VMware vSphere Reviews

VMWare server is an excellent virtualzation tool for the workstation. It could be used as a limited functionality version of VMWare Workstation or as a host for your virtual machines, with all of the bells and whistles that came with Workstation, such as:- Centralized Management of Virtual Machines. - Remote management of VM's and configurations. - Integration with VMware Player and Workstation, to view the machines hosted by Server.

Unfortunately, this software has reached its End-Of-Life, and has held that status for almost two years. Meaning, there are no new software updates or available downloads for it. This product has basically been replaced by ESX, ESXi and vSphere, which are functionally less resource intensive because of their design. We used this tool during my Linux classes when I was attending College for my B.A.

As of now, OracleVM (formerly known as VirtualBox), is an excellent solution that is open-source and freely available for download.

Our primary use case for the solution right now is for a project regarding Telecom Italia. We are working with the telecom. It is mostly regarding the private cloud. The main reason for having all of these products and solutions altogether is to reach the cloud director and to have the private cloud for Telecom Italia.

Our organization has seen plenty of benefits from this solution. We have the possibility to move workloads to different locations. For the end-users and customers, it's beneficial because they can run whatever they want in a matter of minutes or hours instead of providing a data center for themselves and running whatever they need. Thanks to all the solutions altogether, it is possible to move the workload and it has high availability in different time zones and different regions. 

There are plenty of features we have found valuable. It has multiple features that we are using every day during our jobs. 

vSphere itself can handle lots of things, but I can say when it comes to other products, we have lots of other availability, lots of other visibilities with the data center that we have. The areas that could be improved are dependent on the project that we are working on and the use cases.

There are some limitations with the solution regarding migrating. For example, some features like EVC we have in vSphere, but still, it is not possible to migrate VM from Intel to AMD, or we still have some limitations even if we have EVC for VMs.

These are the features that maybe would be really useful for lots of customers that don't want to have downtime, and at the same time they want to be modernized, go through the new technologies now, cloud and everything.

I have been using VMware for seven years or so.

The solution is stable. With respect to the very traditional workload that we had, one server for one application, one physical server, I can say there are lots of improvements when we are using VMware itself. In the traditional way of doing the work, it was not possible to utilize the CPU, utilize the memory that you are using. But here, we have lots of options like over-commitment of CPU and memory. We can manage our workloads anytime.

It is easily possible to scale the solution and upgrade depending on which products we are using on-premise. We can have a path to scale, to upgrade, to do everything.

Usually when I had to utilize customer support for the solution, it was satisfying based on the priority of raising the ticket.

The initial deployment was straightforward, but again it depends on the use cases. For example, in one project we were working on the deployment and using automation from the customer themselves. They wrote their automation, and it was a little complex to match what they need based on their automation and how we could deploy the products for them.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

On-premises

The feature I find the most valuable is that vSphere doesn't break unless integrated with Veeam or vCenter. 

When you run vSphere on its own, that thing can run for 50 years without crashing. The problem starts when you start integrating it to clusters, migrating the virtual machines, doing the DRS, and applying the resource pool. The problem is with the memory. 

Sometimes it's impossible to prevent problems from happening. With vSphere, you never know where the problem is going to come from, but you will always know that there is a problem. This is the problem. 

I would make integration much better and improve speed. I would also make the errors more visible to the user. 

I have been using this solution for many years. 

This solution is stable. 

This solution is scalable. 

Tech support is very knowledgeable.  

On-premises

We are resellers and consultants who provide solutions for our clients.

They manage the virtual machines, such as CPU usage, or memory usage, or disk space.

The most valuable features are the vMotion, the storage vMotion, the DRS, and the high availability function.

The way that vSphere manages the alerts on the data machine is not easy to configure.

I have been working with vSphere for approximately 15 years.

We started with version 4.

It's a stable solution.

VMware vSphere is scalable.

Our clients are medium size companies.

We have not used technical support.

The initial setup was easy.

In my opinion, the essential version is a good price.

This is a good solution and I will recommend it. They are choosing a good product.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Our primary use case is infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

It provides more efficient use of compute resources through virtualization, making our infrastructure more cost-effective. It makes deployment and management of resources easier so that we can be more agile in our projects.  

The free ESXi hypervisor was a great way to get started, as it allowed us to introduce virtual machines so that users could start to experience the advantages.

It would be great if the free version included a management tool that was a scaled-down vCenter Manager.  

We have been using VMware vSphere since 2005.

We use this solution for production workloads.

This solution provides production uptime with its DRS and failover features.

The most valuable feature is vSAN, as it reduces the cost of SAN storage and maintenance. 

Reporting on vCenter needs to be improved.

We have been using this solution for five years.

I find that the Virtual Center Management, iSCSI support, and VMotion hot migration are very beneficial. 

With these features, we have faster server deployments, additional security for development projects, and easier backups.

The fact that we are having faster server deployments has improved our organization. We are also have better security for development projects and are seeing easier backups.

1. Native multi-platform management client (not WEB based) - Last improvements in this area are huge. However, some users prefer a native client. Please VMware, listen to your customers!
2. A fully **automatic** and lightweight Virtual Center. Another time this has a huge improvement in last releases. However, a more automatic and simple deployment is required.
3. Automatic on-demand Hypervisor setup for running some workloads on PC workstations at night. This function doesn't exist at time. We really like to see it!

We have used it for seven years.

We did have some issues, so I would suggest a full automatic host server setup using DHCP and PXE without configuration scripts.

No issues encountered. In fact, the system has been very stable.

No, not with dedicated servers. Yes with ephemeral servers- hundreds of PCs that we like to use as ESXi hosts at night for executing virtual machines focused on computing simulations.

No, we haven't used a previous solution.

The multi-path is very complex with iSCSI and non-existent with NFS.

We did it in-house.

Purchase only the cheaper solution with support. I don’t recommend high-end licenses.

• Hyper-V
• Oracle VM

Contract only experts or use an external consultant.

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.