VMware vSphere Reviews

We're using it to run all kinds of workloads.

Its stability and manageability are valuable.

There should be more stability in the updates. They had an issue with the last release.

Their support should also be improved.

I have been using this solution for 15 years.

It's absolutely scalable. We have 130 users who are using this solution. All of the company is using it.

I am not satisfied with their performance or speed for anything below P1 or production-down status. Anything below that is worse than we could expect.

Its installation is straightforward. That's not a problem.

The deployment duration varies. For a specific installation, it could take 15 minutes to set up the whole thing, and it could also take three weeks. It depends on how we're scoping it.

I could do it myself.

Its licensing is typically yearly. From a value standpoint, it's worth it.

I would absolutely recommend this solution. I would rate it a nine out of 10.

We primarily use the solution for real-time backups. It can create new VMs.

The solution is stable.

I don't have a problem with scalability.

The product is very easy to install.

The reporting could be improved.

We'd like to see better monitoring. There should be better alert systems in place. 

We['ve been using the solution for two to three years at this point. It hasn't been too long.

The product has been stable so far. The performance and reliability are good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The product can scale. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so.

We have two people using the solution at this time. 

We have basically updated the hard disk size of VMware servers so that to accommodate the data of the existing clients. I can't say if we will scale beyond this.

We have called VMware regarding Microsoft Cloud integration.

We were using a third-party utility product. Now, events are being pushed through VMware.

The installation process is quite straightforward. It's not overly complex. I wouldn't say it's difficult. A company shouldn't have any issues with the setup process. 

While we have an integrator handle our deployment we manage the solution by ourselves, in-house. 

You only need two people for deployment or maintenance tasks. 

We had an integrator with us through the process and they assisted with the setup initially.

We have a yearly subscription that we pay for this product.

While we are currently using the on-premises deployment, our plan is to move completely to the cloud. 

We are using the latest version of the solution at this point. I can't speak to the exact version number.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten overall. It's a very useful product.

I would recommend the solution to other users or other companies.

While we work with the latest version, we also support customers when it comes to backing up their older versions, meaning we work with a variety of different ones. 

Many of our customers have their core infrastructure on vSphere platforms. They make use of the solution for their virtual environments when it comes to their educational and healthcare institutions.

We consider the virtualization of CPU and storage resources to be a valuable feature.

The integration with containers should be addressed. While they have started to integrate with Tanzu, the integration is not that good at the moment. 

I have been using VMware vSphere for 15 years.

As the solution has been around for a while, it's quite stable.

The solution is easy to scale. 

We have take advantage of technical support. It is very good.

The initial setup is very simple.

Its duration depends on how big the environment is. Huge ones may take several weeks for implementation, while smaller ones would take several days. 

Once the solution is deployed, there is a need for specific maintenance, as there are security vulnerabilities which must be considered, or new features or versions that may be put out. 

We provide all the maintenance for the customers. As we also have services organizations, we manage some of these environments on the customers behalf.

As the vSphere platform allows for a variety of additions, it is quite good. There is enterprise plus, enterprise and standard, so the pricing is not too bad.

The solution is mostly deployed on-premises, although we also have cloud deployments.

This product is suitable for a company of any size. 

The solution rates competitively against Nutanix and Microsoft. Overall, I feel it to be a pretty proven platform, although the underlying platform, or the management and features that surround it, are of secondary importance. BDI is the main focus. 

I rate VMware vSphere as an eight out of ten. 

I use VMware vSphere as a regular VM for different workloads and different configurations.

I like the capability of vMotion, DRS, high availability, and resource distribution.

The price could be better. The licensing is definitely expensive and tech support is sometimes frustrating.

I have been using VMware vSphere for 15 or 16 years.

VMware vSphere is a robust and stable product. It doesn't break that often.

Technical support is sometimes frustrating. Lately, we have been dealing with some tech support on SRM and they are not able to solve it.

The initial setup is straightforward. Once you have some understanding, it's straightforward.

The price could be better. The license is definitely expensive.

I don't find anything that I think it would be a bottleneck or any challenge. I've been using it for so many years. It's a robust product, and I don't see anything lacking. I would advise potential users to go for it. It's something you can rely on. It's very robust and doesn't break if you implement it correctly. It actually gives you peace of mind.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give VMware vSphere an eight.

We virtualize our infrastructure with this solution. 

We saved a lot of time and hardware with this solution. It also prevents fewer incidents. 

I would like to see more software as a service solutions.

The tech support is very good.

The setup was a bit complex at first. Now, it is more simple. 

The implementation was fast.

The pricing is a little expensive, and the licensing is a bit complex. 

Our main use case for this is that it's the foundation of our company. What our company, MacStadium, does is provide virtual environments for customers to do iOS development on Apple hardware. And the foundation for that, for creating the private cloud, is vSphere.

In terms of mission-critical apps, it's utilized mainly for iOS development. So customers will use the API for vCenter to automate things. They can do CICD, where they can spin up and spin down virtual machines, rapidly, and provide them to their internal groups or to their customers to do iOS development.

It has actually been performing a lot better than you'd think for an initial release. It's very smooth and I've been pretty impressed with it so far.

As a connection for our business, it goes hand-in-hand. It being the only hypervisor that runs on top of Apple hardware the way we want it, there is no "us" without that.

The most valuable feature would be the slight changes they've made to VMFork instant cloning, in which they have abstracted out the parent-child relationship in cloning, in which certain features, like HA and DRS, are now usable on that parent virtual machine. That is wildly amazing and something that wasn't available until 6.7.

We are actually making a lot of use of the VM Encryption feature. We're using that mainly because it's a customer requirement, especially after all the changes in the European Union for security. And that's a major issue. We've been adding in NSX and that, combined with the ability to have encrypted VMotion as well, has been huge.

In addition, the simplicity and efficiency in managing it has always been one big thing with the entire vSphere suite. It has been very straightforward if you're just using it from the user interface. Hitting the API has always been great, and they're continuing to grow that, which has been really good for us.

I know, coming out in 6.7 Update 1, that the HTML Client is going to reach full parity and have all the same features that they had in the now-deprecated thick client that used to be on Windows. That's one really neat feature I'm actually looking forward to.

There are always little "gotchas." In the past, little changes have broken things in vSphere. Going from 6.0, which worked perfectly fine on the Mac Pro, there were certain changes in hardware drivers, when 6.5 came out. Some were no longer present or had been deprecated. As a result, it didn't work on the Mac Pro anymore, which was business-critical. Okay, everybody could stick on one version and wait until it was fixed. We were able to take drivers out of the 5.5 version, add them to the build package for installation and it worked. It was not the most efficient, and storage I/O was kind of slow. Since 6.5 Update 1 came out, that has been solid, no real issues with that.

The stability has been very good. I've run several builds on 6.7 from pre-release and it's been good.

As far as scalability goes for us, I've run it as far as having up to 100 hosts in the cluster and I haven't noticed any degradation. It's been running well.

I actually have gotten quite a bit of tech support for initial installations. Even though they're on the hardware compatibility list, Mac Pros and Apple hardware are very different than your traditional Dell, Cisco, or HPE Blade. Apple hardware is kind of like a black box, so it's very hard to interact with, but ESXi has been perfect.

My experience with tech support has been pretty good. The response times are really good. If the engineer that I'm working with is not directly knowledgeable on that idea, usually he'll get back to me in a short time and hand me off to a guy knows exactly how to help me out with the problem. And then, the follow-up is good as well.

We've always been using vSphere from the beginning, starting with 5.5. We actually worked with William Lam from VMware on getting ESXi working on Minis at that point in time. It's been a wonderful relationship since then.

One big thing that I know a lot of people talk about, when looking at why go with vSphere, is the ecosystem. You have other products that were built solidly to work with the vSphere product and the integration is always completely solid. The continuous development on the vSphere product and all the other products in the ecosystem, and the community, also play a part. There's pretty much nothing that I have run into where I say, "Hey, I want to do something outside of what vSphere does," and there hasn't been somebody within the community who has been able to say, "Oh yeah, I got that running, it is really easy, this is how you do it." That's not something I have seen in any of the other ecosystems.

It was pretty easy upgrading any of the older hosts from 6.5 to 6.7. Everything was pretty straightforward.

In terms of advice, especially if you are on things like Hyper-V or other products that I've touched, the simplicity and scalability of the vSphere product has been solid. For another individual who is in the IT or engineering fields, I wouldn't go with anything else.

One thing a lot of people don't realize or know about is that Xcode and OS X are closely tied to the versioning of vSphere and what features will be enabled. Coming out this September is MacOS 10.14 and that brings with it the need and requirement to run APFS, which is only supported in 6.7. So we have an abundance of customers, all of which are iOS developers, who require 6.7. So having that coming out was a major need and requirement for us.

I haven't noticed a direct performance boost, but the performance is no less than it was in 6.5, which is always generally a good thing. With the addition of features, nothing slowed down, everything is still exactly where it was.

I have been a VMware Certified Professional (VCP) since 2008 and did several projects for server consolidation on-premise and migration to vSphere-based cloud. Currently, I am working on project to build a private cloud on-premise with Cisco FlexPod (Multipod environment stretched over two datacenters). The Cisco FlexPod includes Cisco UCS (computing), Cisco ACI (networking), VMware vSphere (virtualization), and NetApp (storage).  

vSphere has enabled an enterprise class virtualization environment with a central point of monitoring and management stretched over multiple datacenters (multi-site use), adding all the features of clustering for high-availability and failover, VM migration, and operations. 

vSphere brings the features required for an enterprise class system with a lot of supporting components: An intuitive user experience that simplifies and helps operational management, e.g. provisioning and monitoring the status of the VMs and the underlying resources capacity. 

As we introduce the DevOps culture, we need to make sure that the principles and tools used to support this approach can be easily integrated and interoperated with the vSphere environment with no (or less) redundancy in tools and functionality.

It's made us a lot more agile. We don't have to acquire new hardware just to bring it up or utilize new services for our customers. It makes it a lot easier for my team to allocate resources for the other business teams at the company.

The most important feature for us is clearly the foundation it provides. In addition to that, we've found the High Availability and flexibility to be important as well.

I definitely could see some improvements in Operations Management. That's another product that they have, but it's lacking in a few things. I feel that it's not as aggressive as it should or could be. They have different levels built into it, but I think they should have more aggressive levels.

Another area of improvement would be the further development of graphics virtualization. They've starting dabbling in that, it seems, but it definitely needs a lot more. They need to make it a little quicker and better.

I could count on one hand the number of times I've had issues with it and it's generally been related to hardware faults.

It's been very much scalable. When we started using it, we only virtualized a handful of servers. We've since expanded it to virtualize about 90% of our infrastructure at this point.

Customer Service:

Not really applicable to my situation. I've always had a good relationship with the regional sales rep but I don't need to contact him very often.

Technical Support:

It's been a little bit hit-or-miss at times. I think that's related to who picks up the phone first. They always get my problems resolved, but sometimes it ends up being quicker for me to figure out on my own than it is for them to get back to me. I've probably rate technical support a 6 out of 10.

We evaluated Citrix, but in our testing, vSphere was definitely more stable. Once we got started with vSphere and saw what it could do, we liked it more and more.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, but it can get complex as you want to use more features. When we first started, it was very, very simple, but we've since made it a lot more complex to account for redundancy.

We implemented using in-house talent.

Make sure you find a good reseller you can trust. I don't have any advice with regard to pricing though, because the product is worth what you pay for it. I definitely feel like I"m getting good value.

Because there are multiple tiers, you want to make sure that you size your licensing appropriately. If you're going to have a stack, you're going to want to weigh the features that are available with the Enterprise versions versus the standard versions and really understand what you're going to get out of it.

Yes we looked at Xen server, but we had issues with VM stability. This was over 8 years ago though so obviously that isn't likely the same anymore.