VMware vSphere Reviews

vSphere is very easy to navigate and manage.

As a Tech Mktg Engineer, this product helps us develop test environments quickly.

The scroll window of processes at the bottom of the UI for the vSphere client is sometimes is hard to adjust.

About 4 months

No.

No

No.

Customer Service: I did not have to contact them.Technical Support: n/a

No.

n/a. It was already set up for me.

In house.

Not sure

No.

It works very well.

This really depends on the customers requirements. Manageability, transportation and low footprint (and thus higher consolidation ratio) are ones that are often referred to by customers.

Central management, easy deployment, easy management. This simplifies IT management processes and cuts on project costs and power/data center costs.

Licensing cost together with SA.

Since ESXi version 3.

None.

Depending on guest OS, there are some issues with controller type/driver versions.

None, if you have the resources you can easily scale out (or up)/down depending on your scalability requirements. Autodeploy, host profiles and customizations are a great help here. Further vCOPS will give you valuable capacity management options.

Customer Service: Great.Technical Support: Excellent.

No.

Straightforward, must have some knowledge though how to implement in the organizations required solution.

I do projects for customers.

Not at liberty to share.

Yes, XenServer and Hyper-V are often evaluated by customers.

Don't be intimidated by all the possible functions and comparison reports out there. Look what is needed for your requirements and match to available editions. Also when looking into costs, take the whole into account (not just initial costs, but also consolidation ratios, managebilty and the returns you get from those.)

Great product for users stepping into virtualization and consolidation

Management requires vCenter, with additional expense

This makes sense for smaller companies that are looking to start the consolidation process, or smaller divisions of large companies.

Unlike VMware workstation where we have to log in to desktop to run VM(s), with VMware Server we can run VM on the background. It also have a web based management interface so you don't have to install a software on your desktop to manage VMware server. It’s still quite useful virtualization software that you can use for free if you want to spend extra mile patching some files before you can compile support for your kernel.

VMware server already reaches its end of support on June 30, 2011. Since it’s not supported anymore, and new support for newer OS, if you use a new Linux distro, you have to patch some files before you can compile support for you running kernel.VMware itself suggest its users to move to VMware Player if you only need to run small number of VMs on your desktop, or VMware vSphere Hypervisor if you want to run on dedicated machine.

Not the best choice if you want to start learning virtualization. You better choose VMware Player, or VirtualBox if you want to run virtualization software on your desktop or VMware vSphere Hypervisor and XenServer Free edition if you want a free virtualization software on a dedicated machine.

We use VMware vSphere to deploy and manage VMs. 

The tool makes virtualization easy. It was free, and we could profit from its GUI. It helps to manage VMs easily. 

The solution needs to improve its stability. 

I have been using the solution for six to seven years. 

VMware vSphere is stable. I rate it seven out of ten. 

Technical support is not available in the free version. However, you can get support from the community. 

VMware vSphere's deployment is easy. It doesn't take more than 20 minutes. You can download it from the official website and install it. 

We are using the tool's free version. 

VMware vSphere's community is good. I recommend using the product if you are in the initial career phase and need to deploy a few virtual machines for testing purposes. For more extensive virtualization needs in a production environment, especially when dealing with many VMs, opting for VMware ESXi, its upgraded version, would be a prudent choice. I rate it eight out of ten. 

On-premises

The scalability of the solution is excellent. It expands very nicely.

The speed of the solution is excellent.

The splitting of the machines is quite useful. 

The installation of the product is quite straightforward.

Technical support is quite helpful and very responsive. 

Whatever VMware features that are provided on a virtual workstation should also be provided here. However, various features don't seem to be included. 

There needs to be more integration overall. That would be quite helpful.

The stability could improve a bit.

We've used the solution in our organization for many years. I can't speak to the exact amount of time. It's used across many departments. They may have started using the product at different times. However, it has been used for quite a while internally.

The stability could be better. It's not flawless. There can be some improvements. 

The solution scales well. It expands easily. If a company wants to expand, it can do so with ease. It's not a problem.

The technical support is fast and the feedback is good. They are knowledgeable and responsive. We are satisfied with their level of service.

The initial setup is not overly complex. It's quite straightforward. A company shouldn't have any issues with the initial setup process. It's simple. 

We had everything up and running within a week. It doesn't take too long.

We have the staff on hand that is capable of handling the implementation ourselves. 

I'm not sure what the pricing of the product is. It's not an aspect of the solution I typically handle. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We've been quite satisfied with its capabilities overall. We are very happy with it.

I would recommend the solution to other organizations and users.

On-premises

The solution is primarily used to house VMs, virtual machines.

Virtualization changes radically the IT landscape. Rare are our customers who have not implemented it. vSphere is #1 in hypervisors and offers the flexibility and the fastness our customers need.

VM models is a great feature. It allows to create VMs very fast and already patched with the different configurations that the are needed.

The ease to move a VM from a host to another or even to another storage/DC is very convenient. That all this can be done while users work on the VMs is awsome.

The graphical vSphere vCenter interface is now in HTML. I'm not very found of it. Sometimes you can't find items and you need to log in to the different hosts.

Some work has to be done with this admin console.

I have many years (lost the count...) of experience with this solution, beginning with version 4.0, then 5.0, 5.5, 6.7 and finally 7.0 and use it daily.

The stability has been very, very good. I didn't have any crashes. There aren't bugs or glitches. I find it to be a very, very strong architecture.

In terms of scalability, I haven't really had the opportunity to address this as my customers are not very big companies and we have relatively small data centers.

I've never had to call VMware. You basically can find everything on the web. VMware's  website is very good and there is a lot of information everywhere about vSphere on the web with real experts of the product.

No

The setup is straightforward, only a few questions to answer, and you have your hypervisor ready !

Always in house.

The cost of the solution is relatively low. VMware proposes the Essentials kits which are very affordable for SMB companies.

I didn't really evaluate any other solutions. I haven't even really looked at Hyper-V, although my clients sometimes ask about it.

We are implementors and our customers don't sometime have any dedicated IT guy.  But, as vSphere works well once implemented, there's relativally less to do.

On-premises

I have used VMware products at five different software companies, and it was mainly used for the following functions: development environments, QA systems, internal infrastructures like wikis or ticketing. 

It was brilliant to consolidate systems, and it provided the best way of doing it at the time, as far as I was aware.

Snapshot and clone: make VM backups for fast recovery options, build systems and reduced setup times.

When I needed to equip a new startup, I was unable to get the budget for vSphere past finance, so I ended up adopting a cheaper alternative even though it meant more work.

One to three years.

It's very stable

Depends on your budget

Good

I also used Citrix Xen which was really great, but ended up mainly using Qemu and Libvirt with KVM because of costs.

Simple

In house

Great flexible infrastructure 

Depends on your budget and skill set.

Virtualbox, Xen Server and KVM

Linode, AWS and Digital Ocean now use KVM