VMware vSphere Reviews

The most common use case for VMware vSphere is, of course, virtualization, specifically operating system virtualization. We also have containers that are running on them.

Essentially, we have the flexibility for a hybrid cloud. We could easily move workloads from on-premises to the cloud and vice versa if we were running on-premises and cloud, which is one of the most important points in the new releases, in particular.

The quality of support could be better.

We have been using VMware vSphere for six to seven years.

We have dealt with various versions that range from 5.5 to 7.

VMware vSphere is a stable solution.

In our organization, we have at least 60,000 users.

It is being used extensively. It is one of the core products in the infrastructure.

Support has not been as good as it once was. It used to be better, but it appears that the quality of support is declining for some reason. I'm not sure why.

Previously, we were using Hyper-V, but I don't have a lot of experience using it.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. It's very simple.

The time it takes to set up will vary, but it will most likely be within a day. You could set up the environment in a day. It is determined by a variety of factors. If it is done by an experienced engineer, it will be done within a day. If not, it will take longer.

We have a team of three engineers to deploy and maintain this solution.

Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis. The license is a one-time payment. You buy it once and own it forever, but you must pay for support, which is provided by the vendor, on a yearly basis.

We are also using NSX and vSAN. We have been using NSX for three years.

It's not strictly a cloud solution; it can be on-premises as well as in the cloud. It is, in essence, a network virtualization solution. It can be used for virtualizing the network, virtual routers, virtual switches, and virtual firewalls.

Virtualization and on-demand networking are two of the benefits. On-demand networking is the best option if I can memorize it. If you need virtual switches, we can create them as well as routers.

Virtualization would be our area of expertise.

VMware vSphere is, in my opinion, one of the best in its class on the market. However, depending on the use cases, we could certainly recommend it.

I would rate VMware vSphere a nine out of ten.

On-premises

There are two versions of function more popular in our industry. One is the VMware solution, and one is Hyper-V. We choose VMware. We manage the VMware solutions with the vSphere. If you have a VMware solution, we have to use vSphere. However, if we choose Microsoft we have to use Microsoft management tools.

It is easy to deploy and manage backups for me. That said, I've used it a long time and therefore am quite comfortable with it. Upgrades and restores are simple.

The product is stable as well.

The scalability has been good.

Technical support could be a bit better at assisting. 

The solution should be more secure. Of course, it can depend on the deployment of your system on your side. Sometimes if the system is closed, you don't necessarily need more security. However, since we use different applications and tools, we must use different tools. We don't combine our security tools. However, we need to ensure that products like these are secure, and it would be ideal if more security was baked in.  

I've been using the solution for about 14 years or so. It's been well over a decade. I've used it for a while now.

The stability is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

Scalability is very simple. You can improve or expand it as needed. It's not a problem at all if you want to expand it out. 

vSphere is for managing an organization's solutions management software. The size is not based on the number of users. Only IT, those responsible for managing the system center, or the hardware, or software of the solutions really have access to the product.

Technical support isn't ideal. They are slow to respond. We've had issues previously.

We also have used Microsoft's Hyper-V solution.

I find the solution, based on my long history with the product, very easy to set up. It's a pretty straightforward step-by-step process.

Typically, you just need one person to set it up. It only takes maybe an hour or so. Of course, the first time a person does an implementation, they might go slower.

We have two people on the system side and five people on the software side that are capable of working directly with the product.

I handled the implementation myself. I didn't need the help of any integrators or consultants. I'm capable of reinstalling it or doing a whole new setup as needed. 

We pay a yearly licensing fee. 

We're using version seven or thereabouts. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

I would recommend it to other users and companies. 

On-premises

Our clients have a lot that they want to be deployed in an environment. What they normally do is buy two or three boxes, and then it's virtualized. We make the VM sit on those boxes. Within three boxes, they can have at least ten or 20 servers working for them. They have less power, less racking space, less cabling, and all that. That's how we use VMware.

VMware vSphere is a stable platform. We never had any issues with VMware vSphere. Once you deploy it with a stable version of the server or the hardware, there's no issue at all. 

A little automation would help. VMs normally use CPU resources. Let's say that a particular host or a server has ten VMs. Out of that, five VMs are performing, and the others aren't performing at the best level. It would help if VMware automatically learned that, and the suit itself came down to that level. When you normally give a VM four CPUs and the entire GB memory, then memory and the CPU belong to that VM.

But let's say that the VM is not using four CPUs. It's just using two CPUs. Then automatically at the VM level and without the client or the customer knowing, it should just use it at the backend. It would be better this way instead of telling the customer that they are going to reduce it. For them, it's always four CPUs, but at the backend, it's always working with two CPUs or something like that. That would have been a cool feature.

I know VMWare has this Operations Manager. I know that it comes at a price because VMWare normally wants to charge for everything in the software. But I'm not seeing all the features of the Operations Manager. I only see a few features. If all the features can be included in one package, that would be good.

VMware vSphere is a stable platform.

VMware vSphere is a scalable platform.

Technical support is fantastic.

The initial setup is straightforward. It takes a normal amount of time to install the operating system.

Normally our clients go for a one-time cost because that's easier for them. They don't want to go for recurring costs. But some clients prefer to go for recurring costs. It depends on the client and doesn't depend on us.

Once you pay for the standard license, that's it unless you want another feature to be activated. That's a different thing.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give VMware vSphere a ten.

On-premises

We are an IT consulting company who serves and sells IT services.

I am using the last version to understand the new features. Also, we are using it to improve our code for our VMware clients.

We are also using on VMware cloud on AWS inside POC.

It is very simple to manage.

Some of the benefits that we have seen are:

• HTML5
• Web Client
• It is fast and available.
• It works well and is reliable.
• The ESXi Quick Book is a good new feature because production people can quickly reboot the server, where previously it took a long time.

• There is no need to have an iSCSI client. Some people use it, but the industry is moving to HTML5 clients.

I am testing more products and advising my clients about what they should do and implement with the newest version of VMware.

The most valuable features are:

• ESXi Quick Boot
• VM encryption
• New security features.

The new feature announced today with vSphere Update 1 inside vSan is impressive. I did not have a chance to test Update 1 yet. We shall see how it performs in the next few days.

Because my server is too old, I am using my own lab for TPM. I did not have a good chance to test everything. VM encryption is quite simple to implement: Just check two boxes and it is done. It is very easy to do. If you want to move from on-premise to cloud, it is quite easy.

I put information on my blog stating that I would like more Amazon stuff inside of VMware. They have announced many thing that I am looking for today, so I am happy.

Less than one year.

The stability is very impressive. VMware develops many stable products. That is why we participate in the beta product testing to make things better.

The scalability is very impressive. As usual, VMware is able to scale out and up all their solutions.

I do use the technical support, and so do my clients who receive good support. 

I did use in the past Hyper-V, KVM and XEN. I do prefer VMware for the maturity of their  solutions. VMware is also available inside all big cloud provider like Azure, AWS, Alibaba and IBM.

The initial setup is very straightforward. There isn't any complexity unless you have very old servers, then you won't be able to install the latest version of VMware 6.7 because of TPM.

VMWare is one of the most used solution all around the world, it is easy to found some expertise on the market. Ask for a VMware certified person like VCP ou VCAP this will garanty a good knowledge of your tech support.

Our ROI is good. 

There is an average performance boost, especially if you use VM encryption inside the VMware with another product, like McAfee. You will see great improvement in these cases.

The price is high, but you get a lot functionnality included with the product. You can also start with the free version of ESXi.

I am using many solutions: IBM PowerVM, Hyper-V, Acropolis, and VMware.

VMware is the most natural product on the market at the moment, especially in virtualization. The other products are quite good too. I am not saying you can use them, because you can. They are stable now. However, with VMware, you receive more feature than with the others.

Think about your business needs, afterwards choose the product. Write down your needs on paper in bullets, then the solution will be clear and you can justify choosing VMware, not Hyper-V.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10. There is always space for improvement. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It depends on the business's need. That is all. I am a consultant and must know what my client needs. If they want a Rolls Royce, I give them a Rolls Royce. If they want a Honda Civic, I give them a Honda Civic. I must know the products to fit them to the customer's needs. I don't sell too much, just what the customer wants.

We're virtualizing the whole infrastructure of the company. We are only keeping some of the bigger servers as bare metal, but aside from that, everything is being virtualized.

We use vSphere for mission-critical apps including SAP and part of our internal development in C+, for the solution that collects everything for the buyers.

We have seen a performance boost because we have been able to more dynamically allocate either memory or processors.

It has provided us with cost reductions, a little bit more speed in deploying servers, and, of course, consolidation.

It's a very nice tool to be able to reduce your footprint, consolidate servers, and accumulate several servers in a high-density configuration.

It's pretty simple to manage.

It's simple enough right now, but some more automation tools would definitely make it simpler.

It's pretty well integrated with vROps but the integration could be improved a little bit. 

It's pretty stable. We have a wide variety of versions, starting from 4.5 all the way up to 6.5. They all work together and it's pretty stable.

It's simple to scale and the upgrades are pretty simple as well. The upgrades were straightforward. We just installed a new HPC and GN and we deployed everything in there.

However, I prefer to erase completely and reinstall, from the top.

We have Premium Support and they're excellent.

We see a high return on investment, precisely because of the higher density hardware. We're using fewer hypervisors, which results in some return. We also have more virtual servers and less cost. Everything goes hand-in-hand.

Analyze your infrastructure first, see what you want to do, and then start deploying everything from zero.

We use it to manage multi-site, multi-regional implementations of VMware. We use the security end roles to give different tiers of access from the VM up to the VMware installation. We manage the roles and responsibilities within the security to do this. 

We do all the functionality inside vSphere. We use VMotion and DRS to manage some of our licensing issues that we have. With bigger software vendors, like Oracle, we use it to keep licenses and requirements compliant and keep VMs running on specific hardware. 

We use it for quite a few daily tasks: cloning and testing out patching. Then, we can perform snapshots through vSphere. 

Visibility: We can easily pull reports and give access to other people to look at specs or performance metrics. This came as a bonus to us. Yet, we have been using it for quite a long time (12 to 13 years). 

The solution is simple and efficient to manage. It has brought ease of use to employees who are not at a senior level. It has been able to expose minimal tasks which can relieve some of my senior guys to do engineering tasks, as opposed to help desk, reboots, restarts, etc. We have been able to pass some of those tasks along. 

The ability to segregate roles and responsibilities, as well as regions. For example, I can give access to my Chinese team to manage the China servers and hosts. On the other hand, I could give access to my Canadian team to manage global VMware installations. Therefore, I like the flexibility of this tool.

We have just migrated most of our SQL and enterprise databases to vSphere. We don't use it for Oracle, but we do for most other things. We also use it for our communications exchange link, etc. Therefore, it is pretty business critical when it comes to the back office support and server implementations.

There has been a lot of improvement with UI: its speed and usability features. Before, it was very slow. When it comes to cross-regional (e.g., someone in the US managing the China vSphere implementations), it can be a somewhat slow. I would recommend increasing the speed. While there has already been improvement there, I would like to see more.

More than five years.

I haven't had any real issues. In the very beginning, there were some issues when upgrading or migrating from versions. However, our last upgrade was 5.5 to 6.5 where went from Windows to the Linux OVF version, and we did not have any issues with it. 

It is easy to scale and obtain as much power as we need. It is easy to provision and join it to the cluster. We haven't had any issues or limitations.

Technical support is very good. I haven't used them in quite some time though, because we have on-staff VMware experts. When I did use them a long time ago for compatibility with network cards (we use FCoE, which is not the industry standard), they were pretty quick to link us back to some articles to help us resolve our issues. 

When I first came on board, they had a very small implementation of Citrix. The servers at that time would cost 20K per application. They didn't allow us to centrally manage any systems. There would be a hodgepodge of vendors and versions of hardware. Therefore, it was a more difficult to track. When I came on board, we were maybe 20 to 30 percent virtualized. Since then, we're probably 99 percent virtualized. This did reduce staffing costs.

The APIs and plugins are important. We used to use NetApp. We use now InfiniteApp and Compellent. Having these types of plugins and using their APIs in the storage subsystems, allows general admins to provision storage easily, as opposed to being a storage admin. It has alleviated having to have five to 10 storage admins. We consolidated to one or two storage admins, while having the others be able to provision their own storage. 

We are spending less on buying bigger machines, which are overprovisioned. Thus, the ROI is found in consolidation and cost savings.

There are a lot of management and soft skills that we end up being able to save on. For example, my engineers in Canada could watch over systems in China, California, and Phoenix. Thus, it gives us the flexibility of administration. 

We evaluated Hyper-V four or five years ago. They weren't as fast to develop technologies or even adopting the technology. There were some tools missing. Also, they were less innovative than VMware. Now, I think Microsoft has caught up a bit. However, it seems that VMware is putting a lot more R&D money into the product. So, we've been happy. We haven't had a need to leave.

• Look at the market and see what is supportable. How long can you support the product. VMware has the history. It has the people who can support it in the industry. 
• Look at the supportability of it. Look at the job market and how many people, from a staffing perspective, can support it. 
• Then, look at the cost, because I don't think cost is everything.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They are a leader and more innovative than the competitors.

We use it for virtualization of approximately 90 percent of all of our computing. In terms of mission-critical apps, quite honestly we use it for the majority of them on the banking side: our financial apps, loan accounting, loan origination, etc.

We have seen performance boosts for our mission-critical apps, with the ability to add compute at any time. We've been using this for so many years, so over that time we have probably seen performance increases of three to four times. As compute has increased we've been able to offer that to the apps. I don't know that I can give you a total percentage increase but it's a lot.

Other benefits include high-availability, uptime, management is a lot easier, and a lower cost of support but with increased availability. That's a win.

The most valuable features are its flexibility and the ability to move workload.

The built-in security features, such as VM Encryption and support for TPM and VBS, are all important for us, but I can't go into specifics about them.

It's also simple and efficient to manage. It's a complex environment but it is one that we can get our staff trained on, it's not like a one-off environment.

In terms of additional features I would like to see, I just heard about them here at VMworld 2018. They're rolling in security to be a core feature. Built-in app defense is something we'll take advantage of. The ability to utilize tools that are in the cloud - we don't really use the cloud - will be available for use on-premise, and that is a pretty big feature.

More than five years.

The stability has been huge for us. We have a very predictable environment, robust, fault-tolerant. It's great.

Scalability is the big advantage of it. The product itself allows us to scale on the fly as we need it, and plan for the future.

We are a Business Critical Support customer, so we have an engineer dedicated to our team. We use them on a day-to-day basis.

We didn't have a previous solution. We just had challenges that everybody was faced with and VMware, back in its core, back in its early days, had the capability to move compute from one data center to another and that was huge. We wanted to be able to do things in a secure, safe manner with low risk.

I was involved in the initial setup, back in 2005. Back then it was fairly complex but that's because we were early adopters of it.

I don't know that I can give you a number, but our ROI has been significant.

At that time, VMware was an innovator in this technology so it was a question of learning more about what they offered and taking advantage of it.

If you're not already looking at vSphere, you're probably behind. I don't really have any colleagues who aren't utilizing this product.

I rate this solution as a nine out of 10 because I think you can always improve. But it's a tremendous product. We consider VMware a partner, we work with them closely.

The ability to maximize the use of existing hardware resources and run multiple servers at the same time.

Without too much detail, we use the ESXi Server to host our SBS for DNS, DHCP, and Exchange in conjunction with another server the is used to run our file share. We have another ESXi we use in our test environment that has worked out in not only pretesting certain configurations, but also we use it to recover data from, say, an infected hard drive. We simply grab an image of the drive, restore it to the virtual machine while isolating the network connectivity and perform all solutions and testing that may be needed.

At this time and with the way we use it, none.

The company has been using the solution for a couple of years now.

Yes. With ESXi one must make sure the hardware that is used matches the compatibility list provided by vmware. Once the host machine is configured appropriately, it's smooth sailing.

Amazingly, no. All is stable with the host, and the VM's whether Windows XP, 7 Pro x86/x64, 8, 8.1, and Linux.

I think the only limitations with scalability are related to the ESXi host machine itself. If it is not configured with enough horsepower, then it wont be very scalable. However a simple machine with an intel i7 processor, z87 chip-set, Intel nic cards, and 32 gigs of ram has the ability to run multiple servers with ease and speed.

Customer Service: I have not needed to contact their customer service.Technical Support: Support has been self driven via research and VMWare's web site. Being that ESXi is free, the support is great.

Previous to the current environment. I was dabbling with virtualbox. Awesome software but the application for it is different because its small scale and does not optimize its usage of the hardware its running on. It can crash windows.

The initial setup was fairly easy ONCE the correct/compatible hardware is set up for the host machine. I found the learning curve very minor, as well.

The initial setup was performed by our IT consultant. The consultant then showed me how it works and configuration that one can do. I also dove deep into research on ESXi. I would say the level of expertise about 7 on a scale of one to ten because of the way we use it.

Well I am not in the accounting office, but I would "guestimate" that it pays for itself with the increase in efficiency, the ability to circumvent the need to have a ratio of 1 machine for every server, and it doesn't crash.

I built the machine for the test environment we have in-house. The machine ran about $700.00 over all. Day to day cost is only that of the electricity used to run it. The 4 other ESXi hosts were built before I arrived. I can estimate the cost about $400 each plus the OS's (SBS, Win2008r2, etc, etc) to build and to run daily is again only the cost of the electricity.

I came into the environment where it was already in place. Despite that fact, I have test drove Hyper-V and virtual box to compare and get a feel for which is best. I am a believer in VMWare.

Plan, plan, plan. Always plan out your network changes, test those changes, implement, monitor, and note take along the way. Aside from that, do it.