VMware vSphere Reviews

Basically, our operation cluster is hiding under vSphere. 

vRealize Operations Manager is the most valuable feature, but it is not embedded in vSphere; it is a part of vSphere. It is used for forecasting and checking the consumption of CPU, memory, and other resources. It has the capability to do the forecast based on the history and give advice on consumption.

VMware vSphere is easy to use and easy to implement. Its learning curve is not sharp. Any engineer with little or medium knowledge of hypervisors and virtualizations can implement vSphere with a few clicks.

Its performance is an issue in version 6.5, but with the inclusion of HTML files in vSphere version 6.7, the experience is seamless. In version 6.7, VMware has included the HTML file protocol for the web browser or web console, which has changed the console's response and improved the performance.

We are using the trial version of vRealize Operations. It would be nice if some of those capabilities could be included in future versions of vSphere, not as a part of vRealize Operations, but in vSphere itself. It can provide some kind of forecast about your resource consumption based on the actual workload and modeling or testing scenarios. It can give you some advice or tips for the future growth of your infrastructure.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It is stable enough. We are satisfied with its stability.

Its scalability seems to be straightforward. Obviously, you have to check if you have the correct license. Otherwise, you will have to change the license. Licensing can sometimes stop you from growing.

We currently don't have any plans to increase its usage.

We haven't raised any case with VMware so far. We didn't require any support from vSphere tech support.

We moved from legacy servers to VMware Hyperconverged Infrastructure. We were using the ESXi version from vSphere, and then we moved to the cluster version. We have multiple servers in one cluster.

One of the main reasons for choosing vSphere was that it is one of the most known hypervisors in the market. It is easy to use, easy to implement, and straightforward. It was very good for our proof of concept, and we went for it. Eventually, we moved to a cluster infrastructure. Obviously, we use vSphere as the hypervisor.

The initial setup was straightforward. The deployment took one to three days.

We bought the local service from vSphere. The experience was overall good.

We have three people for its maintenance. They are system integrators and infrastructure administrators.

We also tested Microsoft Hyper-V, but at that time, it was unstable. It was not stable enough to be implemented in our environment. That's why we didn't use it.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate VMware vSphere a ten out of ten.

We use it to virtualize our server infrastructure.

Virtualization has made it easier for us to manage our environment. We can manage it from location, the vSphere web client.

We find the solution simple and efficient to manage. 

It provides us cost savings. We are able to virtualize instead of buying many physical servers. Therefore, we can buy one server and add VMs on top of it.

The SQL Servers are our mission critical apps.

• Keep innovating.
• Make it more efficient and stable.

It's very stable. We've had no issues with it.

It's very scalable. You can add different components to it. Moving into the future, as we do different things, we'll be able to stay with VMware.

The technical support is very helpful. VMware's technical support seems to be very knowledgeable.

We did not have a previous solution that we were using.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

It's huge. It has been a big return on investment for us. It saves us money because we don't have to buy as many physical servers. VMware seems to be the future of computing.

It is cost effective. 

We did not look at anything else. We just looked at VMware.

We are just learning about VM Encryption, TPS, and VBS right now. We just moved to VMware ESX 6.7. While I don't have a lot of experience in it yet, but we're looking to implement them.

Since we have had VMware, we've had no problems with it. It's easy to manage. It works very well. Other competitors may not offer as much. You can do a lot with VMware. You get different plugins, so it's a great product. Just go with it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Cost
• Stability.

The most important feature is high availability (HA) which monitors the system and restarts virtual machines to a healthy host whenever the system senses an imminent hardware failure.

Another great feature is DRS which is VMWare’s load balancing software which keeps our virtual machines running on the server cluster in a balanced manner. This automated system keeps all our systems running with a high uptime.

We can bring up brand new servers with a couple of mouse clicks when it used to take a couple of days.

Cloning large servers will require just as much space on the virtual volume as the original server. It makes it difficult when your system has limited space.

We have been using the solution for one year.

We didn't have any real issues with stability, our system uptime is at 99.99 percent.

We didn't have any real issues with scalability. Anytime we need more storage or computing power it is relatively easy to just add another drive or physical server to the clusters.

Technical support for the product is top notch because the solution has been around for many years and most of the issues/bugs have been experienced by others and we have the benefit of those prior solutions.

Contacting support is relatively painless and there is a deep bench of experts.

We did not use a prior solution.

The initial setup was relatively easy, basically installing the VMWare operating system.

The difficult phase was doing the actual VMWare conversions because we were not sure whether the legacy servers would convert over properly.

Another difficult setup was the networking aspect because each VLAN needed to be specified and the network settings needed to be correct.

For pricing and licensing I would consider getting the Enterprise plus edition and the proper Windows datacenter licensing.

We did evaluate other hardware options such as a hyper-converged solution (Nutanix, Simplivity, HP) and better storage options (Nimble, Tegile, etc).

We also evaluated other software options such as Hyper-V.

Our current solution met the needs of our users and the price was very reasonable.

Do as much up-front planning as possible. Make sure you analyze the IOPs of your servers and plan for computing power, bandwidth and redundancy.

Take into consideration whether the DR and backup solution can support the new environment.

Check into whether the operating systems being used can be virtualized and whether the application will work in that space.

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 its agility and that it provides us with the ability to make changes within the environment seamlessly. I also really like its stability; it's got a perfect track record. I can also provide support myself because the product is designed to allow for that sort of support.

It provides not just cost savings, but also peace of mind. I go back to the proven track record as it's the world-class, gold standard above and beyond the competition.

I think a lot of the areas of focus need to be on the user interface. There's been a lot of changes in recent years, the new carry-ons and the demands placed on the product. I think that they might be in the right spirit, but they still have a distance to go in that regard.

I think there's always room for improvement. I think that that's obvious in the track record that this thing has been setting because, every release, there's a very sharp increase in functionality and refinement, etc., but at the same time, it's a very, very good, solid product

We've used it for five years or so.

We've had no issues deploying it.

We've had no issues with stability.

I have had no issues with scalability for the product. If you go above and beyond most of my needs, in terms of items like the configuration maximums, for the most part I never come close, so they're continually evolving the product so that it will be able to support things that are not even realistic at this point in time. It's very forward-looking.

Technical support can be eventful. I can't depend entirely on the staff. I would say, for the most part, on the vast majority of issues, if it's a high-severity incident, you're able to get very good support. To the lowest severity incident, it's a little bit more scattershot.

There are a number of components to the product itself and, based on different architectures, it can change the complexity of that. But I would say, for the most part, it's very straightforward for an initial installation.

Definitely do your research. Leading into something, you don't just want to listen to just sales. You would like to know what the industry is giving, and in the case of this product, there is an enormous wealth of information, a wealth of community out there from which you can draw information to get a feel for kind of what you want to do, completely outside of the sales channel. Beyond that, it is probably beneficial to do something like a large-scale licensing unit to be able to get the kind of features that, on a larger scale, deployment is going to need.

The self-service portal, number one, the ease of deployments, the ability track and monitor how quickly you can provision a virtual machine guest, and the Chargeback model affiliated with that.

The simplicity of deployments, the speed to market with our application portfolios, the ability to give our developers the ability to quickly provision or stand up in an environment without having somebody to hold their hand.

Some of the features I would like to see, future enhancements of the vSphere product which starts with Virtual Center. The ability to manage more than a single host because right now, they're a challenge, because we have so many deployments, we can only manage one Virtual Center per one VMware host box. That's a limitation of the product. We would love to be able to see, we have various locations scattered throughout the US and international. We would love to see Virtual Center being able to manage more than one host at a single location because right now, we're challenging with having to login to Virtual Center at each location, instead of a single pane where the Oracle exist under one Virtual Center, our motto.

We currently use the vSphere EXSi along with their vCAC products. We are currently evaluating their vRealize products and we are also evaluating the vCloud Air.

Some of the advantages of the stability of their product is how robust VMware is, in a sense. The ability to scale on a fly. Without having to touch the system, you can literally increase the compute resources on the fly. I mean, we've been running their products since 2002. I have not had any major issues or outages since, and we've deployed this solution globally.

In my impressions of some of the capabilities and scalability of the vSphere products, it allows you to, without having to invest in a large hardware portfolio, it gives you the opportunity to scale on the fly through consolidation efforts.

We were challenged a couple of years, several years back with figuring out ways to cut cost and save money through ingenuity and automation and innovation, and this is one of the tools that was recently released in the early 2006. That's when VMware, I want to really feel like they really ironed out their niche and made this product usable and feasible for our infrastructure. By doing so, we saved a ton of money.

The efforts required to set up vSphere is extremely simplistic. In our market, we have a large turnover from time to time, so it's easy to train and educate those on setting up the vSphere products from the ground up. It's very simplified. The installations are very easy.

Typically, what we do is the installations are done by our own premise resources with little or no experience, so that goes to show you how easy and simplistic the product is to install and or to manage overtime.

There were other competitors out there that we've evaluated that just fell short of this implementation because of their feature set or some of their security vulnerability.

I have not tested Virtual Volumes. That's why I'm here, to learn more about the Virtual Volumes feature along with the NSX platform. I'm excited about it because we have a huge SAN infrastructure where we would like to be able to move workloads from point A to point B and I think that's a good starting point.

I've seen a lot of hypervisors out there, but 10, hands down, in the market.

If I were to recommend this particular product to some of my peers or co-workers or somebody else in another industry, I would clearly state the reliability, the stability, and the ease of use, is which they would fall in love with and they're always innovative. I mean, that's what we love. Every year, we come back to the conference and you learn something new. There's always some good takeaways.

Typically, I would like to hear from the source. I always find myself as an IT technical resource. I tend to like to talk to the people that's actually doing the work and I like to read some of the guys that have the hands-on experience. I don't go out and read a bunch of documents or books per se. I like to engage with the resources that have actually deployed, implement it, because those are your viable resources that have the hands-on experience.

The ability to aggregate resources.

We have saved money, reducing the number of physical machines. I probably would have had a couple hundred machines and I now have about thirty.

I can't even think of anything – it does everything I need it to.

I love it – over the years its been one of the most stable platforms I've ever dealt with. The platform is more stable than the OS running on it.

I think it’s great. It’s been able to grow even as we care for more and more patients.

I love it. I’ve had great experience with VMware support – they have never failed to resolve an issue or understand how we got there so I don’t get to that issue again.

I wasn’t there for the initial setup, but it's very straightforward.

When choosing a vendor we look at

• Support
• Usability
• Cost

You should also talk to someone knowledgeable not just online research – someone who can help cover questions that wouldn’t normally get covered.

Peer reviews are important but not the highest. There are a few groups I look to specifically, one of which is Spiceworks, but I respect the people I’ve dealt with.

• HA
• DRS
• Storage IO control
• vMotion
• Storage vMotion

On the server virtualization side, we’re able to provide more services with less resources because we can take one server, virtualize it, and put 12 virtualized machines on it, and have them play different roles. It’s allowed us to do more with less.

The web client could use some tweaks, and the should move from flash-based to HTML5.

It's very stable, no hiccups that weren’t addressed by support and updates, no show stoppers.

It's highly scalable. We needed to add HP hardware, and an HR cluster to accommodate recent growth, and it was just as simple as adding to the cluster, so highly scalable.

It's responsive, but a few times we had issues with their tech knowledge and troubleshooting steps. We had to escalate the issue and then it was resolved.

It was straightforward.

It's a good solid product. If I had to virtualize anything, it would be my choice and and would use anything like MS Hyper-V.

Make sure hardware on compatability matrix that VMware uses, because if use something not on list, will run into driver issues unnecessarily. And if planning a brand new data center, those are things you want to look at.