VMware vSphere Reviews

VMware vSphere is primarily used for server virtualization and automation.

The most valuable features are the virtualization and the performance on the virtualization platform.

Both the price and the licensing fee are expensive, especially for our clients with a smaller workload.

I have been working with VMware vSphere for 14 years.

We have versions ranging from ESX 3.0 to the most recent one.

We have clients who use various deployment methods, including cloud, hybrid, and on-premises. 

VMware vSphere is a reliable solution.

It is easy to scale.

We scale with VMware vSphere as well as vSAN.

We have customers with hundreds of servers running on vSphere.

We have contacted technical support many times.

Technical support is responsive. I would rate them an eight or nine out of ten.

We are system integrators. We use a wide range of hardware and products.

On a daily basis, we work with servers, virtualization, VMware, and EMC storage boxes, as well as pure storage.

Our clients have tried Hyper-V as well and other solutions, but the consistency is better and there are fewer issues with the vSphere interface.

The initial setup is not complex. 

It may be complex for the users, but not for the IT person; it is not a problem, and at all difficult

The licensing and pricing need to be improved. 

The price is not an issue for our mid-sized or large-sized customers, but it can be expensive for our smaller customers.

Virtualization fulfills the requirements very well.

I would rate VMware vSphere a 10 out of 10.

We are resellers of VMware products. We sell both VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN.

This solution is used for infrastructure virtualization. It is deployed to get the most benefits of our hardware or for the user's hardware.

It is easy to use.

The features are very rich.

I would like to see it more open to working with other platforms.

They could improve the pricing. The license could be cheaper.

They have multiple components required for the setup. It would be better to integrate it into one solution, especially for small business companies.

I have been acquainted with vSphere for two years.

It's a stable product.

It's a scalable solution. We have between 10 and 20 users.

Technical support is fine.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Depending on the environment, it can take a couple of days to complete the installation and configuration.

We have a team of two engineers to complete the entire setup.

It's a perpetual license paid on a yearly basis.

A customer can buy a license and support on a yearly basis.

The pricing should be more flexible and more affordable for the customer.

I can recommend vSphere to other users who are looking into implementing it.

I would rate VMware vSphere an eight out of ten.

It is a private cloud and it's on a standalone Bare Metal system. On the private cloud environment we provide virtualized computers for different users.

The features that I have found most valuable are the overall good ease of use and the good interface which makes it very easy to migrate from one bare metal to another. These are the two things which I like about it. There are certain things as well which I don't like.

In terms of what could be improved, they should improve their storage management part. vSphere has its own file system type, called VMSS, and that file system doesn't report on proper data usage or things like that. There are certain loopholes wherein it sometimes shows you erroneous data. Again, their VMSS file system, their data storage management system, and its reporting must be improved a lot.

There are certain features which are called VCE which are available as a separate suite for this VMware cloud. The networking is almost integrated within the vSphere so it would be really helpful for the implementation team if they also had an orchestration for a different storage. There might be multiple OEM storage in the back-end, for example, that could connect with the vSphere while the vSphere shows it to the front-end user as a single storage. There is a lot of scope in terms of managing hybrid storage at the back-end of vSphere.

I have been using VMware vSphere for around six years.

VMware vSphere is stable in terms of the computer virtualization and it's also scalable. We can go ahead and make HA clusters, but as I said, in terms of the storage stability, there are certain issues because sometimes it gets confused when showing you the actual status. The back-end of the CLI shows you certain data and the front-end shows you different data. That's where there are certain issues with the reliability, but otherwise, it is quite robust and it's scalable.

We have more than 60 people using the different platforms. The functions include several web developers and a lot of finance applications which are running on Oracle and on different RDBMS's.

They have a wonderful technical support team. Additionally, there are a lot of blogs, forums and community support available over the internet where you do get a lot of support as well. So it's not always necessary to reach out to their technical assistance team. They also have wonderful documentation available that is quite helpful in terms of resolving a lot of issues.

This was a first implementation of vSphere for us. They have a hybrid environment where there is a Hyper-V running their Oracle with VirtualBox running across. We found this to be much stronger and much easier to deploy and hence we thought to continue with it.

Also it supports a wide range of operating systems.

The initial setup is very simple, not complex.

I would say from a completely blank bare metal to the private cloud, it took us around a few hours. Not more than that.

We implemented it ourselves.

I would recommend VMware vSphere to potential buyers. I will always do that. It's highly recommended to go with the entire vSphere Cloud Suite rather than only just going with the Hypervisor. But if you go with the entire suite, it's really wonderful.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate VMware vSphere an eight.

We are using vSphere to virtualize our workloads.

The most valuable features are the resilience of the solution and vMotion.

I would like to have replication between sites available in the standard version.

We have been using vSphere for more than five years.

We use it on a daily basis and it seems stable most of the time.

All of our servers and products run using vSphere. It is easy to scale.

Support for the product is not good enough. It should be faster and more efficient.

This is the only solution of this type that we have used.

The initial setup was simple, but you have to develop it before you begin to install it.

The deployment took us approximately one week.

We shared the implementation with a partner.

We do the maintenance, although we did have a problem one time that we escalated to the vendor.

The price of this solution is mid-range. There are additional features that can be purchased for an extra charge. For example, if you want replication between sites then you have to pay more.

In summary, this is a good product and I recommend it because it's resilient and you do not have many products to install.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily use VMware vSphere just for hosting purposes. We are data center. We create virtual machines and give them to our clients. We deal mostly in gaming.

We only have one virtual machine and we're still exploring it. Overall, it's a super product.

The initial setup is easy.

The product offers good stability.

The solution is too expensive for us and we don't have any funds to direct towards it. We just started the company, which makes it hard to explore the solution the way we want to with the amount of cost involved to do so. They should work to make the licensing more affordable.

I want to be able to use OpenStack, however, I can't do that without vCenter, and it's so cost-prohibitive for us, it's become a problem.

We've only faced one technical issue. That is downloading the virtual machines and uploading the virtual machines. It takes a lot of time and we cannot transfer the VMware from one machine or directly from one server to another. That action requires vCenter. That may only be an issue on the free version and not the pro version. On the pro version, you have much better features. 

It would be ideal if they could integrate billing software so that clients can customize it directly on the virtual machine. Billing should also be done automatically. Perhaps this is already the case, however, I haven't really had a chance to explore it fully.

While I'm currently on the free version, I'd like to have the ability to explore the pro version to see what is on offer there.

I've been working with the solution for the last three years.

The product is very stable. We don't have issues with bugs or glitches and it doesn't fail or crash. It's reliable.

The solution may be scalable. However, we haven't personally attempted to scale anything due to our general lack of funds and the expansiveness of the product. Therefore, I can't really speak to scalability so much.

I'm currently also working with another product called KVM. It's much more affordable than vSphere.

The initial setup is not difficult or complex. We found it to be straightforward and easy.

The solution is extremely expensive, especially for startups such as ours, who don't have the capacity to invest so much in such a product.

Overall, I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. Everything it does, it does very well, even among all of the competition that exists in India. However, price-wise, for us, it's not ideal.

I haven't explored much, however, from what I have seen, they really do cover everything.

The primary use cases for the solution are all of our production and DTQ. 

We're not using any of the built-in security features.

We run 3,000 VMs. It works for what we need it to do. All of our retail point-of-sale stuff, the back-end for that, is on VMware. We're retail, so everything is run in virtual.

The vSphere Client always feels slow, and/or like it doesn't keep up with what I'm trying to do. So I usually use the thick client most of the time.

I'm looking forward to some of the new features on 6.7 where you can record your actions in the Client and then it will spit out all the code. So if you want a script of what you just did, it gives you all the code for that. That's probably the one thing I'm looking forward to the most in the 6.7.

I feel that it's stable. We haven't had any downtime because of the VMware.

It's scalable.

Technical support is helpful. I get through to the right people and they are able to give me the support I need.

It's the only virtual solution I've ever used.

We use vSphere to manage our virtual servers. We have about 50 spread across our main company as well as another company that we own. We use them to manage the applications which are attached to different tasks.

It makes managing your virtual servers easier and more centralized.

• Usability
• Convenience

It could use a smaller learning curve.

It has been very stable since we did the most recent upgrade.

It is scalable.

I would definitely recommend the product. 

We use vSphere to virtualize or server workloads. We use the solution for all our mission-critical applications. We're an airline so our main application servers for running the airline are all virtualized on vSphere.

We don't utilize the built-in security features such as VM Encryption and support for TPM and VBS.

It decreased our overhead for our data center sizing, and it also increased our productivity by being able to deploy applications in a much more timely manner. We have also seen performance boosts. Although I can't give you an accurate number, I would estimate it at about a 40 percent increase.

Some of the most valuable features are 

• the ability to Snapshot so that when we do updates we have a layer of protection for simplified rollback
• the replication that we can leverage for data center failures and data center downtime
• the ease of migrating workloads from physical device to physical device for maintenance that we have to do on physical servers.

The stability of vSphere is fantastic. Over the 10 years that we've been utilizing vSphere, we haven't had a loss, or any downtime, of a critical application, based on the reliability and the flexibility of vSphere.

The scalability is also fantastic. We're able to add resources so that we can grow our clusters and provide more resources to our organization and to our business units. We're able to grow our application sets when required.

We have used the technical support and we haven't had any issues. Every time we've called, we have been directed to the correct servicing department and they have been able to resolve our issues in a timely fashion.

We were just utilizing physical servers with manual deployment of applications. By moving to vSphere, now it's just: Deploy VM from a template, or clone a VM now. Whereas previously, we had to order a physical hardware, wait for the arrival, deploy that into the data center, configure it. Now all of that has gone away.

I was one of the original architects deploying vSphere in our organization. At first, it seemed complex, but as we got a little more familiar with the product it became very straightforward on how to add resources and configure workloads to run on vSphere.

The biggest ROI is the decrease of the physical server in our data center. By reducing that physical server, we're able to reduce our network infrastructure, we're able to reduce the footprint in the data center, and that allows us to recover costs in just operating that data center.

At the time, Hyper-V was putting its foot in the water and Citrix was another competitor. But VMware just seemed to be a little more on - I don't want to say on the cutting edge - but they were the leader in the space at the time so we decided to evaluate them. The evaluation went fantastically so we decided to choose them as our vendor.

The advice I would give is: This is the only solution that you need to evaluate.

I'd have to say that vSphere is a 9 out of 10, just because of its flexibility and ease of use. We can slide in new resources without any impact. We can do maintenance on our clusters without any impact to applications, and we have the flexibility of migrating those workloads to other data centers, when required, in the case of data center downtime.