VMware vSphere Reviews

Most use cases are here in Brazil. The company is moving to vSphere after exchanging from a legacy platform. Most of our clients have not previously considered digitalization. Now, they look up KVM solutions for DevOps, the Zain app, and Zain desktops for desktop visualization. For some clients, these alternatives may seem more enticing. We did a vSphere implementation for a customer in the last 12 months. I think it was version 6.5.3. We used it for a retail company. We also cater to small to medium-sized companies in the US market. I estimate about a hundred people use vSphere.

Visualizing infrastructure is a very important aspect of what we do. VMware vSphere is the benchmark of the visualization market. It's the go-to choice for about every customer that we deal with.

As we are a service partner, I think the most valuable feature vSphere has is the ability to visualize infrastructure. Other similar software does not have this capability.

The visualization market is likely going to adopt more features in the network aspect of the typical data center. It would be useful to have features like micro-segmentation, changing the mix as well as part of vSphere. This is not currently provided and to achieve this, you need the VMware NSX product, which is a different product with its own license. I think some sort of migration tool could be introduced to migrate to the cloud. It should include integrations with a hooked cloud environment, or on-prem and even between clusters. For example, sometimes I need to migrate a VM from a vSphere environment to a hooked cloud environment.

I have worked with vSphere for some years. My company has had a contract with Lenovo for about a year and a half. I am an IT professional. I work with VMware vSphere for our customers.

We are a value-added distributor for some partners like Lenovo. We re-sell vSphere as an end product. We are VMware partners.

vSphere is very stable.

It is very scalable as it is the visualization benchmark.

I don't remember engaging technical support for vSphere. I have not required support thus far for the product. The documentation is very good.

I had some issues with this installation, but not from the vSphere angle. We have to watch compatibility measures between the hardware we are using and other software. It's not a problem with vSphere itself. It's the basic compatibility that we must follow.

The license growth of vSphere depends on the growth of the visual environment and the addition of more hosts.

Although vSphere is still a very useful option for visualization, some clients are trying alternative DevOps solutions for less critical sites. However, they use vSphere as an option for visualization in production.

Just follow the documentation. It's very useful and informative. Before you implement, check the licensing, to see if the license is okay and the compatibility metrics are okay. I would rate VMware vSphere 9 out of 10.

I primarily use vSphere for management. It is very fast, responsive, and easy to use.

It has high clustering and availability features. These features are not found with other hypervisors.

I would like to see VMware head towards a more GPU friendly environment. 

The stability is high. 

I also have experience with Citrix ESXi.

The other options that we considered were Cisco, Dell EMC, and Nutanix. 

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. 

It saves us a lot of money on physical infrastructure through virtualization. Also, you can roll back in case a machine crashes. That saves a lot of money and time. It also saves physical space, energy, and it removes physical limitations, with virtualization you can go anywhere in the world.

vSphere is very stable, reliable.

In the next release, I would like to see programming. I'd like to see a lot more about customization for people who want to customize programming API, SDK.

So far, so good. So far it's very reliable and stable.

Scalability depends on the infrastructure. The software can handle a heavy load.

Technical support is excellent.

It's not complex but I have a lot of experience.

vSphere is fantastic but the reason I'm doing research is that I deal with different vendors, they use different technology, they use Red Hat KVM. The other one is using Hyper-V, so that's why I want to do some research. vSphere is the most popular virtualization technology worldwide. Ninety percent of the world uses vSphere.

The most valuable feature is definitely the High Availability and the abstraction of MAC addresses from the hardware. Also, shared storage is definitely beneficial. Back in the old days when we had single storage, it was usually slow disks that were local to the machines, and once we moved everything over to the virtualization platform, we have the benefit of newer and faster disk arrays directly attached to the VMware system. It's made thing a whole lot easier to manager, particularly from a space point-of-view.

Obviously, SANs have been around for a while, but they used to be direct-attached and not shared among a number of hosts. We jumped from direct-attached SANs into VMware with shared SANs, skipping that extra part of the SAN world.

It brings everything together under one umbrella and allows a smaller organization without a separate administrator for disk, network, host, or server to have centralized, single-pane-of-glass management. It has a much easier interface than a lot of the other tools I've worked with and gives us a better centralization of services.

It seems like VMware comes out with something new every time I think how great it would be to have it. For example, they came out with Storage vMotion, although a lot of people haven't adopted it because some programs won't accept it. Also, with NSX they're working in the networking area, and I'd definitely like to see improvement there, such as integration with the cloud. We've got a customer for whom we're providing disaster recovery with vCloud Air, and there are some improvements could be made there as well.

We actually have two different vClouds -- one of the VMs to replicate to, and the other for the VMs to have Active Directory and a jump host for user connections. I'd like to see better vSphere integration with vCloud Air where they're seamless. This would be a big improvement.

I've used it for somewhere around ten years. I started back three jobs ago, and basically we were using VMware to move some physical machines down to Atlanta from New Jersey, and so we chose vSphere. Our boss brought in a vSphere trainer and gave us a week long class on it before we got started, and then we used the convert tool, and we used another tool called PlateSpin, which was available back then. I don't even know if PlateSpin is still even in business, but I've P2V'd quite a few machines over the years.

We've had no issues deploying it.

It’s absolutely stable for the past ten years. There have been a few bugs here and there, but I know that version 6 has changed the block-tracking bug which affected some of our Veeam customers. So vSphere has been very stable compared to other products. I currently work with another hypervisor and it's way behind vSphere. vSphere is a purpose-built hypervisor, which is more stable than an OS-based hypervisor.

One of the issues that I've always had with the scalability of VMware, and maybe this is another area of improvement, has been the fact that a lot of customers will buy a small environment, the very minimum. They'll buy two hosts even though we recommend a three-host minimum. When they do finally but more hosts, the processors have changed and they have to dumb down the newer processors using EVC. I'd, therefore, like to see VMware come up with a better way of handling newer hosts. I think that that would really allow more scalability.

Now, obviously a lot of people are moving to the cloud and scalability is a moot point, especially for smaller businesses. I have a customer for whom we're moving their environment into the cloud, and they'll be completely in the cloud next year with vCloud. This would eliminate the need to purchase additional hardware that may be incompatible because of processors. That also affects the scalability of vSphere.

I used to say that Cisco has the best technical support until I started working with VMware. I'd say now that there's no better technical support than VMware. Sometime it may take them a little bit of time to find the answer because they consult their team members, but that doesn't bother me. During that time I will have done my own due diligence and researching, but it makes me feel a little better that the answer wasn't obvious. A lot of times, though, they come right back with an answer right away. That says a lot.

vSphere 5.1 was pretty difficult to set up with the introduction of SSO, but 6.0 has simplified that. It's very easy to set up and there are good guides for it. When I install it for my customers, I have them sit and watch so they can learn what's going on. We use it as a teaching opportunity.

Don't just buy the minimum because you need the best clustering capabilities, which includes having at least one host to be in maintenance mode while the other two are running the business.

I'd also advise that you purchase DRS and HA. For example, with DRS, you don't have to manually balance the load all the time and trying to keep the host balanced out.

Backup is obviously an essential part, so I always recommend Veeam, which works very well with VMware. A lot of people think they can do snapshots on their array and that will be their backup, but it's not. for DR, they can use vCloud Air to copy data offsite so they don't have to deal with traditional tape backup or disk-based backups. Plus, having backups offsite means that viruses like BitLocker won't affect your backups.

I'm very happy with VMware.

• vMotion
• HA
• Snapshots

In the past without virtualization, it normally took several hours to get a new server built, including cabling, racking and OS imaging. Now we can use templates with many OS flavours and we can get a new server running in few minutes.

Currently we are struggling to keep the storage capacity under control and as we do not use thin provisioning our capacity is always a challenge, but the actual used space by the guests is pretty low. We need to find a way to go to thin provisioning and keep that under control and implement automation on the capacity management and have threshold alerting.

I've been using VMware for seven years.

We have no problems deploying vSphere.

So far, I only had problems with stability when we implemented a third-party backup tool that uses VMware snapshots to take backups. It brought some instability to some guests at the beginning and it took us some weeks to get to the root cause and things back to an acceptable level of stability.

This is a very good solution and I work for a company with a global ELA with VMware. But as our contract and all our commercial team is in the US, we have a limited number of vouchers for training and events in Brazil.

The technical support is good and they always provide good suggestions and technical recommendations and the response time for critical problems has always fair been fair.

I have never tried a different server or datacenter virtualization solution before.

I was not a part of the initial set-up or project team. I work on the operations team and I have only been a part of migration team when moving from old versions to newer ones, but I have never had problems.

You should have good capacity management and you might have at least two clusters or more to separate your guests by tiers or have a good notion of resource pools to keep the resource utilization in good shape.

You should understand what is your demand and plan your capacity and resource allocation carefully to avoid double work in the near future.

• vMotion
• DRS
• DB switch

We’re able to leverage it for our main corporate IT infrastructure and deploying across nine smaller remote offices. We can cluster storage and make it HA-aware, and don’t need local IT staff at remote office.

For most part, pretty good, but UI could be improved. Has GUI geared towards Linux, would like to see GUI for Windows so that Windows admin can install.

Rock solid. Small issues where ESXi host re-booted, but probably related to internal configuration.

Can add multiple ESXi hosts and expand from there. We started with a minimum three node cluster with HP as backbone for storage for blueprint. We were able to move from a 1GBPS network 10 GBPS. We have now gotten up to 30-40 total nodes between all sites, but the main datacenter has 15-20 nodes.

We contact them once in a while, and have always had a good impression. Some colleagues though, have had issues however.

We were a Hyper-V shop but switched, because more robust. VMware is a gamechagner in virtualization.

It's a little bit complicated at the beginning because we did some of it on our own, and we could have engaged professional services to ease that pain. Some of the complications from a networking piece, which were a little confusing. Also confusing, was the difference between thick and thin provisioning. Logic says you should thin provision, but after taking the classes, we probably should have gone with thick provisioning.

The product is good, but the licensing gets confusing. As a technician, I don’t want to have to worry about the licensing side. If I purchase something, just tell me how many licenses I have left whenever I add a server, just something simple like that.

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.

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

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.