VMware vSphere Reviews

There are several features we've found valuable, including:

• DRS
• SDRS
• vDS
• Resource pool sharing

By engaging virtualization and vSphere's advanced features, we've started to effectively manage workload and resources, resulting in better performance with fine grained tuning.

One of the features I would like to see is less constraints on the fault tolerance feature. Version 6 may have this, but we don't have it yet.

I've used it for four years.

We haven't had issues with deployment.

It's been stable for us.

It's scaled sufficiently for us.

We haven’t have many interactions with customer support. For the ones we had, it was satisfactory.

We haven’t have many interactions with technical support. For the ones we had, it was satisfactory.

We already had knowledge of the product on the team, so it was easy for us.

We're working with a Hardware-as-a-Service model where we're responsible for the software and VMware is responsible for the hardware. We implemented vSphere together with the vendor.

We considered using Xen/KVM, but we didn’t want to spend much time on the configuration and wanted to start working on the product out of the box.

I would recommend analysis of different options and pricing, including public/private-cloud models. Depending on your application and needs, you may not need such an advanced product as vSphere Enterprise.

• DRS
• High Availability
• Overall reliability

The best improvement overall is the ability to rapidly provision servers due to the decoupling of servers from physical hardware. We have saved countless hours of time at the data centers racking and stacking servers.

Recent releases have had significant bugs, which ends up significantly delaying the deployment of new versions. In particular, with vSphere 6, there is an all-paths down related bug that is preventing us from upgrading. The VMware Update Manager component of vCenter desperately needs to be deployed as part of the vCenter Server Appliance, not requiring Windows Server and SQL Server.

I've used it for six years.

No issues with deployment. It is almost too easy. The same with subsequent upgrades.

We have not encountered any issue with stability, however, this is a direct result of watching for reports of others experiencing issues. We take a very cautious approach to upgrades so that we don't experience some of the issues that would impact stability

We have not had any issues with scalability. We have seen significant performance improvements over time allowing us to increase our consolidation ratios.

All aspects of being a VMware customer have been excellent. We have a very engaged sales team who will bring the correct resources to the table when we need to discuss solutions.

The technical support is excellent. The few times we have engaged technical support have resulted in the appropriate engineer being assigned quickly and the person has followed through to resolution of the issue.

We previously used VMware Server. We switched to vSphere ESXi because of the scalability and management enhancements. Additionally, it didn't need a separate operating system to manage.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was almost too easy. Once vCenter is up and running, creating the first cluster was simple. There is very good documentation from VMware and many other resources available online to assist with selecting the correct configuration options.

All aspects of our VMware environment have been implemented using in-house resources.

As a small organization, we don't track specific ROI. What I can say is that we most definitely would have spent a significant amount more money and time if we continued using physical servers instead of virtual servers.

For rapidly growing organizations like ours, virtualization is critical to meeting internal and external customer demands. The licensing might seem to be expensive, but the stability and excellent technical support make up for the costs

We considered Red Hat's KVM offering. The different subscription models (license plus maintenance for VMware vs annual support for Red Hat) would have resulted in more money spent on Red Hat in year six, and every year thereafter.

I would advise anyone who is interesting in implementing virtualization using VMware's products to try it. We started using the free licensing without support and were extremely satisfied with the ability to rapidly provision resources. We then purchased licensing and support to better manage the environment and have grown to 50 licensed hosts.

• vMotion
• High Availability
• Storage vMotion
• DRS

We have v5.5 in production, and v6 in test.

As we are resellers of VMware, we will be migrating customers to v6 in the future. This is to keep in line with new features and better performance in new versions

I would like to have the old vSphere client back as it is a great client to use. Sometimes the web GUI can be a bit clunky along with the newer client.

I used it for two months in a test scenario.

It was fine.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Technical support with VMware is very good. Once they have the logs from your system they will come back with a solution fast.

We used a previous version of VMware.

We've only deployed v6 in a lab environment, but it was easy to deploy, and there was no major differences to v5.5

We did it in-house.

None as of yet but hopefully we will see one.

No other products were evaluated.

I would advise you to implement it as I believe it's still the best in virtualization for expandability and usability.

• 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.

The entire virtualization element has allowed us to utilize the hardware more efficiently.

Instead of having one application for every physical host, we can run 30-40 on the same physical host.

I think the updates allowing me to run through the VCSA appliance could be better.

Fantastic – I love vMotion.

Its been working out great for us.

Our technical support is through HP, but we've had very few issues, and it's been great for us.

It was way too easy.

We look at the price point per performance, performance first and then how much it costs.

We looked at Red Hat but the VMware solution worked out better for us.

Storage vMotion and vMotion are the greatest of use in my current role; however, the most prevalent features would have to be Fault Tolerance, SRM and DRS.

In my current role, VMware has been used to reduce the overall physical footprint of the environment as well as ease the management aspect of all the virtual environments we used to house. In previous roles, it not only improved the aforementioned pieces but it also improved availability time lines in a significant fashion.

The room for improvement would be just like they did with the C# (thick) client back in 2.5.1 and 3.X, they need to work on the speed of the web client as they are moving towards a distributed management environment. The C# client had its issues back in its inception so they are going through the same growing pains again with the web client. Other than that, I would like to see a stripped down version of DRS brought into the Standard licensing model as the jump from a Standard license to an Enterprise (or Enterprise Plus) license is enormous.

I’ve been using VMware in an enterprise workspace since version 2.5.1 in 2005. I have since had experience with version 3.5, 4, 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0. I'm also currently using vCenter Server 6.0.0A and B.

No issues were encountered in the latest migrations that have been performed but this is due to previous experience.

VMware has a great customer service department. If you use a trusted partner hardware (ie, HP in my experience) for your servers, they will also assist in diving into the hardware aspect of the issues you are faced with to hopefully resolve the problem. I’ve always found the VMware support has been there when I needed them. Their response times are very good and the knowledge each support engineer I’ve worked with has been more than satisfactory. I haven’t run into a “blame game” with support while using VMware.

At my current employer, they used to use Hyper-V 2008. We migrated to VMware due to a more robust feature set and the fact that, yes Hyper-V has a lot of the features that VMware does but, once deployment is complete, VMware is a clearly more stable product than Hyper-V in the long run. I’ve seen and been involved with a few Hyper-V migrations that go from VMware to Hyper-V and after six to 12 months, most of those installations wanted to migrate back to VMware.

The initial installation and setup of an ESXi server is very straightforward. When you start getting into the implementation of a vCenter Server you find all the “nooks and crannies” of the installation that are available. It is definitely more complex with a vCenter Server but that is mostly only if you are using all the features available to you. If you just use vCenter for managing multiple hosts at an Essentials license, it isn’t very complex at all.

We implemented using an in-house team (myself). The advice I have is: When you are building a virtualization environment, be it VMware, HyperV, Citrix, KVM, etc., you need to make sure you build the hosts that are going to run the environment properly. Along with that, you need to make sure the storage infrastructure and network are healthy prior to performing an upgrade. If you “cheap” out on any of those aspects, the deployment will suffer in some way.

Yes, we evaluated Hyper-V 2012. From previous experience as well as feedback from the community we decided to move forward with VMware.

Robust, functional, reliable, ease of use, good value.

Exponentially easier to manage servers.

Since 2009.

None

None

None

Excellent.

Excellent.

No - prior was physical one up servers.

Straightforward.

In-house plus one consultant.

Considered Hyper V.

Plan for more storage than you think, use flash, use 10gbE SFP+ to SANs - well worth it.