VMware vSphere Reviews

There are several valuable features, including virtualization, of course, as well as DRS, High Availability, SRM, and vMotion.

It's really helped us out with our testing and development.

It's not perfect, and could use improvements with better stability and better support.

We attempted to upgrade from vSphere 5.0 to 5.5, but we weren't successful. We contacted technical support and, after a few tries, they closed our case and asked us to perform a fresh vCenter install and to create the inventory from there.

It hasn't been as stable as we expected.

Scaling it is not an issue.

Customer service needs a lot of improvement. They need to improve on keeping customers informed of their ongoing issues. They need more support for resolving issues rather than offering workaround and hitting the same issue again.

5/10 - I have opened tickets on a P1 support issue and it hasn't been resolved and I logged it over a month ago.

The initial setup is simple.

We implemented it in-house.

We didn't evaluate other options.

It's a good product, but you have to be patient with it when an issue arises.

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.

• The ability to virtualize hundreds of servers
• Hardware cost

We are a small company so having a solution that bring the costs as low as possible is the most valuable thing.

Right now, I’m looking to implement v6 with Operation Management so that would be the next step, and maybe VSAN as well.

It's pretty stable, coupled with good performance.

Really high.

Luckily we have never had to use them – that says a lot.

We have always been using vSphere.

Setup was very straightforward.

We implemented on our own.

To be honest, I didn’t try Microsoft, or Citrix, so it's difficult to compare, but I'm used to it and it works – works great.

Compatibilities with software, with OS, we have some applications that are only running on XP and 32 bits. You need to do some research to make it work.

You get virtualized servers, which means you can run a bunch of servers on a couple of machines, so you save money and you save the environmental costs like power and heat. You also get the redundancy when you are using features like vMotion.

We have around 200 virtualized servers, so while if we had to buy 200 physical servers, it would cost a lot more compared to what we spend.

I would say that the internal notifications could be much clearer and the performance monitoring could be a lot better. They have an add-on but that costs money.

It's very stable – the only thing I have found is that it’s a learning curve. You need to understand all aspects of your environment. Some people are just network or storage or server related, but you need to be aware of all areas. In general, if you need to troubleshoot a server, and VMware is not around, and we have a situation, it’s going to be harder for someone to understand the solution.

It’s fairly scalable, as we have over 2000 people, 120 branches across different provinces, and it can support our environment.

Technical support has been fine when they figure out if its hardware or software – we have HP hardware, and so the challenge is dealing with whose job it is, HP or VMWare. Once we understand what the problem is, the support is very good.

I would say not complex but it’s not click click click, it goes through a wizard but once you need to architect the network environment it’s a bit complex.

I would tell say that if you have the money you should buy the solution and go with blades. Also, make sure you do a lot of number crunching to show that the solution is valuable.

The stability in general, and the manageability of features like high availability, storage vMotion, and vMotion configuration via distributed switches.

vSphere is a core product in our services. Building our services on top of this product provides us the ability to create stable, enterprise level services.

Currently none, as the development of new features is already going at high speed.

I've been using it for seven years, since v3.5.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

8/10.

7/10.

We previously used XenEnterprise and RedHat Enterprise Virtualization based on KVM. Due to the stability and lack of features, we switched.

It was straightforward.

We did it in-house by our infrastructure team who are VMware Certified Professionals.

Using the vCloud Air Network program, we are in a usage based program. So no upfront investments are made for licenses.

Cheap and fast to deploy new servers.

Faster server deployment.

Standalone GUI dismissed, the web GUI isn't a worthy replacement.

Seven years.

No issues encountered.

As long as the network and storage attached are running fine, you have nothing to worry about.

Monitor your RAM usage closely and you will be fine.

Very good.

Very good.

No previous solution used.

Pretty straightforward.

In-house by following the manuals and training from the vendor it went by the book.

Very high as each new virtual server saves us thousands budget wise.

I don't know but the licensing model is pretty harsh, so don't start if you only want to virtualize a couple of machines

No, it was the only well-functioning solution on the market at the time.

Give Hyper-V a chance and look very well into the pricing model. Make sure your storage and network is prepared for a high load with a small footprint