VMware vSphere Reviews

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.

The most important accomplishment was the cost savings that were achieved by server consolidation and eliminating dependency on the physical server's environment. This also facilitated our disaster recovery by easy replication of the VM images from one site to another.

VMware's high availability which supports our SLA, VMware on the fly features like LUN expansion, P2V and API integrations are the most valuable features.

The solution could benefit by expanding the CPUs and memory from different physical nodes. A more mature dashboard is needed; currently, we rely on third-party VM Management Solutions but most of the features have matured since we first started using it in 2007.

In the early years, we faced few issues but in the last four years, the environment has been quite stable.

The software has been scalable, most of it depends on the physcial server's capacity.

Technical support has been excellent.

We did not use another solution; we started out with VMware and we now have Hyper-V and VMware.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Pricing needs to be competitive since Microsoft Hyper-V has come a long way; they are both around the same price range.

We did not evaluate other solutions, it was the only leading product in 2007.

If you need to meet your business SLA, then there is no second choice in virtualization to give you peace of mind; it is easy to manage, scalable, stable and has APIs to integrate with all the backup solutions.

VMware is the market leader in virtualization. I like the following vMotion improvements in the current version:

• vMotion across virtual switches: There are no restrictions now to migrate VMs across switches (standard/distributed). It is valuable to me for an upgrade or when moving my datacenter.
• vMotion across vCenter Servers: This leverages the migration with unshared storage. In simple terms, VM1 is running on a certain host/cluster, which runs on a certain datastore and is managed by vCenter 1. It can be vMotioned to different ESXi hosts, which have different datastores managed by another vCenter server, called vCenter 2.
• Long Distance vMotion: I can now perform reliable migrations between hosts and sites that are separated by high network round-trip latency times. This is an official definition. For me, it helps me to manage main and DR sites simultaneously and in an effective way.

• Reduces the data center footprint: Fewer servers and less power consumption
• Reduces the overall footprint of your entire data center

They still have restrictions on fault tolerance features and managing snapshots.

I've been using VMware products since 2009 and this version for more than six months.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

I am satisfied with the technical support. Some support cases needed to be escalated, but overall it is good.

I used different solutions from different vendors. VMware products are the most stable/scalable products on the market. VMware can integrate easily with other vendors.

The setup was easy. Some basics should be taken into consideration first.

Just focus on the features you need. Sometimes we misunderstand feature and pricing equations.

I tested it myself in my lab. Also, I visited some companies which work with this product to see it in action.

This solution has lots of features. Just be aware of all of them and you will get the most out of it.