VMware vSphere Reviews

vSphere allows us to virtualize our campus servers and our student environment. We run vCenter within vSphere, so we have about 300 or 400 student desktop workstations that we run at any given time. We are able to customize our students' experience very quickly, very easily, and are able to make it mobile from different computer labs on campus.

We're also exploring opening it up so students would be able to remote into their VDI workstations from offsite. We're also looking into wrapping everything up with Workspace ONE, so we can virtualize more applications and let them have more of an MDM experience as well.

We're not really virtualizing the apps themselves, yet. We're trying to move towards that. Our mission-critical things rely on our servers that we have virtualized. We have web servers, security servers, database servers that we have virtualized and that makes it easier for us to back up and maintain them. Really, vSphere plays a part in our management.

We have seen a performance boost. As we keep moving up to different versions it gets more seamless, it gets easier to maintain, to do updates to our virtual environment and to the physical end. We're also moving towards virtual storage. Moving to flash arrays and virtual storage is even speeding up our students' experience when using the virtual desktops. I would estimate a 25 percent boost.

Another benefit we've seen is with our IT technicians. It used to be this IT was assigned to a specific area, and that was what they worked on. They had 300 or 400 machines that they would have to run around to, to maintain them; re-image them every semester. Now, with the virtual environment, they are able to keep more up-to-date on their applications, on their Windows updates, and do it in the background. They are able to refresh entire labs within less than an hour, rather than sitting there all day or all week refreshing all of the labs.

We have a better, faster management. We have more productivity from our IT staff and more productivity from our students, as well.

Ease of support is one of the main features that we have with it. We're able to take Snapshots before doing updates to make it easy to roll back if something does happen to go wrong.

The visibility that we have of our VMs is also important. What's being applied? Who has management of them? Laying it out in a virtual environment allows us to customize for our students. We're able to respond to the students' needs much more quickly than we could in a physical environment.

I found it a little bit daunting at first when I was coming into it raw, but now the management of it is very simple.

I would like to see a little bit more visibility regarding errors. When an error does occur, there are times where it says "Unknown error" or something to that effect, and it doesn't necessarily give you a lot of metrics. If you go online and you give a description of it, normally the VMware forums can help you find out what it is, but I'd like to see a little bit more visibility from the software itself regarding what's going on: "This went wrong, this is why."

The downtime that we have experienced has not been that much, and normally it's the result of a mistake on our part, not necessarily the software. We've misconfigured something or we haven't thought about a configuration setting that we should have put in place or we didn't do our research. It's not normally the software that has a problem. When we do have a software glitch, it is normally a reboot and it's back up and running, so we have not had much downtime.

So far, we've really enjoyed the scalability of it. The main thing that we have to accommodate for is licensing, making sure that we have enough license to cover our expansion.

Otherwise, we just throw a few more hard drives into our server array and make sure that we have enough storage.

On those occasions where we do run into a problem, we have had great help from VMware's customer support. Recently I had problems getting new certificates for our servers to be able to bring them into our vSphere and Horizon environment. VMware support was able to help me diagnose what was going wrong with those, come up with a plan for the future to be able to more accurately get the certificates I needed, and integrate them into the environment.

I would rate the technical support a solid eight out of 10, maybe even nine. They are responsive, always quick to answer questions, and knowledgeable.

I don't think we were using anything before vSphere. I think we led off with it. My partner was thinking for a time about Microsoft, but he decided that Hyper-V wasn't for us and we went with VMware, and we haven't regretted it a day since.

Pricing can be an issue in terms of scalability, depending on how quickly you want to expand. If you budget every year, put some aside that you know you need to get another host and you plan for it, then it shouldn't be that hard. If you're going to try to all of a sudden say, "I want to add six hosts to my environment," then it's going to a little bit pricey and you're not going to want to spend the budget on it.

Plan your environment well, determine what your needs are, and then try to bump that up by 20 percent; give yourself a little bit of future expanding. That way you don't have to leap off and buy a lot right away. Budget for the future if you can. Put a little bit away here and there. Look at the virtual storage, you will save yourself a lot of headaches on configuring. The physical storage can be a pain. The virtual storage, once you get it in place then you don't have to manage it much.

Make sure that you really have spec'd out your ESXi host so it can support your environment. Normally, that's been fairly easy. Companies like HPE and Lenovo are more than eager to help you make sure that you have a server that is spec'd out for the VMware environment, and help you get solid on what you need.

We haven't done a lot with the built-in security and encryption yet, but from what I've been looking at so far in vSphere 6.7, it looks like something that we would like to integrate. Before I became an analyst I helped manage TPM and BitLocker on laptops. It was a pain. It had to touch each device physically. I'm looking forward to 6.7 where I can utilize TPM 2.0 and encrypt all of my stations on the fly, and make it a more seamless experience.

We are not using VMware Cloud on AWS. Being just a local community college, it's a little bit expensive for us right now, but one day we would like to.

The product is a good, solid nine out of 10. The only reason I would knock it down any is, as I said, I wish the error messages would, at times, be a little bit more verbose and more explainable.

It's running mission-critical and business-critical workloads for our customers, and the experience has been positive.

The mission-critical apps include core banking systems, core healthcare systems, artificial intelligence. And highly transactional workloads are also great fits for vSphere 6.7.

We've seen an increase of about five to ten percent for the mission-critical apps. Their code is a lot more optimized now that they're using it in the public cloud with VMware Cloud on AWS.

In our organization, the lifecycle management has improved. What that means is our customers are spending a lot less time on "keeping the lights on." Day 2 Operations are being simplified a lot.

• The move towards feature-parity with HTML5 for the user interface.
• Also, increasing the release of features, which is partly through the use of that technology stack with VMware Cloud on AWS, so it's a much more robust product right now.
• It is a lot more simple and efficient to manage. It has improved a lot from the early days of vSphere 5.x. Lifecycle management and reducing the number of clicks that an administrator has to do to actually do a task have been greatly optimized, particularly with the HTML5 interface.
• In terms of more easily managing networks and improving visibility, the two go hand in hand. Compared to the vCloud Air days, it's come a long way. It's a solution that actually works now, and you can use your vSphere staff - who have been trained on and understand vSphere - to actually consume that hybrid cloud with very little or no training.

vSphere is the Rolls Royce of hypervisors. Moving forward, they just need to continue integrating and simplifying that user interface experience. With VMware Cloud Foundation, that's the Day 2 lifecycle management. You've got the VMC offering that's obviously all public cloud. They need to keep on integrating the APIs and simplifying the user experience. And they're definitely moving towards the one-click experience that you have with other technology vendors.

The stability has been good. Now that the VMC on AWS codestream is 6.7, and they're following a DevOps methodology, the stability of vSphere obviously has increased greatly.

It scales very well. Now, with vSphere 6.7, it's 128 hosts. Talk about scale with vSphere is now a non-issue. Typically what we do with our customers is deploy vSan clusters, typically 20 to 30 hosts, because that's a natural failure domain. Going beyond that, it really makes no sense, because you want to have separate failure domains.

In the early 6.x days, their support went down. Now with 6.7, being with VMware Cloud on AWS, their support level has increased, because they've had to. It's definitely a better experience now.

Regarding knowing that it is time to switch to this solution, our customers tend to be existing vSphere customers. End-of-life, end-of-support tend to be the trigger for, "Okay, we need to upgrade our infrastructure stack."

The other big trigger is end-of-life of the hardware stack that they're going with. That's typically a conversation about moving from legacy, three-tier infrastructure to a hyperconverged infrastructure stack. And then there's a hypervisor conversation about the best-of-breed to use to meet their business requirements.

Nutanix AHV, Hyper-V is commonly on the list, and Red Hat KVM is the other one.

Partner with the right partner because not all partners are the same. And have a strategy in mind. Have a design in place, the logical design. What functions are you trying to achieve? What business problems are you trying to solve? And then go ahead and do your due diligence with testing, etc. Once you involve the partner and you're implementing, make sure you have proper testing, have a soft launch, and then a go-live, so that you've got a risk-free solution.

That's where a lot of customers go wrong. They don't do their due diligence, and they don't properly launch, and they have the wrong partner that they partnered with, who is not quite up to the task of doing this type of thing.

For our customers that are very security conscious, in the financial space and the healthcare space, they typically will have clusters where TPM and virtual machine encryption are enabled to provide a more secure experience for those services.

We sell a lot of VMware Cloud on AWS. It integrates natively through hybrid cloud extensibility into VMC on AWS. That's actually been a big selling point with 6.7.

I rate the solution at nine out of ten. What would bring it up to a ten is feature-parity with the HTML5 interface.

I deal with the solution in my company to work in the area of data center virtualization.

The most valuable features of the solution are in areas like VMware vSphere vMotion and vSphere HA.

From what I know, the area revolving around the licensing part of the product is not quite friendly. The licenses for those who have a partnership with VMware are not a good thing because we have to use the tool for demos and simulate it in a customer environment. In our company's setup, considering that we have a partnership with VMware, it is very hard to have licenses, making it an area where improvements are required. VMware's NFR licenses were previously available for partners, and the tool used to provide demo centers within such licenses, but the aforementioned licensing structure for partners has been presently discontinued. The product should also provide the partners with the facility to provide the tool's demo in a test environment for customers.

The solution's technical team is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required.

I have been using VMware vSphere for five years. My company has a partnership with VMware.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight to nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Our company's main customers who work with the solution use it in sectors like banking, finance, and government.

My company deals with small, medium, and enterprise-sized customers who use the tool.

I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

The solution's technical team offers fairly good support in some cases, and in a few other cases, they need to offer more help, which is quite difficult to get, and it also depends on the support engineer our company gets.

Neutral

I rate the initial setup phase an eight on a scale of one to ten, where ten means that the setup was a very easy process.

The solution is deployed on the public cloud and hybrid cloud.

The tool's deployment phase takes time, as it is not a quick process. The tool's deployment phase takes a few days to be completed.

The tool is a bit expensive.

With VMware vSphere, it is easy to manage the scaling of our company's virtual infrastructure.

VMware vSphere helps our company's customers in the area of virtualization since it provides good scalability features. In the government sector, people need to engage in a lot of documentation work when purchasing new hardware, and it can be helpful to use the product in such a scenario. In any environment, the product is easy to scale for general usage.

VMware vSphere's high availability or FT feature is used by our company's customers in their clusters to keep their servers available as much as they can. The use of the product ensures minimum downtime, and its users prefer to use the high availability feature of the tool.

The performance and efficiency of the use of the solution have improved our company's customers' organizations. From the use of VMware vSphere, the performance and efficiency of your customers have increased by 30 to 40 percent.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

We are an IT consulting company who serves and sells IT services.

I am using the last version to understand the new features. Also, we are using it to improve our code for our VMware clients.

We are also using on VMware cloud on AWS inside POC.

It is very simple to manage.

Some of the benefits that we have seen are:

• HTML5
• Web Client
• It is fast and available.
• It works well and is reliable.
• The ESXi Quick Book is a good new feature because production people can quickly reboot the server, where previously it took a long time.

• There is no need to have an iSCSI client. Some people use it, but the industry is moving to HTML5 clients.

I am testing more products and advising my clients about what they should do and implement with the newest version of VMware.

The most valuable features are:

• ESXi Quick Boot
• VM encryption
• New security features.

The new feature announced today with vSphere Update 1 inside vSan is impressive. I did not have a chance to test Update 1 yet. We shall see how it performs in the next few days.

Because my server is too old, I am using my own lab for TPM. I did not have a good chance to test everything. VM encryption is quite simple to implement: Just check two boxes and it is done. It is very easy to do. If you want to move from on-premise to cloud, it is quite easy.

I put information on my blog stating that I would like more Amazon stuff inside of VMware. They have announced many thing that I am looking for today, so I am happy.

The stability is very impressive. VMware develops many stable products. That is why we participate in the beta product testing to make things better.

The scalability is very impressive. As usual, VMware is able to scale out and up all their solutions.

I do use the technical support, and so do my clients who receive good support. 

I did use in the past Hyper-V, KVM and XEN. I do prefer VMware for the maturity of their  solutions. VMware is also available inside all big cloud provider like Azure, AWS, Alibaba and IBM.

The initial setup is very straightforward. There isn't any complexity unless you have very old servers, then you won't be able to install the latest version of VMware 6.7 because of TPM.

VMWare is one of the most used solution all around the world, it is easy to found some expertise on the market. Ask for a VMware certified person like VCP ou VCAP this will garanty a good knowledge of your tech support.

Our ROI is good. 

There is an average performance boost, especially if you use VM encryption inside the VMware with another product, like McAfee. You will see great improvement in these cases.

The price is high, but you get a lot functionnality included with the product. You can also start with the free version of ESXi.

I am using many solutions: IBM PowerVM, Hyper-V, Acropolis, and VMware.

VMware is the most natural product on the market at the moment, especially in virtualization. The other products are quite good too. I am not saying you can use them, because you can. They are stable now. However, with VMware, you receive more feature than with the others.

Think about your business needs, afterwards choose the product. Write down your needs on paper in bullets, then the solution will be clear and you can justify choosing VMware, not Hyper-V.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10. There is always space for improvement. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It depends on the business's need. That is all. I am a consultant and must know what my client needs. If they want a Rolls Royce, I give them a Rolls Royce. If they want a Honda Civic, I give them a Honda Civic. I must know the products to fit them to the customer's needs. I don't sell too much, just what the customer wants.

I use it as systems administrative management tool. I use VMware vSphere, vCenter, and vSphere ESXi.

We do not use VMWare cloud on AWS.

vSphere has improved our organization by far, and it's hard to even quantify. The ability to to virtualize systems and run those virtual workloads with a fewer number of servers is tremendous. We are still in the process of converting physical to virtual, but we are getting there.

The mission critical apps that we use for our system are for monitoring different meters throughout households in the greater area in which we operate.

The most valuable feature is the single pane of glass management. There are a number of things which vSphere offers in terms of consolidating infrastructure onto single pieces of hardware. This is instead of having multiple systems running on the OSs that we need. I like the capability of logging into one system, then being able to shift over to another system within that single pane of glass.

vSphere is simple to manage. Some of the best parts of managing it is vCenter. I use that to provide entry points for different administrators to login from different environments to manage either physical or virtual servers and resources on the network in our storage site.

vSphere is going in a good direction already with its improvement. The one area where I would love to see an improvement is the HTML5 client. It's great, but it could get better. I know it can.

It has been fairly stable in 6.7. I have not had any major issues. 

I've come up on older versions from 3.5 until 6.7. This version has been the best experience so far.

I can build out hundreds of hosts, but my environment's not that big. It is not as big as most of the larger companies out there, so I've not hit a bottleneck yet in terms of scalability.

Every now and then, I have to use vSphere technical support. My experience with them has been a positive one overall. Usually, if I don't get an answer from one tech support engineer, I can get another answer from another engineer who will help me out with my particular issue.

I wouldn't say that I invested in a new solution to get to where I'm right now. I just really have been upgrading upon what's already there. I'm pretty much in bed with VM. I'm staying with VM, and that's where I want to be. I don't want to go anywhere else. VMware is top of the line.

I've done setups of different versions of vSphere. The latest one was more complex than 6.5, which had an external platform services controller. Now with 6.7, you have an embedded platform services controller, much like 6.5, but you also get the enhanced link mode capability. That was a big shift for me. 

ROI is tough to quantify once you are already in bed with VMware. However, I did a comparison between physical server to virtual. There was a point in time where we would size out a virtual server to be a massive size, then we'd buy a physical server of the equivalence. We saved somewhere around 20 percent going virtual, as opposed to the physical equivalent.

I have seen a performance boost in a sense that we have provided better utilization of system resources within vSphere. However, I don't have an actual percentage to provide.

Before I started with VMware, I did not have any other vendors on my shortlist.

I would rate it at a nine, because I don't believe any type of technology is a ten. There is always room for improvement. However, this is a solid nine.

Spend time researching, investing, and testing for months. Spend a few months testing the product before implementing it to production.

I don't have too much experience with the encryption or secure features of the new vSphere version.

We use it to manage multi-site, multi-regional implementations of VMware. We use the security end roles to give different tiers of access from the VM up to the VMware installation. We manage the roles and responsibilities within the security to do this. 

We do all the functionality inside vSphere. We use VMotion and DRS to manage some of our licensing issues that we have. With bigger software vendors, like Oracle, we use it to keep licenses and requirements compliant and keep VMs running on specific hardware. 

We use it for quite a few daily tasks: cloning and testing out patching. Then, we can perform snapshots through vSphere. 

Visibility: We can easily pull reports and give access to other people to look at specs or performance metrics. This came as a bonus to us. Yet, we have been using it for quite a long time (12 to 13 years). 

The solution is simple and efficient to manage. It has brought ease of use to employees who are not at a senior level. It has been able to expose minimal tasks which can relieve some of my senior guys to do engineering tasks, as opposed to help desk, reboots, restarts, etc. We have been able to pass some of those tasks along. 

The ability to segregate roles and responsibilities, as well as regions. For example, I can give access to my Chinese team to manage the China servers and hosts. On the other hand, I could give access to my Canadian team to manage global VMware installations. Therefore, I like the flexibility of this tool.

We have just migrated most of our SQL and enterprise databases to vSphere. We don't use it for Oracle, but we do for most other things. We also use it for our communications exchange link, etc. Therefore, it is pretty business critical when it comes to the back office support and server implementations.

There has been a lot of improvement with UI: its speed and usability features. Before, it was very slow. When it comes to cross-regional (e.g., someone in the US managing the China vSphere implementations), it can be a somewhat slow. I would recommend increasing the speed. While there has already been improvement there, I would like to see more.

I haven't had any real issues. In the very beginning, there were some issues when upgrading or migrating from versions. However, our last upgrade was 5.5 to 6.5 where went from Windows to the Linux OVF version, and we did not have any issues with it. 

It is easy to scale and obtain as much power as we need. It is easy to provision and join it to the cluster. We haven't had any issues or limitations.

Technical support is very good. I haven't used them in quite some time though, because we have on-staff VMware experts. When I did use them a long time ago for compatibility with network cards (we use FCoE, which is not the industry standard), they were pretty quick to link us back to some articles to help us resolve our issues. 

When I first came on board, they had a very small implementation of Citrix. The servers at that time would cost 20K per application. They didn't allow us to centrally manage any systems. There would be a hodgepodge of vendors and versions of hardware. Therefore, it was a more difficult to track. When I came on board, we were maybe 20 to 30 percent virtualized. Since then, we're probably 99 percent virtualized. This did reduce staffing costs.

The APIs and plugins are important. We used to use NetApp. We use now InfiniteApp and Compellent. Having these types of plugins and using their APIs in the storage subsystems, allows general admins to provision storage easily, as opposed to being a storage admin. It has alleviated having to have five to 10 storage admins. We consolidated to one or two storage admins, while having the others be able to provision their own storage. 

We are spending less on buying bigger machines, which are overprovisioned. Thus, the ROI is found in consolidation and cost savings.

There are a lot of management and soft skills that we end up being able to save on. For example, my engineers in Canada could watch over systems in China, California, and Phoenix. Thus, it gives us the flexibility of administration. 

We evaluated Hyper-V four or five years ago. They weren't as fast to develop technologies or even adopting the technology. There were some tools missing. Also, they were less innovative than VMware. Now, I think Microsoft has caught up a bit. However, it seems that VMware is putting a lot more R&D money into the product. So, we've been happy. We haven't had a need to leave.

• Look at the market and see what is supportable. How long can you support the product. VMware has the history. It has the people who can support it in the industry. 
• Look at the supportability of it. Look at the job market and how many people, from a staffing perspective, can support it. 
• Then, look at the cost, because I don't think cost is everything.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They are a leader and more innovative than the competitors.

We use VMware vSphere for virtualization purposes. We are telling our clients to use more options for virtualization.

The high availability feature is significant. For virtualization, we prefer to have options for reconfiguration and efficient use. However, the software requires shutting down for reconfiguration, and backup requires shutdown too, which is a limitation. The VMs work smoothly, which is beneficial.

Sometimes, we need valid certificates for VMware, however, we are unable to add the certificates. Another area is the stability during upgrades from older versions to newer versions, where we face issues.

We have been working with VMware vSphere for more than seven years.

The VMs work smoothly with no issues, but there is a risk upgrading from older to newer versions, where we've faced some issues.

There are no scalability options available in VMware vSphere.

We do not have experience of directly contacting their technical support.

The initial setup was easy, and we didn't experience any difficulties. We set it up very easily.

We have no experience with the pricing as we are using the free version.

We might suggest CrossPlox or HackerMesh solutions to others since they are Linux based.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate VMware vSphere six or seven. If I feel that the requirement is best fit with VMware vSphere, then I suggest it. If not, I suggest other solutions.

We can maintain our own infrastructure according to our needs. We need to buy the solution only once, and we can do what we need to do. We can deploy several servers. We can also deploy other machines. We can create templates. OVF is the best feature. We can create an OVF, send it to the other node, and create similar VMs with the OVF.

We can deploy our own bare metal hypervisor over the hardware at the required capacity. We must know how to configure it. The product is not difficult to use. The users access their PCs using a remote desktop protocol. It is as simple as using our own laptops. The solution’s high availability is very good. The tool provides 99.99% uptime.

The hardware cost is high. We need to change the hardware after some time. It is a big headache for the organization. Private clouds are more secure than public clouds. However, public clouds offer services that we can never see in vSphere. VMware must improve its login page.

The UI must be improved. The solution must improve its log system. When a machine fails, it mentions the log but doesn't describe the infrastructure or how the code is designed. If I put one machine on migration and it fails, the log is generated as the user timed out and disconnected the host. Apart from this, there's nothing else mentioned in the log. It is difficult to identify the problem with the machine. The log system is very poor.

It is a challenge to increase the storage. If we have ten users when we start, but the load on the server increases to 20 or 30 after a month, there is a chance that the site will go down. We have to be proactive in implementing datastore. If we have ten users, we must plan to have hardware for 20 users. The cost will be high, but it will be more secure.

I have been using the solution for five years.

The on-premise version is stable.

We are a client-based organization. The number of users depends on the clients. There might be 5200 people using the product in our clients’ organizations.

We have deployed the solution on-premises. The solution has a private cloud, too. There are no hybrid connections available. The initial setup is not difficult, but it is not easy. A normal user cannot do it. We need the expertise to install bare metal. The installation is easy if we know the configuration criteria.

The tool is neither expensive nor cheap. The pricing depends on the users. Suppose we have 100 users, and the architectural team spends $10,000 on infrastructure to build the data center. After some years, we have to replace the systems and upgrade them.

Since I am an engineer, I troubleshoot the issues I face. I recommend people use a public cloud provider. If someone requires a separate data center, they can choose VMware. It is the best solution on-premises and as a private cloud. Overall, I rate the tool a seven out of ten.