VMware vSphere Reviews

We use this solution for network virtualization.

The most useful features are ESXi, DRS, Auto Deploy, and the Lifecycle Manager.

We would like to see the container-based operating system launched soon for this solution.

In a future release, multi-cloud capability should be simplified and easy to handle for administrators. For example, if I have a private cloud and public cloud and we have a feature to run VMware between these two, currently there is some complexity. We are hoping this can improve to allow us to run the workload anywhere.

I have been using this solution for approximately 10 years.

We have had some minor issues with stability in the past that has now have been resolved. 

The architecture has been redefined and the scalability is good. In the previous editions, we had boot failing issues but they have resolved them and introduced a new model of high availability in vSphere for vCenter. Scalable is just a single click and is very easy.

We were having some network glitches and some other issues known by VMware, they were all resolved through provided patches. Now everything is working fine.

We have also been working with AWS and Azure. We normally recommend VMware solutions for private cloud, and for public cloud, AWS or Azure. However, VMware is also having capabilities on AWS and Azure which we recommend.

The setup of this solution is very easy now, it was a bit difficult before and now has been simplified.

When comparing the price of VMware solutions to other vendors, such as Nutanix, they are costly.

We have compared this solution to Nutanix.

My advice to small to large-scale enterprises companies wanting to move to virtualization, vSphere is highly recommended for effective cost savings. The future is in virtualization, the industries are moving in that direction. Everything is in virtualization, such as networks, storage, and desktop applications. We can reduce the data center space, power cooling, and hardware lifecycle. However, the licensing costs are expensive.

I rate VMware vSphere a nine out of ten.

It's running mission-critical and business-critical workloads for our customers, and the experience has been positive.

The mission-critical apps include core banking systems, core healthcare systems, artificial intelligence. And highly transactional workloads are also great fits for vSphere 6.7.

We've seen an increase of about five to ten percent for the mission-critical apps. Their code is a lot more optimized now that they're using it in the public cloud with VMware Cloud on AWS.

In our organization, the lifecycle management has improved. What that means is our customers are spending a lot less time on "keeping the lights on." Day 2 Operations are being simplified a lot.

• The move towards feature-parity with HTML5 for the user interface.
• Also, increasing the release of features, which is partly through the use of that technology stack with VMware Cloud on AWS, so it's a much more robust product right now.
• It is a lot more simple and efficient to manage. It has improved a lot from the early days of vSphere 5.x. Lifecycle management and reducing the number of clicks that an administrator has to do to actually do a task have been greatly optimized, particularly with the HTML5 interface.
• In terms of more easily managing networks and improving visibility, the two go hand in hand. Compared to the vCloud Air days, it's come a long way. It's a solution that actually works now, and you can use your vSphere staff - who have been trained on and understand vSphere - to actually consume that hybrid cloud with very little or no training.

vSphere is the Rolls Royce of hypervisors. Moving forward, they just need to continue integrating and simplifying that user interface experience. With VMware Cloud Foundation, that's the Day 2 lifecycle management. You've got the VMC offering that's obviously all public cloud. They need to keep on integrating the APIs and simplifying the user experience. And they're definitely moving towards the one-click experience that you have with other technology vendors.

The stability has been good. Now that the VMC on AWS codestream is 6.7, and they're following a DevOps methodology, the stability of vSphere obviously has increased greatly.

It scales very well. Now, with vSphere 6.7, it's 128 hosts. Talk about scale with vSphere is now a non-issue. Typically what we do with our customers is deploy vSan clusters, typically 20 to 30 hosts, because that's a natural failure domain. Going beyond that, it really makes no sense, because you want to have separate failure domains.

In the early 6.x days, their support went down. Now with 6.7, being with VMware Cloud on AWS, their support level has increased, because they've had to. It's definitely a better experience now.

Regarding knowing that it is time to switch to this solution, our customers tend to be existing vSphere customers. End-of-life, end-of-support tend to be the trigger for, "Okay, we need to upgrade our infrastructure stack."

The other big trigger is end-of-life of the hardware stack that they're going with. That's typically a conversation about moving from legacy, three-tier infrastructure to a hyperconverged infrastructure stack. And then there's a hypervisor conversation about the best-of-breed to use to meet their business requirements.

Nutanix AHV, Hyper-V is commonly on the list, and Red Hat KVM is the other one.

Partner with the right partner because not all partners are the same. And have a strategy in mind. Have a design in place, the logical design. What functions are you trying to achieve? What business problems are you trying to solve? And then go ahead and do your due diligence with testing, etc. Once you involve the partner and you're implementing, make sure you have proper testing, have a soft launch, and then a go-live, so that you've got a risk-free solution.

That's where a lot of customers go wrong. They don't do their due diligence, and they don't properly launch, and they have the wrong partner that they partnered with, who is not quite up to the task of doing this type of thing.

For our customers that are very security conscious, in the financial space and the healthcare space, they typically will have clusters where TPM and virtual machine encryption are enabled to provide a more secure experience for those services.

We sell a lot of VMware Cloud on AWS. It integrates natively through hybrid cloud extensibility into VMC on AWS. That's actually been a big selling point with 6.7.

I rate the solution at nine out of ten. What would bring it up to a ten is feature-parity with the HTML5 interface.

The primary use case for the product is, we use it as our core infrastructure to power all of our servers as well as any kind of application that runs tolling for the region.

For mission-critical applications that we use this for, it's mostly for proprietary applications that were specifically built to run tolling. So all of our tolling applications run on vSphere 6.7.

In terms of a performance boost, we have seen about a 10 percent boost; not by much. Our workloads aren't CPU or memory-intensive, they're more idle-intensive with storage.

The solution has improved our organization in terms of compliance. In the past, we struggled with VM encryption. We couldn't encrypt the virtual machines with older versions of vSphere without some kind of third-party tool. Now, with 6.7, it's all in the application itself, in vSphere. We no longer have to procure additional products to meet that requirement. We can just do it on the fly, and pass our audit with no issues.

In terms of managing it, it's a lot simpler now with the vSphere HTML5 client. With the phase-out of the Flash client, which everyone doesn't like, it allows us as administrators to do our jobs far more efficiently than it did with the Flash client.

The most valuable feature would be enhanced, what we call, Linked Mode to link our disaster recovery site to our primary site across different vCenters, without being required to be broken apart. Meaning, we have identity management and the actual vCenter servers split. We can actually do embedded now, thanks to vSphere 6.7.

For the security features for vSphere 6.7, VM encryption was really critical because we're required to protect virtual machines. We have to adhere to PCI DSS for credit card protection. So the VM encryption was very critical to passing our audit.

There is definitely room for improvement and that improvement should be in the licensing and the simplicity of procuring additional licenses or additional VMware products. Right now, it's very complex.

Stability for vSphere 6.7 has been a little rocky at times compared to 6.5, but I believe that's because it's a very new product. With updates later, I think it will stabilize out.

We have especially had an issue with our backup software communicating with vSphere 6.7, but that's been remediated so that has kind of gone away. Initially, it was a little rough, but now it's smoothing out.

Scalability for vSphere 6.7 has been a major enhancement compared to 6.5. That is because of the technical features they've added that allow you to scale further away from your primary data center, such as vMotion over long distance, etc. It's made things better for us.

Only for vSphere 6.5 did we use tech support. We have yet to need tech support for 6.7, but I can't imagine it would be any different than 6.5. Any tech support, period, with vSphere, I have never had an issue. Even when it was a really strange issue, we've always resolved the problem.

I was involved with this design, the procurement, the deployment, and the management.
In terms of complexity, it was very complex for the licensing aspect. That's because in 6.7 it's changed, compared to what I procured years ago with 6.5 and 5.5. It has gotten a little bit more complex, but it's easier once you do it.

Nobody else was on our short-list. Hyper-V had come up because another IT office in our agency does use Hyper-V, but for mission-critical applications that are powering an operation, my opinion was "vSphere-only" and my manager's opinion matched mine. So there really was no other option, it was just vSphere.

We do use AWS, but not for VMware Cloud on AWS. We only use it for storage.

I'd give vSphere a nine out of ten. The only reason I give it a nine is because VMware has amped up how frequently they release new versions and that adds instability to a stable environment. But other than that, I would've given it a ten.

The main use case of this product and its performance is server virtualization, and the performance is pretty good compared to what we were used to with the previous version. The previous version for us was version 6.0.

There are built-in security features, TPM and encryption, which are something we're going to use at a later stage. Right now, we are waiting for a hardware refresh to be able to support a TPM version too. But it's something I'm really looking forward to.

The mission-critical apps and workloads running on vSphere are just about everything. Our municipality covers everything from cradle to grave. We are running a retirement home, nursing home, schools. The most important are the healthcare applications.

Since we started using vSphere, there hasn't been as much of a performance boost, but more flexibility and stability. We've actually been running vSphere or ESX since 2003.

How vSphere has improved our organization is that we have a lot of fewer admins today than there were 15 years ago, and we have a lot more servers than at that time. But because of the flexibility and stability we encounter with vSphere, it's manageable.

For me, the most valuable feature would be the EVC, but EVC has been changed to be per-VM which makes it possible for us to migrate the VMs to cloud and not take into account what hardware they're running on.

Also, a big improvement from the previous version is that I'm now able to schedule backup for the VCSA. That is, in my opinion, a huge improvement.

The last thing that I think is really great is, I'm now able to boot the OS and not the entire server. That's going to save me a lot of time.

I find vSphere easy to manage, especially because of both the vCenter and probably because I've been doing it for 15 years.

Where I think there is room for improvement is in the HTML5 interface in vCenter. What it lacks, for me, is integrating into VMware's other products, especially NSX.

The stability of vSphere is, in my opinion, just fantastic. I can't remember the last time we had a breakdown in the hypervisor. 

The scalability of vSphere, for my company, is perfect. It easily fits in, but we are way ahead of what is the theoretical limit.

I have used VMware technical support and the experience has been variable. But I have seen an improvement in the last year.

I was involved in the setup of vSphere. The setup was, in my opinion, very simple. It was very easy to get started.

When we initially chose vSphere, there weren't any other products, so it was simple to select the direction we were going in.

My advice would be just get started as soon as possible.

At the moment, we are not using VMware Cloud on AWS, but that's because we're still trying to get ahold of legislation because of GDPR.

If I had to rate the product from one to ten, I would rate it at a nine. What could they do to bring it to a ten? In my opinion, it would be alignment with other products, and a more automated upgrade, where you take the other products into account, so you can upgrade the entire VMware stack from a single interface.

We run, easily, 98 percent of our servers out of vSphere. We pretty much have nothing physical anymore.

In terms of mission-critical apps, our entire ERP environment is all virtualized, outside of the rack. Everything in our organization, our student database records, employee records, all of our management stuff, is in VMware.

It's difficult to say if we had a performance boost when we moved to vSphere because we have been using VMware for a long time. Our ERP was actually the driving force behind our acquisition of VMware. We used that as the driver to get VMware in the door and going. Then, as we started to see what it was capable of doing - essentially running this entire heavy product - we started consuming more and more of our servers and eliminating physical machines, based on the success that we had with the ERP system.

What I like about it is being able to see my entire organization, especially with some of the newer enhanced links. All of my data centers show up in one view and I can see every server that's running. I also get performance statistics so if there are issues, major problems going on, I can see them.

Management of the solution depends on the interface you are in. The Flash interface can be a little cumbersome sometimes, but thankfully they are moving all of that into the HTML 5. I did see that with the 6.7 Update 1, every function now is pretty much capable of being run from HTML 5. I'm really happy about that and looking forward to moving to that.

Unfortunately, because I'm the infrastructure guy, some of the features, day-to-day things, require me to go back into the Flash version, but I long to go with the HTML 5. It's really fast, performance is great on that, it looks really good, and using it is not a pain.

It would be nice if they could make the upgrades a little bit smoother but sometimes that's a little tricky because, unfortunately, everyone can throw plugins into the environment and VMware can't necessarily control all of those. So I understand the headache for the engineering team there.

The EXSi hosts are rock solid. We've had a couple problems once or twice with a driver update or bad firmware on one of the devices, but I haven't actually had a problem with those in years now. They pretty much run rock solid, 24 hours a day.

vSphere itself is great when you don't need to make updates, but any time you have to touch it, unfortunately there is always a little bit of a fight to get it to do what you want. But then, once you get it there, it's great.

We have grown our environment, introduced new hosts, taken old hosts out. We have some 1,500 VMs running inside of all of our environments now and that has been a slow growth. I don't know how long it took us to get there, but we've grown to that level and it's never once given us a problem. From the interface, you see how much CPU utilization and RAM utilization that each one of those hosts is giving you. You can tell ahead of time when you need to start expanding the environment. And with VMotion, you expand the environment and then let DRS have at it and walk away.

Often, by the time I'm going for support, there's a major issue with the environment. It sometimes takes a little bit of time for them to either see what's going on or to get me to whatever support I need. The few times I have had to call them on something very basic though, they have been pretty quick.

We use the appliances, so the setups are pretty straightforward. Anytime I have to install new test stuff, I never really have much of a problem with it anymore. Obviously, in the past, there were the issues with SSL certificates, but a lot of that has been worked out and the systems are pretty straightforward now.

Upgrades, sometimes, are hit and miss. It depends upon the complexity of the environment. The more side products you are throwing into vSphere, the stickier it can get. I've had upgrades that have failed, but what's really great about using the appliances is that, when the upgrade failed, I just shrugged my shoulders, turned that new box off, turned the old box back on, and kept moving along for a while, until we figured out the issue.

In term of advice, obviously some of the SSL stuff would be good to know upfront because the requesting of the certificates, while it's gotten easier, can still be a little bit tricky. There are so many of them that you need. Knowing the right steps for selecting what you need can be challenging.

We're not using VM encryption, support for TPM or VBS right now, but we're looking at implementing some of that stuff to improve our security stance.

We're slowly attempting to push our database administrators into moving into VMware. They're reluctant, of course, but we have not given them much of a choice. They will come along and we just need to make sure that they're comfortable and we get them fully supported and happy.

I would easily rate the solution a nine out of 10. The little problems I have with it here and there notwithstanding, it's the easiest product I have ever had to use for something as complex as your entire infrastructure being in one area. I have dabbled around with other products and they never seem to quite be at the same level of stability and feature sets.

vSphere is managing virtual machines in VMware infrastructure, ESXi, and it has performed very well. It's actually an excellent product.

The benefit of the solution is that you can create template-based servers within minutes. If you were to use a physical server, it would probably take several hours, if not a whole day, to get everything set up the way you need.

The UI is very intuitive, you don't have to spend hours before you figure it out. All in all, compared to other environments, like Hyper-V, we find vSphere a lot more user-friendly and intuitive to use.

One thing that would be helpful is, these days we have an environment where we are often using clouds as well. A solution that would be a little more cloud-aware would be really helpful. I know there is a product from VMware that is more specifically for the cloud, but it would be nice if VMware Cloud Manager would be cloud-aware. It would simplify certain processes. It's all about doing things faster. If it were more cloud-aware it would be easier to work it into a hybrid environment and literally have seamless interfacing with the leading cloud solution. That would be nice.

I've been using it for years. It's super stable. There are a few glitches, but really nothing major. The stability is one of the reasons we selected this solution.

It's scalable. It's comparable to other similar products. 

I do use VMware support but not for vSphere. Full disclosure: I'm a VMware developer. I've been working with VMware for many years. But their support is excellent.

We had straight physical before. Of course, it is clear that when you use physical infrastructure, depending upon the type of application you're implementing on that infrastructure, often you do not use the infrastructure's capability to the maximum. You use anywhere between 10 and 25 percent of the potential of the infrastructure, and that has to do with the specifics of what application you're implementing and how well this application plays with other applications. A typical example is SQL Server and SharePoint. They both try to steal resources from each other so it's very hard to have those components sharing the same hardware. There are many other examples. This is just to illustrate, a little bit, the benefit of the virtualization solution.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are a reasonably priced solution that the vendor maintains well, one they stand behind, so that when we use their solution, we keep up with the state of the art. Some vendors - and I'm not going to cite names - tend to invest in creating a solution, and then they don't stand behind it, and the customer is left to fend for himself. The solution has never been improved, it's no longer a key part of the vendor's line of business. At this point, for us, the important point is that the vendor keeps pushing the state-of-the-art and keeps improving the solution while maintaining a top level of support for the customer.

I would rate this solution at around nine out of 10. There are ups and downs, but essentially it is an excellent solution.

My advice: Just go for it. At this point, I have had a lot of experience with competing products, but in terms of finish, in terms of flexibility, in terms of user-friendliness again, I would say vSphere, in my book, is still about as good as a solution can be. They are near the top. There is always room for improvement, but they are in front of the pack.

• Core virtualizaton
• Basic hypervisor functions with HA

We are able to scale up far better with densities of 10:1 or 20:1 and provide robust, flexible computing to our increasing application demands.

Stability and manageability need improvement. The core product has not changed much over the years and has large deficiencies in manageability and how they implement certain features. The basic hypervisor works OK, but all the management and bolt-on products have issues and at times overwhelm the core hypervisor.

I've used it for seven years.

We have repeated reliability issues with anything other than core functionality.

SRM has been a disappointment in its scalability and reliability.

We pay for business critical support and that is still bad. I think VMware's biggest weakness is their support organization - 5/10.

We had Hyper-V, but the older versions had issues. When the 2016 version releases, we are going to re-evaluate it.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward.

We did most of the implementation ourselves, but we did have some initial consultation on some design thoughts.

VMware is consistently expensive and their pricing arrogance is what will drive us and other customers away. Compared to physical systems, it is a bargain, but compared to other solutions, it is losing its appeal due to pricing.

The core hypervisor is decent. Many issues will be with management and bolt-on products.

• DRS (compute and storage) is one of the best features for practical purposes.
• HA is a great feature, but if you keep hosts patched, HA doesn’t come into play. It’s not a day-to-day feature you use.
• Ability to vMotion across clusters. We took smaller clusters and consolidated them into one mega cluster because of the ability to vMotion from other clusters live into newly-created clusters.

The consolidation. Pre-VM, we had pain transporting applications from one physical machine to another. Now, we can consolidate machines that aren't using computer resources into an environment where they can all exist without performance degradation.

I'm excited to see in 6.0 the enhanced vMotion capabilities to connect our Phoenix, AZ and Culpepper, VA datacenters. It will have the ability to geo-vMotion instead of just metro-vMotion machines.

Now, it's much better than used to be. HA doesn’t even come into play, but you must manage the environment to maintain that.

There’s some bugs (zero uptime bug, and RAM disk issue), but those were resolved. They were hiccups/annoyances.

Phenomenal. Multiple 32-node clusters and 6.0 can support 64 nodes. Don’t know if we will get that large because it gets unwieldy, and will be hard to vMotion all of that off one host onto another and patch within a reasonable amount of time. It’s so condensed in clusters that it makes it hard to maintain.

Periodically used as sounding board for things we want to do. Not high marks, though, because first-level support is not knowledgeable. I would rather rely on peers in blogs, forums, etc. Also, sometimes they're not communicative.

Involved in the beginning with v2.5, not overly difficult (in ESXi had to come up with some scripts, because at the time it didn’t have a GUI).

Consider the scale of environment, especially if you're in a position to have closeted datacenter. It’s self-contained and cost-effective.

vSphere is great, I’ve made a career of it.