VMware vSphere Reviews

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.

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.