VMware vSphere Reviews

It is user-friendly and easy to use. 

We stopped using a lot of cloud services. However, I see that VMware has integrated with Amazon Cloud. We will now to have to move everything to the cloud. My goal is to uplift our environment to the cloud, which will be probably in two years, but it will happen. It is where everyone is heading, since it is the next big step.

It is very stable. Once you have it in production, there are rarely any issues, which is a nice thing about VMware.

It is highly scalable. We need to scale out and up, and we can do that with vSphere. We can easily add more storage, drives, or memory. 

I do not have any problems with tech support. It is very good. I usually start in-house, then outreach to VMware support if there is a need to do so.

It is easy to set up. Once you get it running, it doesn't break down. It just runs.

The deployment took a week to complete. I do not fault the solution, as it was our personal systematic issues that had to be dealt with internally.

ROI is hard to measure because it depends upon the customer's relationship with the solution and how much they spent on it.

VMware licensing and pricing are a bit more expensive compared to others, like Hyper-V. However, you get what you pay for.

We considered Hyper-V, but decided to go with VMware since there are certain applications which run better on VMware. 

Price is not everything to me. Even though price may put a burden on a company, if you are trying to solve something for your company, the more expensive solution may help you run your environment smoothly. Then, it is worth the expense. 

vSphere has been deployed in many of our customers. It improves drastically DC consolidation and proper use of available resources. At present, virtualised customers are still far from fully leveraging the potential of vSphere in part due to lack of expertise and fully understanding the concepts of virtualisation from an architecture point of view. It also improved resiliency and ease of asset management as most customers were able to reduce role segregation and have seen an opportunity for having DevOps since human resources became more available due to some degree of automation.

Having the ability to deploy fault tolerant VM’s with up to 4 CPUs is fantastic as it goes one level up from a business continuity perspective. Previously, VMware was covering, with just vSphere, backups and DR, and now it also covers a properly functional fault tolerant offering.

Single Sign On is another feature that is enhanced and solves much of the older problems, either in deploying or managing it. Cross vendor integration is in my opinion one of the best features. Although all these features are welcome and a must, they come at a price in terms of licensing.

I’d like to see a better web console or rather, transform the web console in a real single pane of glass for the whole infrastructure instead of having to go for vRealize Ops Manager. Other vendors are providing this already and vSphere (vendor) has that capability. I’d also like to see solutions such as vSAN in vSphere, really take off. It has a lot of potential and since it has been jointly done with other hardware vendors it somehow lost track of what the real purpose was, offer a whole very simple and very effective solution. Support for Virtual Volumes will be the next big thing, and although it is already implemented, it will take a while to see its light in production in customers.

The web client is sometimes slow and sluggish, other than that customers have no complaints around stability if the product is used as intended.

This is one of the strongest points in vSphere. I've had no problems with scalability. Although it is dependant on the underlying hardware infrastructure and its scalability/growth/space/etc.

Customer Service:

It's very good.

Technical Support:

Very good once you’re passed the initial “script-reading-far-far-away” operators.

My customers have used all available solutions. Some move to vSphere, some move away. In the end it will be about costs unless very well justified by a business need for high resiliency and market name.

Customers who move to or implement VMware are already aware and skilled on the implementation level. It is usually very straightforward.

My company or a partner company does the implementation. With the amount of available documentation and training, the is no excuse for a poorly deployed platform on vSphere. Know how on platform usage is a different story.

Considering the consolidation and virtualisation portion of it, for a Greenfield, very good. For brownfield and considering license costs and removing the benefits of virtualisation, it is an ROI nightmare, but focusing on the product itself vSphere delivers a good ROI, lower than competitors but still OK.

Start with the lowest and upgrade if, and only if, absolutely necessary. Customers will find that the standard edition is more than sufficient for their needs until they are internally ready to move forward to a cloud operating model.

All in the market. Hyper-V, KVM, Oracle VM, PowerVM, etc.

Start with the least expensive Licensing model and upgrade as you need. Change your operating model to virtualisation and fully leverage its potential. vSphere has it all in one package and can really change the way IT operates. We’re 12 years into virtualisation on x86 and I still find most of the virtualised customers not happy with what it offers since they don’t know how to utilise it.

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 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.

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!

The command line power CLI module is a great feature, but the PowerShell module is my preferred management tool.

The automation that it provides is the best. Also cost savings, because you don’t have to go with third-party solutions as long as you have people with the ability to script within your enterprise. Then, you can create your own tools and access APIs very easily.

That’s a difficult question because there’s so many features that have been developed but not released yet. I would like to see more workshops with training opportunities at no cost to the customer. That would be very helpful.

Very stable.

We kind of just started off large, and kept getting larger.

It’s decent. Fairly responsive, not super great but adequate.

We were on Hyper-V, and it sucked. The manageability of vSphere far outperforms Windows Hyper-V, at least the 2008 version. VMWare is more stable, it clusters better, and is just better in general.

For me, it’s manageability. VMware offers so many different ways to manage their solution. You can use UNIX-like command-line interface to access the host, can use Pearl, you have a lot of different options at your disposal.

I don’t know.

We hired a consulting firm to come in and actually develop the environment when we moved from Hyper-V.

There’s no better alternative. I would absolutely recommend vSphere. I do think that they’re the most expensive, but well worth the money.

I also think peer reviews would be an interesting way to research, as I haven’t ever encountered a site like IT Central Station before, but I can definitely see the value of moving forward with it.

We use this solution for Datacenter consolidation and it is the infrastructure of our servers.

The interface is good.

It is easy to configure.

I would like to see VDP and other features included to back up the VMs in a native manner.

I have been using VMware vSphere for ten years.

We are working with VMware vSphere 6.5.

VMware vSphere is stable enough, but we have some issues with the storage vendor.

It's a scalable solution. We don't have any issues with the scalability of VMware vSphere.

We have 5,000 users in our organization.

Before we consider increasing the usage, we have to consolidate Windows Datacenter by applying an HCI infrastructure.

Technical support is good.

I am a customer of Dell Technologies as well as VMware.

Other products we work with are VDI, VMware Horizon Server, and vSphere with Operations Management.

I have been using Horizon for eight years. We are using version 7.

It has 100 user licenses, that are deployed on-premises.

I feel that Horizon is more flexible in increasing the number of desktop and network profiles.

I would rate Horizon a seven out of ten.

There are ways to implement VDI in the organization other than the VMware Horizon.

In most cases, the initial setup is simple.

It took two months to deploy this solution.

We have a team of two or three to deploy this solution.

We had help from resellers.

We don't have an active subscription. We have a prepaid or permanent license.

We have been researching vSAN and hyper-converged features.

I would rate VMware vSphere an eight out of ten.

I consider all the features to be of interest. 

Improvements should be made to the controller. 

I have been using VMware vSphere for between three and five years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

The technical support is not too bad, but not the best.

The initial setup is easy but could be moderately improved. 

The licensing could be lower.

I am a consultant and reseller.

My advice to others who are considering implementing the solution is they have a good partner.

I rate VMware vSphere as a seven out of ten.