The most valuable features for us are its agility and that it provides us with the ability to make changes within the environment seamlessly. I also really like its stability; it's got a perfect track record. I can also provide support myself because the product is designed to allow for that sort of support.
It provides not just cost savings, but also peace of mind. I go back to the proven track record as it's the world-class, gold standard above and beyond the competition.
I think a lot of the areas of focus need to be on the user interface. There's been a lot of changes in recent years, the new carry-ons and the demands placed on the product. I think that they might be in the right spirit, but they still have a distance to go in that regard.
I think there's always room for improvement. I think that that's obvious in the track record that this thing has been setting because, every release, there's a very sharp increase in functionality and refinement, etc., but at the same time, it's a very, very good, solid product
We've used it for five years or so.
We've had no issues deploying it.
We've had no issues with stability.
I have had no issues with scalability for the product. If you go above and beyond most of my needs, in terms of items like the configuration maximums, for the most part I never come close, so they're continually evolving the product so that it will be able to support things that are not even realistic at this point in time. It's very forward-looking.
Technical support can be eventful. I can't depend entirely on the staff. I would say, for the most part, on the vast majority of issues, if it's a high-severity incident, you're able to get very good support. To the lowest severity incident, it's a little bit more scattershot.
There are a number of components to the product itself and, based on different architectures, it can change the complexity of that. But I would say, for the most part, it's very straightforward for an initial installation.
Definitely do your research. Leading into something, you don't just want to listen to just sales. You would like to know what the industry is giving, and in the case of this product, there is an enormous wealth of information, a wealth of community out there from which you can draw information to get a feel for kind of what you want to do, completely outside of the sales channel. Beyond that, it is probably beneficial to do something like a large-scale licensing unit to be able to get the kind of features that, on a larger scale, deployment is going to need.
As the reviewer indicates, there is so much valuable information available regarding VMware, including command line operations that sometimes make VM management simpler and faster. For example, VM snapshot review. If you're willing to put a little time into finding and reviewing the information, it will prove very worthwhile. Search vSphere 5 doc for command line info (pubs.vmware.com).