VMware vSphere Reviews

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 entire production and development environments are running on VMware vSphere using the 6.0 and 6.5 versions with twelve-node clustered configurations. Two data centers were deployed to separate the production side virtual machines from those of test and development.

The deployment of Enterprise VMware vSphere architecture helps us provide a robust and high availability infrastructure because of the combined features of VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter such as HA, DRS and Fault Tolerance. This base metal virtualization is highly compatible with almost all of the IT hardware.

The vMotion in particular I think is the most valuable because this feature provides migrations of virtual machines in case you want to run do maintenance. This his feature comes hand-in-hand with other features of VMware like the DRS, which automatically load-balances the whole VMware farm based on the usage and recommendation.

Improve the patch and updates online and remove mandatory reboot, or move the virtual machine onto a physical host that needs patching/maintenance.

I would like to see VMware vSphere provide a centralized patch service on the VMware level, regardless of your operating systems.

I have been using this solution for eleven years.

In my long experience, I have a single incident where our whole VMware farm went down. I can say it is very stable as long as the hardware is healthy.

The scalability is great. This solution is highly scalable and compatible with almost all IT hardware on the market.

The support is very responsive and highly knowledgeable.

Prior to this solution, we used Oracle Virtual Machine and Xen Virtualizations.

I  used the profiling feature.

I set up the system myself.

The license of VMware is a one-time payment and you can continue to enroll in support for troubleshooting and also administer the licenses.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

We have three different types of environments: internal cloud, managed hosting, and VDA. We use VMware vSphere as the main product to accomplish this.

VMware is now the main backbone in our company.

We are not using VMware cloud on AWS. We are in PoC mode. We may use it in another six months to a year.

vSphere helps our organization. Initially, we don't have an internal Cloud. We have an internal cloud, which is four years old now. We have 8000 to 9000 VMs standing in our internal cloud. We also implemented VDA using a VMware vSphere. So, it has been an absolutely pleasure having vSphere.

We provide a service to our internal customers for our development center. We have internal cloud developers. If they require 1000 VMs or 500 VMs, and in the background, we're using a vSphere VMware product. 

The most valuable feature is performance, especially the 6.7 version. 

We were looking for content library options for templates and were happy that VMware introduced it in 6.7 version. 

I like the speed and the quickness of the boot in the newest version of vSphere.

The mission-critical applications in our company, like SAP, Siebel, and a lot of financially related applications are running. Our developer uses most of animation, etc., and we are using the vSphere for that.

We have seen a performance boost compared to the previous versions, like a 5.1, five years ago. It has gradually increased. Previously, we hadn't migrated any database, like SQL or Oracle, into VMware. However, we are planning to now. We are moving forward because a lot of new features are now available on 6.7. 

We are doing a PoC, which we are happy about now. We may move over the database into our VMware environment.

It is simple to manage. However, some of our operation teams, they are used to the desktop line, but VMware removed it in the previous version. Initially, we had an issue on the flash, but now we are happy. With VMware moving to HTML, it's really fast. We did a bit of version testing, and it's really fast and easy to use now.

I have seen some sessions for version 6.7 covering its improvements, which I was looking for, mainly the content library. Our requirement is to move our templates from one location to another location. Previously, this was not available. We are happy this was introduced. 

Another thing is the flash. However, in 6.7, they completely removed it and they are bringing in the HTML. Let's see, as I haven't tried the 6.7 update yet. I hope it will satisfy everything from our point of view.

The stability is good. We have different clusters based on the load of the application and requirements. We can slice the cluster.  

Since we have an internal cloud, suddenly people may require 1000 or 2000 VMS in something. We have options to analyze and make sure we have enough scalability. 

We have some issues but so far it has been good.

We use tech support, which is okay. We used to have a hard time, but at this time, we are happy.

Previously, for monitoring, we use other products. Slowly, we are moving to vRealize now. It depends on our requirements and budget. 

When 5.5 went to 6, we found it a bit difficult because they changed the model. 

Now, we are okay. We have gotten used to it, because it is a new platform. Initially, it was difficult, but now we are okay.

Five years ago, we planned to move from a physical to virtualization environment. We evaluated a lot of other hypervisors, did some PoCs, etc. We decided on VMware. For the past six to seven years, it's been a big journey. 

I would rate vSphere as a nine out of 10.

I will recommend the solution, but there are some steps to take first. There are some VMware videos to view and some KB articles to read, which are available, regarding compatibility. I would recommend them to go through everything. Go through the KB articles, then I will recommend them to implement that one.

An important criteria for choosing a vendor is evaluating how a company behaves. We will review their past history, the current market, and the value of that product. Then, we will see whether that product can used for our requirement. Based on that, we choose our vendors.

We haven't started using the VM encryption. We are in the very initial stage, doing a PoC for it and also the UEFI Secure Boot. These are options that we are trying. Let's see how they will work, and we're looking forward to their results.

I use it as systems administrative management tool. I use VMware vSphere, vCenter, and vSphere ESXi.

We do not use VMWare cloud on AWS.

vSphere has improved our organization by far, and it's hard to even quantify. The ability to to virtualize systems and run those virtual workloads with a fewer number of servers is tremendous. We are still in the process of converting physical to virtual, but we are getting there.

The mission critical apps that we use for our system are for monitoring different meters throughout households in the greater area in which we operate.

The most valuable feature is the single pane of glass management. There are a number of things which vSphere offers in terms of consolidating infrastructure onto single pieces of hardware. This is instead of having multiple systems running on the OSs that we need. I like the capability of logging into one system, then being able to shift over to another system within that single pane of glass.

vSphere is simple to manage. Some of the best parts of managing it is vCenter. I use that to provide entry points for different administrators to login from different environments to manage either physical or virtual servers and resources on the network in our storage site.

vSphere is going in a good direction already with its improvement. The one area where I would love to see an improvement is the HTML5 client. It's great, but it could get better. I know it can.

It has been fairly stable in 6.7. I have not had any major issues. 

I've come up on older versions from 3.5 until 6.7. This version has been the best experience so far.

I can build out hundreds of hosts, but my environment's not that big. It is not as big as most of the larger companies out there, so I've not hit a bottleneck yet in terms of scalability.

Every now and then, I have to use vSphere technical support. My experience with them has been a positive one overall. Usually, if I don't get an answer from one tech support engineer, I can get another answer from another engineer who will help me out with my particular issue.

I wouldn't say that I invested in a new solution to get to where I'm right now. I just really have been upgrading upon what's already there. I'm pretty much in bed with VM. I'm staying with VM, and that's where I want to be. I don't want to go anywhere else. VMware is top of the line.

I've done setups of different versions of vSphere. The latest one was more complex than 6.5, which had an external platform services controller. Now with 6.7, you have an embedded platform services controller, much like 6.5, but you also get the enhanced link mode capability. That was a big shift for me. 

ROI is tough to quantify once you are already in bed with VMware. However, I did a comparison between physical server to virtual. There was a point in time where we would size out a virtual server to be a massive size, then we'd buy a physical server of the equivalence. We saved somewhere around 20 percent going virtual, as opposed to the physical equivalent.

I have seen a performance boost in a sense that we have provided better utilization of system resources within vSphere. However, I don't have an actual percentage to provide.

Before I started with VMware, I did not have any other vendors on my shortlist.

I would rate it at a nine, because I don't believe any type of technology is a ten. There is always room for improvement. However, this is a solid nine.

Spend time researching, investing, and testing for months. Spend a few months testing the product before implementing it to production.

I don't have too much experience with the encryption or secure features of the new vSphere version.

The primary use case is spinning up lab VMs. We can spin up several hundred VMs for students to work with, which could be Windows-based or Linux-based. It's about creating these VMs, then destroying them as soon as they are done. So, there is a lot of creation and destruction. We also spin up VM environments as well. On the vSphere 6.7 product, the optimization is great. The older versions, 6.0 and 6.5 were sluggish. When your spinning and destroying things, it's a big deal to have higher performance.

We don't do a lot with the encryption, but we do have the ability to encrypt something if we send it offsite. We have multiple locations, so we can encrypt our VMs, if necessary. However, we don't have a big need for it, but it's nice that it's there.

Our mission critical is our classroom. If we have college students who can't work, they paid to be there, and are paying us for the environment. Therefore, if we're down for a day, that's a real problem. Given that people have a choice of where they can go for education, we have to be always available. Otherwise, they will go next door. For us, it's about a student's success and you can only do that if you're up and running.

1. A big feature for us was Quick Boot. You don't have to wait for the host to do a recheck on memory. You do an upgrade, and it's not a 10-minute reboot cycle. You can bring your host online and offline. 
2. Database optimization. They did a lot in enhancing the performance. They took down the memory utilization and increased what it brought in. You see more responsiveness, especially now with having the HTML5 client. It feels like a much snappier product.

The biggest feature that everybody wanted was the HTML5 client. This has made everything native where you're able to surf through it. Going into our web page, you're no longer refreshing it. It feels more like an enterprise product now. With Adobe Flash, it didn't feel that way.

The biggest thing to improve is to have more self-service in the portals. I would like to receive more help through the web interface. 

I would like to see continual improvements of the client. It doesn't need to go much larger for support on the number of VMs or its size, because there are pretty high limits already. However, it needs a bit more in the management and the reporting aspect. We have to get a third-party for that. It would be great if it was a bit more integrated.

Stability has been good since the 6.0 days. The biggest issue with stability is the SSO. That is still an issue as far as integrating it with Active Directory, and any large scale of it. That is still a work in progress. However, the core stability aspect of it has been there and hasn't changed. This has just gotten better.

I have no issues with scalability. As large as we have wanted to go with as many VMs, we have never had an issue pushing its limits. 

The majority of the issues are truly integrating it into the Active Directory structures. This doesn't seem to be there yet.

VMware tech support has always been good to us. Our biggest challenge is getting them the logs, but once they have them, the logs are so detailed that any possible issue usually is resolved within a few hours. So, it has always been a positive experience.

Given that we spin up and down hundreds of VMs, we physically couldn't do that with physical hardware. It would just be financially impossible. Having a virtualized infrastructure and being able to bring up Windows, Linux, and VMware within a virtualized environment brings more technology into the classroom. Without it, we couldn't do what we do.

There wasn't a short list. It was the only solution. It's the only thing that made financial sense as far as being able to do what we needed it to do. Nobody out there had it.

I would rate it as a nine out of ten.

Go big with your hardware. You have to be willing to invest in the hardware platform. Storage is key. Make sure you have enough performance with it. When you're looking at the actual overall product, make sure you understand what third party offerings you need to put in. It could be something from VMware or one of the partners, but it's going to be more that just the VMware Suite. There will be one or two things you need to add to it. Specifically, monitoring or reporting will be the big draws.

I don't have a percentage for the performance boost of the apps. However, there is noticeably different speed of how the database is working and how you move through the client. Everything is a bit more responsive. Part of that was getting rid of the flash client as well. We're seeing an overall general performance increase in everything we do, whether it's the monitoring aspect or deploying.

My primary use case for vSphere 6.7 is that it's used strategically as a management plain for all 2,100 ESXi hosts across our environment.

In terms of mission-critical apps, I couldn't tell you, because I operate the public cloud and we don't really care what our customers use it for.

We do not use VMware Cloud on AWS yet but it is something we are exploring.

In regards to a performance boost, I don't know at the application level, but I can tell you, purely at the vCenter level, that we have seen improvements in our ability to migrate from Windows to the appliance, now that there is full feature-parity across the stack. We're seeing reduced resource usage from the appliance, it's way more efficient in 6.7. Operations are able to complete faster, so we're happy.

It has streamlined things for us. We've been able to standardize on the newer 6.7. It's definitely given us a path forward, where we might be able to look at expanding into the public cloud, augmenting our on-prem solution now that we have some sort of feature parity.

Most valuable features of vSphere 6.7, for us, at the management level would be:

• VCHA is a nice redundancy feature that they added in 6.7.
• I like the quality of life improvements with the VMFS-6 for using auto UNMAP on the data stores.
• We really appreciate the improvements to the Clarity UI where we can manage Update Manager (VUM) and our vSAN stack within the modern interface.

The solution is also very simple and efficient to manage. Features that have made it simple and easy to manage include the newer VAMI for the V-center appliance, it's very easy to see what version we are at, and very easy to upgrade to the next version. The fact that we can now use VCHA at the appliance level just decreases our chance of having an outage, because so many of our customers rely on the API interface for V-center. 

There are a few things I wanted to see in the next version of vSphere 6.7 which, it turns out, were announced today (at VMworld 2018) so I haven't had time to explore them. But one of the things that was most important to me was the ability to automate or improve deployment of VCHA in an advanced configuration, where it's not hosting itself. I'm looking forward to playing with the new release and seeing where it's at.

The solution has been very stable for us. Since we rolled the 6.7 we have seen consistent uptime.

Being that it's reduced our resource footprint, I think its very scalable.

We have had to open up support cases for vSphere 6.7. We have gotten generally good feedback, but it's still fairly new for them, like it is for us. A lot of things work differently in production then they do in the lab or in your QA environments, and they're willing to help however they can to stabilize the product.

As we're a partner, we do get generally good help pretty early on.

I was not using any other solution before vSphere.

I was involved from all the early stages of planning to move to vSphere 6.7.

We were already considering moving to 6.5 and, for us, there were so many added benefits of going to 6.7, and being that it's not a real major bump - it's more like 6.5 "Update 3" with a lot of quality of life improvements - it made it very easy for us to make that decision.

When I'm working with a vendor, some of the most important criteria are 

• their release cadence
• how much support they're giving to the product
• what kind of R&D they're investing in
• generally, anecdotally, the response we're getting when we're asking for support.

Moving to 6.7, like I said, has standardized a lot of our environment for us so we have definitely seen a reduction in the amount of time we are spending trying to troubleshoot things. It's very consistent. Everything has performed exactly how we expected it to.

We don't use any of the built-in security features but I do appreciate that vSphere 6.7 is inherently more secure in that it's limited, by default, to using TLS 1.2.

I would rate the solution to be a nine (out of ten) but I think they're steadily creeping towards a ten with some of the post-GA releases I've seen.

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.

vSphere allows us to virtualize our campus servers and our student environment. We run vCenter within vSphere, so we have about 300 or 400 student desktop workstations that we run at any given time. We are able to customize our students' experience very quickly, very easily, and are able to make it mobile from different computer labs on campus.

We're also exploring opening it up so students would be able to remote into their VDI workstations from offsite. We're also looking into wrapping everything up with Workspace ONE, so we can virtualize more applications and let them have more of an MDM experience as well.

We're not really virtualizing the apps themselves, yet. We're trying to move towards that. Our mission-critical things rely on our servers that we have virtualized. We have web servers, security servers, database servers that we have virtualized and that makes it easier for us to back up and maintain them. Really, vSphere plays a part in our management.

We have seen a performance boost. As we keep moving up to different versions it gets more seamless, it gets easier to maintain, to do updates to our virtual environment and to the physical end. We're also moving towards virtual storage. Moving to flash arrays and virtual storage is even speeding up our students' experience when using the virtual desktops. I would estimate a 25 percent boost.

Another benefit we've seen is with our IT technicians. It used to be this IT was assigned to a specific area, and that was what they worked on. They had 300 or 400 machines that they would have to run around to, to maintain them; re-image them every semester. Now, with the virtual environment, they are able to keep more up-to-date on their applications, on their Windows updates, and do it in the background. They are able to refresh entire labs within less than an hour, rather than sitting there all day or all week refreshing all of the labs.

We have a better, faster management. We have more productivity from our IT staff and more productivity from our students, as well.

Ease of support is one of the main features that we have with it. We're able to take Snapshots before doing updates to make it easy to roll back if something does happen to go wrong.

The visibility that we have of our VMs is also important. What's being applied? Who has management of them? Laying it out in a virtual environment allows us to customize for our students. We're able to respond to the students' needs much more quickly than we could in a physical environment.

I found it a little bit daunting at first when I was coming into it raw, but now the management of it is very simple.

I would like to see a little bit more visibility regarding errors. When an error does occur, there are times where it says "Unknown error" or something to that effect, and it doesn't necessarily give you a lot of metrics. If you go online and you give a description of it, normally the VMware forums can help you find out what it is, but I'd like to see a little bit more visibility from the software itself regarding what's going on: "This went wrong, this is why."

The downtime that we have experienced has not been that much, and normally it's the result of a mistake on our part, not necessarily the software. We've misconfigured something or we haven't thought about a configuration setting that we should have put in place or we didn't do our research. It's not normally the software that has a problem. When we do have a software glitch, it is normally a reboot and it's back up and running, so we have not had much downtime.

So far, we've really enjoyed the scalability of it. The main thing that we have to accommodate for is licensing, making sure that we have enough license to cover our expansion.

Otherwise, we just throw a few more hard drives into our server array and make sure that we have enough storage.

On those occasions where we do run into a problem, we have had great help from VMware's customer support. Recently I had problems getting new certificates for our servers to be able to bring them into our vSphere and Horizon environment. VMware support was able to help me diagnose what was going wrong with those, come up with a plan for the future to be able to more accurately get the certificates I needed, and integrate them into the environment.

I would rate the technical support a solid eight out of 10, maybe even nine. They are responsive, always quick to answer questions, and knowledgeable.

I don't think we were using anything before vSphere. I think we led off with it. My partner was thinking for a time about Microsoft, but he decided that Hyper-V wasn't for us and we went with VMware, and we haven't regretted it a day since.

Pricing can be an issue in terms of scalability, depending on how quickly you want to expand. If you budget every year, put some aside that you know you need to get another host and you plan for it, then it shouldn't be that hard. If you're going to try to all of a sudden say, "I want to add six hosts to my environment," then it's going to a little bit pricey and you're not going to want to spend the budget on it.

Plan your environment well, determine what your needs are, and then try to bump that up by 20 percent; give yourself a little bit of future expanding. That way you don't have to leap off and buy a lot right away. Budget for the future if you can. Put a little bit away here and there. Look at the virtual storage, you will save yourself a lot of headaches on configuring. The physical storage can be a pain. The virtual storage, once you get it in place then you don't have to manage it much.

Make sure that you really have spec'd out your ESXi host so it can support your environment. Normally, that's been fairly easy. Companies like HPE and Lenovo are more than eager to help you make sure that you have a server that is spec'd out for the VMware environment, and help you get solid on what you need.

We haven't done a lot with the built-in security and encryption yet, but from what I've been looking at so far in vSphere 6.7, it looks like something that we would like to integrate. Before I became an analyst I helped manage TPM and BitLocker on laptops. It was a pain. It had to touch each device physically. I'm looking forward to 6.7 where I can utilize TPM 2.0 and encrypt all of my stations on the fly, and make it a more seamless experience.

We are not using VMware Cloud on AWS. Being just a local community college, it's a little bit expensive for us right now, but one day we would like to.

The product is a good, solid nine out of 10. The only reason I would knock it down any is, as I said, I wish the error messages would, at times, be a little bit more verbose and more explainable.