VMware vSphere Reviews

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.

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

• Cloud computing service (IaaS)
• Private/hybrid cloud
• Virtualization infrastructure
• Virtualization desktop infrastructure.

• High availability causes downtime service because it is needed to reboot VMs.
• Fault tolerance is limited by the four vCPUs.
• The service provider is not easy to integrate via API like OpenStack.

• vCloud Director, because we may use it as the dashboard for providing cloud services.
• vCenter 
• vSphere, because it helps us in the management of thousands of VMs in the coverage UI.

The SDK/API to help SPs (service providers) provide the pay-as-you-go business model in cloud service.

I value the support for this application.

If you compare the trend of each version, you can see that the practical features add to this product's value.

It would be very useful if they would configure the built-in backup application on this product.

I have used it for more than five years.

There were some stability issues. If you assign a non-dedicated resource to this product, you can see the issue in storage.

There were no scalability issues as such. However, it depends on the license that you buy.

Technical support was at a high level.

If you have a good understanding from the system how the solution works, it can be simple. Otherwise, it can be confusing.

If you compare it with the applicable features provided, the cost is reasonable.

We evaluated Microsoft Hyper-V.

You should at least try this product once.

• Hardware consolidation
• Easy provisioning
• Speed to get environments out to business units

• Hardware abstratction (lets us refresh easier)
• Storage
• DRS

There are some networking changes, storage integration, and leverage features that aren’t available.

It's pretty solid, there's a few bugs, but nothing detrimental.

It's very scalable and easy to deploy.

It's got pretty good tech support, quick answers, and they integrate well with certain key partners (Cisco, NetApp, etc.).

It was very straightforward.

Five years ago I used vSphere in a small data center that needed to go virtual. vSphere was more mature than other solutions, and I did a lot of test devs with it and it proved its stability.

I would recommend it, as it's very stable and robust. Make sure you stay current, and up to date.

It gives us flexibility in deploying infrastructure. With vMotion, we're able to move critical VMs around our cluster infrastructure, which we manage with DRS.

From a compute and storage perspective, we're able to use our resources much more efficiently.

it’s so simple that it’s idiot proof.

We never have a problem. It’s almost set it and forget it. Once configured, it takes care of itself. Usually any issues are with hardware, which can’t be helped. With vSphere running on UCS, we’re thrilled.

We’ve needed to scale and have had no problems in deploying nodes into clusters and getting their profiles. It’s very simple.

We've not had to engage them in some time. In the past, we never had a bad experience. We had complex tech issues which we worked through the night and they stayed with me on the phone.

I was not involved, but it would be simple to apply consistent set of policies and get them to function as a single entity.

It’s incredibly mature and simple. It’s one of those things where you say “why not?”

• High Availability, so we're able to failover in the case of hardware failure
• vMotion, for live migration from one server to another without interruption
• DRS, on par with or better than other hypervisors

• Reduces the size and cost of our physical data center.
• It gives us a smaller footprint, and we can do more with less.

vROPS should be part of the product and not something extra. There’s a bunch of third-party applications that can do the same thing for less money. If VMware wants people to get vROPS, it should be included. Price is an issue.

It's rock solid. We're 100% virtualized and we run everything in this architecture (FAS and vSphere), but you have to deploy it correctly.

It's infinitely scalable, if you have the money.

It's great, except for AirWatch.

Upgrading from v5.5 to v6.0, there were a couple of areas in which we had to be careful because the instructions weren't presented clearly, especially with the new vCenter architecture. You have to be careful, but after that, everything else was easy.

Over the last couple of years VMware has included more in your license, but support costs start going up for those products. Hardware costs go down, but licensing starts to cost. CTO’s start looking at open source because of cost, but architects don’t want that.

It just works. Just get it. There are other hypervisors, but the amount of time you put into it to get your job done, you’re going to save money on the back end with vSphere.

The ability to spin up machines when we need a test and dev environment for client work.

It saves me time, and at the end of the day, that’s it for me.

It fits my needs right now, I honestly don’t need anything else.

It’s stable – no crashes, no bugs, knock on wood, but it’s been great.

We have scaled, from about one server to three now. Its very easy to just scale up.

I've used them just once. They were responsive, quick, somebody got on the phone and it worked to a resolution quickly.

We were limited on space in our data center, with physical servers, and we needed more.

It was very straightforward.

I did it, and it was easy.

Just VMware, my previous job we used it, and it was great. I’ve been a customer for a long time now. I just want something to work, and I know VMware does.

It’s been great. I would recommend it all the time, it’s great. Peer reviews are quite important, as I need to know what others are experiencing before I do.

VM snapshot consolidation. It does that extremely well.

Reliability, it just runs without you worrying about it all the time. I don’t have to tweak it, don’t have to really do anything. It’s easy to use as well.

I really don’t have much to complain about as we don’t need very much, so we really are happy where we are right now. However, they could do with bringing back the regular GUI.

Fairly stable, doesn't crash, and does what it needs to do. It’s great.

We’ve only scaled a little bit. We’re not super large, but it definitenly is somewhat easy to scale up. The hardest part is the physical connectivity to disparate networks, which VMware can’t really control.

Excellent, it’s very smooth. You call with your problem, you get to the right person quickly, and they dive in and resolve the issue quickly. If it’s not a VMware issue, they’re very good at letting you know where the issue resides at.

It’s fairly easy to set up. There’s always a little bit of a question of what comes first, the host of the virtualization of the vCenter server, but it’s not too hard to figure out.

I’d highly likely to recommend VSphere, but the only thing that’s prohibiting the switching is cost, as it definitely is expensive.

We always look at responsiveness, availability, and willingness to work on a partnership when choosing a provider. I believe we continuously still look at updates, and sadly we still have some Hyper-V. It’s hard to cost justify switching over for vSphere, as Windows Data Center is just so cheap. But vSphere is definitely better if you ignore costs.

If I’ve never worked with a product, and I’m comparing apples to apples across the board, I definitely have to look at what peers are saying in helping me reach my decision.