VMware vSphere Reviews

Our main use case for the product is we want to do virtualization. We want to save costs on the physical hardware because we were running some big workloads on the physical hardware that we migrated over to VMware. In terms of the retail applications which we are running on the physical hardware, we have now virtualized them.

The product has improved the organization in terms of the infrastructure stability and security, balancing the resources, and providing cost saving. The cost savings and the TCO with vSphere are very good.

We are using our vSphere for our new workloads in terms of Federation Services as well as for our VDI workloads. These are mission critical for us because they are the customer-facing.

Day-to-day, the most valuable feature on vSphere is its DRS feature: Distributed Resource Scheduler. We don't need to manage or balance resources. As soon as you come to the office in the morning, it's automatically balanced.

We work in a retail company, so you don't know what time the customer will be coming in or what time the work load is high. We are not uniform in terms of our workload. Therefore, it is important for us that when the workload is high, it is automatically optimized.

In terms of the vSphere security, the most important feature is the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), which was launched in 6.7, as well as the encrypted vMotion. These help us to bridge the gap if there is a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack or suspicious activity, so at least our VMware workloads are secure.

The best feature that we like is the Web Client. We just login and there is the data center. We don't have to walk to the data center everyday. We just open our laptops, log into our vCenter, and we have our full data store and data center ready. 

I can see the room for improvement still in the user interface (UI). 

There is still room for improvement with the HTML5 Web Client. They are working on it, as I can see on their blog. However, there is still room for improvement in the newer features that they can push into it.

Stability is perfectly fine. In the past eight months, we have been able to achieve 100 percent uptime. Therefore, the stability is quite impressive.

We are using it on a big scale. vSphere is one of the biggest product of VMware, and we have around five vCenters with around 80 hosts.

Scalability is one of the best things about vSphere. You don't need to change your design if you have a new demand for workloads or if a new product is coming in. Thus, the scalability feature is awesome.

Tech support is sometimes good and sometimes bad. We work in the Southeast Asia region where sometimes we have a language barrier. Therefore, their tech support is 50/50 for us.

With the initial setup, server workloads were running on an open source. When we had planned to go with VMware, we faced a bit of complexity. It was just a one time thing. After that, everything went smoothly. So, there were some complexities that we did face.

In the past six months, we have saved around 110TBs of storage, which is almost equivalent to $200,000 USD. That is a huge savings.

We have seen a tremendous performance boost. From when we started this VMware engagement in 2016 until now, we have seen around a 70 percent performance boost. This is a good number.

When we started with VMware, we also tried Citrix XenServer. We considered them as well as Red Hat's platform.

I will rate vSphere a ten out of ten, as I'm a huge fan of vSphere. 

Please look into this solution. You can have it, test it, and download it for 60 days, then you can test it yourself decide what is best for you.

We don't have VMware cloud on AWS, but we have plan to go on it in six months.

The most important thing when choosing a vendor: We look for performance, return on investment, and tech support. Tech support is very important for us in day-to-day tasks. These are the things that we look for in a vendor.

Our primary use case for vSphere is not a primary use case, because we actually offer a pretty wide breadth of services. Our key use cases revolve around hosted private cloud, as well as being the underpinning virtualization platform for our multi-tenant vCloud Director based cloud.

We don't use VMware cloud on AWS.

vSphere has improved our organization by allowing us to deliver rock solid stability to our clients in a cost competitive fashion. The industry has moved far beyond bare metal infrastructure, other than for very specific us cases. As an operator of mission-critical applications on behalf of our clients, we chose vSphere because we needed the operability we get from features like vMotion, the stability that it gives us, and the ability to run pretty much any workload.

We host infrastructure for a very large number of clients. In many cases, we're running all their mission-critical applications in our data centers on top of vSphere. So, there is no single industry vertical. However, for each of our clients, we are their operator, and this is their mission-critical infrastructure.

When I think about the performance aspects of vSphere, we've been using it since before there was vSphere. We were actually a very early partner of VMware. I've been with NaviSite for a very long time, and I recall doing a VMware GSX Server deployment, from a number of years ago. 

When I look at the performance aspects, I've definitely seen a reduction over versions from the virtualization penalty. This has been significantly reduced over the years. The size limitations of VMs, number of CPUs, amount of memory which can be allocated, and amount of storage which can be allocated are no longer of practical consequence. So, the monster VM that we talked about over VM Worlds of three to five years ago, they're here to stay, and those limits are no longer practical impediments to virtualization. 

1. The most valuable feature of vSphere is vMotion, because it rocks. It radically changes the way we think about how we can operate a large infrastructure, and notably, in terms of proactive maintenance. 
2. The second biggest feature is HA, because complexity around IT resilience is a difficult problem to solve, especially at the application level. Therefore, being able to rely on the infrastructure to provide a 90:10 or 99:1 rule is more than enough resilience for most applications, and getting that directly from the infrastructure is fantastic.

These features are useful day-to-day, because we operate a very large number of single-tenant private ESX deployments, managed by vCenter, as well as VCD-based public cloud. Frankly, with hundreds and thousands of hosts under management, there's no way we could operate that infrastructure without the use of vMotion. The ability to migrate those workloads to free up the physical infrastructure for maintenance activities, patching, BIOS updates, etc., is a critical requirement to operate.

An important vSphere feature from a security perspective is VM encryption. As is the right thing to do in this day and age, security needs to be the number one concern for any IT operator. While there are security solutions which can be delivered at the physical, hardware layer, they don't necessarily address all of the requirements from an encryption perspective. Being able to have VM-centric, VM-level encryption is a great feature of vSphere.

As with any piece of technology (hardware or software), there's always room for improvement. vSphere is incredibly mature from a core feature and function perspective. As we continue to push mission-critical workloads into vSphere, and those workloads are not readily protected at the application layer for availability, continuing to increase the size limitations on FT-protected VMs would be a great advance.

vSphere management has evolved over time. It's inherently complex. Operating a large virtual infrastructure is not an easy task for anyone. That's why certifications, such as VCP exist, because you have to have the right skill set to operate the environment. As the product evolves and starts to take advantage of things, like DRS, workload placement becomes less of an issue for humans to worry about, because the system takes care of it for you. Of equal interest is SDRS, storage management and storage placement, as historically, it was one of the most challenging things to mange in a large production VMware environment. With SDRS, we've actually seen our need to babysit it and manage it as a human go way down.

vSphere has been very stable. It would be where it is in the market overall if there were any sense of instability. No software nor hardware is perfect, so really it comes down to the failure rate that we see running workloads on vSphere. Is it significantly, materially, measurably different than running those workloads on bare metal? I would say absolutely not. 

Equally important is the stability better because, when things happen, hardware is lost. In response, VMware HA automatically restarts those workloads and the effective downtime is radically minimized. This is compared to what it would be for a human response.

Scalability on vSphere has always been important for us, because of the scale at which we operate. We had a client, who maxed out under the VMware 5 limit of 32 hosts per cluster. So, it has been great to see the continued improvements in scalability. At the VM level, the limits are no longer practical impediments. Now, at the VMware cluster level, we're also seeing sizes which can operate pretty much any large client environment.

We've had to use vSphere and VMware tech support on a fairly regular basis, but not because there are fundamental flaws in the platform. Things happen. Client environments are complex, and in some cases, the interoperability with other third party products requires engagement with support. We have found the engagement able to solve our problems pretty much all the time.

I'm not directly involved in the day-to-day operations of our vSphere environments, but we stand up private vSphere-based clouds on a fairly regular basis. We manage those on a go forward basis in terms of patching, upgrading, etc. Deploying vSpheres is pretty easy. The biggest feature that has made that easier, as compared to three or four years ago, is the vCenter Server Appliance. Its ability to deploy the management plane as a virtual client and bootstrap an ESX environment. That's a big step forward.

1. Compared to deploying traditional infrastructure models, like bare metal, and the ability to virtualize and maximize the utilization of the physical infrastructure speaks well for ROI. 
2. In today's market, agility is the new currency. Without virtualization, and vSphere in particular, we wouldn't have the level of agility in the business that we have today. Frankly, it's needed by pretty much any industry. Regardless of whether you're technology-centric or not, you are a technology company.

If I had to give a rating of one to ten for vSphere, I would give it a nine. No software nor hardware is perfect, but vSphere is good. That's why I would say a nine. There is still some room for improvement, like larger FTVMs, continued evolution, and keeping pace with the scalability of underlying physical infrastructure.

For somebody looking to evaluate a virtualization platform such as vSphere or any of its competing open source solutions, like KVM or other virtualization platforms, one of the key considerations is to look at TCO. vSphere may seem expensive upfront, and there may be some sticker shock there, but if you look at it over the long-term and from a human capital perspective to operate the platform over a period of three or more years, the manageability of vSphere drives the total cost of ownership way down.

It's a virtualization service.

The product is performing well. We are quite satisfied with it.

We are looking into using VMware on AWS in the future.

We have seen an improvement in uptime. The whole hardware lifecycle process is easier, which was previously a pain.

I find the solution simple and efficient to manage. It is not rocket science. It is easy to install and maintain. I didn't need to read a lot of books. The solution is quite handy.

• The high availability (HA)
• VMotion
• The seamless 24-hour uptime

We have a lot of databases running on mission critical apps which control our end production line: Exchange, virtualize, and the main controller. We are at about a 85 percent virtualization rate. We also have mission critical apps which conform our factory.

On Vista, there should be a lot more new features. We would like to see more security features to harden our environment in the future.

From a technical point, there is not much room for new innovation in the hypervisor. It is more about improving the environment or the landscape, not the product.

The licensing should be more competitive based on its price. There should be more features for the licensing that you own. Money is a factor, because our management is looking right now at its money. The most annoying thing is to tell people that I would like to continue using VMware, and have them argue the other solutions are free.

Maybe 80 percent of the time, our issues were hardware problems caused by HPE. Crappy driver issues leading to a blue screen of death. If you have a corrupt driver, is it the fault of the VMware or is it the fault of the vendor who should support it? These were mostly our outages.

This was due to the product cycles being too quick. Neither VMware nor HPE could test the stuff properly. The cycles were too quick and they had to push out the software, then errors happened. Both software companies needed to fix or address issues in their old versions, but then they also implemented new bugs in their newer versions. Software will never be error-free, because the product cycle frequency is too high. 

We are version 6.0, but these issues happened on 5.0, 5.1, and 5.5. We haven't seen them on the current version. It is annoying because we work with clusters, and we can't really have one node fail.

It can scale linearly. At some locations though, we are using HPE SimpliVity to scale.

The technical support is very good. I have nothing to complain about, as they are quick and try to respond quickly. Sometimes, they don't have a solution right away, but that's reasonable. 

If you track down an issue and you don't have a solution or work around, you have to give it to the engineers who will take sometime fixing it. That's fair.

We have PCS support. It has better support compared to HPE. Maybe Cisco is better, but it is still good.

We were not previously using anything from a virtualization perspective.

If you figure out how to do it, it's quite easy. 

There are so many options on the market, and if you switch from a SAN to an S environment, you have to look for white papers and guidelines from Windows. It is also hyper-converged. Yet, if you can follow the guidelines, it's easy. 

We did the implementation on our own.

The business is able to gain in faster services because you are provisioning the ends more quickly due to templates. Thus, the provisioning is quite good. 

The pricing is too expensive. The reason why we implemented Hyper-V is because of the licensing costs. 

They are way too high. This is tough when you have to present to management with a flat budget, and everything will be more expensive. 

We are currently using VMware and Hyper-V.

Our shortlist consisted of KVM, Hyper-V, and VMware. We went with VMware back then because of its reporting, it was market leader, it has good support, and the price was previously fair. 

I would recommend trying the solution.

The primary use case is enterprise virtualization for server consolidation, energy conservation, data center space conservation, and overall efficiency and scalability.

The mission-critical apps we use it for are everything from machine-learning to business processing to scientific research and development.

We have absolutely seen a performance boost, in particular with some of our legacy applications. For some of the legacy apps, we have seen at least a 75 percent increase. In addition, some of the newer applications have also seen a boost because they're just more efficient running on VM rather than on bare metal. For the newer apps, depending on how they're optimized, the increase has been at least 10 percent.

Another benefit we have seen is the many-to-one relationship of VMs to hardware, versus one-to-one. It's a real win-win for our data center. It's a win-win for taxpayer dollars. And from a scalability point of view, we're able to rapidly scale workloads where we weren't able to do so before, working with just our pure hardware.

In addition to that, it really fits nicely into our automation efforts, where we can dramatically reduce the deployment times for applications and the services we provide.

The most valuable features for us are DRS, VMotion, and, of course, some of the analytics that we were able to define to quantify our workloads and tell us how we are able to make our data center more efficient.

It's absolutely efficient and simple to manage in general. Set it up, configure it, then monitor, manage, and maintain. That's it. What makes it simple to manage is that we use a flavor of Auto Deploy, storage policies, among other features around policies, where they come online and their policies are in them. Everything conforms to a policy. It's pretty much set up for good.

I'd like to see a little bit more integration for VDI. I think that Composer servers, security servers, broker servers with connections, I'm not sure they are necessary at this point. Perhaps they could have a lot of those functions baked directly into the hypervisor. It seems to me that if the hypervisor is scalable and flexible enough, that the processor and compute can handle all of that. Maybe we eliminate those other components for VDIs and have more mixed workloads: server workloads and desktop workloads all in the same hypervisor.

Having been a customer for a long time, and running this for well over a decade, stability has not been a problem. It has its nuances, it's not perfect, but stability hasn't been an issue.

Scalability has been the goal all along here, to be able to meet in the middle of the scalability, horizontally and vertically. We have over 10,000 users.

We've used technical support in the past. It was "fair" in the beginning, it's certainly better now. We don't necessarily rely too much on support now because there's such a breadth of knowledge in the community and among other customers so that everybody is connected.

I've been involved from the beginning until the end. In the early days, before ESX, we worked with what was called GSX, or Ground Storm X. It wasn't easy, but once you got it configured it worked and it did what it was supposed to do. We didn't have any major issues.

It was all self-installed. A lot of it was a matter of reading the directions, following them, and going to "next".

One of the things I think a lot of people are inherently bad about is assuming ROI and never quantifying it. Where I am, we've done a pretty good job of quantifying over the years. We've not only studied everything down to the number of Velcro ties used but the number of cores, the cost per core for network, even power cords, and including the consumption of water. 

We've been able to quantify virtualizing everything we can, instead of just assuming it, for ROI. We have been able to show quite a bit of good discipline around that. Again, on behalf of tax-payer dollars, I feel confident that with our shift to virtualization over a decade ago, we can definitely quantify our ROI. It's really simple.

Data-centers grow in a different direction now. They grow smaller and they become very dense, very lean, and that, unto itself, shows an ROI. There's really not a whole lot of assuming at this point that needs to be done. It's just there. You can quantify it very easily.

I have recommended VMware over the at least 12 years now that I've been working directly with them and VMware's hypervisor products. I've recommended it to a lot of folks, and this goes back to the days when other players were involved; companies like Virtual Iron and Zen. VMware has always been a leader in that space and I foresee that they always will be.

Although I work in government, we are actively pursuing VMware on Cloud and we are awaiting certain certifications to help drive the initiative. At the moment we're at a standstill with that.

In over a decade, from where we started until where we are today, I would say that this solution is right around a 10 out of 10. And I can confidently say that for any customer. Even for those who are just starting up, you're working with a product that's tried and true. It didn't just come out yesterday. It's been here for a very long time.

We run, easily, 98 percent of our servers out of vSphere. We pretty much have nothing physical anymore.

In terms of mission-critical apps, our entire ERP environment is all virtualized, outside of the rack. Everything in our organization, our student database records, employee records, all of our management stuff, is in VMware.

It's difficult to say if we had a performance boost when we moved to vSphere because we have been using VMware for a long time. Our ERP was actually the driving force behind our acquisition of VMware. We used that as the driver to get VMware in the door and going. Then, as we started to see what it was capable of doing - essentially running this entire heavy product - we started consuming more and more of our servers and eliminating physical machines, based on the success that we had with the ERP system.

What I like about it is being able to see my entire organization, especially with some of the newer enhanced links. All of my data centers show up in one view and I can see every server that's running. I also get performance statistics so if there are issues, major problems going on, I can see them.

Management of the solution depends on the interface you are in. The Flash interface can be a little cumbersome sometimes, but thankfully they are moving all of that into the HTML 5. I did see that with the 6.7 Update 1, every function now is pretty much capable of being run from HTML 5. I'm really happy about that and looking forward to moving to that.

Unfortunately, because I'm the infrastructure guy, some of the features, day-to-day things, require me to go back into the Flash version, but I long to go with the HTML 5. It's really fast, performance is great on that, it looks really good, and using it is not a pain.

It would be nice if they could make the upgrades a little bit smoother but sometimes that's a little tricky because, unfortunately, everyone can throw plugins into the environment and VMware can't necessarily control all of those. So I understand the headache for the engineering team there.

The EXSi hosts are rock solid. We've had a couple problems once or twice with a driver update or bad firmware on one of the devices, but I haven't actually had a problem with those in years now. They pretty much run rock solid, 24 hours a day.

vSphere itself is great when you don't need to make updates, but any time you have to touch it, unfortunately there is always a little bit of a fight to get it to do what you want. But then, once you get it there, it's great.

We have grown our environment, introduced new hosts, taken old hosts out. We have some 1,500 VMs running inside of all of our environments now and that has been a slow growth. I don't know how long it took us to get there, but we've grown to that level and it's never once given us a problem. From the interface, you see how much CPU utilization and RAM utilization that each one of those hosts is giving you. You can tell ahead of time when you need to start expanding the environment. And with VMotion, you expand the environment and then let DRS have at it and walk away.

Often, by the time I'm going for support, there's a major issue with the environment. It sometimes takes a little bit of time for them to either see what's going on or to get me to whatever support I need. The few times I have had to call them on something very basic though, they have been pretty quick.

We use the appliances, so the setups are pretty straightforward. Anytime I have to install new test stuff, I never really have much of a problem with it anymore. Obviously, in the past, there were the issues with SSL certificates, but a lot of that has been worked out and the systems are pretty straightforward now.

Upgrades, sometimes, are hit and miss. It depends upon the complexity of the environment. The more side products you are throwing into vSphere, the stickier it can get. I've had upgrades that have failed, but what's really great about using the appliances is that, when the upgrade failed, I just shrugged my shoulders, turned that new box off, turned the old box back on, and kept moving along for a while, until we figured out the issue.

In term of advice, obviously some of the SSL stuff would be good to know upfront because the requesting of the certificates, while it's gotten easier, can still be a little bit tricky. There are so many of them that you need. Knowing the right steps for selecting what you need can be challenging.

We're not using VM encryption, support for TPM or VBS right now, but we're looking at implementing some of that stuff to improve our security stance.

We're slowly attempting to push our database administrators into moving into VMware. They're reluctant, of course, but we have not given them much of a choice. They will come along and we just need to make sure that they're comfortable and we get them fully supported and happy.

I would easily rate the solution a nine out of 10. The little problems I have with it here and there notwithstanding, it's the easiest product I have ever had to use for something as complex as your entire infrastructure being in one area. I have dabbled around with other products and they never seem to quite be at the same level of stability and feature sets.

vSphere 6.5 is the primary virtualization technology in use at our firm and supports the entire organization infrastructure.

Has kept our business running with very little downtime and our clusters balanced with DRS/HA.  We are able to patch our hosts during production hours with the ability to keep services running.  It has also given us the HA capabilities for our vCenter servers using the new built-in HA option for the appliance and never having to worry about downtime.

vCenter Appliance, DRS, HA, Update Manager and SRM help us keep our business running smoothly.  Having the vCenter Appliance has allowed us to save costs on Windows licenses and have a more stable platform for managing hosts.  Also having Update Manager now as well it makes the move to VCSA that much better.  SRM has allowed us to failover our Tier1 services in under 30 minutes for each whereas it would take over an hour the old fashioned way.  DRS and HA have kept our cluster stable and VMs running optimally.  With the built in Update Manager now in the vCenter Appliance it is easy to scan and remediate our Hosts even during Production hours as we can use HA/DRS with Maintenance Mode.

Get the HTML5 client to 100% parity to replace the Flash client.  When the next release comes out ensure all bugs/fixes are implemented as there was some pretty nasty ones on initial 6.5 release.

More than five years.

There were some initial bugs with PSOD and certain hardware vendors but patching and updates have resolved most.

There are no scalability issues other than purchasing additional licensing when adding hosts or scaling up/out.

Technical Support has been good but better communication at times could help improve it even more.

Positive

No other solution has been used.

It was simple and straightforward as we have upgraded as versions have come out.  6.5 will be our last upgrade as it will be a hardware refresh next.

In-house implementation as we have VMware certified users.

Has allowed us to run our HPE DL580 G7 servers still without issues so spend on hardware has been next to nothing.

VMware is costly versus other competitors but is still one of the market leaders and expanding now with partners like AWS.  Ensure you get the right licensing for the feature sets you want within the product and research what those are.  Setup can be easy if you have someone that has worked with VMware before or costly when hiring external help, but research in to implementers prior to hiring them is always the best method to get good ones.

No other options were evaluated as VMware has been the primary hypervisor since I have been with my company.

vSphere 6.5 has been a great release with the vCenter Appliance and will only get better in the next release with the HTML5 client becoming 100% in parity to the flash client.

Server Virtualization is the most important feature because that helps me to utilize 100% capacity of my physical server or box. Its redundancy, uptime, or high-availability is also valuable.

Storage-sharing is also valuable. In vSAN, I can utilize the maximum storage. In the physical boxes, if you don't require storage, it lies idle, but with VMware or any kind of virtualization, you can utilize the full storage.

Its price could be better. It is expensive, and its price is a big concern.

I have been working with vSphere for the last ten years.

It is stable. I started my virtualization career with VMware 3.0 or 3.5. At that time, it was volatile, but now it is quite sturdy. At that time, it was working with Exchange 2003. When I installed it on VMware, I found that Exchange was giving problems and servers were hanging, but nowadays, servers are quite stable. Virtualization is quite good nowadays, and that is the future. All cloud solutions are good nowadays.

It is scalable. I have around 200-plus servers with me.

Their technical support is good. I am happy with that. When I call my VMware team members for any issue, they usually guide me. I am getting good technical support. When I open a high-priority ticket, and I want the support within 10 minutes or 15 minutes, I call my local team member or my Account Manager, and they arrange it for me. I find them very good. I don't find any issue with VMware.

Their training is also good. People, who are not a part of an organization and want to get some training, can connect to their virtual labs. They are doing pretty well. 

I didn't work on something similar before vSphere. After vSphere, I tried to work on Microsoft Virtualization, which is also quite good, but I did not get much exposure to that. My organization prefers to work on VMware. In our sister concern, we're working on Microsoft, but we are planning to move them to VMware vSphere because I want to establish my DR on the other side. We had VMware DRS hosted at one of the service providers, and then we moved to Microsoft Azure, but now we're planning to move back to on-premise.

Its price is quite high. VMware licensing is quite costly. You have to pay for the CPU and Threads, but if you want good service, you have to pay the price. Its cost is not more than 1 million for us.

If you want 100% utilization of your hardware, you should definitely use it. There is also network virtualization and storage virtualization, but it would be quite cheaper if you go for physical storage.

If you are a medium to large organization, the hybrid environment is also there. If you are a small organization, you should go for the cloud because if your utilization is not much, it is always recommended to go for the cloud. Otherwise, go for VMware virtualization. It is 100% useful for an organization.

VMware is bringing a lot of features. They are quite ahead in terms of features. They have containerization, monitoring, operational manager, and all required features. vSAN and storage utilization are also there. They are bundling everything. Their Research and Development is very good. 

I would rate VMware vSphere a nine out of ten.

I use vSphere 7.0.1 for a few reasons. My primary use case is for my lab, as vSphere offers a great versatility to use VDI, containers, distributed Storage, and SDN on the same hardware. I also use vSphere for non-production tasks on Rasberry Pie 4, and it offers a great deal for working with Docker on cheap hardware with a single management interface, vSphere. 

My lab is composed of three white-box servers with vSAN, a 10 gig network, a local SAN, and all storage with SSD to deliver fast VM.

I also have vRealize operating to monitor all the VMware components. 

The new version of vSphere now integrates with containers and offers some new improvements inside vSAN, like file sharing. So, with VDI there is no need to add a VM to build a file server.

With containers, NSX is no longer mandatory and with the VMware operation manager, you can get an integrated monitored platform that can scale easily.

You will get both hands on the wheel because all of the products are fully interconnected.

vSphere 7 also adds better certificate management than before (less certificate) and vSAN is also improved in terms of the space management for reconstruction, so you will need less reserved space for this kind of operation. 

VMware Tanzu (container) is the most valuable addition because you get an efficient solution to manage the VM and container in a single pane of glass.

The integration of Tanzu inside the base version of vSphere, without the need to install NSX-T, is a great addition. Many IT people don't know NSX-T and NSX can cost a lot, so it could save a lot of money. However, you will not get the enhanced network function due to the lack of NSX-T. 

The improvements to vSAN with a file server service is also a very valuable feature for many companies because they will be saving with the management of an NFS storage or a file server.

The HR proxy is actually a little bit harder to install and setup than other vmware products. So, direct integration with a vSphere distributed switch would be great addition, but you can bypass this setup if you chose an NSX-T switch.

The distributed switch, which is the networking part of vSphere, should have more functions. It should be like VMware NSX-T so that network management with VMware Tanzu will be better, although it is already good.

vSphere 7.0.1 is not available on ARM computers for production loads. I hope that it will become available soon so that we can run our production web server container on it, for example.

I have been using VMware vSphere for a few months.

This product is very stable and reliable. Now certificate management is also improved, the new version of vsphere has only 2 or 3 certificates so it is easier to manage.

vSpshere 7, like the previous version, is easy to scale up and down. vSAN is the same, and Tanzu as well. vSan need less space for is own management and it is integrating some features like a virtual witness node that improve the scalability. Other new functions inside vsan like file sharing is also a great addition for vsan scalability.

I always get great support from VMware technical team.

I did use the previous version of vSphere and I upgraded for the Tanzu support and VSAN improvement.

The initial installation of vSphere 7 is straightforward. If you try the ARM version, it is a little more complex but just follow the step-by-step process and it will work.

For Tanzu, the HR proxy is more complex because you will need to do some network design. For vSAN, VMware gives you a great tool to set your solution up easily.

I'm a VM expert so my level of expertise is great. My solution is an in-house one.

The ROI is very fast due to virtualization, perhaps a couple of months.

vSphere 7.0.1 offers a lot more than the previous version. Container support is the last great addition for VMware and it is worth the money you spend on it.

I did not evaluate other container solutions. For storage, I also use FreeNAS.