VMware vSphere Reviews

Currently, our whole infrastructure stack is residing on the VMware hypervisor. Everything we use is running on VMware. We have multi-site vCenter data centers. We have four sites, but they are two separate pairs of sites that provide redundancy. We will shortly also use VMware Site Recovery Manager for the two to four hours disaster recovery strategy. 

We are on version 6.5 or 6.7, and we are moving to version 7.0 shortly.

It is a very stable solution. It performs well for our requirements. It has been running for a long time, so we are very knowledgeable about this solution.

It is a very well-supported solution, and it is very flexible. The expansion of its functionality is dynamic.

Its cost needs to be improved. It is very expensive as compared to other solutions.

I have been around VMware and vSphere for the last ten years.

In terms of stability, it is very well-established and very stable. For any problems or issues that we've encountered in the past, their support was quite dynamic. We've had very good success in resolving any issues or problems. None of these issues or problems had a direct impact to live services. They have built it in a way so that it provides redundancy and flexibility. It ensures that your production environments remain available at all times, even in the case of problems or issues that could be encountered. I would give it an A for stability. 

It is easily scalable, and it can be scaled without any impact on the availability of the production environment.

Their support is very good. I would give them good grades. For any problems or issues that we've encountered in the past, their support was quite dynamic. We've had very good success in resolving any issues or problems. Because there are many different products in the stack, you need to ensure that you reach the right person for the product you're looking at, but it is always fairly simple and easy to reach the right person.

The learning curve to actually get used to the product and know the product properly is fairly steep. I have been working with this solution for the last ten years, so it is not a new solution for me. I couldn't speak to today's onboarding process because I haven't onboarded in the last year. It has been many years.

It is very expensive as compared to other competitive hypervisor solutions in the market today. Its competitors are actually more aggressive. Even though most of them are less established solutions, they have started to catch up in functionality and capacity, and their pricing is extremely aggressive.

If someone is starting new with VMware, it is important that you either onboard someone who has experience with it or you ramp up the knowledge of your IT operations staff. It is far-reaching and complex and requires a good understanding to manage it properly. If you don't have a good understanding at the beginning, you could find yourself in situations where you're not getting the actual return on the solution because you're not managing it properly. The knowledge gap at the beginning has to be covered quite thoroughly.

I would rate VMware vSphere an eight out of ten.

My primary use case for vSphere 6.7 is that it's used strategically as a management plain for all 2,100 ESXi hosts across our environment.

In terms of mission-critical apps, I couldn't tell you, because I operate the public cloud and we don't really care what our customers use it for.

We do not use VMware Cloud on AWS yet but it is something we are exploring.

In regards to a performance boost, I don't know at the application level, but I can tell you, purely at the vCenter level, that we have seen improvements in our ability to migrate from Windows to the appliance, now that there is full feature-parity across the stack. We're seeing reduced resource usage from the appliance, it's way more efficient in 6.7. Operations are able to complete faster, so we're happy.

It has streamlined things for us. We've been able to standardize on the newer 6.7. It's definitely given us a path forward, where we might be able to look at expanding into the public cloud, augmenting our on-prem solution now that we have some sort of feature parity.

Most valuable features of vSphere 6.7, for us, at the management level would be:

• VCHA is a nice redundancy feature that they added in 6.7.
• I like the quality of life improvements with the VMFS-6 for using auto UNMAP on the data stores.
• We really appreciate the improvements to the Clarity UI where we can manage Update Manager (VUM) and our vSAN stack within the modern interface.

The solution is also very simple and efficient to manage. Features that have made it simple and easy to manage include the newer VAMI for the V-center appliance, it's very easy to see what version we are at, and very easy to upgrade to the next version. The fact that we can now use VCHA at the appliance level just decreases our chance of having an outage, because so many of our customers rely on the API interface for V-center. 

There are a few things I wanted to see in the next version of vSphere 6.7 which, it turns out, were announced today (at VMworld 2018) so I haven't had time to explore them. But one of the things that was most important to me was the ability to automate or improve deployment of VCHA in an advanced configuration, where it's not hosting itself. I'm looking forward to playing with the new release and seeing where it's at.

The solution has been very stable for us. Since we rolled the 6.7 we have seen consistent uptime.

Being that it's reduced our resource footprint, I think its very scalable.

We have had to open up support cases for vSphere 6.7. We have gotten generally good feedback, but it's still fairly new for them, like it is for us. A lot of things work differently in production then they do in the lab or in your QA environments, and they're willing to help however they can to stabilize the product.

As we're a partner, we do get generally good help pretty early on.

I was not using any other solution before vSphere.

I was involved from all the early stages of planning to move to vSphere 6.7.

We were already considering moving to 6.5 and, for us, there were so many added benefits of going to 6.7, and being that it's not a real major bump - it's more like 6.5 "Update 3" with a lot of quality of life improvements - it made it very easy for us to make that decision.

When I'm working with a vendor, some of the most important criteria are 

• their release cadence
• how much support they're giving to the product
• what kind of R&D they're investing in
• generally, anecdotally, the response we're getting when we're asking for support.

Moving to 6.7, like I said, has standardized a lot of our environment for us so we have definitely seen a reduction in the amount of time we are spending trying to troubleshoot things. It's very consistent. Everything has performed exactly how we expected it to.

We don't use any of the built-in security features but I do appreciate that vSphere 6.7 is inherently more secure in that it's limited, by default, to using TLS 1.2.

I would rate the solution to be a nine (out of ten) but I think they're steadily creeping towards a ten with some of the post-GA releases I've seen.

The use case is that we want to upgrade to the new features and functionality of version 6.7.

We run several SQL Servers on there, Active Directory Servers, file servers, web servers; multiple servers running on it.

The new HTML5 interface is much more robust; a lot fewer bugs in it, more features. It's an overall better experience for us.

It's hard to say there has been a performance boosts for these apps but I would say it is a boost because the servers are much more responsive, the end-users complain less about it. So it must be a good thing.

The main benefit of the solution is that it makes end-users able to use the interface much more effectively. They don't have to install a client on their machine, they can do it from their phone, their laptop, their tablet, any OS, anytime. It's a better experience for the end-user.

The HTML5 interface is much better, it's faster, faster than the old C# Client, which was very nice to have. But with the HTML5 interface, it's smooth, fast, responsive. I can do it from any device, from my Mac, my PC, even from my phone.

The solution is very simple to use and to manage. Updates are simple. The biggest feature that enables the ease of use is the fact that you can update via the web interface. With a couple of clicks, the update is done; no manual intervention, you just click Update and it automatically reboots the server for you and you're back up and going again.

As far as additional features go, they've already added the VMware Update Manager to this version, which has been great; it's been very nice to use.

It would be nice to see it a little more tightly integrated with the patching solution so you could do it in one pane of glass. Right now, you have to jump back and forth. It's still not difficult, but you have to jump back and forth to do your update definitions and then go back and actually do the updates themselves.

In terms of stability, so far the impressions of this solution have been very good. It's been very stable. We haven't had any downtime at all with this new solution.

So far, we haven't had any issues at all with scalability. We've got over 1,500 VMs, about 84 hosts right now, so it's been very scalable for us.

I have used technical support before, via the web interface. You ask questions there and they respond with email or a phone call back to help you solve your problems.

I was an initial installer and I was actually a beta customer as well. The setup was very straightforward. Compared to the previous versions, it's much easier. You can upgrade from a Mac or a PC or via a web interface.

The biggest ROI has been technical. Technically, it's much easier to deploy, much easier for the end-user to use, we have much happier end-users. As they manage their systems, they're much happier without having to install a client, which takes time, takes resources on their machine. They can do it from any device, anywhere, at any time, which is very nice for them.

Anybody who's looking to research this, to upgrade in the future, should go for it. It's a very easy upgrade. The features are very beneficial. It's very worth the time to update. It's a much easier solution for the future, and it's a better experience for all involved.

Regarding using VMware Cloud on AWS, we use AWS right now, but for our backup solutions, is all. Cold backup, long-term storage out to the cloud, is all we do right now.

For us, the biggest criteria for selecting a vendor, right now, are the pricing and the support. Because we are higher education, we have to find the best price, and support comes right behind that. We need the best support as well.

I would rate the solution as about a nine out of ten right now. It could be better but it's very close to perfect right now.

vSphere allows us to virtualize our campus servers and our student environment. We run vCenter within vSphere, so we have about 300 or 400 student desktop workstations that we run at any given time. We are able to customize our students' experience very quickly, very easily, and are able to make it mobile from different computer labs on campus.

We're also exploring opening it up so students would be able to remote into their VDI workstations from offsite. We're also looking into wrapping everything up with Workspace ONE, so we can virtualize more applications and let them have more of an MDM experience as well.

We're not really virtualizing the apps themselves, yet. We're trying to move towards that. Our mission-critical things rely on our servers that we have virtualized. We have web servers, security servers, database servers that we have virtualized and that makes it easier for us to back up and maintain them. Really, vSphere plays a part in our management.

We have seen a performance boost. As we keep moving up to different versions it gets more seamless, it gets easier to maintain, to do updates to our virtual environment and to the physical end. We're also moving towards virtual storage. Moving to flash arrays and virtual storage is even speeding up our students' experience when using the virtual desktops. I would estimate a 25 percent boost.

Another benefit we've seen is with our IT technicians. It used to be this IT was assigned to a specific area, and that was what they worked on. They had 300 or 400 machines that they would have to run around to, to maintain them; re-image them every semester. Now, with the virtual environment, they are able to keep more up-to-date on their applications, on their Windows updates, and do it in the background. They are able to refresh entire labs within less than an hour, rather than sitting there all day or all week refreshing all of the labs.

We have a better, faster management. We have more productivity from our IT staff and more productivity from our students, as well.

Ease of support is one of the main features that we have with it. We're able to take Snapshots before doing updates to make it easy to roll back if something does happen to go wrong.

The visibility that we have of our VMs is also important. What's being applied? Who has management of them? Laying it out in a virtual environment allows us to customize for our students. We're able to respond to the students' needs much more quickly than we could in a physical environment.

I found it a little bit daunting at first when I was coming into it raw, but now the management of it is very simple.

I would like to see a little bit more visibility regarding errors. When an error does occur, there are times where it says "Unknown error" or something to that effect, and it doesn't necessarily give you a lot of metrics. If you go online and you give a description of it, normally the VMware forums can help you find out what it is, but I'd like to see a little bit more visibility from the software itself regarding what's going on: "This went wrong, this is why."

The downtime that we have experienced has not been that much, and normally it's the result of a mistake on our part, not necessarily the software. We've misconfigured something or we haven't thought about a configuration setting that we should have put in place or we didn't do our research. It's not normally the software that has a problem. When we do have a software glitch, it is normally a reboot and it's back up and running, so we have not had much downtime.

So far, we've really enjoyed the scalability of it. The main thing that we have to accommodate for is licensing, making sure that we have enough license to cover our expansion.

Otherwise, we just throw a few more hard drives into our server array and make sure that we have enough storage.

On those occasions where we do run into a problem, we have had great help from VMware's customer support. Recently I had problems getting new certificates for our servers to be able to bring them into our vSphere and Horizon environment. VMware support was able to help me diagnose what was going wrong with those, come up with a plan for the future to be able to more accurately get the certificates I needed, and integrate them into the environment.

I would rate the technical support a solid eight out of 10, maybe even nine. They are responsive, always quick to answer questions, and knowledgeable.

I don't think we were using anything before vSphere. I think we led off with it. My partner was thinking for a time about Microsoft, but he decided that Hyper-V wasn't for us and we went with VMware, and we haven't regretted it a day since.

Pricing can be an issue in terms of scalability, depending on how quickly you want to expand. If you budget every year, put some aside that you know you need to get another host and you plan for it, then it shouldn't be that hard. If you're going to try to all of a sudden say, "I want to add six hosts to my environment," then it's going to a little bit pricey and you're not going to want to spend the budget on it.

Plan your environment well, determine what your needs are, and then try to bump that up by 20 percent; give yourself a little bit of future expanding. That way you don't have to leap off and buy a lot right away. Budget for the future if you can. Put a little bit away here and there. Look at the virtual storage, you will save yourself a lot of headaches on configuring. The physical storage can be a pain. The virtual storage, once you get it in place then you don't have to manage it much.

Make sure that you really have spec'd out your ESXi host so it can support your environment. Normally, that's been fairly easy. Companies like HPE and Lenovo are more than eager to help you make sure that you have a server that is spec'd out for the VMware environment, and help you get solid on what you need.

We haven't done a lot with the built-in security and encryption yet, but from what I've been looking at so far in vSphere 6.7, it looks like something that we would like to integrate. Before I became an analyst I helped manage TPM and BitLocker on laptops. It was a pain. It had to touch each device physically. I'm looking forward to 6.7 where I can utilize TPM 2.0 and encrypt all of my stations on the fly, and make it a more seamless experience.

We are not using VMware Cloud on AWS. Being just a local community college, it's a little bit expensive for us right now, but one day we would like to.

The product is a good, solid nine out of 10. The only reason I would knock it down any is, as I said, I wish the error messages would, at times, be a little bit more verbose and more explainable.

Our use case is virtualization of hardware infrastructure, for return on investment cases. We have done pretty well with it. I'm really happy with it.

The mission-critical apps we run on them include SQL; there is a lot of file sharing; there are a lot of websites and web servers running on them. There's some big data stuff for big science. We have to be able to digest lots of data and then pull analytics on it at a high-level, and be able to show big data in useful ways.

With the current compliance options that I have to go through, it's very nice to have a lot of the encryption built in. It checks a lot of boxes for the federal level so I don't have to either bolt something on or have something on top of it. Having it native and integrated into the system makes things much easier.

Also, being able to manage a lot of servers in one pane of glass makes things a lot simpler. Basically, a lot of things just happen in one area. You can roll things over, move things around more dynamically, without having to hit multiple systems. Being able to manage it, in its entirety, is easier and better for us.

• VHA
• DRS
• VMotion
• Redundancy, failover, any DR situation
• Reducing the overall physical footprint for electrical needs, heating, cooling
• Money-saving, in general

In terms of management, it's getting better. There were recent changes with the infrastructure and the architecture, going from a physical vSphere vCenter client to the web interface. That has slowed things down a little bit, to be honest. It's getting better. With the 5.7 release they've optimized it, the menus are a little snappier, and it isn't as cumbersome to manage through as it was on the previous website or vSphere Web Client instance.

Also, reading some of the sensors in the hardware itself, that's where VMware does a really great job in the digital infrastructure and being able to scale things and knowing what's going on in vSphere. But not having to buy something from a third-party to scan the actual hardware components, like the hard drives and the port containers and fan speeds; not having to bolt something on and go through another vendor, would be helpful.

Stability has always been really well done with VMware. I have always been very happy with the stability of the system. You can set it up, you can check your optimizations there. But as far as weird issues with being able to convert things from physical to virtual, I've really had no big problems in switching that over. It's been really seamless to the end-user as well, just doing standardized conversions. It's been very stable and easy to manage.

I haven't had any loss of data in quite some time. Data is the key to everything. Downtime and loss of data are almost unacceptable in my current position.

I can always go horizontal, vertical is a little problematic sometimes. Horizontally, being able to add storage on the fly - even hot ad-hoc remove, if we do have some higher workloads or the like - we can always scale that without re-booting, with the newer operating systems. So the scalability portion is always on key.

Technical support is pretty good. I've had to use them a couple times for smaller issues. They've always been very helpful and we've always come to a solution.

The backup solution we were using at the time was Dell's version of IBM's Tape Library with Symantec Backup Exec. We were doing tape backups at the file level, not really any virtual snaps, so incrementals every day, fulls on the weekends.

As data gets bigger it's harder and harder to back up and that's where virtualization comes in, because you can start doing analysis on data changes and deltas a little bit better. Tracking and things that are tied into VMware assist digital backup solutions to be faster, more resilient, and have less downtime in a restore situation.

In my previous job, I was a Senior Systems Administrator for a credit union. We were running VMware 3.0, 12 years ago, and having that experience - and being bleeding edge at that time - helped me really be a catalyst in getting over to virtualization. That knowledge that I had in the past has always helped me, because I've seen VMware grow and do the things that it has done. Having that knowledge was helpful in setting it up from fresh, again: making the redundancies, knowing some of the pitfalls you have when first setting it up, and seeing a lot of the capital that you can lose if you don't understand what you're doing at that time.

I set it up myself. I can get technical support, but I can't have on-prem or anyone else.

Performance is somewhat relative, but an overall return on investment comes from not having multiple physical servers and from helping to aggregate a lot of the processors and RAM, and being able to use them more efficiently. We're not really worried about speed but about more efficiency.

I've been with them for so long, I never looked to much else. I've always been happy with vSphere and seeing what they've done for VMware itself. Intel products weren't really there, and I still don't feel they're there.

I've really enjoyed the Dell partnership because I do Dell on the back-end. The hand-holding between Dell and VMware works relatively well, with their hardware control lists and being sure they stay compatible for long periods of time, without having to spend money on new hardware. You can stay in your swim lane. That partnership is really a key to success.

My advice is "do it".

I rate vSphere at nine out of 10 because the HTML version of things needs to get a little bit better. The vSphere side of things gets a little difficult to manage; right-click, in some browsers, doesn't work as well as it used to. I'm seeing a little bit of general latency that we didn't used to get with the thick client. It's getting there.

Version 6.71 brought some of those performance metrics back, but it's just hard to get from one end to the other. With the ever-changing federal requirements, we need to really strip down and minimize what can be done in the browsers. It is getting more and more difficult, Java being the key thing. Going to HTML 5, that's a great thing because Java is going to be pay-to-play next year. And you don't have the vulnerabilities with HTML 5. It works symbiotically. We're seeing that progress. There are some growing pains, but it's getting there.

The most valuable feature for us is Virtual Volumes because it gives us better control of VM stores.

It's given us the ability to consolidate SAN- and NAS-storage availability.

Even though the Web Client is faster and more efficient in v6 as compared to previous versions, it could be faster.

I've used it for three months.

We've had no issues with deployment. Upgrades from v5.5 went smoothly.

No purple screens of death with ESXi 6 whatsoever. vCenter Server works perfectly.

We encountered no issues with scalability.

We haven't used them often, but they've been excellent.

Technical support has been excellent.

We went with v6 to get the benefits of the better Web Client.

The initial setup was staightforward with the ESXi and vCenter upgrades. It worked the very first time.

We implemented it in-house.

We expect to save in the $100,000 range after only one year since we virtualized more servers.

Just evaluate the features offered in the different versions to meet your needs.

We looked at Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer, but VMware has always served us well.

Install it in a test lab first if the experience level is low for VMware solutions.

VMware vSphere is a very stable solution that can be used to host your virtual services. If you want to host a virtual machine, VMware vSphere is the best tool available on the market.

The most valuable features of the solution are the overall virtualization technology and the new features that allow you to move servers from one system to another. The solution's newer technologies allow you to do network-level isolation.

It would be good if the licensing cost of the solution could be cheaper.

I have been using VMware vSphere for five to ten years.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten for stability.

The solution's scalability is also good because you can scale using your required hardware. At the same time, the VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter combination can allow you to scale up to a decent level. Around 100 users were using the solution in our organization.

The solution's technical support was good and fast enough. The technical support team was able to help us with most of the problems we experienced.

The installation and initial setup of the solution were simple because we had a team of people already familiar with VMware. Learning a newer version was never difficult for them. They could easily streamline into the newer versions and use them effectively. So, the learning curve was not that high for the team.

The biggest benefit we had with VMware vSphere is that we could provide effective service to our end customers. I was able to support multiple operating systems on VMware, which was the biggest value of the product.

VMware vSphere on-premises is still cheaper than the cloud. It's the kind of technology you can always count on.

VMware vSphere has helped us provide better services to our customers because we were able to provide them with stable service. The availability of our systems increased by using VMware products. The solution's security was adequate, but we were not using it extensively.

The solution's High Availability is definitely the factor that comes into the picture because you cannot have downtime in today's IT world. VMware becomes a core strength of the product. It gives you the required availability, scalability, and stability for the environment.

I have always been looking for a seamless cloud migration strategy, which has already been implemented. Now, you can easily migrate systems from on-premises to AWS or Azure cloud. It is easy to integrate VMware vSphere with other products.

Many people using the infrastructure on-premise sometimes want to use the additional capacity in the cloud for additional functionality. The version I used earlier did not have the functionality to move the server from on-premises to the cloud seamlessly. In the newer version, they already have established that part.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

My primary use case of VMware vSphere 6.7 is that I manage some 100 clients who are using this product in their day-to-day work. These are businesses that use it. It runs the core of their networks. It runs their business. It is critical for them to be up and running, so vSphere is pretty important for them.

The mission-critical application that we run on vSphere is our main program that we use to actually monitor all of our customers. We have hundreds of customers. Our main application of remote monitoring runs in our vSphere environment. We also run our Exchange, which is critical. That's how we get our alerts about all of our systems that we're managing. We also run our ticketing systems. When a customer will submit a ticket via email we get it. All of that is running on vSphere.

While I don't have percentages to share, I can say that I have received a performance boost (using vSphere).

The solution has improved our organization because it's made our jobs a lot easier. We're able to monitor all these customers and, with vSphere, they're much more stable than they were previously when they were on physical servers. The fact that they're more stable makes our jobs a lot easier.

The most valuable features of vSphere are really the scalability and its reliability. It's really helped us, as a managed service provider, because we have so many customers that we have to be pretty much on call for, so that when it's up and running and it's working well, that makes our jobs a lot easier.

The built-in encryption of vSphere really helps us to secure our customers, especially customers in the medical field who need to be HIPAA compliant. Being able to encrypt the VM itself helps out a ton.

I find vSphere very simple and easy to manage. It has a very good GUI that you're able to use. Anybody can log in and start clicking around and figure out how to power on a VM, how to create a new VM. It's pretty streamlined for the most part.

As far as the ease of use goes, if you ever were in a situation where something was down, I feel like the logging in VMware makes it really easy to report what's going on. The logging is a really helpful feature. Also, some of the features built in, like vMotion - if you do have a server that's down - you can use something like vMotion to get it back up and running.

As far as room for improvement goes, I really feel like each release they're coming out with new features, making it better and better. The new HTML5 client is almost there. It needs just a little bit more and then it will definitely be ready.

Stability has been awesome. Like I said, we have 100 clients who are on vSphere and it has made all of their systems a lot more stable, which is great for us.

Scalability is really great. Being able to have a customer who decides, maybe a year after they've purchased their hardware, that they need to add another server because maybe they've decided to purchase a new product - being able to scale that system out really helps a lot.

Getting vSphere set up for the first time is pretty straightforward. The installation process is not that painful. It really guides you through it so it makes it a lot easier, especially if it's your first time doing it.

As far as our ROI goes, vSphere actually reduces time to set up a server by a ton. By a server, I mean a virtual machine. In the past, you'd have to order in hardware, wait weeks for it to come in, and then install Windows, patch it, and actually go deploy it at the customer location. Now, if the customer's already running vSphere, all we have to do is log in to that, build the VM, and install Windows and we're good to go. We've gone from days to an hour, probably.

When we were looking at vSphere, we did look at some of the competitors. Of course, we looked at Microsoft Hyper-V because we're a Microsoft partner as well. However, it lacked a lot of the things that vSphere had.

The best advice I could give somebody looking to implement the solution is definitely to download the trial because you can try it out for free. Put it on some test equipment and run it and you're going to love it.

We don't have a customer that uses VMware Cloud on AWS, but we've been very involved in hoping the price gets cheaper so we can sell it.