VMware vSphere Reviews

We use it exclusively for internal purposes within our company, managing our office infrastructure as a private cloud solution.

It stands out as a comprehensive and advantageous solution, providing a full package that effectively caters to our needs for managing our private cloud.

The most significant aspects for us are the invaluable features of High Availability and vMotion in VMware. Additionally, the seamless sharing of resources and numerous other robust features make it highly commendable. Specifically, the capability to implement a load balancer between hosted environments without any downtime is particularly appreciated, underscoring the platform's reliability and advanced functionality.

The current concern revolves around the pricing as it might be less affordable for certain regions. In countries like Tunisia and many others in Africa, there seems to be a challenge regarding the cost of licensing.

I have been working with it for ten years.

It is robust and stable, rating it a perfect score of ten out of ten.

It offers good scalability. I would rate it eight out of ten. It's a small organization, with one hundred users.

It boasts robust support. I've collaborated with local partners in Tunisia, and their operations, coupled with same-day support, have proven highly responsive. I would rate the support experience a solid ten out of ten.

Positive

I have experience working with Hyper-V, and when comparing stability, VMware surpasses it across various generations. While Hyper-V has shown improvement in newer versions, it hasn't reached the level of stability that VMware consistently delivers.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward. I would rate it eight out of ten.

For deployment, it typically takes around two to three days with minimal configuration. One person is often sufficient for handling such setups. It's worth noting that if we opt for solutions like Analytics or other complex configurations, the need for additional personnel may arise, but for straightforward deployments, a single person can effectively manage the process.

I find it highly expensive. I would rate it ten out of ten. It would be highly beneficial for VMware to collaborate with local hosts and partners in countries like those in Africa to establish specific pricing that would align with the economic conditions of countries in Africa, ensuring suitability and compatibility with our consumption capabilities.

In instances where organizations operate on robust infrastructures and budget constraints are not a significant concern, my usual recommendation is VMware. This is especially true for financial companies that prioritize investing in and managing critical software solutions without financial constraints. Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

The primary use case is for virtualization, including the implementation of vSphere, vCloud Foundation, vCloud Director, and cloud automation with vSphere.

My customers, particularly SMBs, mainly utilize High Availability (HA), DRS, and vMotion features. The vMotion feature is beneficial for online migration of virtual machines from one host to another without downtime. High Availability and vMotion are significant features used in the standard edition to support SMB customers.

Customers face challenges due to increased costs after VMware's acquisition by Broadcom. The cost changed from perpetual to subscription, and there is a need for alternative solutions. Additionally, there is no AI functionality in the basic or standard editions.

I have been working with VMware's vSphere since 2004 or 2005, which amounts to approximately 16 or 17 years.

The stability of vSphere is rated a ten. It is a very stable hypervisor solution.

Scaling is easy, whether it is hyperconverged or a three-tier architecture. Adding a compute host is a quick process, taking about half an hour. For scalability, I would rate it eight.

As a partner, my team solves most tickets, needing support only about once or twice a year. Based on customer feedback, I would rate support as a seven or seven and a half out of ten due to issues such as support timing.

Neutral

The initial setup of VMware vSphere is straightforward, and I would rate it as nine out of ten regarding ease.

Customers experience cost savings in terms of hardware footprint, high availability, and no hardware dependency with vSphere standards.

Costs significantly increased from perpetual to subscription, with prices rising by two to three times over three to five years.

Customers are evaluating alternatives like Proxmox and other virtualization engines due to the increased costs of VMware vSphere.

VMware vSphere is a stable hypervisor. Competing hypervisors still face challenges, except for Nutanix, which requires changing hardware for hyperconvergence. VMware optimizes hardware and virtual machines better than others. Overall, I rate vSphere nine out of ten.

Our primary use case of VMware vSphere is virtualization. It doesn't depend on the hardware anymore, so it's easy to migrate and scale. 

This solution is deployed on-premise. 

One of the most valuable features of this solution is the ease of deployment. It's also user-friendly and has been on the market for more than a decade, so it's a leading technology in hypervisor solutions. 

VMware vSphere could be improved with cheaper costs. 

I have been using this solution for 10 years. 

This solution is very stable. 

The scalability of this solution is 10 out of 10. 

For this solution, we don't have an end user environment, but for our servers and our whole VM infrastructure, there are around 500 to 1,000 users. I'm not sure if we are going to increase our usage because, nowadays, most organizations are moving to cloud, but we have on-prem solutions in most cases. 

We rarely contact technical support because I have a back-to-back engineer and we both have a good understanding of the VMware infrastructure. We are able to solve about 90% of problems ourselves. 

We have a mixture of VMware and Hyper-V. For the small branches, we use Hyper-V because of the licensing and because Windows has four VMs embedded into the core Hyper-V. For VMware, we need to buy a separate license, but we use it for bigger offices and centers. 

The setup process of this solution is very straightforward and easy. For VMware, almost all the data center administrators can be easy to manage and deploy. The installation took less than three or four hours. I did it myself. 

I implemented this solution myself. 

VMware is expensive, from the baseline, initial investment. It depends, though, because if someone goes for ESXi—the latest version, ESXi Essential, or even the opensource—then it is not available in Microsoft. ESXi opensource is totally free, and the only features that aren't available are some API features. But if someone has a small office with less than 50 users, and they just need to run the hypervisor, then VMware is a free solution for that. If someone is considering the price and comparing Business ESXi with Hyper-V, if they already have an existing Windows license, then I would suggest going for Hyper-V because it's much cheaper. Aside from that, I would recommend going for VMware. 

I rate VMware a nine out of ten. VMware is fine. If someone has an office and they only need two or three servers, then I would recommend Hyper-V because they have a free instance for up to four servers. My recommendation would depend on someone's environment and budget, and totally depends on the size of their organization and server. 

Our primary use case of this solution is for server consolidation and high availability. We are customers of VMware and I'm a senior systems engineer. 

The solution is highly reliable and suits our needs - it's highly popular. Support and the overall community are great. You can find a solution to any issues you have. 

I think what they need to improve on is their pricing. They're starting to get a little high-end in terms of price compared to other solutions and the other solutions are catching up. Everything with VMware is very modularized and you can't just buy one piece and be done with it.

In my opinion, they would be wise to include a high availability out of the box type set up and not just for cloud, but site to site.

I've been using this solution for close to 15 years. 

Technical support is excellent. They stay on the line and track down the problem. Usually it's on the first call. I have had some complex issues that took a day or two to resolve but for the most part, they're resolved in the first call.

For the most part, the initial setup is pretty straightforward. If you start getting into the more complex setups, it can get more complex. For most use cases, it's just stick the disk in, let it run, and it sets most of itself up. It's almost out of the box ready.

As far as I know, there is a standard licensing fee. It all depends on the options that you choose and what you need for each business. Every company that I've worked for has had a different pricing model and a different set of use cases. So pricing can range anywhere from $700-$800 per server core, all the way up $2,000-$3,000 per core.

It's important to do your homework and make sure that it's the right solution for you. It's the same with anything, there are other options out there and you need to figure out what fits your business use case at the time.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

I use vSphere 7.0.1 for a few reasons. My primary use case is for my lab, as vSphere offers a great versatility to use VDI, containers, distributed Storage, and SDN on the same hardware. I also use vSphere for non-production tasks on Rasberry Pie 4, and it offers a great deal for working with Docker on cheap hardware with a single management interface, vSphere. 

My lab is composed of three white-box servers with vSAN, a 10 gig network, a local SAN, and all storage with SSD to deliver fast VM.

I also have vRealize operating to monitor all the VMware components. 

The new version of vSphere now integrates with containers and offers some new improvements inside vSAN, like file sharing. So, with VDI there is no need to add a VM to build a file server.

With containers, NSX is no longer mandatory and with the VMware operation manager, you can get an integrated monitored platform that can scale easily.

You will get both hands on the wheel because all of the products are fully interconnected.

vSphere 7 also adds better certificate management than before (less certificate) and vSAN is also improved in terms of the space management for reconstruction, so you will need less reserved space for this kind of operation. 

VMware Tanzu (container) is the most valuable addition because you get an efficient solution to manage the VM and container in a single pane of glass.

The integration of Tanzu inside the base version of vSphere, without the need to install NSX-T, is a great addition. Many IT people don't know NSX-T and NSX can cost a lot, so it could save a lot of money. However, you will not get the enhanced network function due to the lack of NSX-T. 

The improvements to vSAN with a file server service is also a very valuable feature for many companies because they will be saving with the management of an NFS storage or a file server.

The HR proxy is actually a little bit harder to install and setup than other vmware products. So, direct integration with a vSphere distributed switch would be great addition, but you can bypass this setup if you chose an NSX-T switch.

The distributed switch, which is the networking part of vSphere, should have more functions. It should be like VMware NSX-T so that network management with VMware Tanzu will be better, although it is already good.

vSphere 7.0.1 is not available on ARM computers for production loads. I hope that it will become available soon so that we can run our production web server container on it, for example.

I have been using VMware vSphere for a few months.

This product is very stable and reliable. Now certificate management is also improved, the new version of vsphere has only 2 or 3 certificates so it is easier to manage.

vSpshere 7, like the previous version, is easy to scale up and down. vSAN is the same, and Tanzu as well. vSan need less space for is own management and it is integrating some features like a virtual witness node that improve the scalability. Other new functions inside vsan like file sharing is also a great addition for vsan scalability.

I always get great support from VMware technical team.

I did use the previous version of vSphere and I upgraded for the Tanzu support and VSAN improvement.

The initial installation of vSphere 7 is straightforward. If you try the ARM version, it is a little more complex but just follow the step-by-step process and it will work.

For Tanzu, the HR proxy is more complex because you will need to do some network design. For vSAN, VMware gives you a great tool to set your solution up easily.

I'm a VM expert so my level of expertise is great. My solution is an in-house one.

The ROI is very fast due to virtualization, perhaps a couple of months.

vSphere 7.0.1 offers a lot more than the previous version. Container support is the last great addition for VMware and it is worth the money you spend on it.

I did not evaluate other container solutions. For storage, I also use FreeNAS.

The entire production and development environments are running on VMware vSphere using the 6.0 and 6.5 versions with twelve-node clustered configurations. Two data centers were deployed to separate the production side virtual machines from those of test and development.

The deployment of Enterprise VMware vSphere architecture helps us provide a robust and high availability infrastructure because of the combined features of VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter such as HA, DRS and Fault Tolerance. This base metal virtualization is highly compatible with almost all of the IT hardware.

The vMotion in particular I think is the most valuable because this feature provides migrations of virtual machines in case you want to run do maintenance. This his feature comes hand-in-hand with other features of VMware like the DRS, which automatically load-balances the whole VMware farm based on the usage and recommendation.

Improve the patch and updates online and remove mandatory reboot, or move the virtual machine onto a physical host that needs patching/maintenance.

I would like to see VMware vSphere provide a centralized patch service on the VMware level, regardless of your operating systems.

I have been using this solution for eleven years.

In my long experience, I have a single incident where our whole VMware farm went down. I can say it is very stable as long as the hardware is healthy.

The scalability is great. This solution is highly scalable and compatible with almost all IT hardware on the market.

The support is very responsive and highly knowledgeable.

Prior to this solution, we used Oracle Virtual Machine and Xen Virtualizations.

I  used the profiling feature.

I set up the system myself.

The license of VMware is a one-time payment and you can continue to enroll in support for troubleshooting and also administer the licenses.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

It is primarily our server virtualization solution. We have approximately 2,000 servers, all of which are running VMware vSphere.

In terms of the benefits, I'll take you back to 2010, when we first implemented this solution. We only have physical servers, and we have a lot of projects because my company works in the energy industry.

We have many projects that could not be completed on physical servers because we have 2,000 servers.

If we were to do all of these projects on a physical server and our data center, we would have to travel all over the country. As a result, VMware aided us in server consolidation.

It aided us in server consolidation, and with VMware, we were able to provision applications for our customers very quickly. As a result, the time to manage was extremely short. So that is the advantage that we can find with VMware.

The product is extremely powerful.

We have had a module called vRealize for three years. We primarily use vRealize to troubleshoot any issues that may arise with our virtual machines, which is the main reason why we believe this solution is excellent. When a user has a problem, it does not have to be that his application is very slow or that it can't work. Using vRealize, we can determine which part of the solution is causing the problem and resolve it.

The cost is an area that could be improved. Today, there are many hypervisor solutions on the market that are less expensive and provide the same functionality. They share the same characteristics. I believe that one area where VMware can improve is in pricing, as we have found VMware products to be on the expensive side at times.

I'm only considering the VMware solution, with the cloud solution. I would like to see cloud integration, such as cloud service and cloud feature, in the vSphere license. That's exactly what I'm looking for.

In terms of cost, I believe there is room for improvement. They must work on the price, as well as the technical support.

We have been using VMware vSphere for approximately 12 years.

Last year, we made some upgrades, and are now using the most recent version.

In terms of stability, we don't have any major issues with that product.

It is very reliable, and the product is very stable. 

It is a strong product, and it is dependable. Most of the time we have not had any problems with this product. It doesn't happen very often, I believe the product is very good.

VMware vSphere is a scalable product. We had about five host servers, we gradually increased to 10, and now we have approximately 40 host servers running long VMware vSphere. It is simple to add a new server to the clusters.

We are a group of four administrators who are working on a solution. However, with VMware vSphere, we place software for the company, such as customers.

When I refer to the company, it's not the outside customers, I am referring to employees in company fields such as HR and accounting. We have 5,000 people working in our company, and they are all using the VMware vSphere software that we provide to them.

It is used on a daily basis because we are constantly confronted with the extension of results such as CPU, RAM, and storage. We use vSphere on a daily basis.

We are pleased with VMware's vSphere global support.

If you give me a notation, on 10, 20, or something like that where the scale is set at 20, I will give them a 14 out of 20, because I believe they are no longer as good as they once were. The VMware support is now of lower quality. I will give them a 14 out of 20.

We started with VMware. 

I already have VMware and Nutanix in my infrastructure.

It wasn't difficult. I think I learned it about a month after I started, and I was able to deploy VMware vSphere.

This solution is being maintained by four administrators. We have 2,000 virtual machines, also known as VMs, and 40 host servers. We are a group of four people who do all of the patching and maintenance work.

We had a consultant to help us with the initial setup.

Yes, I have seen a return on investment, but I am not the appropriate person to tell you about it. Our company is large in size. There are people working on it, doing economic studies to see if we can get a return on investment. What I can tell you is that there is a return on investment. But I can't tell you the specifics right now.

This solution is quite expensive, but it provides the same functionality as its competitors.

Today, you have the Nutanix Hypervisor, which I believe is AHV and is also very good. However, because our infrastructure is so large, we have Nutanix servers that are similar to Hyperconverged, but we run VMware on them. However, we have some other sites where we have installed the Nutanix Hypervisor, which is AHV. And it is effective. And it's free if you buy the Nutanix bundle.

The license is expensive. It is powered by the CPU. The more CPU' you have, the more you have to buy.

I'll say that if you want the vSphere solution for all virtualization, you should first look at the size of your infrastructure. If it is small, you don't have to go to, as I previously stated, Hyper-V or another solution. However, if you are starting with a medium or large size, you should use a solution like VMware because its performance is very strong. And, because we have a large infrastructure, we can see that it works very well. This is my advice to anyone looking for server virtualization software.

I would rate VMware vSphere a seven out of ten. It has been difficult for me to find a VMware engineer to work on my project. They don't seem to be very close to the customers, in my opinion. That is the main reason I gave this score of seven out of ten.

We use vSphere for production work on defense projects.

There's a lot of things they can improve on, but it's just a matter of where they are at in their development cycle right now. I wish they would have been able to handle Apple at this point, but they can't. So it's just one of those things. They've got features I'm still trying to understand. We haven't gone to containers yet, and I'm trying to find a use for a container.

My company has been using vSphere for four years, but I've been using it since about 2003.

Everything has been stable.

VMware vSphere is easy to scale. We haven't had any problems scaling what we're scaling now.

I have contacted VMware support in the past, but I haven't needed to in a couple of years. They got back to me. Once you actually get in the queue and they actually talk to you, you're fine. It took me 48 hours to get in the queue because it wasn't a life or death issue. It was just a question. I've called them for more urgent stuff before, and they picked right up and answered the questions. They got us back online within a few hours.

This department happens to run VMware. Other departments run VMware and also use Citrix for certain things. We're looking at running BDI rather than Citrix.

It depends on how you're setting vSphere up and deploying it. They've added some products recently like vSAN and a few other things to the base loads. You have to know what you're doing with those, but it works beautifully if you're doing a standard deployment with general IP storage.

On a government contract, everything's just a base price. You don't get much of a choice. We'd always like to see the price drop, but I realize that may not be realistic.

I rate VMware vSphere nine out of 10.