VMware vSphere Reviews

We use it to host our business-critical applications and servers on-premise.

I have found the Storage vMotion feature to be the most valuable.

It is a very user-friendly solution.

One problem that needs fixing is when we run the backup for the servers, the servers become inaccessible to everybody on-site while it is creating a snapshot. If your server size is large you will have to wait longer when the server is unavailable. 

In the future, it would be a benefit for VMware to improve on the Storage vMotion feature by making it become faster between host. It takes a lot of time to transfer files between hosts currently.

I have been using the solution for six years.

The solution is very stable.

The scalability in my experience is good.

I was not at the company when they did the deployment of vSphere version 5.5 but I did do the deployment of a host on version 6.7, which is quite straightforward.

The pricing is reasonable and you are able to purchases licencing for certain time frame intervals, monthly, yearly etc.

I would definitely recommend the solution to others working in IT.

I would give the solution a nine but the vMotion feature takes too long for transferring files between stored data sources.

I rate VMware vSphere an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case of this solution is for server consolidation and high availability. We are customers of VMware and I'm a senior systems engineer. 

The solution is highly reliable and suits our needs - it's highly popular. Support and the overall community are great. You can find a solution to any issues you have. 

I think what they need to improve on is their pricing. They're starting to get a little high-end in terms of price compared to other solutions and the other solutions are catching up. Everything with VMware is very modularized and you can't just buy one piece and be done with it.

In my opinion, they would be wise to include a high availability out of the box type set up and not just for cloud, but site to site.

I've been using this solution for close to 15 years. 

Technical support is excellent. They stay on the line and track down the problem. Usually it's on the first call. I have had some complex issues that took a day or two to resolve but for the most part, they're resolved in the first call.

For the most part, the initial setup is pretty straightforward. If you start getting into the more complex setups, it can get more complex. For most use cases, it's just stick the disk in, let it run, and it sets most of itself up. It's almost out of the box ready.

As far as I know, there is a standard licensing fee. It all depends on the options that you choose and what you need for each business. Every company that I've worked for has had a different pricing model and a different set of use cases. So pricing can range anywhere from $700-$800 per server core, all the way up $2,000-$3,000 per core.

It's important to do your homework and make sure that it's the right solution for you. It's the same with anything, there are other options out there and you need to figure out what fits your business use case at the time.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We primarily use the solution for everything Microsoft-related for the most part. I would say our visualization platform is about 99.5% of all our workload from a Microsoft point of view

The solution has high availability. 

The on the fly changing of the resources on a VM is very helpful. 

You've got the underlying capacity, that's greater than what the actual server has, and therefore you have the ability to do on the fly add capacity. I would say that's by far the thing we use the most. 

The VRS, to a lesser degree, is also quite useful to us. It does work in the environment. 

The solution is very good from a recoverability point of view. Everything can be stored much easier on a virtual server than on a physical box. 

The biggest pain point is probably the firmware management of the underlying hardware. It could be a lot better.

We use HP hardware. The biggest thing is the firmware upgrades and other items at the backend. You have to take down the system. It's an in-memory database and that can sometimes cause issues. If you have to do firmware upgrades, it's organizing downtime and all sorts of things, which normally in a VMS space isn't an issue. They have embedded some of this in 7.1, however, I haven't tested it or seen it in action as yet. 

That said, one of the problems is that when we're sort of behind big memory servers and the databases in them if you migrate it, it potentially breaks the system off. That's a big pain point that the firmware management of the underlying hardware should handle. VMware doesn't really cater to it, however, Nutanix to some degree does cater for. It gets pretty expensive, however.

We are always sort of one or two versions behind. We never test the latest version. I would say for me personally, the management aspect with large memory and in-memory databases for the motions and stuff like that is what it needs. That's one of the key things that I need really, from a support perspective. That's caused a number of issues already. 

You do get something called host profiles, which they've also improved slightly, however, I still think it's a bit clunky in terms of the way you can manage it. They can produce something to improve that aspect slightly.

I've been using the solution for more than 12 years. It's been over a decade at this point.

The solution is mostly stable.

We've had issues, however, if you think about it, it's quite complex if you look at stuff like a three-tier architecture with different stories, subsystems, and things like that. It's not really VMware if it's unstable perhaps. 

VMware itself isn't necessarily unstable, however, they might present as a VM-ware issue due to the fact of the storage latency or a driver issue. We did a firmware update and VMware itself I think is quite stable. Every now and again, there's an issue that creeps in, however, it's because we use different vendors for storage and a different vendor for computing. Overall, by and large, VMware is very stable.

From the way we set it up, it is relatively easy to scale as long as you've got the planning in place for where you're going to. We use something called blade technology, and that is relatively easy to scale.

There's a total of ten people that are actually on the solution at any given time.

I've used technical support a couple of times. I'm quite happy with it. We've got an agreement with HP. We offer our support via HP or via Data Centrix with HP. Durin the couple of times I've used it has been quite fast and thorough.

I've never used a different solution. I started using VMware or VMware server, about 20 years ago. vSphere ESX is probably the first visualization tool I've used. Subsequently, yes, we've tested one or two other options, for example, Hyper-V and what used to be called Acropolis. We've also used Oracle VM. However, for production and for everything else we've done, we pretty much speak to VMware. It's tried and tested and we're quite happy with the stability. Therefore, we stick with it.

If all your hardware requirements are met, it is a relatively simple implementation. However, you have to have the boxes ticked in terms of connectivity, capacity, and all that sort of stuff. The actual VMware part of it is not the biggest complication of everything now.

We handle maintenance ourselves. My team consists of five people, and of those, only one of them really works on the maintenance of the hardware and the software. It doesn't take a lot of personnel.

Initially, we did use a vendor for the initial setup. That's even before I started at this company. The company uses their local vendors to output the hardware deployment and with the software deployment, however, it's my understanding that it's been done in-house mostly.

It's not a cheap solution. The maintenance specifically is quite expensive. I also find that it's more expensive than the higher tier products. 

We've looked at buying into something like a vROPS or whatever they call it today. However, when you look at the cost and the benefits, although there is great benefit in the product, it's just never been a cost discussion that we've been able to entertain with management. 

Similar to vSAN, we looked at that a couple of times. It's a great product and it has proven itself. It's brilliant. It's stable. However, as soon as you look at any peripheral products, it becomes quite expensive, as it's licensed per socket or per blade or per server or whatever. 

We're just customers.

We are a little behind the latest version, which I believe is 7.1. We're using 6.5 for the most part. We still have a little bit of a legacy in 5.5, however, that is just hardware related. It doesn't support the newer version. We trying to rectify that as soon as possible.

I would recommend the solution to other companies.

Overall, I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

I use vSphere 7.0.1 for a few reasons. My primary use case is for my lab, as vSphere offers a great versatility to use VDI, containers, distributed Storage, and SDN on the same hardware. I also use vSphere for non-production tasks on Rasberry Pie 4, and it offers a great deal for working with Docker on cheap hardware with a single management interface, vSphere. 

My lab is composed of three white-box servers with vSAN, a 10 gig network, a local SAN, and all storage with SSD to deliver fast VM.

I also have vRealize operating to monitor all the VMware components. 

The new version of vSphere now integrates with containers and offers some new improvements inside vSAN, like file sharing. So, with VDI there is no need to add a VM to build a file server.

With containers, NSX is no longer mandatory and with the VMware operation manager, you can get an integrated monitored platform that can scale easily.

You will get both hands on the wheel because all of the products are fully interconnected.

vSphere 7 also adds better certificate management than before (less certificate) and vSAN is also improved in terms of the space management for reconstruction, so you will need less reserved space for this kind of operation. 

VMware Tanzu (container) is the most valuable addition because you get an efficient solution to manage the VM and container in a single pane of glass.

The integration of Tanzu inside the base version of vSphere, without the need to install NSX-T, is a great addition. Many IT people don't know NSX-T and NSX can cost a lot, so it could save a lot of money. However, you will not get the enhanced network function due to the lack of NSX-T. 

The improvements to vSAN with a file server service is also a very valuable feature for many companies because they will be saving with the management of an NFS storage or a file server.

The HR proxy is actually a little bit harder to install and setup than other vmware products. So, direct integration with a vSphere distributed switch would be great addition, but you can bypass this setup if you chose an NSX-T switch.

The distributed switch, which is the networking part of vSphere, should have more functions. It should be like VMware NSX-T so that network management with VMware Tanzu will be better, although it is already good.

vSphere 7.0.1 is not available on ARM computers for production loads. I hope that it will become available soon so that we can run our production web server container on it, for example.

I have been using VMware vSphere for a few months.

This product is very stable and reliable. Now certificate management is also improved, the new version of vsphere has only 2 or 3 certificates so it is easier to manage.

vSpshere 7, like the previous version, is easy to scale up and down. vSAN is the same, and Tanzu as well. vSan need less space for is own management and it is integrating some features like a virtual witness node that improve the scalability. Other new functions inside vsan like file sharing is also a great addition for vsan scalability.

I always get great support from VMware technical team.

I did use the previous version of vSphere and I upgraded for the Tanzu support and VSAN improvement.

The initial installation of vSphere 7 is straightforward. If you try the ARM version, it is a little more complex but just follow the step-by-step process and it will work.

For Tanzu, the HR proxy is more complex because you will need to do some network design. For vSAN, VMware gives you a great tool to set your solution up easily.

I'm a VM expert so my level of expertise is great. My solution is an in-house one.

The ROI is very fast due to virtualization, perhaps a couple of months.

vSphere 7.0.1 offers a lot more than the previous version. Container support is the last great addition for VMware and it is worth the money you spend on it.

I did not evaluate other container solutions. For storage, I also use FreeNAS.

We use it mainly to host virtual machines. We have the standard version, so we do VMotion. Sometimes it's easier when you need to do some maintenance on a whole server to be able to move the virtual machine from one host to another, so there is no downtime for the users. For virtual machine management, it's more fluent to dynamically set the resources on the servers, for example, if we need to increase the storage volume on a virtual machine or increase the RAM or adjust the CPU cores. It's easier to handle this on vSphere or any other hypervisor than on bare metal.

The VMotion feature is the solution's most valuable aspect. The fact that you can move the load without service interruption to the users is great.

The initial setup is easy.

The container management could be improved. It's far from perfect right now.

I've been using the solution for the last eight years. It's been a while.

The solution is very stable. It's quite mature. There used to be a more pink screen of this in version five, however, since then, since maybe version 5.5 or version six, it's very stable and it's very rare that the application hangs.

The solution should be scalable. However, I've never managed one of the node clusters, so it's hard for me to comment. It's easy from a small cluster to add nodes. How well they behave when you go beyond the 20, 30 nodes, I don't know.

It's been too long since I've contacted them, so I don't have any meaningful comment on this.

The initial setup is not complex at all. It's relatively easy. It's a fairly basic process for pretty much any network administrator.

In terms of deployment, the environment we have is not that big. We have less than 10 physical servers, so we tend to still do it manually instead of automating everything. This will change eventually, however, right now we set up everything manually. In regards to the time it takes to set up a vSphere cluster, you're looking at maybe two hours overall if you include all the hosts and the license configuration and the cluster configuration.

Everything is always too expensive. Of course, they could improve on that side and then probably they will have to. I know they revisited the licensing costs of the user charge. Now they charge per core instead of per socket. 

This will make them more expensive than they were and maybe it will make them also less price competitive with some other solution on the market. On a Windows environment, Hyper-V is pretty much free, however, you need to license all the cores anyway if you're going to install any Windows on the physical server. Therefore, when you use Windows servers and virtual machines, you have to pay an additional tax, let's say, for vSphere if you want to use vSphere for the hypervisor. That's something that you don't need to do with Microsoft Hyper-V. Of course, there are other hypervisors that are free - like KVM. On the cost, right now, they pretty much are the most expensive solution Ion the market.

We don't have a business relationship with the product. We're just customers.

If we speak about version five or plus five, I'm pretty knowledgeable about those as I was a network administrator back then. However, version six, version seven, I deal with these versions maybe two times per year, so I'm not very good on them.

Overall, I'd rate them at an eight out of ten, mostly due to the high pricing and container management.

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.

The company I work for is a global company and has many data inflection issues. Quality control decisions are not actually made at the local level. It is made at the headquarter level in Europe. 

We have our cloud site solution, our production environment, and our data recovery environment. We use VMware solutions integrated with HP solutions for hardware replication and storage-to-replication facilities. We use vSphere with ESXi 6.0, primarily for VM migration. We have an HP storage replication system in place for our first storage requirements with the VMs. Every other one is managed by VMware vMotion. vSphere and ESXi 6.0 are used to host our application servers, operational applications, and additional HR applications.

For extensions, we have vMotion to manage the virtual machines so that we can watch the network. For all of our backup requirements currently, we use the HP Data Protector. 

We have some downtime, but we can quickly recover from a disaster depending on the magnitude or the extent of the disaster using vSphere. The software will recover from any disaster that happens. We have also reduced our cost of production as well. vSphere has also improved our operational productivity. We have isolated servers that we couldn't integrate together, but now we can with vSphere, despite the fact that they are different models. Where they're different physical models, different memory models, you can integrate all of them. It makes our resources more available and our services more reliable to our users.

The features in vSphere data recovery are excellent. Sometimes I've deleted an entire server before and was able to recover the deleted VM. I didn't have to use the backup to restore the VM. I just used some command line tools and I was able to restore the deleted VM. I find that fascinating. 

For VM migration, I can migrate my virtual machines from one place to the other. vSphere has easy integration. I have some older server models. They are HP products. I have both old and new server models. I was able to integrate all these servers despite that fact that the date of manufacture is a five-year gap between the units.

I was using the same version of vSphere and I was able to integrate all the servers together. They are working well through it.

We want to see improvement from VMware with security. We want minimal downtime. We want automation. We want to deploy more efficiently.

If there is a disaster of any kind we want to respond quickly and recover from it. With vSphere, you get to provision server resources with ease. While we like vSphere, one problem we have is saturation. For example, if I want to deploy 10 virtual machines, I will have to install the operating system one by one. I will have to install the patches one by one, also to every kind of script. I will have to learn more, but automated deployment is not easy to implement. 

It makes you spend a lot of time on deployment. You can't have time for doing other things.

On login incidents and other events, I would prefer to have some notification in the logs.

These are the main areas of improvement that we would like to see.

The stability is good. Previously, our whole infrastructure couldn't support our operations. We are always having downtime, we are always having system instabilities. 

Since we implemented a new solution with vSphere, we have a greater capacity of infrastructure relative to our virtualization that almost doubled what we used to have before the implementation. 

It makes our services more reliable. We have also had more uptime of our operational applications.

VMware vSphere is a very scalable solution. The only thing is if you are to upgrade, i.e. from ESXi 6.0 to 6.7, you might not be able to use your older servers. I believe VMware will not support these after ESXi 7.0.

For newer servers, VMware is scalable. We can always use it at least. The only issue I may have is we may not be able to use our older servers with the newer versions of VMware ESXi. 

In-house users number about 110 to 115. We have customers that login into our servers. We have web applications that customers log into from outside.

Around 2000 to 5000 customers use our vSphere installation per day.

We have billing people that are working there with our customers. We have operation people that are in the field that are using various equipment that is connected via wifi to our systems. Then we use the VMware network to carry our own operations and activities. 

We have customer service people that attend to customer inquiries, to try to resolve customer issues, but are still logged into the same application. There are various roles from read-only customers that want to pick one information or the other about their product on our sites. They don't actually update anything except they want to transact business with us. 

We use vSphere to help the users as well as to manage users that need information regarding a particular product or report. Users generate various reports from our SaaS/PaaS applications.

The staff we currently have are about five in IT. We have the manager, we have infrastructure persons that consist of system and network. We also have a database specialist that manages our applications. Our database specialists also serve as the developers for the application support. We have user support teams. The various support people that we have dedicated for the maintenance of the VMware vSphere deployment is about five in total.

We should still be able to support our users, at least, for the next five years. After five years, we may now be thinking of upgrading the infrastructure. This solution is being used every day, i.e. 24/7/365 days a year.

We believe that there's been increased usage, but we just implemented it last year. From our plan, we know that at least for the next five years we may not upgrade.

We also have a maintenance contract with HP. Any event that we could not handle locally, we escalate to HP to be aware of and also to the application vendors. 

For technical support, we have people that maintain the solution. We have a network of experts and specialists. We have a cloud computing specialist as well. We have a database specialist that does VMware integration and so does our software application developer. 

Even with all these people, we still also have a customer service contract with VMware and another with HP, the hardware vendor. We don't actually have any contract with Cisco, but we use Cisco devices. The main vendors that we have a contract with are the application vendors Dell and HP. We have a maintenance contract with VMware in case there are any issues beyond local resources. VMware will escalate them quickly when they respond to our queries.

We didn't use anyone before we procured VMware. Before we procured the product, we didn't use any other advisor. We were using HP hardware and servers. 

For the implementation period prior to 2015, we first implemented on-premise attached solutions. Prior to that time, all our applications were stand-alone IDS servers.

Our initial setup was outsourced, possibly it wasn't that complicated. Because it was outsourced, the consultant made it easy for us. 

After the initial setup, the subsequent ones were relatively easy for us. We trained in the VMware settings for the hardware. Depending on the part of the initial setup, we had older models of servers than we had new models. For the initial setup for the older models, we employed a consultant that did it for us. We implemented the newer models ourselves last year. 

We consulted with HP to do the initial setup for us which was relatively cheap. We did the integration of the old and the new servers. Running the new server models with our VMware vSpehere license, we used our own local resources to do that work.

Implementation actually took longer than planned because of some issues that we did not envisage at the start. When we called HP for price assessment, they came and discovered that our power solutions were not good for their product. We had to spend extra buying new UPS units and installing them. That made the implementation take an extra month. 

For everything together, both the implementations, it was four or five months or so for us to install the new server models and the integration as well. We used the VMware ESXi as the VMware vSphere hypervisor, prepared the servers, and installed the hardware from an HP reseller. 'The installation, especially the setting up of partial integration, was actually done by HP Nigeria. Everything went great because we didn't have any issues. 

Some of the administrative tasks we were supposed to carry out by ourselves. HP gave us direction on how to go about it and it went pretty well.

This is really a niche area, but we have an enterprise license for our business. We have many users on our cloud applications, so we went with a costly enterprise license.

VMware does provide organizations with discounts. The customer service license fee we got discounts on from the supplier in order for us to get the best out of the license fees. That's our experience. We possibly paid less than our partner company. The partner is only local and not global like our firm.

Even if I decide to use a product, I cannot deploy it because my superiors have to determine the policy. Those superiors are not here locally. They are in Europe. 

We don't use Veeam here, though I've used it at some point. Right now we don't use it in our production environment. We currently use HP Data Protector. 

We evaluated other options like Salesforce and Microsoft Active Directory, which we only tested for production. The policies were on central management, so we only tested these solutions with our time. The applications we used were effective only when activated.

The advice I would give is that there should be proper planning for implementing VMware solutions. With us, the content management suppliers and the various vendors provided this. 

If VMware vSphere is the particular product you are choosing, consider where the sellers were located and if they have a knowledge of the product.

• Do the suppliers have the right models for your business?
• Do the suppliers have different VMware licenses available?
• Will you be able to enjoy the VMware license discount with the manufacturer?
• Does the integrator company have good partners in the supply chain?

If you just launch a VMware deployment without planning, it is not advised. Engage with all management and staff, then do proper planning before going into vSphere implementation.

No product is perfect but VMware vSphere is absolutely excellent. It has issues, i.e. the result of insufficient speeds, but no product is 100% perfect. That is why I would give it a nine out of ten rating.

vSphere 8.0 is the primary virtualization technology in use at our firm and supports the entire organization infrastructure.

Has kept our business running with very little downtime and our clusters balanced with DRS/HA.  We are able to patch our hosts during production hours with the ability to keep services running.  It has also given us the HA capabilities for our vCenter servers using the new built-in HA option for the appliance and never having to worry about downtime.

vCenter Appliance, DRS, HA, Update Manager and SRM help us keep our business running smoothly.  Having the vCenter Appliance has allowed us to save costs on Windows licenses and have a more stable platform for managing hosts.  Also having Update Manager now as well it makes the move to VCSA that much better.  SRM has allowed us to failover our Tier1 services in under 30 minutes for each whereas it would take over an hour the old fashioned way.  DRS and HA have kept our cluster stable and VMs running optimally.  With the built in Update Manager now in the vCenter Appliance it is easy to scan and remediate our Hosts even during Production hours as we can use HA/DRS with Maintenance Mode.

Get the HTML5 client to 100% parity to replace the Flash client.  When the next release comes out ensure all bugs/fixes are implemented as there was some pretty nasty ones on initial releases.

More than five years.

There were some initial bugs with PSOD and certain hardware vendors but patching and updates have resolved most.

There are no scalability issues other than purchasing additional licensing when adding hosts or scaling up/out.

Technical Support has been good but better communication at times could help improve it even more.

Positive

No other solution has been used.

It was simple and straightforward as we have upgraded as versions have come out.  8.0 will be our last upgrade as it will be a hardware refresh next.

In-house implementation as we have VMware certified users.

Has allowed us to run our HPE DL580 G7 servers still without issues so spend on hardware has been next to nothing.

VMware is costly versus other competitors but is still one of the market leaders and expanding now with partners like AWS.  Ensure you get the right licensing for the feature sets you want within the product and research what those are.  Setup can be easy if you have someone that has worked with VMware before or costly when hiring external help, but research in to implementers prior to hiring them is always the best method to get good ones.

No other options were evaluated as VMware has been the primary hypervisor since I have been with my company.

vSphere 8.0 has been a great release with the vCenter Appliance and will only get better in the next release with the HTML5 client becoming 100% in parity to the flash client.