VMware vSphere Reviews

• VMware server is a free hosted virtualization server which runs on top of various operating systems such as Linux, Solaris, Windows and Netware • It separates single physical server into various virtual machines which can be deployed many times • The installation of the server no longer requires hardware configuration • It serves as a testing environment for experimental OS, patches and softwares but does not need installation or any configuration • It can automatically starts virtual machine at system boot • It can also take full control of virtual machines from remote computers • It provides a complete GUI VMX editor • It allows virtual machines to use two VSMP processors • VMware server 2.0 has Web Management Interface which is used to easily manage virtual machines

• VMware has lesser functionality than the proprietary VMware ESX • VMware server does not fully control the scheduling of hardware resources because the complete control falls into the underlying operating system • VMware Server Support ended on June 30, 2011

Most usable hypervisor in the industry. It's well documented, really simple and quick to setup.

You can not manage it from Linux.

It's how we manage our server infrastructure virtually.

It meets all of our needs.

I'm looking forward to the HTML client being finished. That's the thing that's annoying me, but I know it's coming this fall.

If they were going to make the transition from the standalone installable client to the HTML, I wish they would have done more development on it before they released. It's not feature-complete, so we have to go back to the old client to do certain things, and I don't really want to.

One to three years.

It's a very stable product.

We haven't had any scalability issues yet. I don't foresee us having that issue. We're small enough that, if there is a case where it wouldn't scale, it's not going to be discovered by us.

Technical support is always helpful.

I would absolutely recommend it. vSphere has been at the last two jobs that I've had and it's solid.

It's a definite nine out of 10. I'm not sure that there's anything out there that would be better. Microsoft has a hypervisor but I think VMware is more feature-complete.

• vMotion
• Storage vMotion
• High Availability
• DRS
• Storage DRS
• Enhanced vMotion Capability

Less time is needed to go live for workloads. We have, therefore, been able to increase our efficiency and that of the virtual infrastructure.

The web client is prone to errors and crashes. Dump this in favor of the C# desktop client.

I've used it for two years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

7/10

Technical Support:

5/10

We have been using VMware in our environment since the company's inception.

I joined the company after it was implemented.

As far as I know, it was done in-house.

You should use vSphere for robust performance and stability.

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.

• Ease of use
• UI
• vMotion, migrating VMs from one physical server to another with no downtime

It simplifies the management of VMs of our 30 VMs. It's helped with disaster recovery, and we use EMC for disaster recovery, but it's managed with vCenter.

We moved the disaster recovery location from one state to another, and VMs helped us so that we didn’t have to move physical servers,

I don't use it enough to suggest improvements.

No issues, it's rock solid.

There's no issues with it.

We’ve had no need for tech support yet; my team have so far been able to solve any issues.

Make sure you get training on its use and deployment, because you won’t know what you’re getting into.

Robust, reliable, ease of use, good value for money and reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Reduced TCO through the elimination of physical servers into virtual servers.

Since 2010

No. Setup and installation takes less than 20 minutes.

No.  

Excellent.

Setup was straightforward.  Even an entry-level IT engineer could follow the instructions on the screen with ease.

In-house team.

Daily usage is for Critical Business Applications to the users. 

Yes, did a comparison between Microsoft Hyper-V and VMWare. In the end, VMWare won the battle of evaluation.  

1) Easier way of segmenting the resources. 2) Host profiles - Template to build hosts in minutes. 3) Performance and Graphs - Easy to monitor the hosts 4) Vmotion - In essence, this technique helps you to move a live server between hosts without any downtime. 5) Robust Management Tools 6) Cost saving 7) Advanced memory management - The memory unused in the hosts can be reclaimed and used effectively. 8) High availability

The major disadvantage that i can think off is that we have to pay for all the features to be available. Virtualization has made datacentre operations easier. As a sysadmin, managing multiple hosts is more simpler and flexible with the vmware ESXi. Running multiple hosts, operating systems on a single host makes it more efficient and saves costs. ESXi also allows you to pool the resources of several machines effectively, thereby helping to run the application smoothly without hassles.

This gives the technology lovers an opportunity to do all the things they want or need to do at the same time.