VMware vSphere Reviews

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

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Customer Service:

Excellent.

Technical Support:

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.

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 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