VMware vSphere Reviews

• 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.

• vMotion
• DRS
• DB switch

We’re able to leverage it for our main corporate IT infrastructure and deploying across nine smaller remote offices. We can cluster storage and make it HA-aware, and don’t need local IT staff at remote office.

For most part, pretty good, but UI could be improved. Has GUI geared towards Linux, would like to see GUI for Windows so that Windows admin can install.

Rock solid. Small issues where ESXi host re-booted, but probably related to internal configuration.

Can add multiple ESXi hosts and expand from there. We started with a minimum three node cluster with HP as backbone for storage for blueprint. We were able to move from a 1GBPS network 10 GBPS. We have now gotten up to 30-40 total nodes between all sites, but the main datacenter has 15-20 nodes.

We contact them once in a while, and have always had a good impression. Some colleagues though, have had issues however.

We were a Hyper-V shop but switched, because more robust. VMware is a gamechagner in virtualization.

It's a little bit complicated at the beginning because we did some of it on our own, and we could have engaged professional services to ease that pain. Some of the complications from a networking piece, which were a little confusing. Also confusing, was the difference between thick and thin provisioning. Logic says you should thin provision, but after taking the classes, we probably should have gone with thick provisioning.

The product is good, but the licensing gets confusing. As a technician, I don’t want to have to worry about the licensing side. If I purchase something, just tell me how many licenses I have left whenever I add a server, just something simple like that.

• High Availability options
• High server consolidation ratio
• Space, noise and power consumption reduction
• Easy to administer

• Response time to all areas of our company.
• Server deployment, SLA, everything was accelerated rapidly.
• Testing environment, templates, storage usage, all areas were enhanced.

• Server consolidation
• Response time
• Internal process management
• Storage usage and performance

Five years

We never found any issue during deployment of VMware vSphere. From version 5.0, 5.1 and now in 5.5 works everything fine.

The virtualization changed everything in our company, and is the way to lead from now.

We never found any issue of stability using VMware vSphere. From version 5.0, 5.1 and now in 5.5 works everything fine.

The virtualization changed everything in our company, and is the way to lead from now.

None.

VMware vSphere is a solution that offers excellent resources optimization and utilization. The solution himself improves the data center management and resources utilization is many ways.

We can't think our data center without virtualization.

Customer service from VMware was always excellent. Being a client of VMware, our company have the best response, even from our partners.

Never required technical support from VMware. As a VCP, I always solve the issues myself, but I know some examples from other companies and they are very happy about this.

No. The initial solution was VMware and we loved the product. There exists other solutions, but no one offers the level of trust and features that VMware offers, even open Source solutions like Xen.

No, anyway. From initial installation of ESXi servers to configuration in vCenter Server the installation process is very intuitive and easy (remember that I'm VCP).

In-house.

Our ROI was 6-12 months. The budget required to mount our virtual infrastructure was high at first glance, but the ROI was more quick than expected.

We are very happy with this and consolidation that VMware offers.

Some licenses are expensive, mailny Enterprise Plus versions, but the features that this versions includes are impressive. Just make sure you get the right version for every business or needs.

We evaluate other options, but VMware is centuries ahead other solutions of virtualization. Microsoft Hyper-V is the closest, but not reach the level of VMware. Open Source solutions was not considered at initial instance, they do not apply for a serious project of virtualization.

Evaluating migration to vSphere 6.0 in brief. I'm currently taking vSphere 6.0 courses and reading a lot, including writing a lot in my blog about this version. The improvements are really big and we wait more announces in VMware World 2015 very soon.

• High Availability
• Distributed Resource Scheduler
• Site Recovery

It has allowed us to provide services to our customers more efficiently than ever. Combined with HP Cloudsystem Matrix, it has become standard with our customers.

• VDI
• Backup solution

I've been using it for the past nine years, since v2.5 was released.

Not really, just some tuning prior to release into production.

Not at all, this is by far one of the most reliable hypervisors to date.

ESXi allows us to grow dynamically and with minimum downtime.

9/10.

8/10.

I have used Hyper-V solutions that lack many high availability features, and the idea of being a Windows based hypervisor made them not so stable.

It was pretty much straightforward. It all depends on how deep you want to go with configuration.

We implemented it for our customers.

From my position, it means lot less administration, and better ease of use. It also allows us to have fewer physical servers.

Some may say it's not cheap, compared to Microsoft or Citrix, but when you master the solution, you realize its features are unique.

We just looked at the different licensing options.

I would encourage you to try this solution not just for Labs, but for production and DRP solutions. I know there are many others out there, and some very good ones, but VMware has been evolving in the right direction, and it is still the benchmark for all the others.

I think that the Fault Tolerance and High Availability features are the most valuable ones. Storage vMotion, Server vMotion, and all the flexibility that vSphere can provide to a storage environment without interruption is also very good.

In the past, many organizations had many physical servers, and with VMWare we can consolidate many servers without compromising on the performance. We can save a lot of space in the data center. It also helps us to save power that, at this time, is a very important factor. With VMWare, we can use all the resources available on the servers without losing CPU or memory resources, and we can centralize the space into just one storage space.

In many areas of IT, you can use VMWare solutions. Here we have many applications running on the VMware vSphere, such as Oracle Database, MySQL, SQL, web applications, Apache, and many more. For all solutions of course, it depends on how the applications work, but until to day, I haven't observed any applications that won't work inside the vSphere infrastructure.

I have been using it since v3.5, so more than eight years, I have experience with other VMWare solutions too.

No, I did not have any issues because it all depends on how the environment was configured.

Nothing too important yet. The new v6.0 improves upon many features in vSphere High Availability. The enhancements correct issues of recovery from storage issues with a new feature called Virtual Machine Component Protection. This feature corrects many problems that we had when the backup tool lost connection with the ESXi servers.

No, I did not have any issues because it all depends on how the environment was configured.

I haven't had any issues with customer service and most problems can be solved through their website.

I have not had any issues with technical support as they have solved any issues that I have had to contact them about.

We have other solutions in the environment such as Oracle Rac and Microsoft Hyper-V, but I believe that vSphere is the most reliable product on the market.

The initial setup wasn't complex because we have experience with other VMWare solutions.

I implemented ii in-house.

Our ROI is high because we have 800 virtual servers spread across 22 physical ones.

When compared to the impact that the product has had, I do not believe the cost to be too high.

I have tested other products such as Hyper-V and Zen, but I believe that vSphere is more stable and has many more features available.

Go ahead and get it as this product is very, very stable.