMware for years.

The important criteria involved in choosing it were flexibility and ease of use for our user base.

My advice, if you are going to implement it, is: Read the documentation and question the vendor carefully when doing the install.

The most valuable feature for us is the portability of the VM itself. I've dealt with enough physical servers to see the benefit of having a layer of abstraction between Windows or Linux or whatever software is running on top of the hypervisor. It provides flexibility and manageability by abstracting the physical dependencies from the physical hardware.

It's allowed us to consolidate 150 physical servers down to six servers with 150 VM's running on top. That's the biggest impact to our environment.

The web client needs a lot of work. Unless they replace the C# client with something better, they're going to have issues. Without a better management interface, they're going from a great system to a very poor one.

I've been using it since version 3.5, which was 2009, so about seven years now.

We haven't had issues with deploying it.

It's definitely stable as I've seen ESXI servers up for 1000 days before a reboot. You can go with management services without attached the VM's.

I started in a very small environment with two hosts with 20 VM's and now we have 25 hosts spread across data centers and branch offices and much bigger clusters. The scalability is definitely there.

I've had some issues with support recently. I was lucky enough to get accepted into the vSphere Beta program so I got more direct contact about my issues, but their tech support has not been as good as it used to be.

That depends on your definition of complex. It takes some time to wrap your head around the concept of virtualization. But it gets simpler, especially as you set up from scratch.

Make sure you're using the right licenses because VMware licensing is a little bit complex. In my previous job, I ran into an issue where I wanted to expand our cluster from three hosts to four hosts, but we couldn't do it because my boss had bought a vCenter Foundation license and it only permitted three hosts. It's one of those little surprises that you can find yourself in. Just pay attention and make sure you are buying the right system that's going to scale to what you need as far as licensing goes.

It was already in place when I came into my position. I believe it was chosen because it's the best on the market. Hyper-V isn't at feature-parity with vSphere.

It's just made my life so much better as far as being able to move servers around and perform firmware updates during the middle of the day. I love that.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I have no experience with their customer service.

I have no experience with their technical support.

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.

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.

Implementation was done in-house.

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.

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.

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.

The best part of ESXi for us is the flexibility it gives us, we can spin up a new server in minutes, we can increase VM drive space live, we can perform maintenance on our infrastructure with minimal down time – we have a blade solution, and have the capacity to move VM’s to allow us to perform updates/upgrades to individual hosts during work hours with zero disruption to the business.

Its allowed us to reduce the time needed to bring onboard new services. For example, we migrated from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010, the flexibility of running a virtualised environment allowed us to quickly build new servers to test, this is something that would have taken considerably longer using physical hardware, with VMware, we were able to tailor the system spec without having to scramble around for memory, drives CPU’s etc. This ultimately reduced the time to complete the migration.

I’m keenly awaiting multi core Fault Tolerance, so I can have all our VM’s covered by FT – currently it’s only available for single core VM’s.

Fault Tolerance is now available for multicore VM's, but, you;ll need to factor in how many cores the host has before rolling this out to the more powerfully specced VM's.

5 years

None, we found VMware support really good.

None, we had a few teething issues which were mainly due to our lack of knowledge of the product when we first installed it.

None at all, we can add hosts on the fly, we’ve expanded our SAN array from 1 to 3 shelfs without issue.

We use VM and also a 3rd party for support – no problems have been encountered which were not resolvable.

1st class – no complaints at all.

We had the implantation done via a reseller, what we did find was that the initial knowledge transfer of skills from the vendor to us was questionable (in that they came in and set it up, then really left us to it. This gave us a very steep learning curve at the outset.) If we did the project again, this is an area that I would focus on as part of the project, so that we were more comfortable with what we put in place. This doesn’t mean we had a negative experience, rather we were a little green to start with.

I’d say, understand what it is you wish to achieve from the outset. Take into account growth, be aware of VM sprawl and the associated license costs – we were all happy to add servers left right and centre, we’ve now been through a server rationalisation process to bring our VM server count down a little. Make sure that your engineers are suitably trained and make sure that you have a good support contract in place – it gives you peace of mind!

From the admin perspective, the centralized management/administration of the environment. Additionally, a much smaller data center footprint, streamlined machine deployments and flexible resource sharing rank right up there.

It is hugely more efficient for daily monitoring, patching and upgrades and deploying new machines. With more than 100 servers we would have a couple of full time folks just for patching! Server reboots during business hours are far less disruptive to the end users. We are also in the midst of a large e-commerce project and vSphere has allowed us a ton of flexibility with development and test environments that we wouldn’t have in a physical environment. A lab environment that very closely mirrors production was far easier to design and build than the physical lab we had been struggling with for years.

We are a small shop but still pay the big bucks for licensing vSphere products in order to gain the features that fit our goals.

I'm looking forward to a review of VMTools updates in vSphere 6, which have hopefully been revamped. We currently have a somewhat dated change process so tools updates are hampered by a process that doesn't quite fit and requires more after hours work that is necessary.

We implemented vSphere 4.1 in October 2010 and upgraded to 5.1 in June 2013, then to 5.5 in June 2014. We are beginning to review vSphere 6. Alongside vSphere, we also use ESXi 5.5.0.2718055, and vCenter 5.5.0.2646482.

No – the original deployment went very smoothly with vendor assistance. Upgrades since have been smooth as well. We did a lot of homework before embarking on any upgrades.

No. The virtual environment has remained incredibly stable over the five years since the original deployment.

No. The original deployment consisted of virtualizing 32 machines. We now have over 100 VM’s.

We periodically have regional reps reach out but they don’t seem to know much about our environment. When we call in, for whatever reason, the folks answering phones are very polite, respectful and efficient at directing our calls.

Periodically we have an issue where we have to call in to tech support, but many times are able to Google the issue and find an answer on VMware’s site. When we do have to call though, tech support has been great to us. They definitely stick with an issue until we say it’s resolved.

No, we moved from a completely physical environment.

A little of both. It was complex because we didn’t know a lot about it but being involved in the setup with a vendor proved itself to be pretty straightforward.

We implemented with a CDW team since we hadn’t done any virtualization. They were extremely knowledgeable regarding not only VMware but Cisco, Microsoft and Linux which helped us design an infrastructure that suited our needs well at the time.

We had one Citrix server at the time and I believe we did a very high level evaluation of Xenserver, but VMware was more in line with our virtualization goals.

Do your homework so you learn as much as you can about virtualization concepts as there are many nuances that are quite different from the physical counterparts. It’s easy to get an ESXi host stood up and install a vCenter management server – then you decide to stand up a “few” VM’s and when you figure out how easy that is, you are off and running. But what about your network configuration and HA or DRS to name a few. It’s way easier to learn the concepts ahead of time than to have to research a bunch of little issues after the fact. Google VMware and/or vSphere and have at it!