VMware vSphere Reviews

The primary use case for vSphere is managing and controlling all of our virtual environments from the servers, and the storage resources, to all of the guest virtual machines.

As far as mission-critical apps go, the most important that I see is our computer-aided dispatch software which runs all of the police, fire, and ambulance services for the city. That that is the most important thing that we do, to simply protect lives and protect property.

Other kinds of very critical workloads that we have to have include an enterprise-resource-planning system that most everything goes through. The city also has a lot of geographical information about everything that is in the city. The citizens use that data constantly.

We do not use VMware Cloud on AWS.

As far as performance on vSphere goes, the performance is great. We've been running everything virtualized from VMware forever, so I can't really say that there has been a boost in performance, but I can tell, from version to version - and now out on version 6.7 - that everything is continuing to be better, faster, and stronger in everything that it does.

vSphere has improved our organization and what we do because it easily enables all of us as IT professionals to provision and manage the vast quantity of servers and other resources that we have. For the about 400 virtual servers that we run, it takes less time to manage and take care of those than it does for the 25 physicals that we have, just because it's so easy to simply take care of it all in one common solution, in one pane of glass.

One of the most valuable features that vSphere has is its HA and DRS protection, where it can simply make sure that all the machines are always where they need to be and how they need to be taken care of. We have a lot of servers and services for emergency services, for police, fire, and the like. We have the ability to use DRS as Anti-Affinity Rules to make sure that those redundant server pairs always stay away from each other. But then, if anything would happen to one of them, we have HA to be able to come up and bring it right up and going again. A lot of companies will say, "Oh no, we lose so much money per hour when something goes," but in our particular use case, if our emergency services would go down, people could actually die. That's a little bit more important.

vSphere does offer quite a bit of security stuff built-in. It is nice to know that we can have the virtual machines encrypted, so that if somebody were to get a hold of any of those files, we don't have to worry about them actually being used. Since we do have so many different departments and areas with a lot of people that need access into the solution, we can use the role-based access controls to really restrict and control who can do what, so everybody can do what they need to do, but they can't do anything else past that.

I do find vSphere simple and easy to manage. Most of the common tasks that you would do are very quickly available. One particular case that we go in all the time for is provisioning new servers. If you take that to the analogy of the physical world, that was something that, by the time you got it and you plugged it in and you stacked it, you did everything, you got the firmware up and going, you got the OS loaded and patched, you were easily in it for a day to two days, trying to prep up something that way. Just yesterday, I was sitting in a session (here at VMworld 2018) and I got a request for a brand new SQL Server for somebody and it was literally: right-click from template, new machine, here's its name, here's its IP address. Oh, by the way, tag it out as an SQL machine, and in 10 minutes the machine is up and running and is already installing SQL on its own, automatically. So it's pretty cool stuff.

I see room for improvement in the vSphere product just a little bit. I know they are doing all that transition from the traditional fat client to the new HTML5 interface. I've watched that grow from being technical previews to where it's at today, and it's probably 90 percent there. But I think that VMware could continue to put improvements into that UI, so that all the tasks can be performed as quickly as they used to be done in the fat client. 

Just yesterday, I met with the lead solutions architect for vSphere, and one of the things that I really kind of sat him down on was, "What's the deal between these Custom Attributes and these Tags? What are you trying to do with that?" He said, "So here's the deal. I know that they're halfway done and we have a vision of where they're all going, but we'll get it there." That that would be a great ability, to keep all that metadata about your virtual machines inside the solution and staying with the machines.

Stability is great. We keep all of our stuff up to patch and keep up on drivers. I actually couldn't tell you the last time I've had one of them crash on me. It's been a while.

For our environment, the scalability has been great. I've been with the city for about three-and-a-half years. We had about 100 VMs at that time, and now our account is well over 500 and the solution has simply grown to fit that need.

I am going to be honest that their level-one support is actually not that helpful. It's been something that I talked about with some of the people in the Inner Circle discussions and they're changing some of those processes around. But I do find that once you get up to the level-two and level-three techs, that they are very competent and very capable engineers who have been able to resolve any problems that we've had.

I was involved with the initial vSphere setup. For the most part, the setup is fairly straightforward. The last time, when we set up the vSphere 6 environment, we went into fully redundant HA platform, services controllers, so I think we chose to make the solution a little bit more complicated than it needed to be. But with 6.5 and 6.7 there are some enhancements and they want all that stuff embedded and the process is a lot simpler and it's a lot easier to get everything going.

For return on investment, I don't know that I can give you any real hard and fast numbers on things, but I can tell you, from a time perspective, what vSphere has been able to do for us. When I started out, provisioning servers was a very long and drawn out process. Now, we're to a point where literally, from the moment I decide I want a server to the time that Windows is up and running is less than ten minutes, and that's fantastic to me too. 

It saves me a lot of time because I'm now provisioning several servers a week and that's just par for the course. All that time that you do that repetitive, tedious type work, is time that you're not being able to deliver meaningful, value-added work for the company.

We did take a look at Microsoft's Hyper-V platform. The city's always had a philosophy of, "Just because we've always used something doesn't mean that that's always going to be the right way to continue to go forward." So we did take a look at the Hyper-V Server 2016 type stuff. But honestly, in my opinion, it's not there yet. VMware was still the superior choice for the hypervisor. 

As an overall solution, I'd probably give it a nine out of ten. It is very rock solid in everything that it does and it simply works with everything, and it does a pretty darn good job doing it.

We use the solution for virtual machine virtualization and as a hypervisor. 

The tool's most valuable features are CPU virtualization and RAM allocation, which are better than those of other hypervisors. 

VMware vSphere requires a lot of paid add-ons that need to be integrated into it. 

The solution is highly stable. It is stable as long as there are no hardware and software issues. 

My company has hundreds of customers who use the product. 

I am very satisfied with the tool's technical support. 

The tool's deployment is straightforward. To implement it, you need to plan, deploy, and migrate the solution. 

The solution's licensing is costlier than other hypervisors. 

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten. It doesn't have any significant security features, and you can only get it through add-ons. 

VMware vSphere is the virtual platform for our company, where we host all the virtual machines.

We use the solution's vMotion feature to migrate VMs from one host to another across different environments and data centers.

It is not easy to upgrade VMware vSphere from an old version to a new version. We have to work with the support to upgrade the solution.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten for stability.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten for scalability.

The initial setup of the solution is not easy, but it's also not very complex. If you don't have experience working with VMware vSphere, it's pretty hard for you.

VMware vSphere is a more mature and stable virtualization tool than Microsoft Hyper-V.

VMware vSphere saved us a lot of costs and easily deployed the server from templates. We use the solution to make capacity changes, increase the memory, and increase the CPU. The reason we use VMware vSphere is its high availability feature.

VMware vSphere integrates well with our existing IT security measures. We have all the agents on the VM and a central console for the security, patching for the security, and monitoring. My team has less than 1,000 VMs, and we have three resources working to support their virtualization.

I would recommend VMware vSphere to other users because it is the best virtualization solution in the market. From what I know, most companies use VMware vSphere.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The focus is more on simulating various PM (Performance Management) products. This involves tasks like identifying bugs or testing new updates.

As for the workflow, it primarily revolves around working remotely due to the pandemic. Unlike having a physical lab where reconfiguration is feasible, I have taken advantage of VMware solutions, including VMware vSphere and related products. I have adapted them to match the specific configurations.

The emphasis isn't specifically on a particular feature, but rather on the ease of use. For instance, when building a test lab or setting up an entire environment from scratch, VMware products are notably more user-friendly compared to alternatives like Nutanix. I've had prior experience with Nutanix.

From my personal perspective, I found it easier to adapt to using VMware than when I started using Dynamics. This ease of use is a strong point. It's largely about how straightforward it is to navigate through VMware's user interface. In contrast, with Nutanix, there's a need to delve into smaller configurations and navigate vendor-specific settings. VMware, on the other hand, offers a more accessible management page. This difference primarily centres around usability and the overall user-friendliness of the interface.

Given that I've been using version seven, it seems that some of the bugs I faced during that version have already been addressed in subsequent updates. Although I haven't personally tested them yet, it appears that these issues have been resolved. In version seven, there was a problem with the network interface not responding due to certain configurations not being properly filtered. However, in version eight, this requirement has been minimized, so the mentioned bug is less likely to occur. Instead of solely addressing these fixes in newer versions, it might be beneficial for them to consider applying these improvements to the older versions as well. This approach could prevent users from feeling compelled to upgrade to version eight solely to avoid encountering the issue, and instead provide updates for version seven users.

I have been using VMware vSphere for sometime.

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten.

The case of scalability of this solution is easy in a hybrid setup so I would rate it nine out of ten. 

I lack substantial experience with technical support, as my past interactions mainly pertained to license-related matters. When it comes to addressing actual technical issues, I haven't had the opportunity to gain significant experience yet.

Positive

I would rate the initial setup eight or nine out of ten because of its easy navigation and setup.The deployment takes almost half an hour. Essentially, having the network configuration prepared is crucial, as it often represents the most time-consuming aspect when setting up an environment, whether it's on-premises, in the cloud, or anywhere else. Once the network configuration is in place, the process becomes smoother and more straightforward.

It's a common trend as many progressive IT firms are transitioning towards cloud or virtual environments due to factors like pricing, SMAX, and VMatter. In this regard, I would rate VMware as moderately satisfactory. I would rate it seven out of ten.

We use vSphere to monitor our ESX hosts and VMs. We use it on day-to-day basis. vCenter one of the first things employees open when they arrive to our offices. It is a good product. It has an array of things that you perform with it, and we use it all the time.

We are planning to use AWS, but we are not using it yet. 

It's easy to use. For an admin who is just starting to use it, it doesn't matter, since it's generally widely used. This is a big advantage. Anybody can just come in and start using it from day one.

It's simple to use. I don't use it a lot, but I can get in and guide myself through the menus. That is what makes it intuitive and easy to use.

It is a single pane of glass that lets you access your hosts and VMs. This makes the solution impactful, as you have one place to go to manage everything from one console.

The encryption security is great. It is a topic we take into consideration daily. It is important that we enable all the features and make sure our data center is secure. Nobody can hack us, get in, steal information, and use it from our systems.

We run an electric grid. Our apps that run on the electric grid are going on VMs, so these are very secure apps.

I would like to see AI in future releases.

We have had downtime, like everybody in the industry.

We scale it both vertically and hortizonally. We have many data centers on it.

We have a great team behind us technically from VMware.

I did not do the initial setup.

It keeps together a lot of different environments, making it easier and faster to work. It definitely has a good turn around.

The pricing could be improved.

I would definitely recommend the product.

Stability of the Hypervisor, DRS, and HA are some of the more valuable features.

VMWare (and any virtualization platform) completely changes the way an organization functions. The way you investment in hardware is done from a completely different perspective, in that an initial capital investment is required, and the resources would then be available for the organizations' use.

This, of course, allowed the organization to have a ton of flexibility in resource availability. We were then able to create and build high availability across deployed hardware that would've otherwise been much more complex to accomplish using more traditional methods.

Nothing I can think of. For a while, allowing for HA without shared storage was a missing feature, but as of 5.1, VMware introduced that feature.

I have used vSphere v4.0/5.0/5.1 alongside vCenter v5.1, and VMware Vieew v4.0 and v5.2.

There is a lot of know how required to deploy VMWare correctly, especially if it is being architectured to be highly available. A simple deployment is not too hard, but the issues that I had faced initially were mostly related to adequate shared storage connectivity, etc.

As mentioned above, the stability issues have been caused mostly by the inadequacy of the storage (90% of problems have been related storage).

Not at all. Scalability is one of VMware strengths. Running out of resources has really never been an issue, as it is easy to add new hardware, and/or storage, and expand existing infrastructure.

Customer service has always been available, in a more or less adequate time. VMware is good at responding at critical issues that have a high business impact, though sometimes I had experience less than stellar experience in slightly less urgent issues. This is mostly referring to the timeliness of service. Getting the help needed after getting in touch with support has never been an issue.

The support is usually pretty good. VMware support is good at making an effort to resolve the problem on first contact, and escalate as necessary. I have always received a solution to my problem.

For an enterprise virtualization platform, I have only used VMware. I have also used Amazon Web Services as an IaaS, but that doesn't exactly sit in the same category as an on premises virtualization platform.

As mentioned above, a simple setup is not hard. However, there are lot of intricacies to the product to set it up correctly with shared storage, so that fail over can function correctly, and DRS, HA, and vMotion to function efficiently.

I initially did the implementation on my own, with some help from VMware on best practices. I did get some help in getting my enterprise storage installed, and got some guidance from them to fine tune configuration of VMware vSwitches, to achieve optimal performance.

The ROI on virtualization platform isn't always necessarily completely obvious at first glance, as the initial cost to implement it is typically fairly high. However, keeping in mind the soft costs, it would easily prove to be more economical than traditional solutions. Not only that, but it also will require less engineers to manage the system, as all the management tools are built-in within vCenter, to create a unified solution that would ultimately reduce management cost.

The original cost of the first set of servers to migrate a whole school district to, was close to $100,000. More recently, an upgrade to an SSD SAN cost an additional $120,000. Keeping in mind software costs of maintaining the product, and all virtualized servers, the day to day cost of the product is essentially the cost of running the hosts, (power, cooling, etc).

No. I had started with VMware very early on, and adopted it when it became a viable enterprise product.

For anyone looking to implement VMware, don't take the initial implementation lightly, and don't cheapen up on the hardware, especially the storage. You will save a ton of headaches by investing in good storage that would be adequate for at least three years.

Also, do your homework on best practices, and how to implement things. It is very easy to get things working and it is more difficult to get things working smoothly. Never had I thought that I had to get familiar with the deep workings of disks, and IOPs, read and write/s ... but these are really necessary if a good implementation is the goal.

Our clients use the product for virtualization. Some of our internal divisions also use the product for virtualization.

The solution saves cost. We can run seven to eight different applications on it. SDDC is the best feature. The data center replication features and high availability are valuable to us. We use the product because of its HA. The HA solution is more comprehensive.

VMware is not efficient. The solution is slower than other tools. We can run applications on other platforms whose VMs are faster than VMware’s. We can also run bare metal on physical servers, but it will be very expensive compared to VMware.

I have been using the solution for seven to eight years.

The tool is stable.

The tool is very scalable.

The support could be better. The team is not very responsive. It keeps sending us to the resellers and distributors. Support is not that good compared to Microsoft’s.

Neutral

The deployment is very complex. We cannot design the tool without VMware-certified architects or professionals. We need at least five people for designing, planning, deployment, and maintenance. Maintenance does not require many people. Our operations personnel can maintain it. The deployment takes at least two weeks. The learning curve for operations is not that steep, but the learning curve for deployment is very steep.

The product is very expensive.

We use the solution internally and externally. We have different virtualization platforms. VMware is a mature solution. It's stable but a bit pricey. It doesn't have any competition. If we compare it to the full solution stack, it's a very mature solution. Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.

We implement all the standard VMware data solutions. Typically, that's vSphere and sometimes DataCore, the other product we like. We use vSphere for the virtualization of data servers, and other common uses.

Our customers opt for virtualization because it's cheaper and better than non-virtualized solutions. VMware is probably the best on the market now. 

We're implementers and we started using vSphere when it was first released. We've been with VMware since the beginning. There was no ES6 at that time, only GS6 on Microsoft, so we started with Windows-based VMware. It's an old solution. We've been using it for a long time. 

We haven't encountered any limitations with vSphere's scalability. At the same time, we usually do not install huge server farms here in the Slovak Republic, so we only use VMware for small installations with a few host servers. I don't think we'll reach the limits of VMware's scalability since we only work with small organizations. 

We tried Hyper-V a few years back, but there was a problem with the 2012 version of Hyper-V, so we prefer VMware because we know it works. However, I'm not sure about the newer versions of Hyper-V. I can only speak to our experiences with the older one. We weren't satisfied with the features, and the Microsoft code had bugs that they didn't repair those errors. 

Overall, Hyper-V was a highly unstable solution at the time, so we decided to stick with VMware because it was much more reliable. Maybe Microsoft has improved Hyper-V since then. I can't say.

I rate VMware vSphere nine out of 10. It does what we need it to do, and works fine. There aren't any additional features that we need at this time.