VMware vSphere Reviews

We primarily use the solution for our virtual environment.

The VM features are all very good.

We've been very happy with the reporting aspects of the solution.

The documentation of the product is excellent. It's very helpful.

The product has been very stable. It's quite reliable.

The solution is very scalable.

We've found the technical support to be very helpful and responsive.

The initial setup is quite complex.

We would like the pricing to be lower. It's very expensive right now.

There could be more security features added to the product.

I've been using the solution for about five years or so. It's been a while at this point. I have a good amount of experience on it.

The stability is very good. It's reliable. The performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The scalability is very good. If a company would like to expand, it can do so.

In our organization, ten to 15 people are using the solution.

We've been in touch with technical support in the past. They've always been responsive. They are helpful and effective at solving issues. We're quite satisfied with the level of support our organization receives.

The initial setup is not straightforward. It's pretty complex.

The licensing is on a subscription basis.

The solution, in general, is quite expensive. They should work to make it less costly for their customer base.

We are customers and end-users of the product.

We are using the latest version of the solution at this time.

We've just deployed it ourselves, and it is very small. We haven't had any difficulties with it at all so far and it's been five years.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We've been largely very satisfied with the capabilities.

We use it to host our business-critical applications and servers on-premise.

I have found the Storage vMotion feature to be the most valuable.

It is a very user-friendly solution.

One problem that needs fixing is when we run the backup for the servers, the servers become inaccessible to everybody on-site while it is creating a snapshot. If your server size is large you will have to wait longer when the server is unavailable. 

In the future, it would be a benefit for VMware to improve on the Storage vMotion feature by making it become faster between host. It takes a lot of time to transfer files between hosts currently.

I have been using the solution for six years.

The solution is very stable.

The scalability in my experience is good.

I was not at the company when they did the deployment of vSphere version 5.5 but I did do the deployment of a host on version 6.7, which is quite straightforward.

The pricing is reasonable and you are able to purchases licencing for certain time frame intervals, monthly, yearly etc.

I would definitely recommend the solution to others working in IT.

I would give the solution a nine but the vMotion feature takes too long for transferring files between stored data sources.

I rate VMware vSphere an eight out of ten.

It's virtualization software. We are using it to virtualize virtual machines.

It cuts down on hardware costs by being able to virtualize multiple hardware and multiple machines on a single piece of hardware.

The primary use is the most valuable feature. Being able to virtualize virtual machines on one set of hardware is essentially what it does.

The user interface could use some improvement.

I have been using VMware vSphere for approximately five years.

This product has been very stable.

The version that I have is not very scalable, although overall, the product is. I bought a limited version. We do not plan to increase our usage within the next year. There may be, later on.

I really haven't had much need for technical support.

Prior to using vSphere, I was working strictly with individual machines.

I thought that the initial setup was very straightforward.

We deployed with our in-house team.

I and another person are in charge of administration and maintenance. There is routine maintenance needed for virtual machines. This includes maintaining existing virtual machines, as well as creating new ones when required.

Considering that this solution has cut down on the number of real machines that I have, I would expect there to have been cost savings.

My advice for anybody who is looking into using vSphere is that there are a lot more options out there now, but this product has worked well for me.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this product is that it's too easy to create new machines.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is High Availability Industrial Control Operator Interfaces, and Historian & Regulatory Compliance Data.

This solution offers an easy OS upgrade and safe migration in a live environment, where downtime is extremely costly.

The most valuable feature is its ability to revert to previous snapshots during testing of various guest and application deployments.

Two improvements that I would like to see are higher resolution console modes for guests and easier switching between consoles.

The primary use case is documentation.

I use this solution on AWS, which is pretty standard. It is fairly easy to use and has enhanced security. 

From a feature set point of view, I am quite comfortable with it. 

The pricing and tech support need improvement. 

I have not scaled it very high. I have only used it in small implementations. I only have a total of 190 people using the solution.

The technical support is poor. We are in Australia, but we do not have the same level of support as the US and Europe. 

Setting up this solution is not a problem. 

The price is high. It would be nice if VMware made a price reduction. 

I looked at native AWS as an option. My preference is Oracle VM versus this solution. 

Our main use case of vSphere is as the lower layer of a cloud service provider. It's the basis for offering our services through vCloud Director to our customers.

The HTML 5 is valuable in the measure of time saved, day by day.

The most valuable feature of vSphere 6.7, is the HTML 5. I find it really awesome because it speeded up all our daily operations.

It's reliable, stable, and much easier than the previous version.

vSphere now is even simpler. It was simple even before, but going through the HTML 5 interface - and 90 percent of the features are on HTML 5 - it's even easier than the previous ones. Version 6.05 still was, it had HTML 5, but not one 100 percent.

A slight improvement could be made to the interface of the management of vCSA, so that they answer on the 5480 ports. That kind of graphical interface could be improved, but it is not a main point.

The stability of vSphere has reached a good point. Especially without the Flash and the so-called FLEX Client, with HTML 5 it is much more stable than it was before. Previously we used vCenter on Windows. We're adopting the vCSA now, it's much faster and more stable.

vSphere is much more simple to scale than before, thanks to vCSA instead of the monolithic installation on VMware.

We use VMware support. We use it quite often, but not because the product is bad, just because we have so many customers. We are talking about 5,000 virtual machines, so it's statistically probable that we would need to access support. The support is really great.

When we chose VMware, of course we checked other vendors like Microsoft because it's present everywhere; even the open-source KVM. But we decided Microsoft wasn't at an enterprise stage and the open-source one was nice to use but, since there was no support, it wasn't suitable to offer to our customers. We didn't have any doubt choosing VMware.

The built-in features such as encryption - even including TPM module 2.0, are good, but still not useful for us, just because we don't have a lot of requests for this.

The mission-critical applications - more or less all are critical applications. vCenter keeps all the virtual machines of our customers and we don't know what's on those virtual machines. For us, every one of them - not knowing what is inside - is critical. That is for the vSphere used for resources. For the vSphere that we use for management, the critical ones are the infrastructure applications, the ones that keeps the infrastructure working. So from the databases to vCenter itself, to vCloud Director, to NSX. All those machines are critical in that they keep the system working.

As for VMware Cloud on AWS, we have only tested it.

I rate vSphere at eight out of ten. Ten is perfection and I, more or less, never give a ten because people can improve. It's eight, not nine, because I still don't have complete control of the interface.

• vMotion is one of the most useful features, which helps to provide both flexibility and High Availability. With new versions of vSphere and vCenter, it is still improving (e.g., vMotion across vCenter Servers and virtual switches).
• High Availability - it's a useful feature that helps to minimize downtime of VM's and ensure RTO of our business continuity.
• Simplicity of installation and usability. For our activity, it is very important to quickly deploy a new instance of ESXi and put it in production. I was surprised to discover a large compatibility of HW equipment from different vendors (Dell, IBM, HP, Fujitsu) and different generations of hardware.

A good example is that we had improved organizational functions by providing much more IT services with the same IT staff. It is also worthy to mention that the quality of our services considerably increased. This infrastructure helps us to maintain the data center in the agricultural sector. Also, providing VDS/VPS services to different customers bring some additional profit to our organization.

Big improvements were introduced in v6 compared with v5.5, but I am still expecting some additional improvements for our activity. Another area is the backup solutions that are relying on CBT. For the moment it is resolved, but due to the fact that during the last three months there appeared some critical bugs, the virtual machine backup might be inconsistent.

We started with v5.0 and have been using it for nearly four years.

We encountered no issues with deployment.

There was an issue in v5.5 where I got PSOD. It was a problem with the network adapter e1000. The solution I found was in a KB and the problem was solved quickly by applying a patch to ESXi.

We encountered no issues with scalability.

The level of customer service is high.

We haven't had any requests for technical support. I think it's a good indicator of the quality of vSphere.

At the beginning of the virtualization of our data center, we used open source projects (such as KVM), but we quickly realized that they didn't satisfy our business requirements.

The initial setup was straightforward and clear.

We implemented it in-house. Due to a limited budget, all implementation, maintenance, and support is performed by us.

We did not calculate the ROI because we are a non-profit organization. As a state enterprise, our primary mission is to implement, administrate, and maintain information systems in the agricultural sector.

Compared with other vendors’ products, the pricing of the license is slightly lower. The annual S&S price is very affordable.

Before choosing this product, we compared it with Mic.

This is one of the best products as a virtualization platform. It is important to consider best-practices designing the infrastructure and to put in practice-available features. I think new customers will be pleasantly surprised with the results.

Pretty much everything about VMware is a strong point. From my point of view, it's one of the most stable and scalable technologies on the market, and when it comes to virtualization it's probably the very best there is. 

As a backup and storage admin, I haven't had the chance to explore in-depth all of its features, but what I did get to work with thoroughly seemed very reliable, just to name a few: vMotion and Storage vMotion, Storage APIs (such as VAAI), Storage Thin Provisioning, good integration with LUN mapping to VMFS, etc.

Obviously, it brought with it many of the unique things that any virtualization technology provides, such as High Availability and trimming down costs and data center space requirements. It helped us develop some of our most important and complex infrastructure projects, such as: VDI, Internal Cloud (IaaS for internal Dev Teams), Data Center Clustering with good High Availability potential, etc.

Hard to say what I'd like to see in the next versions. Over the years, the VMware development team constantly delivered major improvements to this product. I've only had the chance to work version 4.5 up to 5.5. Since I haven't had the chance to test the current version which is 6, I think it wouldn't be fair to make suggestions due to the fact that some of my ideas may have already been implemented starting with version 6. 

However, when I think of what tried me most with vSphere, it's probably the fact that my colleagues and I on the Virtual Infrastructure Admin team always had to do debugging and troubleshooting on VM configuration files in a manual manner if we wanted to bring to life broken VMs. 

Sure, some official KBs are pretty useful but not all issues can be covered by them. It would really ease up and speed up the troubleshooting process for advanced and experienced administrators if vSphere had some sort of VM file debug tool that can also run automatic integrity checks and repairs based on the entire set of configuration files, live run-logs, a potential database that logs the history of changes made to the VMs, and stuff like that. 

This would be especially useful when you have environments that tend to do a lot of Snapshot manipulations such as those that use specialized virtual backup and/or replication software.

I've been using it for about a year and a half. Currently, the organization where I work has most of its virtualized infrastructure running v5.5 (we're towards the end of a broad upgrade project) throughout the last year and a half. Since I've been occupying my current position, I've also had the chance to use also versions 4.5, 5 and 5.1.

Deployment isn't the simplest nor the most complex. If you can install a standard HP & Dell server, there's no reason you couldn't take care of a VMWare ESXi Hypervisor. After that, configuration and administration via the vSphere console is pretty easy.

There have been no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues with scalability.

Personally, I haven't had the chance to work with the VMware customer service since most of the issues encountered were usually fixed by applying the solutions presented in official KBs.

Before VMware, our company used to employ Citrix for the VDI infrastructure. Besides being more easy to use for the common VDI user, VMware also allowed us to step up the game by also taking the majority of your server infrastructure to the virtual environment.

Both deployment and administration of the VMware infrastructure in our organization is performed by internal specialized teams.