VMware vSphere Reviews

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.

It is a compute virtualization software. It is mainly used to virtualize physical servers and deploy virtual machines on top of virtual servers. So, instead of having one workload per server, you can have multiple workloads.

The fact that you can use all the CPU and memory power that the server can provide is most valuable. In a physical server, you might end up not using all the physical resources. There are a lot of benefits, such as flexibility and mobility, in virtualizing computes.

The improvement is more from a licensing perspective rather than from a feature functionality perspective. There could be more flexibility and fewer model options to make it easier to sell. Today, there are so many different options available, and sometimes, it is not really clear which one is the right version or the right model to propose. 

We have been providing this solution to our customers for 15 years.

It is definitely stable.

It is scalable. In our country, I believe 50% of the customers are running vSphere virtualization.

I don't have experience with their technical support. 

I never did an installation, but as per my understanding, it is straightforward.

The number of people required for installation and maintenance really depends on the scale of the project. Usually, one engineer can deploy vSphere very easily.

It depends on the contract they have with VMware.

I can recommend this solution. I would rate it at least an eight out of 10.

On-premises

It is largely for workload virtualization. 

Instead of having so many servers, we have got just two server nodes that are configured in high availability. We are running all our application servers, databases, and Linux and Windows systems on two servers. We've got about 12 virtual machines. If we didn't use VMware, we would have needed to buy 12 physical servers.

The virtualization, the remote management user interface, and the web console are most valuable.

The biggest room for improvement would be just simplicity. It is very intuitive, but it needs somebody with a lot of IT background. 

The way VMware manages storage is not the best. Nutanix manages storage a little bit differently, but we are not using Nutanix. VMware needs to find a way to manage storage properly. There should be storage aggregation and better management of storage.

We tried to install drivers for 100 Gigabit Ethernet Mellanox, and it was very difficult to put third-party hardware and upgrade the servers. We had to roll back because it just wouldn't boot.

Its price definitely should be improved. Its pricing is on the expensive side.

I have been using this solution since 2017.

It is very reliable.

We tried to plug in more hardware, but the drivers were not seamless. We are using the OEM version for HPE because we are using HPE. It could be because it is yet to work with HPE hardware. HPE hardware works with Mellanox, but it just couldn't take Mellanox. We downloaded the Mellanox drivers from their website, but it just couldn't boot, so we had to roll back.

We have three administrators. The number of users varies over time. We started with 24, and because of COVID, we've reduced the number of people who can work in the office to about five.

They are very responsive.

Its initial setup is very straightforward. It is very easy to install.

They can do better by giving better pricing. Their pricing is on the expensive side. As a matter of fact, we are considering switching to OpenStack.

We only work with perpetual licenses. As a company, we don't do subscriptions.

I would recommend this solution any day. I would rate VMware vSphere a nine out of 10. It is excellent.

On-premises

The product is primarily used for my main server for the main business. All the servers are on it.

The interface that the product offers is very easy to navigate. I learned it quite easily. I check the hypervisor interface on it. It's much easier for one who is familiar with the technology. 

The details that I get from the solution are great. It gives a lot of detail.

The product has been pretty easy to use overall.

The stability is okay.

Technical support was helpful and knowledgeable. 

I would prefer it if there was a better connection between the storage and the server. For that reason, I'm going to HCI or dHCI. I want to integrate it all into one interface and I can't do that here. That's why I'm going to HCI or dHCI.

The initial setup is a bit complex. You likely will need some help with the implementation. It's not something just anyone can do.

I've been using the solution for 15 years at this point. it's been a long time. I have a lot of experience with the product as I've worked with it for over a decade now. 

The solution's stability is okay. For us, it's enough. There aren't issues with bugs or glitches and it doesn't seem to crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The scalability depends on the hardware. If your hardware allows you to expand, it shouldn't be an issue.

Every year we increase storage, and therefore we regularly increase usage. However, I am planning to replace our current storage.

I have dealt with technical support in the past. It was less with VMware, and more with the vSphere storage. Once or twice I needed help. It was pretty good. I found them to be knowledgeable and responsive. I would say we are satisfied with the level of support on offer.

The initial setup is not really straightforward or simple to execute. 

I didn't do it myself. That would have been a bit much for me. I needed an integrator to do it. It's a bit complex to do.

In terms of the deployment time, when we last did it four years ago, it took about one week to get everything up and running.

We have one technical person on our team that assists with deployment and maintenance. They are an admin.

I enlisted the help of an integrator that mostly did the installation for us.

We do pay for the solution. It's on a yearly basis.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this product. When I started to use it about 15 years ago, it was the only tool option to work with.

I'd recommend the solution to other users and companies. 

Overall, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. I would say that we are quite happy with its capabilities overall. 

On-premises