VMware vSphere Reviews

We are virtualizing our x86 server infrastructure with VMware vSphere. It consolidates our environment dramatically. Our virtualization ratio is over 92%.

Using vSphere we have virtualized over one thousand servers and this gave us management, cost and datacenter space advantages.

vSphere offers the High Availability feature which serves automatic recovery of failed host's virtual machines on another host or hosts in the cluster. Also, DRS makes the cluster balanced.

Although vSphere is a nearly perfect product, it does need a little improvement. Datacenter and Cluster structure should be mixed so that the management of clusters would be easier.

We are using the VMware vSphere product to virtualize our servers and we are very succesful. We are very satisfied.

It provides a new environment in an expedient manner. It is a better use of resources between the servers. As we can use these resources better, it helps our TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) analysis.

We would like VMware to add capacity to add more equipment. We also think it could improve with the hyper-converged.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. We like that it is very functional and it has ability to access hyper-conversions. There is a capacity to grow the environment by adding the same type of equipment, and that really interests us. 

I do not have experience with the technical support team.

We looked at Microsoft Hyper-V, but it does not have all of the systematics of VMware vSphere.

I think that vSphere is an expensive solution.

We are in the IT manufacturing industry. This solution has performed wonderfully. We do research and development into how our products can be best used in a vCenter/vSphere environment.

Mission-critical applications we use it for include vSan, HA, DRS. They're all very, very important to us.

We have a lot of customers that use VFRC, so the ability to put that together and now, with 6.7, to have full multipathing support, we do a lot of fiber channel work, we do a lot of fiber channel support. That makes it really easy with some of our own items to get them out there to the customers who need them.

The redundancy, the failover, the ability to stay up and running 24/7, all the various tools that are in there, high-availability, DRS, are very critical to us. All of that has helped improve our organization.

The vCenter management is huge: ease of use, the simplicity of it.

It gives us, with the Enterprise Plus version, pretty much all the tools that we need right on hand that work great with our products. We can help our customers make their data centers run a lot smoother.

My biggest suggestion would be some kind of a mechanism - and it's almost an AI-type thing, a Siri/Cortana - for where to find how to do certain things. If there was the ability to just type in a basic question and say, "How do I change the VM settings for this?" and it could bring me right there, that would be really awesome.

It's very, very stable. The amount of times that we have to reboot vCenter or any of the VMs is very rare. It's only gotten better over the last couple of years. You expect a certain number of reboots and it just seems that the number needed is going down every single year.

Scalability is awesome because, for us, we do a lot of pods. We create pods and nodes and small clusters to do some of our R&D products. The ability to bring them up very quickly, very easily, without adding lots and lots of additional hardware, and without taking excessive amounts of time, and then tear them down, but just shove them on the back burner in case we ever need to come back to it - that for us is one of the biggest features that we could ever have.

They're very awesome, quick to respond to us. Sometimes you get the email exchanges for a while, but once you get somebody on the phone, they get in, they dive in, they fix it, it's done.

We were previously using standalone servers. Once I came on board and I started talking to them about the features, we made the decision to virtualize some of our more urgent applications. We did it and everything has been running really great since. As a result, we are bringing more and more in, to the point where those standalone servers are basically sitting idle on a shelf now. 

The initial setup was very straightforward, very easy. For me, it's been about eight years using VMware, so it's very fluid, very easy for me to do. I've never really had any kind of a problem.

Being a field engineer, it's a little more difficult for me because I'm not involved with the finances of the company. But we know that we're getting a strong ROI because the amount of money that we're spending on external assets seems to come down every year. We're getting by with what we have longer and making more efficient use of it.

We did take a look at Hyper-V, we considered KVM, but it really came down to Hyper-V and VMware and, in the end, because of VMware's market share, it became a no-brainer solution for us. We went that way. Once our management made that decision, I was able to push and show them all the features and the abilities that they were unaware of at the time they made their choice, to really enhance what we were doing.

Do your homework, figure out what you need. This really relates back to the question about the licensing. Do your homework, find out what version you need, think to the future, and figure out what you might need in five years and invest in that now, because that stepping stone just gets easier and easier if you plan for the future now.

We have not done a lot with the built-in security features. Some of our customers are inquiring about it. That really is their own choice to use. It's not something that we develop products for when we have not begun to use it internally in our own environment, yet. We also do not use VMware Cloud on AWS.

Regarding a performance boost, there is nothing that I've noticed but, to be blunt, it's so robust, we've never pushed it to the max.

As far as simplicity, it is the easiest solution, especially with the vCenter management tools. As far as specific examples, I started way back in the days when we were using the Client, the individual 4 Client, and trying to manage multiple servers was really a headache. The ability to do it all, multiple data centers, multiple areas, from one centralized location, is huge. It's just gotten easier and easier. There are still some areas where it would be nice to be able to find things quicker, but it's improved so much over the last two to three years that it's phenomenal.

It's so versatile, so feature-rich, but there is some of that add-on confusion. What version do I need for this? What licensing do I need for that? What comes free? What doesn't come free? If that was a little cleaner or eliminated entirely - here's your product and everything comes with it - that would probably raise it to at least 9.5; nothing's perfect.

The primary use case for us was to virtualize a small data center of about 30 guests. We use it for our Active Directory and Exchange servers. The solution has worked well.

We're not yet using VMware Cloud on AWS or vSphere's built-in security features.

Going from a purely physical environment before, we have seen a performance value boost. It also gives us greater flexibility and it allows us to adapt to our environment much more quickly than a standard hardware solution would.

The most valuable features are the simplicity and ease of use for, a small IT department like ours. It's simple and efficient to manage.

I would like to see continued support of the HTML5-based utilities.

It's been very stable for us.

We have a pretty static environment but, for our needs, it has been very good.

We have had to use technical support a couple of times. It has been very good, a very good experience.

We had outside help from a partner, but the initial setup was pretty straightforward.

We're a small, privately held company, so ROI is not something we concentrate a lot on. But just from the surface appearance, it has really helped us.

Make use of the resources that are there. That's something we failed on when we first started. We started out thinking, "We're going to go with this company for storage, we're going to use Vsphere, etc.," and we just went in with a partner. As I went further along, I learned that there were a lot of built-in resources that I really didn't know I had access to. That was a bit tough.

When selecting a vendor, the most important criterion for us, being a smaller IT department, is the support. Also, to a certain extent, the name is important, because when you're a small department you don't have the opportunity to evaluate as many companies as you'd like to. Sometimes you end up going with the main name brand. When you're a small shop, you need all the help you can get.

I rate vSphere a solid nine out of ten, especially since, with 6.5 and beyond, it has matured and it's full-fledged. It's tough to think of anything I'd want to add to it at this point. I would have rated vSphere 5.5  as an eight out of ten, so it feels like 6.5 is a progression towards ten. There's really no feature that I can explicitly name that would make it a ten. They just need to make more progress, have more stability, and continued simplicity.

The most valuable feature is definitely the High Availability and the abstraction of MAC addresses from the hardware. Also, shared storage is definitely beneficial. Back in the old days when we had single storage, it was usually slow disks that were local to the machines, and once we moved everything over to the virtualization platform, we have the benefit of newer and faster disk arrays directly attached to the VMware system. It's made thing a whole lot easier to manager, particularly from a space point-of-view.

Obviously, SANs have been around for a while, but they used to be direct-attached and not shared among a number of hosts. We jumped from direct-attached SANs into VMware with shared SANs, skipping that extra part of the SAN world.

It brings everything together under one umbrella and allows a smaller organization without a separate administrator for disk, network, host, or server to have centralized, single-pane-of-glass management. It has a much easier interface than a lot of the other tools I've worked with and gives us a better centralization of services.

It seems like VMware comes out with something new every time I think how great it would be to have it. For example, they came out with Storage vMotion, although a lot of people haven't adopted it because some programs won't accept it. Also, with NSX they're working in the networking area, and I'd definitely like to see improvement there, such as integration with the cloud. We've got a customer for whom we're providing disaster recovery with vCloud Air, and there are some improvements could be made there as well.

We actually have two different vClouds -- one of the VMs to replicate to, and the other for the VMs to have Active Directory and a jump host for user connections. I'd like to see better vSphere integration with vCloud Air where they're seamless. This would be a big improvement.

I've used it for somewhere around ten years. I started back three jobs ago, and basically we were using VMware to move some physical machines down to Atlanta from New Jersey, and so we chose vSphere. Our boss brought in a vSphere trainer and gave us a week long class on it before we got started, and then we used the convert tool, and we used another tool called PlateSpin, which was available back then. I don't even know if PlateSpin is still even in business, but I've P2V'd quite a few machines over the years.

We've had no issues deploying it.

It’s absolutely stable for the past ten years. There have been a few bugs here and there, but I know that version 6 has changed the block-tracking bug which affected some of our Veeam customers. So vSphere has been very stable compared to other products. I currently work with another hypervisor and it's way behind vSphere. vSphere is a purpose-built hypervisor, which is more stable than an OS-based hypervisor.

One of the issues that I've always had with the scalability of VMware, and maybe this is another area of improvement, has been the fact that a lot of customers will buy a small environment, the very minimum. They'll buy two hosts even though we recommend a three-host minimum. When they do finally but more hosts, the processors have changed and they have to dumb down the newer processors using EVC. I'd, therefore, like to see VMware come up with a better way of handling newer hosts. I think that that would really allow more scalability.

Now, obviously a lot of people are moving to the cloud and scalability is a moot point, especially for smaller businesses. I have a customer for whom we're moving their environment into the cloud, and they'll be completely in the cloud next year with vCloud. This would eliminate the need to purchase additional hardware that may be incompatible because of processors. That also affects the scalability of vSphere.

I used to say that Cisco has the best technical support until I started working with VMware. I'd say now that there's no better technical support than VMware. Sometime it may take them a little bit of time to find the answer because they consult their team members, but that doesn't bother me. During that time I will have done my own due diligence and researching, but it makes me feel a little better that the answer wasn't obvious. A lot of times, though, they come right back with an answer right away. That says a lot.

vSphere 5.1 was pretty difficult to set up with the introduction of SSO, but 6.0 has simplified that. It's very easy to set up and there are good guides for it. When I install it for my customers, I have them sit and watch so they can learn what's going on. We use it as a teaching opportunity.

Don't just buy the minimum because you need the best clustering capabilities, which includes having at least one host to be in maintenance mode while the other two are running the business.

I'd also advise that you purchase DRS and HA. For example, with DRS, you don't have to manually balance the load all the time and trying to keep the host balanced out.

Backup is obviously an essential part, so I always recommend Veeam, which works very well with VMware. A lot of people think they can do snapshots on their array and that will be their backup, but it's not. for DR, they can use vCloud Air to copy data offsite so they don't have to deal with traditional tape backup or disk-based backups. Plus, having backups offsite means that viruses like BitLocker won't affect your backups.

I'm very happy with VMware.

• Virtualization
• Clustering
• High Availability
• All the core functionalities

Allows for substantial increase in server density, reduced spin up times, allows for more remote site management. Recoverability in a server crash situation is substantially improved as well.

User interface and management. The ability to manage the underlying infrastructure is very poorly thought out and implemented. They moved from a C client to a web interface, but still require critical functions to use the client.

I've been using it for seven years, since it was ESX v3.5.

WAN management of sites has some intermittent stability issues.

I would rate it fairly high, as much as I complain about the changes their back end team make, their front end support, and sales guys are very communicative.

We used Microsoft Virtual Server before ESX3.5 was released. We switched because it was not an enterprise grade option.

The setup for the current datacenter was complex, not because of VMware but because of the hosting limitations provided.

We had it initially set up by a vendor team, and I spent four months afterwards fixing their work. I would advise that you verify in advance the skills and knowledge of the implementors.

No attempt to calculate ROI has been made on the current environment.

I am attempting to build an environment around ROBO licensing, which I would advise anyone who has remote offices to investigate. It should cut our costs bytwo-thirds when I am finished.

No evaluation was done.

• Bare metal Hypervisor
• Management
• Mobility of VMs
• Distributed resource services - HA, DRS; Network and Storage

Hypervisor & Management in the new vCenter Server 6 with Platform Services Controller gives us a huge opportunity for scalability. It's also helped improve our SSO functionality with one click.

It would be nice if they could have offer a straight/forward deployment of vCenter from an OVA, not from an ISO.

I've used vSphere for about 15 years, and vCOPS for two years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

I have not needed to contact them yet.

I have not needed to contact them yet.

I hadn't used a previous solution.

It was straightforward.

An in-house implementation was done. All the pre-production implementation tests were made on VMware Workstation 11. Regarding vCenter 6, it is a must to install the VMware OVF tool in order to find, and make, the needed settings in the appliance *.vmx , before starting it. Having in mind the vCenter appliance is intended for ESXi deployment, in the production environment it was straightforward.

The ROI is much better with the VSOM.

From the position of an enterprise partner of VMware, it is not really easy to convince the end-customers of the VSOM benefits, having in mind the price tag.

No other options were evaluated.

DRS and vMotion are the most valuable features.

Recovery from hardware failures is easier than before, growth is much easier, and it's very easy to scale out.

I don’t know that I'm looking for any improvements. I'm looking to use additional features that are already out there, and different additional products that they have out there.

Good – rarely have any problems.

Very easy to grow out and scale.

It depends on the issue, sometimes we call the support and talk to them but many times it's just an issue of going on to forums and see how other people are dealing with the issue.

Very straightforward – no problems setting up.

Potential vendors have got to provide a benefit which is hopefully not an additional cost. Or, at least be able to make up for that cost somewhere else.

Peer reviews, are very important. I prefer to start with those before I contact the vendors.