VMware vSphere Reviews

• DRS
• vMotion

However, without entire feature set we couldn’t manage.

It reduces the time needed to roll out new solutions. Also, it provides a single platform for our API integrations.

It needs color coding (e.g. production/non-=production, tier levels), as it treats everything the same.

It's pretty solid, most issues are resource and Java related, because Java is a resource hog, but it runs pretty smoothly.

There's no concern of scalability, and it gets better with each version. The only issue was with the FT portion, but with 6.0 no concern because it’s capable.

Zero issues with tech support. Our TAM answers after some time, but it's not a negative because they're dedicated just to our company.

The setup itself is simple, and the only thing is finding the minimums; it won’t tell you minimums prior to upgrades, and you won’t find out until machine dies.

It lose points because it lacks color coding, the web client is clunky, and the interface itself makes it harder to find stuff.

You should run the SQL scripts outside the intial install, cluster SQL, cluster vCenters and run as VMs, and set DR rules to match.

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.

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.

• Distributed Resource Scheduler
• High Availability
• Storage I/O Control
• vMotion
• Storage vMotion
• Fault tolerance
• vSphere distributed switch

Using vSphere, we have more confidence that the virtual servers are secured with the HA feature.

Party auditing users, as today we do not natively know what each user is doing in the virtual environment.

I've used it for 10 years.

There were no issues as we followed the documentation.

No issues encountered.

The scalability of vSphere is amazing. No other virtualization manufacturer can even come close to the limits of vSphere's standards.

Customer Service:

99.9999%

Technical Support:

99%

I used a different solution, but it was not even close to vSphere. It was a good solution for certain environments, but lacking some features.

Take the time to study vSphere to get to know more about the product. There are a lot of documentation and labs available to help a person develop the skills required to work with vSphere.

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 critical production server virtual infrastructure. No any "gamers" in this area. Latest product can help more than previous. VMware Replication, vSphere Data Protection based on AVAMAR technology, new vCPU architecture and more new features says us that it is the one biggest product.

Costs is very expensive. But some cutting features like Vcenter Operations Manager Fundamentls are available in starting versions of vCenter. It is good way for the best marketing from VMware. But Enterprise or higher versions are very expensive.

Now I lead the Upgrade to vSphere 5.1 project in my Company. SSO installation are strange... need to involve DBA in this process. Scripts are not good... This installation must be re-produced. But new features are very great and interesting.

• 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.

It gives us great management capability and it integrates well with NetApp storage.

There's a lot of expertise within the legal industry for VMware, and we’re early adopters of VMware since 2.0.

Also, we can spin up VMs within hours instead of going through a paper trail of physical servers and install process. This has drastically reduced our procurement timeline.

It's hard to say because now that Dell acquired EMC, which owns VMware, we have to see how that flushes out.

It just works, and is not buggy.

It scales well.

It's pretty good, and because we don’t use them much, this reflects on how well the product works.

We used a third-party installer, which made it straightforward. But it was complex because of planning involved.

Understand your requirements and see how it fits in, especially with Hyper-V as a competitor. Take into account third-party support.