VMware vSphere Reviews

The level of consolidation that you can implement from a hardware reduction element – it is so valuable to us in our industry. Ease of use and simplicity.

The cost savings in itself from having to buy 15 servers in each hotel. Now we have one server for each hotel. When we release our new applications, we don’t have to invest in new infrastructure, we just scale because its already in place. We're on a five-year lifecycle so we can scale for five years with no further investments.

Centralized management could be better. A server can only be managed by one vCenter. This limits our visibility to remediate, troubleshoot and fix problems efficiently.

It's very reliable. They're is not another product similar, and we've had no major outages for seven to eight years. We have hotels where you can barely reach and because of the stability of the product they can trust the reliability.

It grows beyond belief. In my situation, because Im always dealing with corporate, I have shown that virtual machines can scale to whatever we have asked it to do. If we need to scale we can, and the hardware just needs to be ordered, and setup.

I love them, they are the best in the world. We only call in emergencies, and they are the best in the world. We are changing to v6 and the support model is changing so we to procure the enterprise support even for the basic offices. In the earlier versions, I had it but now we're trying to persuade VMware for that additional 24/7 service.

It's straightforward, and couldn't be any easier. I did training around the world for IT resources, even teams who have never seen it can adopt it, both in terms of administrative and installation.

VM snapshot consolidation. It does that extremely well.

Reliability, it just runs without you worrying about it all the time. I don’t have to tweak it, don’t have to really do anything. It’s easy to use as well.

I really don’t have much to complain about as we don’t need very much, so we really are happy where we are right now. However, they could do with bringing back the regular GUI.

Fairly stable, doesn't crash, and does what it needs to do. It’s great.

We’ve only scaled a little bit. We’re not super large, but it definitenly is somewhat easy to scale up. The hardest part is the physical connectivity to disparate networks, which VMware can’t really control.

Excellent, it’s very smooth. You call with your problem, you get to the right person quickly, and they dive in and resolve the issue quickly. If it’s not a VMware issue, they’re very good at letting you know where the issue resides at.

It’s fairly easy to set up. There’s always a little bit of a question of what comes first, the host of the virtualization of the vCenter server, but it’s not too hard to figure out.

I’d highly likely to recommend VSphere, but the only thing that’s prohibiting the switching is cost, as it definitely is expensive.

We always look at responsiveness, availability, and willingness to work on a partnership when choosing a provider. I believe we continuously still look at updates, and sadly we still have some Hyper-V. It’s hard to cost justify switching over for vSphere, as Windows Data Center is just so cheap. But vSphere is definitely better if you ignore costs.

If I’ve never worked with a product, and I’m comparing apples to apples across the board, I definitely have to look at what peers are saying in helping me reach my decision.

• vMotion
• DRS
• HA

The ability to perform consolidation and it's portability, flexibility, and DR capability.

None that I can think of. It's a nicely-evolved product.

Overall, it’s very stable. I'm very impressed, except when running on Dell, but it works on Cisco blades.

It's very scalable, and you can add more as needs dictate. It depends on the ratio and goals for consolidation, so you can scale as you need.

The quality is not quite what it used to be since it was outsourced.

It’s now very easy, was harder but now more deployment options, scripts, auto-deploy, can have full automation or manual, smaller footprint.

vSphere provides a lots of great features. In my opinion, VMotion is a feature that helps save time, cost, and effort.

You can arrange for system maintenance at any time you want without required downtime.

We've used it to implement a virtual datacenter server for in-house applications and services and have achieved a green and efficient virtual datacenter.

After consolidating all the physical machines in our datacenter onto vSphere, we have also achieved faster server provisioning. With the help of templates, we have reduced the time from weeks to several minutes and, therefore, we can provide services for other departments nearly instantaneously.

I think that all the improvements VMware could make would be related to monitoring. vSphere should be equipped with a better monitoring solution.

I have been using VMware products for 8 years.

Starting with testing software on a VMware Workstation box, and then virtualizing all IP services such as routing, DHCP, DNS, etc with an ESXi 4.1 host. And lately transformed almost services to VMware vSphere 5.0.

As with any software, ESXi and vSphere have their own requirements, but if you meet the requirements for hardware, network, storage, etc., then deploying a vSphere system is just easy as pie.

It's efficient and very stable.

VMware helps scaling with VMware vSphere is just easy by adding more ESXi hosts to an existing cluster, and then vSphere DRS will does the work for you like monitoring resources and spreading VMs to balance workloads on all the hosts between that cluster.

I have not made any calls during the time we have been running vSphere.

I have used KVM and Microsoft Virtual Server before switching completely to VMware vSphere. With VMware vSphere, we have a good management tool, with easy provisioning, and easy troubleshooting.

It is a quite straightforward setup. It’s just a easy-to-follow wizard installer, and I don’t think that there is an easier way to do it.

Pricing and licensing models vary, and are dependent upon your organization requirements and operations. Always start with the minimal licensing model then, later, upgrade to meet your needs.

Due to the simplicity of vSphere deployment, the ease of management, and the small footprint of its hypervisor, we decided to use it without wasting time on other products.

We were seeking a green and an efficient solution for our datacenter. We found vSphere to be a great product and decided to become their customer.

When working with vSphere, I think you always have to take three things into consideration:

• Know your system requirements - are there any compatibility issues, or performance impacts etc.
• Monitor the current physical infrastructure so you have a specific resource consumption, and can then develop the best investment plan
• Make a transformation plan from the physical infrastructure to the virtualized one

- Increase the flexibility and agility of the infrastructure to move at the speed of business by decoupling the server from the hardware - Server consolidation has driven the virtualization industry shift, and vSphere leads the charge. - Virtualization overhead is the smallest of any hypervisor on the planet. - Supports over 90 operating systems, whereas other vendors cannot even come close - Centralized management and built-in performance statistics collection make management easy - Complementing tools, such as Site Recovery Manager, vCenter Operations Manager, vShield, and vCloud Director just increase the power of the stack. - Add in the licensing for the operating systems and the applications running virtualized, plus the cost of management tools. The competition costs the same.

- The entry point for small business is fairly high. They are working on this currently. - Capacity management for top-tier business critical servers - Currently VMware has a tremendous amount of products that complement the vSphere suite. Some of the products are complementary, and some compete with each other. This product list is sometimes hard to navigate. - Security access granularity for end users can be complex.

VMware's vSphere is currently THE industry leading virtualization platform. I have been using VMware vSphere and its predecessors for almost ten years now. The core hypervisor continues to lead the industry. At the present time, you cannot go wrong with VMware's vSphere suite. However, competitors are rapidly closing the gap, so watch the market closely over the next few years. I implement business-critical applications on vSphere for all sizes of business almost daily, and am proud to be a virtualization enthusiast. At the moment, VMware vSphere is my hypervisor of choice - without reservation.

* User friendly and not complex. * Easy to deploy, manage and troubleshoot. * Scalability and stability. * Highly recommended for mission critical applications and databases. * Aggressive in educating their clients.* User friendly and not complex. * Easy to deploy, manage and troubleshoot. * Scalability and stability. * Highly recommended for mission critical applications and databases. * Aggressive in educating their clients.

VMware should compete against their competitors in terms of Pricing. Hopefully, they can value add some features without any additional cost.