VMware vSphere Reviews

One of the most valuable features of this product is the integration of VMware vSphere. If you have experience with this product, it is very simple to configure and use. With minimal studying, you can configure and manage it.

The main improvement we found is the simplification of configuration. No more SAN configuration is required; no more complex configuration of LUN and presentation to the VMware infrastructure.

I think this product has a lot of areas for improvement.

First of all, there’s no agnostic option of vSAN to use it with another hypervisor. The only option is to present the storage via NFS (iSCSI will be available with version 6.5). The problem with this configuration is that you lose all the benefits of HCI. Essentially, you transform the vSAN into a network data store.

Also, no PIN to SSD: If you have a hybrid mix of disks, you can’t configure a PIN for a particular VM on a particular SSD.

Additionally, some features are only available on the all-flash version.

Deduplication and compression are enabled cluster-wide. There is a way to disable these options, but the problem is that you can’t enable this option in any combination you want. Essentially, compression and deduplication are either both on or both off. This is not good if you intend to use it for an application like SQL server and Oracle DB.

The vSAN license not very cheap.

I’ve been testing and studying it for about 6 months.

The scalability with these kind of nodes is fantastic, because you can scale out with any resource you want.

• Storage space (each server has 24 hard disk slots).
• RAM can be upgraded to 1.5TB for each node.

The only problem is that it’s not possible to scale on CPU. So if you want to scale on CPU, you have to buy 3 CPUs in one shot (with numbers of core), or buy another node. We know HCI work in this way.

I have never used support until this point. We have good enough skills to fix problems without support for now.

We used old-style infrastructure with a SAN data store and blade center. We changed to simplify infrastructure management.

Installing a complete VMware with three nodes, vSphere Software Appliance, and all things related took some time. So its not so easy and not so fast.

We evaluated lot of alternatives, both standard infrastructure and HCI infrastructure. Coming from a previous VMware vSphere installation, we choose the same product for continuity.

Its important to have experience with VMware products, and licensing is not very cheap.

VMware leads the pack with their hypervisor. It's a tiny install, but it's packed with features.

The setup can be complicated for those who are not technically inclined. The pricing can also be complicated.

I've used it for 10 years now.

We did encounter issues during deployment, but they were mostly because of human errors.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues scaling it for our needs.

In my experience, I give VMware customer service a 7/10.

In my experience with technical support, I give them a 7/10.

The initial setup was straightforward, unless you not technically inclined, in which case it is complex.

We implemented it with out in-house team.

The pricing and licensing with VMware can be complicated, but once you understand it, it makes sense.

The most valuable features for us are vCenter, vSphere, vROPS, vRO, NSX, SRM and vSphere replication. They're not only the most valuable features for us, but they're the features that we use the most right now.

From an organizational point of view, it allows us to give a lot of services to our customers. This is true of all VMware products that we purchase. We make sure that our business ultimately benefits from it.

We have many versions of vSphere, but when it comes to the vSphere appliance, we don't have failover or a recovery point.

I also would like some added features to vSphere, such as Fault Tolerance with more CPU support. That would be really helpful to everyone, I think.

From a features perspective, with vSphere 6.0 and PSC being introduced as the new authentication module - you cannot use a PSC for a fresh 5.5 Install. I think we should have this feature enabled as this could help us in multiple instances.

Also, every would probably like to see a easy/recommendable way to  migrate from Windows vCenter to a appliance. 

I've been using it for seven years now.

We haven't had issues with deploying it.

It's been consistently stable, and that has probably been the best feature -- its stability.

Probably VMware should consider of lifting the maximum number of VM's per vCenter which is 15000 now(10000 powered ON and 5k powered off). The number has been consistent from a long time. 

Also, VMware should raise the number when it comes to SRM/vREP.

We didn't really evaluate other solutions, but we're aware that Hyper-V is out there. But we went with VMware because they've been in the market a long time and we trust them.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward and there's not really anything complex about it. I've been working on it for six years now, and it's easy for me.

My advice would be to go for it. VMware has a wide range of products. Try them :)

There are several features we've found valuable, including:

• DRS
• SDRS
• vDS
• Resource pool sharing

By engaging virtualization and vSphere's advanced features, we've started to effectively manage workload and resources, resulting in better performance with fine grained tuning.

One of the features I would like to see is less constraints on the fault tolerance feature. Version 6 may have this, but we don't have it yet.

I've used it for four years.

We haven't had issues with deployment.

It's been stable for us.

It's scaled sufficiently for us.

We haven’t have many interactions with customer support. For the ones we had, it was satisfactory.

We haven’t have many interactions with technical support. For the ones we had, it was satisfactory.

We already had knowledge of the product on the team, so it was easy for us.

We're working with a Hardware-as-a-Service model where we're responsible for the software and VMware is responsible for the hardware. We implemented vSphere together with the vendor.

We considered using Xen/KVM, but we didn’t want to spend much time on the configuration and wanted to start working on the product out of the box.

I would recommend analysis of different options and pricing, including public/private-cloud models. Depending on your application and needs, you may not need such an advanced product as vSphere Enterprise.

vMotion, which lets us migrate from one server to another, is a really beneficial feature.

We are using

• less hardware and
• less power

as a result of this solution.

Improvements need to be made in the performance manager.

I have used it for over 10 years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

5/10.

5/10.

I didn't use any other solution.

Setup was very easy.

We used a vendor team who were 5/10.

I advise that you take your time and get the most you can for the money.

This was the only solution we looked at.

Spend time learning the product before going into production. Buy the vCenter software. That is a must.

• 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.

vSphere has many great features. It is very hard choose just one because most of them work together. But, based on the way how vSphere manages all resources provided by the physical system, I believe that the high availability system is the greatest feature of the solution. It works with a series of sub-features that ensure customer resources are online during critical changes.

We are constantly updating and migrating systems here in my current company. With this product, we can run parallel systems with a low cost and without impacting our customers. With this solution, we can provide more resources, cheaper, quickly, and still keep the integrity and quality of our services.

This product already does this very well, but all improvements are related to how physical resources, as well as memory and CPU, are managed . These are the main problems of the virtualization, it uses more memory than CPU. We still have problems with memory in virtualization environments, and some cases can present problems of throughput with virtual disks, too.

I have been working directly with vSphere solution for about four years, but I work with virtualization about six years.

This solution is very stable. Hardly ever do critical issues appear in the environment, and most analyses that are done in the system are about performance improvements.

No, this solution is prepared to expand or decrease as necessary.

It is great. They really have a good service.

The support service is very efficient. They are fast and usually they have a great technical knowledge beyond an effort to solve your problem.

I work with more than one virtualization technology. The solution implemented varies according to client requests.

The implementation of the solution is relatively simple. Of course, you need to have some knowledge about infrastructure to be able to create an environment without performance issues. But in general, the deployment of the vSphere system is easy. Just some feature configurations need to be really studied to improve if they really have to be implemented. VMWare provides all the documentation necessary to implement and manage vSphere throughout your environment.

The most common problem in implementing this solution is the incompatibility with some physical hardware, but it was more frequent in the past. All current physical hardware can support virtualization technology.

The implementation was done in-house.

This solution is recommended for environments considered medium and above (in the number of servers and hosts). If you are intending deploy this solution to small environments, the cost-benefit is not worth it. VMware provides a free license to be put in small environments, but all the good features of the systems will be disabled. For smaller businesses, I would recommend another solution.

As prices vary, the ideal would be to contact a direct sales team, and report the company's needs so they can point out the best license to use.

As I said, I work with more than one virtualization technologies. Beyond VMWare vSphere, I've worked with Microsoft Hyper-V, which is a great virtualization solution too.

It is necessary to be sure about the systems that will be migrated to a virtualized environment. Although nowadays virtualization is at an advanced stage, some systems still present problems when they are migrated from a physical server to a virtualized one. Systems that require too much performance need to have a different configuration, then it's a necessary study on how to implement them.

Robust, functional, reliable, ease of use, good value.

Exponentially easier to manage servers.

Since 2009.

None

None

None

Excellent.

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.