VMware vSphere Reviews

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.

We've found that the most valuable features for us are:

• vMotion
• Replication
• Portability

It's improved our functioning in three areas:

• Deployment
• Backup
• Disaster Recovery

One way VMware could improve on this solutions is to re-incorporate the FAT client along with the web client.

I've used it for nine years.

Deployment is done with future needs in mind. But with day-to-day deployment, we haven't had any issues.

There have been no issues with the stability.

We've been able to scale out at deployment time to match our predicted future needs.

Customer Service:

Customer service is very good.

Technical Support:

Technical support is very good.

No previous solution was in place.

The set-up is very straightforward.

We used in-house staff to deploy. Depending on the implementation, you would decide then on a vendor, if necessary.

I don’t have a specific number on the ROI, but it has been very good.

I would recommend discussing an ELA with the vendor.

Think of the entire environment when making this decision - deployment, storage, backups, etc.

It's a stable product, e.g. if I lose the entire SAN all the VMs still run. They might pause but only after they try to write to disk. After the SAN has been reconnected, VMs resume as if nothing happened.

As I work as a consultant for Advania Sweden, I meet a lot of different customers with different challenges. But all customers can agree that delivery time for a server resource to the organization has been reduced from weeks to minutes.

I would like to see an additional licensing model based on size restraints rather than functionality. Also, a foundation licensing model that includes both NSX (Network virtualization) and VSAN (SAN virtualization) but with size restrictions. Then my SMB customers could benefit from our large customers' features.

I’ve been using VMware’s virtualization solutions since 2001, and I haven’t found a more sturdy solution yet, and I have tried most of them out there. Due to its stability, it’s one of the cheapest, if you look at the total operating cost. You can even replace the underlying hardware without downtime.

None, and I do all my deployments from either USB or PXE.

Only one time due to a bad third-party network driver, but here VMware’s technical support showed it’s colors and the matter was resolved quickly and smoothly.

Not yet, but I haven’t gone full scale yet with VM in the 10K area.

Customer Service:

They respond to emails quickly and resolve my problems (most licensing issues in the past).

Technical Support:

As well as the network issue, when we had to restore a SQL database with the wrong parameters they sorted it out.

I’ve tried a lot of different solutions, as a consultant my specialty is incident and disasters, I've been assisting in trouble shooting and most of then had switch to VMware due to it’s reliability.

If you don’t have a complex infrastructure you can do a next, next, finish installation and it would run fine.

I always install it myself since I like to run the latest software before i go to production. If there are any hiccoughs, I like to deal with them in pre-production, rather than finding them when I upgrade later on.

My customers ROI lies between three and nine months.

When you do a budget make sure to include administration time, what level of SLA they require and based on that choose right level of features.

• OracleVM
• Citrix Xen
• Proxmox
• Hyper-V

• Make sure you have a strategy so you could utilize a hybrid cloud solution as you grow.
• Build your segments as managers and users
• Look beyond licensing cost and calculate administration and support time
• Make sure you have a good naming strategy that can scale - I had a customer that named his hosts after the seven sins in the bible, so when he needed to grow beyond seven hosts he had to invent an eighth.

Ability to automate deployments. We’re very new to this, but the potential from an automation standpoint will save our company money and IT time. Our ROI will see an impact with the potential that vRealize brings.

They understand end-user needs and provision tools that let us do day-to-day deployments and enhancements. It’s a product that continues to grow based on customer needs.

The web tool could be improved, if that’s the direction they’re going, then they need to put more resources towards it to make it good. If we’re forced to use it based on hardware, it should be improved.

Good experiences. With any tool, there’s room for growth that could enhance it.

It's extremely scalable. Our limitations are our own creativity. The key is understanding the business need. If you understand that, scalability is only limited by forecasting. You must know your own products.

Great tech support. I love those guys. Every time I had a ticket, I could escalate, and they’d work in tandem with other vendors (i.e. NetApp) to find solution.

I wasn't part of initial set-up, but I believe it’s complex based on the senior engineer’s experience. For example, right now the metrics to upgrade is complex, requiring certain elements.

Access the enormous amount of virtual apps they have to get practical performance instead of just the KB to deploy.

Obviously, the virtualization allows us to save money because we can run many servers on one physical hardware.

We save power and monty. Virtual servers are much faster than physical servers, so personnel costs and investment costs are also much lower.

The vSphere web client is not very good – the C# client is much better.

We have been using it for seven to eight years.

Very stable.

It's perfect.

Support is not perfect – it’s a long process to get to the experts when you reach out to support.

We haven't used another solution.We do an

It's straightforward.

We did it ourselves.

We do an evaluation every few years. We've looked at Microsoft, and ORACLE. I look for continuity, as I need a solution that will be also be available for me in two years etc. I also look at peer reviews, and think that they are very important.

• Stability
• Ease of deployment

We have been able to consolidate 70-80 physical servers into much smaller ESXi virtual servers. We’ve reduced our footprint to a much smaller virtual environment.

I can't say as I'm still trying to figure out the product fully.

I have been extremely impressed by the stability of the solution.

It's extremely scalable. The ease of being able to add a new server or host in, and get it compatible with what's going on gives us a lot more functionality to get that host up and running.

Fortunately, I haven’t had to use it much, but I’ve gotten good response, usually we get someone on the phone and they are able to help us with our issues.

No previous solution was used.

I inherited our production environment, but I set up the dev environment and that was up and running in a day. The time from installation to functional environment was about a day.

I think as a company VMware is committed to innovation and stability and from a setting up the environment standpoint, you want consistency, but from what we’ve seen VMWare has that.

vMotion, Storage vMotion, Distributed Resources Schedule (DRS), NIOC, SIOC, Storage Profiles.

Our business has been able to consolidate fleets of physical servers to virtual servers, and is able to respond to changing business needs quickly.

Needs improvements to the Fault Tolerance feature, focus more on the performance and quality of the hypervisor. I'd like for them to add more vCPU capability.

5 years

I haven't seen any issues with deployment.

Lately I have seen some bugs coming up.

I haven't seen any issues with scalability.

Customer Service:

Good, but could be better. Lately I have seen VMware dropping the ball on customer service.

Technical Support:

3 out of 5

Yes. Hypervisor setup and setup of High Availability clustering in a jiffy.

In-house

There is no setup cost. Its only the administration cost.

Yes. Hyper-V, Xen.

From my personal experiences I've found that it’s still the leading hypervisor on the market.