VMware vSphere Reviews

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.

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!

We have the ability to run within our block environment with a private cloud capability, enabling us to realize our automation roadmap.

We’ve consolidated over $10 million for licenses, $12.2 million in maintenance, and $10.3 million in labor costs – it's a tremendous cost-saving.

I would like to see non-cloud native apps to be able to run on infrastructure and not be dependent on the underlying VMs for stability.

It improves our stability.

We can dynamically scale within hours to meet our business demand, which use to take months.

We include a mission-critical support model, which gives us a very rapid response. So the response time is very good.

Very complex, as there are a lot of moving parts to get into service. We simplify it for the end users but it is complex.

I would say that the total cost of benefits are not just across virtualization but across general business categories. Don’t cut yourself short from using the solution to drive cost-benefits in multiple financial categories.

As a manager, it’s easier for management, as I don’t have a lot of physical servers with them possibly failing. I’ve been slowly getting all the servers virtualized by adding more hosts.

The disaster recovery solution is so much better to use, to bring systems back up. I’m one person, so I’m managing 22 servers on one set of hosts, and it’s so much easier when I can do it on just one.

I don’t think we're large enough to use it like some other firms do, so v5 is perfectly fine for me. We’re running v6 now, but we really don’t even need that.

I’ve been running it for more than a year now.

We have to get another host because of growth, and I had some issues with my backup software in the beginning, and since then, it’s been running great.

We’re growing only because we’re realizing that we need to switch from physical to virtuals, plus we are launching a few new products causing for new products. Now we’re going from two to three hosts. They’ve been great so far.

I would’ve said it was excellent until the last case. vSphere was running a bit slow, and the last case it took the guys weeks to get back to me. It was a minor issue. and perhaps that was why. The diagnostic logs were sent, and it took weeks before they got back to me.

I had help, but I would say it was fairly straightforward. At that time, I hadn’t even been to a class, so it was very new to me.

We had two vendors come in, and one was quoting a SAN that was ridiculously expensive (I don’t remember who), but the other vendor, which was BPI information systems, came in with a cheaper SAN solution, because that’s where your cost is. We ran it and we’ve had no problems. My environment’s probably smaller than an enterprise, however.

The cost of hardware and maintenance is something we always look at. I was am one person, and it was getting too complicated to keep the physical servers running for, so we needed to switch to virtualization.

I reviewed Hyper-V, but everybody uses VMware. We really only looked at VMware though as consultants recommended it. I knew I wanted to go there.

The support could be a bit better. I would do the same thing that I do.

I don’t have a very big network because I’m so busy, but I count on my consultants and information system networks a lot. After, I’ll research a lot on the internet to back up what we’re doing.