VMware vSphere Reviews

I'm a Solutions Architect. I advise clients on how to leverage VMware products to provide resiliency in the face of disruptive events. VMware's platform is the most robust for running VMs upon, and it also has the most mature technology. Therefore, it is much more reliable and predictable, and those are the key characteristics needed to ensure a successful business continuity solution. Bleeding edge newcomers have yet to prove themselves production worthy compared to VMware's long history of success.

Portability of infrastructure is the greatest asset of any virtualization platform. By using VMware solutions, there is no lock-in with a particular hardware vendor for compute, network, or storage needs. Likewise, the ability to run various guest operating systems further amplifies that flexibility. The overwhelming majority of my clients are able to use VMware's solutions for 100 percent of their software application needs. Finally, the ability of a running VM to be quickly relocated to another hypervisor or launched at another site via replicated storage greatly reduces downtime.

• Storage vMotion to safely migrate VMs to other hypervisors, storage solutions and sites while the VM is still running. 
• Distributed vSwitches to better manage networking across large infrastructures. 
• vRealize for operations management and automation to remove human error from complex tasks and enable more efficient processes and business activities. 
• The VCSA appliance provides a great interface for most management tasks. 

In general, the combination of VMware products that compose or plug into vSphere enable most organizations to better prepare for disruptive events.

The ability to run ARM based VMs on an x86 platform for testing purposes. With the growing use of SBCs running on ARM architectures for IoT devices, it would be very useful if developers could build and deploy VMs running operating systems like Raspbian used on Raspberry Pi devices on their existing x86 ESXi environments. Even if this is not possible through some form of emulation, the ability to add ARM hypervisors to vSphere environments would be very useful. This will enable more rapid development cycles for customers just getting started with IoT but already existing vSphere users. 

Since 1999 when they only made Workstation.

I've used Hyper-V, AHV, VirtualBox and KVM solutions. Each of these solutions has merits, but none of them are as flexible and reliable as VMware solutions. They are all rapidly improving, but are not being adopted widely enough to rival vSphere's dominance. I rarely advise clients to switch away from a VMware based solution, because of the long history of success and reliability that comes with it.

Do not buy based on price alone. Many of my customers chose the lowest cost option only to discover that the additional funds needed to access even a few more features would have been money well spent. Likewise, if you are going to spend more money on additional features, then have a plan to actually deploy and integrate those features into your infrastructure. Many customers never take full advantage of the many features that they are paying for and that can be avoided by being proactive in developing your overall vision for the infrastructure.

I am constantly evaluating many solutions. I also regularly re-evaluate other solutions. The competition is improving, and VMware has done a great job improving as well.

My primary use case for the product is testing Home Lab. I was involved in the early vSphere 6.7 beta. I wanted to see what the new features were, how it worked. I'm using it currently in my Home Lab for testing lots of the different products as a vSphere-base for vSAN, NSX, running the latest vCenter, etc.

Some of the critical workloads that I'm running in my vSphere environment are Exchange, SQL, various different application servers, and those have to be up and available at all times, and vSphere does that for us. It gives us High Availability, failover, vMotion capability for load balancing. It works great.

Since migrating over to vSphere, we're seeing a significant performance boost due to the fact that we've migrated over to an all-flash vSAN array. Previously we were running external storage SAN over fiber channel. We saw a significant increase, I would say at least a 50 percent increase, in our speeds due to our vSAN running on all-flash. It's been a huge improvement.

The way that vSphere increases our availability in our organization is that it allows us to run our critical business workloads, keep them highly-available, run them at speed, and easily scale when we need to.

The most valuable features for me are a very easily scalable infrastructure. I can have a couple of hosts to do basic workloads. I can have a lot of hosts to do a lot of workloads. vSAN integrates my storage so I don't need an external storage SAN. I love having everything integrated in the same UI. The new HTML5 interface doesn't require any plugins anymore and it's super-fast. Really liking that change.

In terms of the built-in security features that I'm using, currently I am using vSAN Encryption, using an external KMS server, and it works great. It's pretty easy to set up, very easy, especially in the UI, to integrate that and get that set up.

The way that I find vSphere simple and easy to manage is that the interface is all laid out for you. You've got various different views based on what you want to do in the UI. You have your Hosts and Clusters view, if you're doing something where you need to manage at the cluster level. You can manage at the host level in there. If you're doing something very VM-specific or on a vApp level, you can go into the VM and Templates view. It's very easy to scale and use what you need to use.

An improvement could be allowing a "dark mode" for the interface. I think the HTML5 client is a little bit hard to read. It's all white. It's a little bit bright on the eyes. A lot of us IT guys view in the dark.

The stability in our vSphere environment has gone very well. We have never actually had an outage. Due to the HA failover capabilities of the cluster, the High Availability of vSAN, Distributed Resource Scheduler allowing you to basically vMotion VMs and balance your loads across all your clusters, it's been very highly available. We've never had an outage or an issue; never any kind of a data loss incident, even when we were running external storage as well.

Scalability works pretty well. You can start out at a couple of hosts, based on your business needs, your budget. That's probably the base recommendation I would start out at for having some of the DRS and HA failover capabilities. But if your business grows, you can easily add a host and a cluster and expand your capabilities on storage and compute. If you're running vSAN, you can run on the storage side, too.

I have had several instances where I've had to use Global Support Services. They're always great. They are very knowledgeable. If they don't know the answer, they can easily escalate to another engineer and help you out and get the problem solved, usually pretty quickly.

I was not initially involved in the vSphere setup at my current company; that predated my joining the company. But I've brought up the secondary environment and integrated vSAN at that company, and setup was straightforward. It's pretty easy to get everything set up and get things done. I've done that many times in production, and torn down and rebuilt the Home Lab many times. It's pretty straightforward.

We do not currently use VMware Cloud on AWS.

If I had to rate vSphere from one to ten - version 6.7 - I would say right now it's probably about a ten.

It is primarily for virtualization. 

As an enduser, I would say it has allowed us to have the flexibility of moving around our workloads on different machines, and not having to worry if anything is down. Since we are a small organization, we don't have a lot of hardware resources to spare. So, this consolidation helps us to aggregate a lot more services and solutions utilizing the same hardware. Of course, it also allowed us to upgrade our skills, which helped us when deploying other solutions.

We truly value the security of the solution. We also value the consolidation, which can be done in terms of releasing the hardware footprint, and the service call. Furthermore, the automation and ease, as well as source utilization are key features of this product.

I think the cost should be reconsidered. VMware is not the cheapest solution out there, despite the fact that it may be one of the best.

In addition, I think some of the backup features or the prediction features can be improved. The legacy workloads are not prone to be virtualized. Some users may want to see a common deduction product across the physical service.

It has been a very stable solution for us. We have not had any downtime in the past three years. 

The scalability is excellent. I do not see any other solution that comes close to this product.

The response time from tech support is efficient. The tech support team there is very knowledgeable. 

The initial setup is straightforward, and not complex at all. 

The cost is a bit high.

Another solution in the same sphere is Hyper-V, which is quite good in terms of basic plain virtualization software. However, vSphere offers a scaled-up version. 

Primary use-case would be updating our Gold/Masters for the Horizon environment. It works pretty well. We're still getting used to the HTML5 Client versus the old Flash-based Client.

We use it for all of our servers, we have virtualized everything. The mission-critical things, for a bank like us, are the mainframe - it's the IBM iSeries - and our Saleslogix application. Those would be the two biggest ones, but we use it for all of our databases as well. We're 90 percent VMware, with hundreds of servers.

It's been a pretty smooth transition. We just upgraded to 6.5. Hopefully, we'll be updated to 6.7 soon. But it's been working really well.

It's hard to say whether we've seen a boost for these apps since we were very much first onboard a long time ago with a VMware. But performance-wise, every upgrade we do, we see it gets better. Everything gets better: the networking gets better, NSX is getting better. Security-wise, that's been a really good thing for us, separating our network out a little bit more, automating our failovers.

The most valuable feature is being able to VMotion and migrate easily, moving machines around on the host. I know DRS will take care of a lot about that, but there's still some manual intervention here and there, so the flexibility of it has been really good.

It's pretty simple. It's easy to upgrade.

I would like to see DRS for the GPU machines.

It has always been stable. We haven't had any downtime in all the years we've used it.

It's highly scalable. We've grown, we've doubled our size, and it has been easily scalable for us: slide in a new host and then attach the host to the vSphere client and then push the profile out. It makes it really easy.

I've never had to use technical support, myself. We have probably used our VMware rep here and there. We usually get our answers through our rep or our TAMs. There hasn't been anything "break-fix" where we had to call technical support and get on the line right away.

Our customer rep answers all our questions and, if he doesn't know, he comes back the next week and he lets us know. It's been a really big help.

Our ROI comes from being able to replace a lot of our endpoints, mostly on the Horizon side. But using vSphere with all the endpoints, replacing all of our physical machines as well with Dell EMC's wide clients, it has almost been invaluable to us. The cost savings have been great there: buying $300 machines instead of $1,000 PCs.

It is quick to learn, it's not overly complicated. You don't have to spend a lot of time learning about it, at least from the usability perspective, once it has been set up, of course. It's really easy to use, easy to set up, easy to find what you're looking for, easy to manage.

When selecting a vendor to work with, our biggest issue would be availability. We've had some issues with some vendors in the past where they were just too small. Being in Des Moines, we don't have a lot of options, other than bringing people in from other states, or even other countries, possibly. If we do have something come up - which, luckily, we really haven't had anything too bad - just having that immediate connection and resolution is important.

This solution has to be a ten out of ten. It's been great. It's easy to use, it's laid out very well, so it's easy to onboard.

It is used for some databases to the application server and any load that you can think about.

There are many features that are valuable and that excites me. However, it totally depends upon the customer. I'm working on the behalf of a service provider, who supports a customer. How useful it depends on what kind of licensing the customer carries.

The initial setup is straightforward and not overly complex.

Its scalability potential is good.

The solution is quite stable. 

Technical support has been good.

I can't speak to any missing features. It has everything I need.

I've been using the solution for ten years.

We have found the solution to be stable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The solution can scale and expands well. If a company needs to expand, it can do so.

The solution offers helpful and responsive technical support. We're quite satisfied with eh level of service on offer. 

We have found the setup process to be simple and straightforward. There wasn't too much complexity or difficulty.

We are with one of the service providers. I'm managing VMware.

We are not working with the latest version of the solution. We're working with, for example, N-1.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We are very happy with its capabilities and don't have anything negative to say.

VMware vSphere is used for server virtualization. We are using Microsoft Active Directory, file, and Linux servers

The built-in backup and hyper-converged systems have helped our organization.

The most valuable features of VMware vSphere are backup and recovery.

I have been using VMware vSphere for approximately 10 years.

The solution is stable. However, sometimes it goes down, which can be time-consuming because it requires some complex scripts only the support team know.

I am the only person doing the maintenance of this solution.

VMware vSphere is scalable.

We have approximately 500 users using the solution.

The support has been good.

We have used Microsoft previously and we have found VMware to be more mature.

The setup is easy. However, the configuration expansion can be difficult. The full implementation took three to four days. This included the move from physical servers to virtual ones.

We used a reseller for the implementation and had a good experience.

When you spend on this solution you will get it back.

We pay for the solution on an annual basis. There are no additional fees other than the standard license.

It's quite stable, has good support available, and is a mature product.

I rate VMware vSphere a nine out of ten.

We are using VMware vSphere on all of our servers in all environments.

The solution has many valuable features. Virtualization is flexible and it has simple clustering. However, the most important feature is the ability to move between VMs. The vMotion features are very good.

The monitoring is not good in vSphere, many times you have latency or you cannot find what you want. The events should be improved.

I have been using VMware vSphere for more than five years.

The stability is very good, but the performance is not good. If you have a large workload, you have to go to a physical service.

The solution is scalable, to add storage is easy.

We have approximately six administrators that use the solution in my organization.

I have needed the support of VMware on one occasion. The first level of support is not good but the second level is better and overall the response times tend to be poor.

The initial setup is easy.

I did the implementation of the solution myself. We do the regular maintenance ourselves.

I'm satisfied with the VMware vSphere price. They have a bundle that is priced well. However, any advantage feature is very costly.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate VMware vSphere an eight out of ten.

We provide basic VMware virtualization platforms basically for private clouds and hybrid clouds.

These are being used in the case of server consolidation for reducing the hardware sprawl and also, for a lot of the monitoring solutions now, so that companies can have their own virtual machines. For that, many of the clients need a virtualization platform. That's where we recommend vSphere.

It's the de facto leader in the virtualization market as of now and it's been the pioneer and it's got the maximum breadth of the features available across the virtualization sphere. 

It has got almost all the features that one can expect to find in a solid platform. It has good features performance-wise and offers a very small footprint. They're top-class security-wise. 

The latest innovation always comes from VMware.

The stability is very good.

The scalability is excellent.

While they have got enough integration as of now, they definitely need to get more cybersecurity integration as that is always beneficial.

The installation is complex and you need to have a good understanding in regards to what you are doing when you are setting it up.

The solution is relatively expensive. It's a big downside. 

I've been using the solution for six to seven years. It's been a while. 

The solution is excellent in terms of stability. There aren't issues around bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. the performance is reliable. 

The scalability is top-notch. There is nothing to complain about. It scales quite well.

We have about 50 to 60 customers that use the solution. 

The tech support is world-class and we are very happy with their level of service.

Virtualization is always a challenge. It's never a straightforward task as there are so many variables and parameters to consider. There's nothing straightforward about virtualization. Having said that, vSphere is so widespread and available, that you get access to the knowledge and the resources you need to implement it very easily. In that sense, you don't really have to struggle too much regarding the installation. You get a lot of help, however, you need to know what you're getting into and what you're doing.

We have about three to four engineers who support VMware and then a couple of guys managing customers.

The biggest pain when it comes to VMware is that licensing costs are pretty high.

The product itself has been around for so many years, I'm sure they can offer much better terms.

The licensing is paid on a yearly basis. 

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

I'd recommend the solution. Most people cannnot ignore VMware unless they are looking for something very, very, very, very minimal. It's best in class.