VMware vSphere Reviews

I'm always sort of working with the servers, therefore, whenever there is a requirement for a different kind of server, I deal with it. For example, one of my departments asked me to provide one server where they can store some files. Instead of getting a full physical server, we created some virtual machines on vSphere and gave it to the department so they could store their data there. That is one where we are using the server. Sometimes we buy software from outside, and there are specific requirements on hardware - for example, X amount much of RAM is required, Y amount of CPU is required, etc., so we try to use the vSphere to create the virtual machines for that.

It's not a particular feature, really, however, I can say that the solution is just easy to maintain, and makes it easy to backup all those VMs. We can easily save our data and we can deploy VM machines very fast and create the delivery of the server in a pretty simple, dynamic way.

Our company has very limited requirements. We just create VMs and deploy VMs on the machine and give the users access. It's solving our problems perfectly. I'm not using any advanced features right now, however, it is sufficient. 

It's very simple and I really like it overall. 

I can't think of any features that are missing. I'm not really using any advanced options and don't have complex requirements.

The solution could be a bit more user-friendly.

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

The solution is very stable. We've never had any issues. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution can scale. If a company needs to expand it out, they can do so with relative ease.

There are four or five users that work directly with the solution, however, we have it deployed to many departments, so it's used quite a bit in the company. We have about 10-20 servers that are running on the machines.

Right now, we're happy with it, however, we may move to a different product that is even more scalable in the future, That's yet to be decided.

I've dealt with technical support in the past. Whenever we've logged a ticket, it's resolved very well. Everyone is quite knowledgeable, and whenever there is a requirement to follow a query, their tech team resolves those queries very efficiently and our problems were always resolved. We're pretty satisfied with their level of service.

We didn't previously use a different product.

We're considering moving to a different product in the future that could potentially scale even better than this. The reason we haven't moved yet is the fact that it's not easy for us to deploy and migrate all the machines from VMware to any other product.

We didn't actually handle the installation, and therefore I can't really talk about the process, as I wasn't involved directly.

The company that we bought had installed the vSphere for us and that server is still running from last year. We haven't touched it.

The solution was actually installed by the company that we ended up buying, and therefore we didn't directly handle any aspect of the implementation.

We have the licensing for the solution and the perpetual license which we have allows us to choose whether we want a support license separate or not. It's not an overly expensive solution. The pricing is average.

We're currently in the process of evaluating other options on the market to see if there are open-source options that could work for us or products that scale even better than vSphere.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with vSphere.

We aren't using the latest version of the solution. The near version is sufficient for us and it's solving our requirements.

Overall, I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

While I would recommend it due to the fact that it's solving my problems, I am evaluating other products that may be better. There may be an open-source option that could also work for us.  That said, this product is great in that we are using it hassle-free.

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.

We have co-located our servers in different data centers, and these co-located servers are in a cluster. For storage, we are using vSAN, and for compute, we are using vSphere 6.7. We will be upgrading to version 7 in due course.

It is very easy to use and very stable.

The cost can be better.

I have been using this solution for almost eight to nine years.

It is very stable.

It is scalable. You can use a cluster with 216 nodes. I believe it can be scaled much more.

We use vSphere to create virtual machines and give them to our customers. Most of the applications are on it, so we have around 8,000 to 10,000 users on five different clusters. In terms of our plans to use this product in the future, we are currently thinking about whether to continue using this solution or not.

Their support could definitely be better. They can put more experienced and more intelligent people on support. I would rate them a seven out of ten.

I won't say it is straightforward, but it is also not complex. If the hardware and net securities are there and you have the hardware configuration, then the installation takes 24 to 48 hours.

We have a team of infrastructure users who are experts in VMware. They do the installation. Two persons can do the deployment.

It is expensive. 

I would definitely recommend this solution to others. It is a very good product. It is very stable, so your infrastructure uptime can be better. The manual cost of your infrastructure can be less if you use vSphere.

I would rate VMware vSphere an eight out of ten.

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.

Virtualization, VDI and application publishing are the most valuable features of VMware vSphere.

The solution’s pricing is too high and could be improved.

I have been working with VMware vSphere for more than five years.

VMware vSphere is a very stable solution.

VMware vSphere is a scalable solution.

The solution's technical support team is good because if we open a priority ticket, they call within 30 minutes.

Positive

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

VMware vSphere can be installed in just two days for a normal project. However, it would take at least three months to implement everything, depending on the scope of the customer's requirements.

The solution’s licensing terms keep changing, which is too complex for our customers. If a user purchases a new license, it cannot be mixed with the existing perpetual license.

Overall, I rate VMware vSphere an eight out of ten.

We use VMware vSphere in order to get access to the data center worldwide.

The performance of the solution could be better and there could be an extra level of security.

I have been using VMware vSphere for approximately three years.

The stability could be improved because there can be some connectivity issues. There are times the networks disconnect and then reconnect, this could improve.

The scalability is good.

Mostly everyone in our company is using this solution including the technical team and managers, approximately 400 people.

We have an internal team that is providing us with technical support.

Positive

The installation is not difficult it is self-explanatory.

We did the implementation ourselves.

There are some maintenance tasks needed, such as updating and upgrading.

There is an annual subscription to use this solution.

I would recommend this solution to others. It is one of the best tools.

I rate VMware vSphere a nine out of ten.

We primarily use VMware vSphere for virtualization.

We use it mostly on-premise, but for the last year on cloud.

It has facilitated the adoption of DevOps practices and technology.

The feature that I find very valuable is the ability to move images of virtual machines from different workspaces to other workspaces between different installations.

An area for improvement is that when comparing VMware to Nutanix, Nutanix has higher availability, like clustering for virtual machines. That is a good idea and VMware could profit from something like that for higher availability installations.

I have been using VMware vSphere for the last eight to 10 years using different scopes for different projects.

It is pretty stable.

I haven't had a chance to do any scalability exercises, just some tests, but not on real-time or on real production. Probably later I will get a chance to test scalability.

There are about 10 or 15 people using it directly in the environments and between 500 and 600 people that are enabled with the VMware.

We require just another engineer and myself for the deployment of VMware.

We probably will not increase the licensing for the VMware, but we will increase the load on the installation that is being handled by VMware.

I haven't had a chance yet to use technical support, but from past experience I would say that it's very good. For this project we have not had a chance to use direct technical support, but for previous projects it has been good. So hopefully it stays like that.

The initial setup is relatively simple. Between one and 10, I would give it a six.

For the product that I'm working on right now it took about three weeks because it had several different virtual machines and inside the virtual machines there were a lot of containers. So there were certain complexities that extended the complexity of the VMware installation itself. But for just the VMware only it took about a week and a half or something like that.

We did not use consultants or resellers for deployment, just the documentation.

Our license is on a yearly basis.

My advice to anyone considering using VMware vSphere is you have to find out the requirements. You have to do a very good job finding the requirements so that the scoping and provisioning of the resources are okay. That way you don't have  later have to be constantly changing the configuration. It is good to spend some time doing requirements and finding out the loads, etc... that you are going to have to handle.

Generally, VMware vSphere is not perfect, but it's okay. On a scale of one to ten, I will give it an eight.

You get used to the interface. The pricing is getting cheaper, but it depends. Anyway, it is a good product.

VMware vSphere allows you to run multiple virtual machines. For example, I can run up to 10 computers, virtual servers on one physical server. 

We have at least 10 people using this solution in our organization.

The most valuable feature of VMware vSphere is the ability to work in big system infrastructure. For example, you can move one bridge, one machine to another, or one virtual machine from one server to another. This is beneficial when you want to put a server under maintenance.

Also, the security features and implementation are very easy.

There is nothing from my perspective that the product needs to improve. It works for all my needs.

I recommend that VMware vSphere continue to release more features.

I have been using VMware vSphere for 7 years.

This solution is stable.

VMware vSphere is scalable.

Previously, I had used Hyper-v. VMware is a much better solution.

The initial setup of the solution is straightforward.

We use third party support for this product.

I would rate VMware vSphere a 10 out of 10.