VMware vSphere Reviews

You can get it downloaded and installed for free. It allows you to do more with less. It's easy to use and simple to configure. There are hardware vendor specific builds of the software, increasing visibility and manageability of the product.

We have less physical servers to monitor and put under warranty.

10 plus years in various forms as GSX, ESX and now ESXi.

Deployment options are varied with ESXi, so depending on what you're trying to achieve within your business.

Due to the multitude of configuration options, you can occasionally experience compatibility issues with 3rd party storage vendors such as NetApp which recently had a known issue with NFS reporting all ports down.

Never encountered any scalability issues with this product. It is truly enterprise.

Customer Service: Good to excellent.Technical Support: Good to Excellent depending on what engineer is assigned to you.

I have tried other hypervisor technologies including XenServer, Hyper V, KVM, Parallels and virtual box. They all do the same thing, but ESXi has been doing it better for longer.

Exceedingly simple setup. You can make it more complex depending how truly enterprise your needs are, like stateless implementations of ESXi.

Reduced Electricity Bills, reduced hardware and warranty costs. Reduced server implementation time. Increased management and availability of corporate services.

Not on this occasion but I have assessed other hypervisors.

Assess why you think virtualisation is the answer to your problem. Research hypervisor choices, perform Proof of Concept exercises with those products you choose to assess and most of all think about the legacy of what you're doing. i.e. what do you want to leave behind?

- Enterprise class solution - Live Migration (both server and storage) - High Availability and Load Balancing - Disaster Recovery - Lots of 3rd party vendor support - Excellent technical support

- Cost - Lack of support for virtualization (all hypervisors) - Licensing- Started with VMware ESX ver 2.1 in 2004. Currently using vSphere 4.1i and working on upgrade to 5.1 - Chose VMware for several reasons (1) Had experience with Desktop and GSX products (2) Ran on bare metal (3) No other real competitors at the time

Advice: - VMware is not the only game in town anymore - Look at your requirements: - If you are a small to medium shop other server virtualization products may provide what you need - If you are a large shop I would recommendVMware

We primarily use VMware vSphere for virtualization.

We use it mostly on-premise, but for the last year on cloud.

It has facilitated the adoption of DevOps practices and technology.

The feature that I find very valuable is the ability to move images of virtual machines from different workspaces to other workspaces between different installations.

An area for improvement is that when comparing VMware to Nutanix, Nutanix has higher availability, like clustering for virtual machines. That is a good idea and VMware could profit from something like that for higher availability installations.

I have been using VMware vSphere for the last eight to 10 years using different scopes for different projects.

It is pretty stable.

I haven't had a chance to do any scalability exercises, just some tests, but not on real-time or on real production. Probably later I will get a chance to test scalability.

There are about 10 or 15 people using it directly in the environments and between 500 and 600 people that are enabled with the VMware.

We require just another engineer and myself for the deployment of VMware.

We probably will not increase the licensing for the VMware, but we will increase the load on the installation that is being handled by VMware.

I haven't had a chance yet to use technical support, but from past experience I would say that it's very good. For this project we have not had a chance to use direct technical support, but for previous projects it has been good. So hopefully it stays like that.

The initial setup is relatively simple. Between one and 10, I would give it a six.

For the product that I'm working on right now it took about three weeks because it had several different virtual machines and inside the virtual machines there were a lot of containers. So there were certain complexities that extended the complexity of the VMware installation itself. But for just the VMware only it took about a week and a half or something like that.

We did not use consultants or resellers for deployment, just the documentation.

Our license is on a yearly basis.

My advice to anyone considering using VMware vSphere is you have to find out the requirements. You have to do a very good job finding the requirements so that the scoping and provisioning of the resources are okay. That way you don't have  later have to be constantly changing the configuration. It is good to spend some time doing requirements and finding out the loads, etc... that you are going to have to handle.

Generally, VMware vSphere is not perfect, but it's okay. On a scale of one to ten, I will give it an eight.

You get used to the interface. The pricing is getting cheaper, but it depends. Anyway, it is a good product.

Public Cloud

We have a partnership with VMware and I'm the professional service team lead. 

VMware has many good features, is stable and reliable. 

I'd like to see the snapshot feature that Nutanix has in their product. It takes a snapshot as a backup without processing as a third-party product. I'd like to see that backup feature in VMware.

We've been using this solution for seven years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable.

We're not very satisfied with the customer support. Sometimes I open a ticket and get a remote appointment with one of our customers and most of the time they're not there and I can't contact them. 

The initial setup is pretty easy and took us a couple of days. We check that the hardware is compatible, then we update the firmware and set up an IP address and then test and tune it. Most of our clients are smaller sized companies. 

This is generally a good and stable solution. It's about weighing up the cost against what the product offers for a specific use case. 

I rate this solution seven out of 10. 

Hybrid Cloud

We are using VMware vSphere for our internal management systems. Additionally, we are running the Acronis backup solution, which is partly running on vSphere.

VMware vSphere has useful tools for management and support.

We have had some problems setting up the monitoring with vSphere. The process could be simplified.

I have been using VMware vSphere for approximately two years.

VMware vSphere is stable.

The scalability of VMware vSphere has been very good for what we use it for.

I have not contacted the technical support personally but my colleagues have and it has been satisfactory.

I rate VMware vSphere a nine out of ten.

On-premises

We use it for the virtualization of server infrastructure.

It is very versatile. All features are beneficial and very good, especially DRS and resource pooling.

They can maybe review its price. They can also consider offering a free public version for development for a certain number of users. 

I am using version 6.7, and it would be good if it has support for SaaS storage. They might already have this feature in the latest version 7.1.

We have been using this solution in our company for 10 years.

It is extremely stable.

It is very scalable. Its usage depends on each customer. We have small, medium, and large customers. 

As a company, we are not a big consumer of VMware solutions. We do VMware deployments in other companies. We sell it to other companies, and we have a partnership with VMware. 

Based on my experience, they are very good. Their support used to be best, but it also depends on the number of subscriptions for each contract. Generally, their process is very good.

It is easy.

I'm not a pricing or budgeting person, but I know that its price is a little bit high, and they can consider reviewing it. Its price is probably the highest in this domain.

I personally do not recommend Hyper-V based on my experience, but I can recommend others to also look at Proxmox. There is also a solution from IBM. They are, for sure, very good contenders.

I would rate VMware vSphere a nine out of 10. It satisfies our needs.

Private Cloud

Our deployments were formerly on-prem, but we have the role of a cloud provider. We have a distributed solution in our data center and several international cloud providers.

We use VMware vSphere for most of our business processes, including HR. 

We like a lot of the features, but none really stand out. It's very transparent and independent. 

We are very close to VM, all of our pain-points involve direct discussions. There are no special pain-points. This solution allows us to handle our system. It's required in business processes.

The management could be simplified for base-level customers, but of course, it would be difficult to match all customer needs. 

We have been using VMware vSphere for over 20 years.

VMware vSphere is absolutely stable.

We expand VMware vSphere daily. It's very scalable. 

The technical support is great. 

The initial setup is straightforward. The complexities lie on the TITO solution on-top.

The price could always be lower, but I think it's fair. 

I would absolutely recommend using this solution. It's clear-based, straightforward, and includes all of the options required in business. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of ten. 

Our primary use case is to implement a high availability server environment.

It helps to automate the data replication and DR.

The feature that I have found most valuable is the auto recovery during failure.

The scalability of the solution should be improved.

Three to five years.

The scalability needs improvement.