VMware vSphere Reviews

- 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.

vSphere is an excellent product to virtualize computing workloads. It helps with consolidation of servers and datacenters, and increases utilization of computing resources. The product is very stable, and contributes to high uptime for critical workloads. Additional benefits from a virtualized datacenter include reduced power and cooling costs.

Many features have been added over the years which makes it difficult to deploy without formal training. License costs are fairly high, especially compared with substitutes that are quickly catching up in performance and features.

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.

ESXi has one major benefit that outweighs the others; IT'S FREE!Yes, it has plenty of other benefits, like running a wide variety of different virtual operating systems in virtual machines (it supports every platform but OS X, and that can technically still be "hacked" onto it).It's incredibly robust, has excellent resource management, and is easy to set up. It allows for importing of virtual appliances, or pre-made VM's, or a creation of your own VM's.

The only issue I have with ESXi is that it is console (CLI) based. While I personally have no operational issue with this, as most of my training began with CLI based systems, some people might not want to configure a high availability virtual machine server via the Command Line.They're now marketing ESXi as VMware vSphere Hypervisor, which makes sense because that's essentially what it is. There used to be another product called ESX, which was a step between ESXi and vSphere, but they did away with that and rolled some of the features into ESXi.

All in all, it is an excellent solution that I have deployed in multiple locations and organizations.

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.

We use this solution for financial full disclosure, end-user computing, and for private cloud.

Stability and scalability are the most valuable features of this solution. 

The connectivity to the pools from the large amount of memory to the CPU is also very good.

Also, the stability that it provides from the large system to the virtual machine is good.

I would like to see more support regarding containers, and they need more features for them.

I have been using VMware vSphere for a couple of years.

The stability of this solution is one of the most valuable features. It's a very stable product.

It's a very scalable solution. Every release includes scalability.

We have 200 to 300 customers who are using it and we have plans to increase our usage.

Technical support is moderate.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The time it takes for deployment depends on the environment and the design of it.

We need a team of five technicians to maintain this solution.

It's a monthly subscription model.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate VMware vSphere a nine 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

We use vSphere primarily for data center solutions. We migrated most of the physical workloads to a virtual environment. Even physical data center migrations were made possible because of VMware workloads. We had replication workloads using such technology for DR purposes. I've also deployed a Nutanix cluster with the VMware Hypervisor.

I like the standard features. 

The price could be better.

I've been using VMware vSphere for eight or nine years.

It's a stable product. I have a little reservation about their vSAN product, which I don't think is well suited for co-work loads that require performance. In that aspect, I tend to favor Nutanix, but other than for vSAN, I think it's a good product.

It's a scalable solution.

Technical support is very good.

The initial setup becomes simpler by the day. It's very easy. But it wasn't easy before and was pretty tedious. But these days, it's easy.

The deployment time depends on the workload and how large the environment is. If there are a lot of hypervisors and migration work, it could take anywhere from two to six days or more to install and deploy.

I work as an integrator, so I implemented this solution.

It could be cheaper. But not only cheaper because Nutanix's hypervisors are free of charge out of the box. You don't even have to pay for the hypervisor's enterprise version. Given that, I don't think VMware should be charging so much for the hypervisor. The hypervisor is a commodity now.

I would recommend it to potential users.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give VMware vSphere a nine.

On-premises