VMware vSphere Reviews

• The deployment of Distributed Virtual Switch
• Hyper visors for 5.1, 5.5, 6.0
• We use these to deploy our product (Cisco switches)

• Very flexible and scalable SDN solution
• We can add hypervisors with VNX and switches for a CSA fabric solution; it's very flexible for that
• We can scale up Nexus switches for ACI (application centric infrastructure)

• Right now, the NIC teaming feature has only four roles, only supporting it for one role (IP route hash), but it should include all roles
• MAC pinning feature should be there in NIC-teaming
• It needs a more friendly UI, as right now it's difficult to see what we’re maintaining

It’s a hyper visor residential product, and the AVS status is shared between hosts immediately through vCenter, making it more stable.

Using vCenter and AVS, we can create easily, and transparently, a VMM (virtual machine manager) domains. In general, we can scale easily.

No direct experience.

It was a very easy initial setup, including the ESXi host.

We must meet a real-switch behavior and functionalities. Go ahead and definitely purchase it.

Cost, for one thing, it greatly reduces from physical servers.

Time, it saves me time. It’s also much easier to manage.

More storage capabilities would be great. Also, more hot-adding of devices would be helpful.

Fairly stable – we have issues, but overall it’s a very stable product that doesn’t require much legwork to run.

Not much experience, so I wouldn’t know.

They’ve been extremely helpful. Basically, we create a ticket and they assign a technician that usually calls us back within an hour. They usually do a great job of diagnosing and fixing the problem.

We were using hardware before, we started that in that development phase and realized the benefits of virtual environments and started migrating over.

It’s fairly straightforward.

I always look at the technical support, product availability, and product stability when selecting a new product. We just looked into vSphere though as there’s nothing else like it.

Nobody’s perfect, but it’s great for our needs, and I would absolutely recommend the product.

• 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.

It is os-independent having a very thin architecture with which it can offer unparalleled security and reliability. Unlike most other hypervisors in the market, this don't need a general purpose operating system clearing the hazards of processor overhead, Antivirus and other OS processor consumption. Its this feature makes it prominent in the market of hypervisors.

Well, not much drawbacks actually. It serves the purpose it is designed for but still a very few little things that i have notices that can be called its drawbacks can be 1. Fault tolerance limits features available to virtual machines. 2. Automatic fallback of VMs currently not supported. This can be crucial in some environments.

The clustering and High Availability features are very useful and valuable.

After implementing VMware alongside some HP solutions, the total ownership cost was reduced significantly, and operational time was also reduced, which resulted in increased productivity and efficiency.

Management features for multi-vendor products for complex environment need work.

I have six years of core experience in design and configuring VMware solutions.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

9/10.

Technical Support:

9/10.

We started virtualization with Microsoft Hyper-V v2, but VMware products are more stable and scalable.

It's straightforward.

The first implementation was done by a vendor team, and after that we completed three upgrade project cycles in house.

The cost of licensing is bit on the high side.

We also looked at Microsoft Hyper-V v2.

VMware is good for virtualization.

The licensing costs are expensive and most of the important features require a license. 

For example, we would like to use DRS but there is an additional license for that. If it were free then it would be very helpful. 

I have been working with VMware vSphere for three years.

This product is very stable. It gives you good visibility of your hardware and the loads on it.

Up to now, I haven't had a problem that caused me to contact the technical support team.

I have experience with using Proxmox on a single host for about two months, with Hyper-V. This setup is only in a lab and not for production.

For my initial setup, I am not using the entire functionality. We are using vMotion, storage, and clustering.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

On-premises

• Storage vMotion helps a lot when migrating from one storage vendor to another
• Storage vMotion migrates a virtual machine and its disk files from one data store to another while the virtual machine is running, with no down time.
• We can move virtual machines off of arrays for maintenance or upgrade
• We have the flexibility to optimize disks for performance or to transform disk types

We migrated our storage from IBM DS4700 & V7000 to VNX 5400 smoothly through storage vMotion.

I would like to see data recovery responsible for the virtual machine snapshot. It is not reliable as the parent snapshot gets corrupted and the whole corresponding snapshots collapse.

We have been using this solution since 2009.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

The initial setup is straightforward. The only complexity appears with inherited network security policies.

Pricing is a little bit high, but you have to value stability, scalability and the support level which are the most valuable parts of any solution.

Choose VMware to gain the proper stability, scalability, and flexibility with premium support.