VMware Software Defined Data Center Reviews

We started the project using this solution about three years ago, and we are now in production.

We primarily use this solution for automation.

We have an on-premises deployment.

The most valuable feature of this solution is integration because everything is available on a single pane of glass.

This is not yet a mature product. Initially, it is simple to use, but after some time in production, you've got problems. These are particularly related to the main design.

The design phase is not easy. All of the stuff available on the website is not very carefully designed. We suffered for four months before obtaining the bug fix.

I would like to see the process of building and setting up homogeneous classes made easier.

We have some Intel machines and some AMD machines, are we cannot mix these within the same cluster. It is a big mess for us. As we want to scale, we do not always want to use the same kind of machine.

This solution is stable, but problems can be difficult to solve when something goes wrong.

I am very confident about the scalability. Compared to an ESXi environment, I'm not convinced that the same applies to NSX.

We have about ten people in our team who use this solution. We are working towards increasing the number of users. However, there are things that have to be fixed in production first. After that, we can scale more.

I cannot say very much about the post-sale support team because they normally speak with the customers directly, and we are not advised of the problem.

For the software-defined storage it is very easy because there is not very much to do. The product is quite automated.

For the NSM design, it takes a lot of time because you have to configure the integration for third-party products like Cisco ACI. 

During the design phase, we had VMware at our site. They carefully considered the aspects of our design.

You have to learn a lot before using this product, but once you learn it, there are a lot of advantages.

The main problem is design, not implementation.

When it comes to this type of solution, there are not very many people who are skilled in managing it. For example, I could say that in Italy we have four or five.

I definitely recommend this product for others but, again, in some cases, there is a lot of work to do.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

It helps me virtualize my environment. The software stack's been out there for over 10-plus years. It's a very solid stack. The feature sets have improved drastically, especially with the new release. Since they are running the same software stack both on-prem and in the cloud that means that I don't have to have different installations. It's a consistent implementation across the board.

It cuts down the sprawl of the environment. Helps use fewer tools to manage the environment.

Maturity of the features they've released just now. What they've released now has a lot of potential, but it's in the very early stages. Again, that consistent feature set across on-prem and cloud, that's what I would look for.

The product's pretty mature, so it's pretty good.

Scalability is great, too. They've made a lot of strides towards making that possible. They've come down to where you can dynamically add and remove resources.

It depends on who get on the other end of the line. Generally, it's good. Their resources are good. There's a lot of online self-help type support.

There is a lot of need for saving real estate cost and cooling, and those kinds of things. This software really helps with that.

I generally look for a company with good technical backing, as company which is constantly refining the product to make it better for the customers.

We chose VMware for the value, and for what we were doing, it was the simplest, most efficient way of deploying the services.

It's become more and more straightforward. It was never too complex, unless we were doing something crazy. It's gotten very simple. From what used to take maybe a couple of days, is down to an hour. That's a huge improvement.

Microsoft was the only other big one. Amazon Web Services is slightly different so I wouldn't put them in the same category, but they are playing in the same level right now.

I personally like to do a proof of concept, build it out, play with the product. That's how I would suggest a colleague evaluate a new product.

Do your homework, go through documentation, talk to the support engineers, sales support, pre-sales support, and just to get a good feel for what is involved. Again, doing a proof of concept helps in figuring out those issues which may come up in production.

We are using the solution to manage the OEMs and credit profiles and utilize different features from ESX, such as VMotion and vSphere.

We decided to move to a different version of VM to create different solutions.

The higher availability, the DRS, and its connection with NetApp are the most valuable features.

Perhaps integration with Azure would be beneficial. It would be great to have compatibility with vendors like UCS, considering I use different hardware such as HP or UCS. 

Additionally, a direct connection to monitoring tools would be valuable.

I have been using the solution for the last 12 years.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. I have plans to utilize ESX and other features for the neighboring infrastructure and other features of VMware ESXi.

I like their technical support because they met my expectations when I was in B1 or B2.

Positive

The initial setup is simple because they have a lot of knowledge, and it's intuitive when you're configuring the solution for VMware.

I see a Return on Investment as it is a very useful solution.

The solution is expensive.

I recommend the solution. I rate it nine out of ten.

We are using it to install several versions of virtual machines so that we can fit the needs of any user internally.

The most valuable feature is that you can share all your resources with all your users and put the vSAN software and virtual machines on each one. Moreover, it has good performance and flexibility. 

Even though it is very powerful software, it is complex. The way the software is driven should stay the same. My main problem is that they are changing the interfaces frequently, and each interface is incompatible with the last one. So you have to be in constant learning.

But the main problem here in a country like Mexico is that the software cost is exceptionally high compared to other states. One of the ways to adopt this platform is that it would not be as expensive as it is. For example, this version of the storage utilization is costly, and most of the other features, the most valuable ones, are extremely expensive.

I have been using the solution for four years.

It is a very stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. I rate it ten out of ten. I plan to expand the usage in the future.

The technical support team is good. We contacted the support and paid for the service, and they were very quick in their response.

Positive

The initial setup was complex. The complexity needs some understanding.

I have seen an ROI, and it's very good.

You can make better use of all your resources, reduce the cost of energy use, and complete balance between all your needs and all your resources through Defined Data Centre.

I rate it a ten out of ten.

We are a system integration company and this is one of the solutions that we provide to our clients.

One of our clients in the Health Care field is in the process of modernizing their data center using this solution. It will be replacing a lot of different products from different vendors that all have different levels of support. Currently, a large team is required to maintain the data center because it contains legacy technology, and the management of everything is very tough.

This solution helps customers to utilize existing hardware and perform this type of migration in steps, replacing hardware devices one by one. It helps us to scale up and scale-out. We can decommission an old server and add a new one, but we don't have to decommission everything all at once. With some customization, we can utilize the existing resources.

There are different deployment models, including both public cloud and private cloud.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the SDDC Manager. It is the big difference between this product and its competitors.

the VMware SDDC solution gives the IT admin fully control on the level of HW and SW, you could manage, upgrade and update the VMware infrastructure and you could utilize vRealize suite for operation and automation of your project.

so, the most valuable thing in the SDDC solution are two products which make it different from the competitors:

1- VMware NSX for networking and security virtualization

2- VMware SDDC Manager 

The main problem that we are facing with this solution is vSAN stability. Sometimes, the storage becomes unstable. It is not an issue with integration; rather, it seems to be within vSAN. It could be the hardware that we are working with. VMware has confirmed the bugs, but have not told us to upgrade the hardware. It is compatible and everything is ok, so I don't know. VMware has done some upgrading and patching.

Not all of the storage systems from other vendors can be integrated into this solution.

The licensing for this solution should be improved. For example, you should be able to expand the SDDC with a compute-only node, rather than a hyper-converged node. Otherwise, you are buying a vSAN license for nothing. Their competitors, like Cisco, do not have this problem.

They have to add the fibre channel storage so that it can be integrated with the SDDC nodes. That was the customer can utilize their storage for file-sharing, which most of the customers have. EMC Unity and HP3PAR connect using FC connectivity, but for this solution, we have to change everything in order to mount this storage to the SDDC node.

Adding endpoint security to this solution would be a good improvement.

This is a stable solution, but the stability is not as good as some other products such as VxRail and Nutanix. While more recent releases may be more stable, I have had some issues in the past. VMware did solve a couple of bugs for us.

This solution is very scalable.

The technical support for this solution is perfect. They are very co-operative.

Prior to this solution, we worked manually. We would supply a hyper-converged infrastructure to our customers and then install a software-defined network. It is an SDDC, but there is no single management portal. This means that it is not fully integrated.

The initial setup of this solution is easy. All of the customers can go to VMware Hands-on Labs online and test this solution before buying it.

The time required for deployment depends on many things. It depends on whether they are migrating data, or if they are a disaster recovery site, and how many nodes there are. It also depends on the integration.

If we exclude the racking and stacking, physical network connectivity, and hardware configuration, and are only setting up SDDC for say ten nodes, then it can be done in three to five hours. It's up and running, albeit empty, without virtual machines or anything else.

All of the customers can go to VMware Hands-on Labs online and test this solution before buying it.

If you add virtualization to and HCI solution then VxRail is more stable than this solution. However, VxRail is more difficult to upgrade and patch because it is more complicated.

When you install a Nutanix system then you never have to touch it.

This solution is being sold more often than competing solutions by Dell and HP.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use this solution to help centralize our office.

We have two Data Centers. One of them is for our DR and the other is for production. This is an on-premises deployment.

We have a lot of VMware hosts and this solution is needed for them. If you have more than two VMware hosts then you definitely need this solution to connect and manage them.

Using this solution will provide you with a lot of features for working with multiple VMware hosts.

The most recent web-based interface has given us some problems. For example, if you delete a virtual machine or you delete storage then it takes a long time to refill it. In prior versions that were a client installed directly on the PC, the interface was more responsive. Things happened on time. I had a problem last week where one of my VMs was deleted, and it took perhaps thirty minutes to repair it.

This product is one hundred percent stable.

After we installed it, we have not had any issues with the core product.

Scalability depends on the hardware. If you have a server with low performance when you will have problems. On the other hand, if you use high-performance servers then you will have no trouble with scalability.

We have not needed to contact technical support regarding this solution.

We used another virtual environment prior to this solution, but it was not as stable. Stability is important because if you need to restart the server then it will restart all of the virtual machines inside it.

The initial setup of this solution is not a problem.

We handled the implementation and we do the support for this product ourselves.

It is hard to find things that this product needs. Whatever we have needed, we found it.

We are completely satisfied with this product.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

It's really valuable because we're expanding our server environment constantly and it helps us manage that effectively. Because we're a company with well over 10,000 employees and offices in over 50 countries, we need a central location for us to manage all of our servers and all of our ESX nodes. It's a great avenue to integrate everything together.

Upgrading from previous versions is tricky, especially when you have an environment that spans over five operating systems, and we're using various types of hardware. So a streamlined updating process would be better than what we're currently doing, which is piece by piece rolling out the updates fairly slowly over the course of a couple years, going from 5.5 to 6.0.

It's been a couple of years. We've been VMware customers since early 2000, so we're constantly evolving what products we use. We're reevaluating what version we should be using, and it's usually a slow trod. But SDDC, in particular, it's been about three years.

Fairly consistently. We do have to open up a few technical tickets every month, but considering the sheer scale of our environment, I would say that's typical or even better than usual.

We scale up all the time. We have an automated deployment system for new servers and it's led to this server sprawl, and it's created a new issue where we have to manage our ability to shutter servers that aren't being used because it is so easily scalable that it can almost be abused.

Like clockwork, but we have a pretty high level of service because we're such a large customer.

If you already know the basics of server virtualization, I would say that it's fairly easy. It's a central hub for integrating all these different products that they use, so for what it is, it's simple enough. As simple as it needs to be.

When looking at vendors, I would say that we wouldn't be working with VMware if they weren't the industry leader in virtualization. So, reputation for one. With that comes service. We have different consulting groups that work with our company, but just to have heard from the vendor, themselves, that's very important just because they are the experts on the subject.

We are using all of the virtualization technology.

Our primary use case is infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

For some clients, we provide backup as a service. In this case, we back up their on-premises data to the cloud.

We are using the cloud deployment model.

The major benefits of this solution are stability and performance.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the infrastructure as a service. Not all of our clients require the backup to the cloud, but the majority demand IaaS, or the migration from an on-premises solution to the cloud. For example, for replication purposes.

The next version of this solution should include more automation.

There should be more visibility in the performance and the configuration.

They are using vRealize Log Insight as the virtualized log platform, but this solution is not well developed and not yet ready to use for advanced optimization and troubleshooting.

This solution is very stable. In fact, stability is the major advantage of this solution. 

We have not yet tested scalability.

My experience with technical support has been varied. It depends on the kinds of hardware because some of them do not have precise knowledge. In general, it is good because they pick up the issue and give you the insight to deal with it.

I have also used Nutanix. There are some differences between VMware and Nutanix, where each has benefits and downsides. The advantage of this solution is stability.

The initial setup of this solution is complex.

We are not well experienced with this solution so we hired a consultant to assist us.

We are not using the latest version, and we plan on doing some upgrades.

This is a solution that I recommend. It is really stable and rewarding.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.