VMware vSphere Reviews

The primary use case for vSphere is managing and controlling all of our virtual environments from the servers, and the storage resources, to all of the guest virtual machines.

As far as mission-critical apps go, the most important that I see is our computer-aided dispatch software which runs all of the police, fire, and ambulance services for the city. That that is the most important thing that we do, to simply protect lives and protect property.

Other kinds of very critical workloads that we have to have include an enterprise-resource-planning system that most everything goes through. The city also has a lot of geographical information about everything that is in the city. The citizens use that data constantly.

We do not use VMware Cloud on AWS.

As far as performance on vSphere goes, the performance is great. We've been running everything virtualized from VMware forever, so I can't really say that there has been a boost in performance, but I can tell, from version to version - and now out on version 6.7 - that everything is continuing to be better, faster, and stronger in everything that it does.

vSphere has improved our organization and what we do because it easily enables all of us as IT professionals to provision and manage the vast quantity of servers and other resources that we have. For the about 400 virtual servers that we run, it takes less time to manage and take care of those than it does for the 25 physicals that we have, just because it's so easy to simply take care of it all in one common solution, in one pane of glass.

One of the most valuable features that vSphere has is its HA and DRS protection, where it can simply make sure that all the machines are always where they need to be and how they need to be taken care of. We have a lot of servers and services for emergency services, for police, fire, and the like. We have the ability to use DRS as Anti-Affinity Rules to make sure that those redundant server pairs always stay away from each other. But then, if anything would happen to one of them, we have HA to be able to come up and bring it right up and going again. A lot of companies will say, "Oh no, we lose so much money per hour when something goes," but in our particular use case, if our emergency services would go down, people could actually die. That's a little bit more important.

vSphere does offer quite a bit of security stuff built-in. It is nice to know that we can have the virtual machines encrypted, so that if somebody were to get a hold of any of those files, we don't have to worry about them actually being used. Since we do have so many different departments and areas with a lot of people that need access into the solution, we can use the role-based access controls to really restrict and control who can do what, so everybody can do what they need to do, but they can't do anything else past that.

I do find vSphere simple and easy to manage. Most of the common tasks that you would do are very quickly available. One particular case that we go in all the time for is provisioning new servers. If you take that to the analogy of the physical world, that was something that, by the time you got it and you plugged it in and you stacked it, you did everything, you got the firmware up and going, you got the OS loaded and patched, you were easily in it for a day to two days, trying to prep up something that way. Just yesterday, I was sitting in a session (here at VMworld 2018) and I got a request for a brand new SQL Server for somebody and it was literally: right-click from template, new machine, here's its name, here's its IP address. Oh, by the way, tag it out as an SQL machine, and in 10 minutes the machine is up and running and is already installing SQL on its own, automatically. So it's pretty cool stuff.

I see room for improvement in the vSphere product just a little bit. I know they are doing all that transition from the traditional fat client to the new HTML5 interface. I've watched that grow from being technical previews to where it's at today, and it's probably 90 percent there. But I think that VMware could continue to put improvements into that UI, so that all the tasks can be performed as quickly as they used to be done in the fat client. 

Just yesterday, I met with the lead solutions architect for vSphere, and one of the things that I really kind of sat him down on was, "What's the deal between these Custom Attributes and these Tags? What are you trying to do with that?" He said, "So here's the deal. I know that they're halfway done and we have a vision of where they're all going, but we'll get it there." That that would be a great ability, to keep all that metadata about your virtual machines inside the solution and staying with the machines.

Stability is great. We keep all of our stuff up to patch and keep up on drivers. I actually couldn't tell you the last time I've had one of them crash on me. It's been a while.

For our environment, the scalability has been great. I've been with the city for about three-and-a-half years. We had about 100 VMs at that time, and now our account is well over 500 and the solution has simply grown to fit that need.

I am going to be honest that their level-one support is actually not that helpful. It's been something that I talked about with some of the people in the Inner Circle discussions and they're changing some of those processes around. But I do find that once you get up to the level-two and level-three techs, that they are very competent and very capable engineers who have been able to resolve any problems that we've had.

I was involved with the initial vSphere setup. For the most part, the setup is fairly straightforward. The last time, when we set up the vSphere 6 environment, we went into fully redundant HA platform, services controllers, so I think we chose to make the solution a little bit more complicated than it needed to be. But with 6.5 and 6.7 there are some enhancements and they want all that stuff embedded and the process is a lot simpler and it's a lot easier to get everything going.

For return on investment, I don't know that I can give you any real hard and fast numbers on things, but I can tell you, from a time perspective, what vSphere has been able to do for us. When I started out, provisioning servers was a very long and drawn out process. Now, we're to a point where literally, from the moment I decide I want a server to the time that Windows is up and running is less than ten minutes, and that's fantastic to me too. 

It saves me a lot of time because I'm now provisioning several servers a week and that's just par for the course. All that time that you do that repetitive, tedious type work, is time that you're not being able to deliver meaningful, value-added work for the company.

We did take a look at Microsoft's Hyper-V platform. The city's always had a philosophy of, "Just because we've always used something doesn't mean that that's always going to be the right way to continue to go forward." So we did take a look at the Hyper-V Server 2016 type stuff. But honestly, in my opinion, it's not there yet. VMware was still the superior choice for the hypervisor. 

As an overall solution, I'd probably give it a nine out of ten. It is very rock solid in everything that it does and it simply works with everything, and it does a pretty darn good job doing it.

Our use case is virtualization of hardware infrastructure, for return on investment cases. We have done pretty well with it. I'm really happy with it.

The mission-critical apps we run on them include SQL; there is a lot of file sharing; there are a lot of websites and web servers running on them. There's some big data stuff for big science. We have to be able to digest lots of data and then pull analytics on it at a high-level, and be able to show big data in useful ways.

With the current compliance options that I have to go through, it's very nice to have a lot of the encryption built in. It checks a lot of boxes for the federal level so I don't have to either bolt something on or have something on top of it. Having it native and integrated into the system makes things much easier.

Also, being able to manage a lot of servers in one pane of glass makes things a lot simpler. Basically, a lot of things just happen in one area. You can roll things over, move things around more dynamically, without having to hit multiple systems. Being able to manage it, in its entirety, is easier and better for us.

• VHA
• DRS
• VMotion
• Redundancy, failover, any DR situation
• Reducing the overall physical footprint for electrical needs, heating, cooling
• Money-saving, in general

In terms of management, it's getting better. There were recent changes with the infrastructure and the architecture, going from a physical vSphere vCenter client to the web interface. That has slowed things down a little bit, to be honest. It's getting better. With the 5.7 release they've optimized it, the menus are a little snappier, and it isn't as cumbersome to manage through as it was on the previous website or vSphere Web Client instance.

Also, reading some of the sensors in the hardware itself, that's where VMware does a really great job in the digital infrastructure and being able to scale things and knowing what's going on in vSphere. But not having to buy something from a third-party to scan the actual hardware components, like the hard drives and the port containers and fan speeds; not having to bolt something on and go through another vendor, would be helpful.

Stability has always been really well done with VMware. I have always been very happy with the stability of the system. You can set it up, you can check your optimizations there. But as far as weird issues with being able to convert things from physical to virtual, I've really had no big problems in switching that over. It's been really seamless to the end-user as well, just doing standardized conversions. It's been very stable and easy to manage.

I haven't had any loss of data in quite some time. Data is the key to everything. Downtime and loss of data are almost unacceptable in my current position.

I can always go horizontal, vertical is a little problematic sometimes. Horizontally, being able to add storage on the fly - even hot ad-hoc remove, if we do have some higher workloads or the like - we can always scale that without re-booting, with the newer operating systems. So the scalability portion is always on key.

Technical support is pretty good. I've had to use them a couple times for smaller issues. They've always been very helpful and we've always come to a solution.

The backup solution we were using at the time was Dell's version of IBM's Tape Library with Symantec Backup Exec. We were doing tape backups at the file level, not really any virtual snaps, so incrementals every day, fulls on the weekends.

As data gets bigger it's harder and harder to back up and that's where virtualization comes in, because you can start doing analysis on data changes and deltas a little bit better. Tracking and things that are tied into VMware assist digital backup solutions to be faster, more resilient, and have less downtime in a restore situation.

In my previous job, I was a Senior Systems Administrator for a credit union. We were running VMware 3.0, 12 years ago, and having that experience - and being bleeding edge at that time - helped me really be a catalyst in getting over to virtualization. That knowledge that I had in the past has always helped me, because I've seen VMware grow and do the things that it has done. Having that knowledge was helpful in setting it up from fresh, again: making the redundancies, knowing some of the pitfalls you have when first setting it up, and seeing a lot of the capital that you can lose if you don't understand what you're doing at that time.

I set it up myself. I can get technical support, but I can't have on-prem or anyone else.

Performance is somewhat relative, but an overall return on investment comes from not having multiple physical servers and from helping to aggregate a lot of the processors and RAM, and being able to use them more efficiently. We're not really worried about speed but about more efficiency.

I've been with them for so long, I never looked to much else. I've always been happy with vSphere and seeing what they've done for VMware itself. Intel products weren't really there, and I still don't feel they're there.

I've really enjoyed the Dell partnership because I do Dell on the back-end. The hand-holding between Dell and VMware works relatively well, with their hardware control lists and being sure they stay compatible for long periods of time, without having to spend money on new hardware. You can stay in your swim lane. That partnership is really a key to success.

My advice is "do it".

I rate vSphere at nine out of 10 because the HTML version of things needs to get a little bit better. The vSphere side of things gets a little difficult to manage; right-click, in some browsers, doesn't work as well as it used to. I'm seeing a little bit of general latency that we didn't used to get with the thick client. It's getting there.

Version 6.71 brought some of those performance metrics back, but it's just hard to get from one end to the other. With the ever-changing federal requirements, we need to really strip down and minimize what can be done in the browsers. It is getting more and more difficult, Java being the key thing. Going to HTML 5, that's a great thing because Java is going to be pay-to-play next year. And you don't have the vulnerabilities with HTML 5. It works symbiotically. We're seeing that progress. There are some growing pains, but it's getting there.

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.

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.

We use VMware vSphere for many things in our business, such as ERP software, file sharing, and back office. Additionally, we use it for many types of servers, such as database and file servers.

We need to improve availability and disaster recovery in VMware vSphere.

I have been using VMware vSphere for approximately seven years.

VMware vSphere is stable.

I have found VMware vSphere to be scalable.

We have approximately 25 users in my company using this solution. All the employees are using the solution.

The technical support is good and they are available over the internet.

The initial setup of VMware vSphere was simple. The full deployment took approximately two weeks.

We had a consultant that did the deployment of VMware vSphere.

We have two engineers for the support of the solution.

VMware vSphere is a good solution, but we are looking for ACI opportunities.

My advice to others is when you are looking for a solution, look for a vendor in the county you live in.

I rate VMware vSphere a nine out of ten.

We're using it to run all kinds of workloads.

Its stability and manageability are valuable.

There should be more stability in the updates. They had an issue with the last release.

Their support should also be improved.

I have been using this solution for 15 years.

It's absolutely scalable. We have 130 users who are using this solution. All of the company is using it.

I am not satisfied with their performance or speed for anything below P1 or production-down status. Anything below that is worse than we could expect.

Its installation is straightforward. That's not a problem.

The deployment duration varies. For a specific installation, it could take 15 minutes to set up the whole thing, and it could also take three weeks. It depends on how we're scoping it.

I could do it myself.

Its licensing is typically yearly. From a value standpoint, it's worth it.

I would absolutely recommend this solution. I would rate it a nine out of 10.