VMware vSphere Reviews

Cross vCenter vMotion is a valuable feature.

It allows you to perform vMotion from one vCenter to another vCenter without the need for shared storage, like a cut and paste.

This was not possible until version 6 and is built upon Enhanced vMotion.

It requires L2 network connectivity.

Cross vCenter vMotion can be particularly useful if you have migration projects, or you simply want to shift workloads to different location.

It can be particularly useful if you have plans to move from a VCSA to a Windows Platform vCenter and vice-versa.

If you have shared resources with public/private cloud, you can move them by establishing several vCenters.

One improvement could be to have the vMotion independent of the SSO Domain.

With Cross vCenter vMotion, it is a requirement to have both the source and the destination vCenter on the same SSO domain. It also requires version 6 and above. You cannot have this between a version 6 and 5.5.

I still experience lag with the web interface

• Scalability
• Flexibility
• Vmotion across vCenters

It has helped organise computing into more logical groups, instead of random physical servers all over the place. It has also made the provision of new servers quicker and easier, allowed the space to build proper development infrastructure and also allows quick decommissioning.

The webclient could use more features and a cleaner layout.

I've been using the product for 2 years.

There were no issues with deployment. It was very smooth.

No issues encountered. It has really improved.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability. This is much better now.

No, I did evaluate Hyper-V and Xenserver, but stayed with VMware due to features, despite initial cost difference.

The setup was fairly straightforward. ESX is easy to configure and vCenter is intuitive on top.

We evaluated our current project vendor, but discovered we had more knowledge and accountability in-house.

As I previously mentioned, we evaluated Hyper-V and Xenserver, but we decided to stay with VMware as a result of the features offered.

I would recommend evaluating the features that match what you need before deciding. Use the 60 day trials to test.

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.

• 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.

• vMotion
• DRS
• HA

It uses less data-room space, and has lower cost and power consumption, giving us much bigger cost savings.

I wish they would maintain thick clients and web clients, so you can choose which to go with.

It's great, just natural hiccups during the upgrade process, but we straightened out those issues.

It's fantastic, able to go as big as you want to go, so long as the backend and databases to support are big enough.

Used tech support for upgrades over the years, and they were good. They were better before partnering with EMC, and not a little more drawn out (ticket, open case, priorities, etc.). Don’t work with TAM.

I was not involved when they did the initial setup. In a prior job, in a big environment, the setup was smooth in moving to 5.5 from 4.1

Budget appropriately, so look at yhr infrastructure, and have no fear on the VMware side because it's a great product.

Nothing is perfect, and something will always have an issue.

There are no physical limitations in being able to move virtual machines around hosts and storage.

It allows us to be flexible-- every time we need a new server we don’t need a new physical box.

I’m sure there is plenty that could be better, but nothing comes to mind immediately because it just rocks.

Very impressed – rock solid.

It's infinitely scalable.

It's readily available as needed.

I inherited our setup. It's very easy to add new versions as well. As long as you know what you're doing, it's very easy.

We did an evaluation of Microsoft Hyper-V, and it's not there compared to VMware. It's where VMware was five years ago.

You can't go wrong with VMware. The stability and the flexibility it allows, they do it best compared to competitors.

Peer reviews are fairly important, but I try to form my opinion from a POC over anything else.

It's consolidated in that multiple VMs can run on a single host and have a single point of management.

• Application protection
• Load balancing
• Protection against network/host failure

5.1 SSO is a disaster, it was re-done for 5.5 and improved again for 6.0. VMware even recommend upgrading directly to 5.5 and skipping 5.1, and we are now planning to upgrade to v6.

Personally since 2012, and in my current role only a few months.

There were no major issues.

Not really, as 5.1 has been out for a very long time, and any stability issues have been ironed out as with any product.

Upgrading from 5.1 to 5.5 is the biggest issue.

Customer Service:

Very good and the communities help a lot too.

Technical Support:

Very good and the communities help a lot too.

The solution in this company started on v4.1, and has moved to v5, and is currently on v5.1. This was to do with keeping with in support and being able to use new features.

With v5.1 you have to consider the various roles and how you wish to deploy them. SSO, Web, inventory, vCenter can all be installed together, separately, or any mix in between, and even physically if you wanted. I have inherited this design, and I would have done it differently, but as time passes, best practice is improved.

All this was done in-house, with the help of specalist consultants, I have inherited this role and the environment is currently in flux

For the company very good, as they run loads of different applications at the same time

If you can go for enterprise plus, do so as you get access to the VDS and all the features it provides, esp LBT and NIOC.

Hyper-V is gaining traction but VMware is currently still the way to go.

Plan it properly and skip 5.1 if possible. I would avoid 6.0 until Update 1 is out, so any initial bugs can be ironed out.

VMware vSphere is a proven product with an established track record. We bought it as part of our server system upgrade project to accommodate our new student management system from Oracle. At first, we had a taste of vSphere as part of a demonstration system. We got to play around with it and really liked its features and the capabilities that it can bring to our organization.VMware is also a Cisco partner, and as such Cisco has a validated design for using vSphere together with their blade servers for Oracle PeopleSoft. This was critical in selecting vSphere as our virtualization platform foundation, as the application which we envisioned to run on the servers is fully tested and verified by Cisco and Oracle to work with vSphere.

With all the desirable features of vSphere and its proven track record, its no wonder that it's also the most expensive virtualization platform out there. This is the first major disadvantage when using VMware. Other vendors have competing products with similar capabilities. However, these products are not proven and tested.Another thing to watch out for when using vSphere is that you really need to plan your deployment and use thoroughly. With the high cost associated with this product, proper diligence must be taken in the planning on how to use this product to achieve the desired results.Lastly, make sure the hardware that you run vSphere on is fully supported. Hardware compatibility issues can limit the functionality of vSphere or worse render the hardware useless.Despite the inherent high cost associated with using this product, I will still highly recommend this for use in production environments. The benefits that will be enjoyed far outweighs the consequences as long as proper planning is done.

It is also recommend to get a reliable partner for integrating the software with the hardware system. As vSphere has numerous features, an inexperienced integrator or un-trained in-house administrator might not be able to configure fully all features necessary to maximize the product.