VMware vSphere Reviews

The most valuable features for us are HA, DRS, and SDRS.

We have reduced our number of physical servers from 180 to 20, saving us cost and resources in our data center.

I'd suggest improvements in a couple of areas. First, the Web Client is too slow. Also, they need to improve vRealize Operations Manager.

I've used it for almost 2 years.

We were unsuccessful in a few setups, for example, installing on SD cards in some UCS blades. I think, though, that the problem was related to hardware and not to the setup process.

It’s very rare that the hypervisor has stability problems.

Only with big VMs -- over 64 GB of RAM or with disks over 2 TB -- are there scalability issues.

I've not got enough experience to comment on the level of customer service.

I’ve always received good service form technical support.

I’ve used different hypervisors and also previous versions of vSphere. I think that vSphere is the most complete and stable solution for enterprise customers.

Personally, I find the initial setup too simple, but I’ve worked several years on different versions.

I’ve implemented vSphere in my company and for several customers.

I think that in the past there have been some mistakes in the licensing policy. I hope that in the future it will be simpler.

We have migrated from the previous version without evaluating other products. For our development environment, we are evaluating whether or not to migrate to a product without license costs.

For a customer who needs to have a stable infrastructure that's scalable, for very critical applications, I recommend vSphere without a doubt. I would also recommend that you request a VMware Partner to design and implement the solution.

The most valuable features are high availability and DRS.

• High availability: High availability is particularly valuable to my company because I know that if one of my hosts should fail, we will experience minimal interruption. The VMs affected will be booted back up in minutes on another host. This is critical to our business continuity.
• DRS: Prevents us from having to micromanage the placement of our VMs. They stay running in optimal spaces on our hosts. If we were to license Fault Tolerance (FT), we could potentially lose a host and have all the VMs continue to run without interruption. However, this is unnecessary in our line of business.

It allows multiple VM servers to live and move across several hosts, as resources change.

I would like to see better licensing and less complexity of use.

• Licensing: Any licensing after essentials plus becomes very granular. In turn, it is very expensive to license the features that you want. This is unfortunate, because IT for most companies is perceived as a “black hole” for costs. It becomes hard to justify because you cannot directly pin a value to it. Because of the perception, it is sometimes difficult to approve such large purchases, especially for something you can’t physically hold in your hands.
• Complexity: There is a benefit in having granular controls. In many cases, this is largely unnecessary. You may need to look for a feature that maybe you don’t have to change often. Maybe you only have to change it once. You can sometimes spend large amounts of time and effort to find it, which can be fairly frustrating.

We have used this solution for about six years.

There have been some stability issues. Adding plugins and vendor modules sometimes causes some pretty unexpected results.

There have been some scalability issues. The Essentials Plus licensing is very restrictive and has no upgrade paths to other licensing models.

Technical support is very good. That is, if you can get a support rep on the phone in a timely manner with whom you can overcome language barriers.

The initial setup was fairly easy. Adding on and configuring made it complex pretty quickly.

Skip Essentials and Essentials Plus. You will outgrow it, and then you will be stuck with a very expensive jump to Professional.

Consider alternatives like AHV before jumping in feet first.

Inventory, vMotion, and cloning are the most valuable for me. Customization of VM's which include joining machines to multiple domains, changing names, IP address information, and post operation using Powershell scripts. I like the single pane of glass view for management

VM cloning speed is excellent and has allowed me to provide easy of use and speed when cloning one or more VM's using PowerCli.

I honestly can’t think of anything right now, it provides the access and management tools I need and keeps them in easy reach.

I've used it for five to six years.

It’s been very stable.

No experience of scaling.

It’s been great, no issues, they’re fast and straightforward.

It has always been vCenter, they were in a Rackspace physical environment beforehand.

I wasn’t involved.

I’ve always used VMware ever since the beginning, so I’m biased and I think they have a great product. I’ve played with Hyper-V and it’s just way behind in my opinion. Download them and try them all out and see if you like using the tool daily. Research and troubleshoot well.

It’s rock solid and there’s nothing in its class in terms of alternatives.

• Training is really great
• Ease of use
• Ease of implementation

It's opened up new services for us that we can offer to our customers. We've moved all our secondary products to virtual environments, so we're able to offer other physical hardware, and have our system simplified.

I'm not a big fan of the web client, and would have liked to have had them stick with the Windows client, as the web one is quite a bit different.

It's very stable, and just works which is one of the reasons we went with it instead of MS Hyper-V. It's more robust and feature rich than Hyper-V too.

Very scalable, and we can serve a wide range of clients with budgets ranging from $20 million to $20 billion.

They're knowledgable, and willing to help, but it's not as instantaneous as I’d like, but they do eventally answer.

It's very easy. I wan't involved in the early stages, and I came in when v5 was in place and when lots of infrastructure was already set up.

I’d recommend it, but take time evaluating to see which parts you need, as it can be a little more expensive, but it seems to work. Also, be sure to have a lengthy POC.

Nothing’s perfect, and they are docked points for moving to a web client. Also, single sign-on is unfriendly, and there were growing pains.

Old school stuff - power savings, ability to consolidate, licensing savings, and ease of management. All the new features are great, but they’re just iterations of an already awesome product.

It provides us a global standardization, ease of management on a global level, and helps our remote sites for those who don’t have a sufficient tech level.

The core savings is huge and allows for quick and deep provisioning. It’s getting harder and harder to remember how physical servers work.

Ditch flash-based web client, make it HTML5. Would like more customization of the web client to make it do what I want. I occasionally flip to the old client because I know it. Web client is a better solution, but it's not done right.

Make training more accessible. Right now very expensive and hard to see the value. Lowering cost would be huge.

Extremely stable. There’s occasional bugs, but very rare.

Very scalable, eventually do run into licensing costs, but the platform itself is scalable, almost infinitely. The business around it limits scalability.

Used tech support on couple of occasions, but no system-down type issues, just minor bugs.

Easy to set up, not difficult, but more difficult to implement it the right way, especially for larger organizations, but that’s just knowing the platform. You have to do homework, and know what you’re doing. If you link vCenter, you must make sure, for example, to do it correctly (like MS SQL, you must know to separate logs and data files, etc.).

It loses points on cost, as there are free solutions, but we don’t want to use them.

Depending on the size and budget, if there's a smaller shop with less money, and you could get by with just a couple VMs, vSphere would be difficult to recommend. But if you're larger with more money, it’s the best platform for virtualization and cloud integration. VMware is further along than anyone else in this regard.

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.