VMware vSphere Reviews

• DRS
• Distributed virtual switches
• vMotion
• HA
• Extensibility - you can ring in many ecosystems

• Agility and availability
• Near-zero downtime
• Incredibly easy to use - good on one hand, but on the other, it means that when you get outside use cases, they usually target for vSphere, and you can set yourself on fire. For basic install on autopilot, it does what it does, but if you want to do something inherently complex, move out of the realm of easiness.

I’d like to be able to expand the capability of SMP fault tolerant VMs. That’s a game-changer when talking about business-critical applications (i.e. Oracle). If we had this, we’d no longer need an Oracle rack (will have better solution with this improvement).

It's extremely stable, and solid. No problems with respect to the hypervisor itself.

As a consultant, most horror stories come from people doing things they shouldn’t do. It becomes so easy, people take certain things for granted. e.g. a VM snapshot file showed that a user had let something run for three years.

That’s the kind of stuff that makes it unstable.

It's got excellent scalability. There are no applications that can’t be virtualized now.

VMware have one of the most consistent tech supports out there.

It was very easy.

This is where it loses points on sometimes perceived costs; the competition has done a good job of promoting the notion of a “VMware tax”, but the benefit is there with their licensing scheme.

Buy it, and you will be hard pressed to find a better combination, but you need to understand it, and have a plan. As simple as it is, don’t just go out and buy.

The features we most value are:

• High availability (in ESXi)
• Disaster recovery (via SRM)
• Self-service portal via vRealize automation

The solution has helped us to achieve the following:

• Faster time to market our services
• Lower overall TCO

Commercially, the stock keeping units have changed with the latest iteration of the product.

We have been using the solution for five years.

We had some stability issues but VMware support has made the experience manageable.

We did not have any scalability issues.

I would rate the technical support as 8/10 mainly due to the speed in delivering resolutions to concerns encountered.

We did have a previous solution but it lacked the functionalities.

The setup was straightforward and vendor support is available from planning, to setup, to maintenance.

The cost might be higher than other products offered by the competition but, if implemented correctly, it is worth the investment.

We evaluated the Oracle VM solution.

This software is just another tool to get things done. Ensure that you have laid out your requirements and have carefully evaluated your priorities before acquiring a cloud solution.

• HA
• DRS
• Snapshot
• FT
• vMotion
• SvMotion

It gives us the ability to be running over 250+ VMs on five physical hosts and in various flavours of guest OSs. Previously, we did not have this option.

The only improvement that is needed that come to mind are improvements in the vRealize Automation and vRealize Operations management simplicity.

I've used it for six years.

We have not had any issues with deployment.

We have not had any issues with stability over the six years we have been using the solution.

The solution has scaled well.

I would give the technical support 7-8/10.

In terms of the setup, it was generally straightforward overall. However, it was relatively complex to set-up vRealize Automation 6.

Implementation was done in-house.

We made an ROI after three years of using the solution.

My advice when it comes to pricing is that pricing is a bummer, especially when it comes to SnS coverage. From the feedback I have received from other users, that’s a concern for most of the customers.

The products we looked at prior to this one were Hyper-V and RHEV.

Overall, I strongly recommend this product.

• It provides the option to view performance with advanced real-time monitoring.
• With it, it's very easy to create new virtual machines.
• It also helps you upgrade your machines by making hot templates of them.

We have migrated several databases based on the Oracle VM solution to VMWare as we've seen a great difference between these two products.

The setup is complex even for experienced IT administrators who have worked with hypervisors, and it should be made a little easier.

We've used it for one year.

It's a little complex, but we were able to do it. Other than that, we had no issues with deployment.

We had no issues with the stability.

We had no issues scaling it for our needs.

We previously used OVM but chose VMware to consolidate our architecture.

Our initial setup was quite complex because several machines where physical machines, others were OVM virtual machines, and others were VMware machines.

We implemented it through an in-house team.

I would have preferred to implement vSphere straight away instead of OVM and then switching.

The 3D Graphics isn’t something I have used yet, but will be very nice for VDI environments. Also, the improvements in vMotion will bring on some major changes.

In general, VMware improves the way almost every business using it operates. Server virtualization cuts down on operating costs by a lot, makes servers easier to manage, and offers increased redundancy.

I think the product licensing is very confusing still and should be simplified on a sliding scale. i.e. one to three servers are essential for four to 10 standard, etc. Instead of licensing per core.

I was using this product at home during the early testing phases and once released we rolled this out to a few of our customers.

No issues encountered.

In the early builds there were some stability issues, but that was resolved early on and is not an issue.

No issues encountered.

9/10.

10/10.

I have used Hyper-V, but it does not even come close to comparing to vSphere. There are plenty of features you cannot do easily in Hyper-V that vSphere makes a breeze.

Very straightforward. Just like moving to any other vSphere release.

We did it in-house. We are a VMware partner so we set this up for our customers.

The licensing can be a little strange, since the per CPU licensing will hopefully be gone in the future. Just make sure to know exactly what you need to make sure you purchase exactly what you need. Also, it is pretty easy to use a licensing calculator.

No other options were looked at.

You should work with an existing VMware partner to deploy, but seek proper training or coursework for day to day management.

vMotion, because you can move off failed hardware, and if you have a maintenance window, you can put everything onto a physical server, and then put everything back

Less downtime for all end users, so if it fails you can get it up on the other machine quickly.

I don’t like the web client, as it's real clunky, and not so instantaneous.

It's very stable.

You can go as big as you want

It's very easy.

If you don’t have it, you need it because everything should be virtualized.

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.

It enables vMotion, DRS, and HA.

The ability to consolidate and portability, flexibility, and DR. The management thereof is a single pane of glass.

The web client is botched.

There's not many problems with it.

It's very scalable and increasingly so because of what they’re doing with applicances. There's no trade-off between maximums of Windows and appliances.

Since they outsourced it, response times are not what they used to be.

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