VMware vSphere Reviews

We are just beginning on vSphere. In the next two and three years, I would like to explore the virtualized automation.

Virtualised automation is a useful feature.

The pipeline feature can be improved, as it doesn't allow for specific situations.

We have been using vSphere for about 2 years. 

Because vSphere is a minimal interface, it tends to be stable.

As you can set up various environments, vSphere is very scalable. In the future, we may consider switching from vSphere to Hyper-V.

We purchased the OEM, but not from VMware. We bought it from HPE. The first year of support provided by HPE is okay for now.

IBM Power. We switched to vSphere from IBM Power because the hardware is cheaper.

The setup of vSphere is straight forward. I have set up a few vSphere environments.

vSphere is very expensive.

I would give vSphere 9 out of 10, as it is easy to use, and there is good support available.

It is a private cloud and it's on a standalone Bare Metal system. On the private cloud environment we provide virtualized computers for different users.

The features that I have found most valuable are the overall good ease of use and the good interface which makes it very easy to migrate from one bare metal to another. These are the two things which I like about it. There are certain things as well which I don't like.

In terms of what could be improved, they should improve their storage management part. vSphere has its own file system type, called VMSS, and that file system doesn't report on proper data usage or things like that. There are certain loopholes wherein it sometimes shows you erroneous data. Again, their VMSS file system, their data storage management system, and its reporting must be improved a lot.

There are certain features which are called VCE which are available as a separate suite for this VMware cloud. The networking is almost integrated within the vSphere so it would be really helpful for the implementation team if they also had an orchestration for a different storage. There might be multiple OEM storage in the back-end, for example, that could connect with the vSphere while the vSphere shows it to the front-end user as a single storage. There is a lot of scope in terms of managing hybrid storage at the back-end of vSphere.

I have been using VMware vSphere for around six years.

VMware vSphere is stable in terms of the computer virtualization and it's also scalable. We can go ahead and make HA clusters, but as I said, in terms of the storage stability, there are certain issues because sometimes it gets confused when showing you the actual status. The back-end of the CLI shows you certain data and the front-end shows you different data. That's where there are certain issues with the reliability, but otherwise, it is quite robust and it's scalable.

We have more than 60 people using the different platforms. The functions include several web developers and a lot of finance applications which are running on Oracle and on different RDBMS's.

They have a wonderful technical support team. Additionally, there are a lot of blogs, forums and community support available over the internet where you do get a lot of support as well. So it's not always necessary to reach out to their technical assistance team. They also have wonderful documentation available that is quite helpful in terms of resolving a lot of issues.

This was a first implementation of vSphere for us. They have a hybrid environment where there is a Hyper-V running their Oracle with VirtualBox running across. We found this to be much stronger and much easier to deploy and hence we thought to continue with it.

Also it supports a wide range of operating systems.

The initial setup is very simple, not complex.

I would say from a completely blank bare metal to the private cloud, it took us around a few hours. Not more than that.

We implemented it ourselves.

I would recommend VMware vSphere to potential buyers. I will always do that. It's highly recommended to go with the entire vSphere Cloud Suite rather than only just going with the Hypervisor. But if you go with the entire suite, it's really wonderful.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate VMware vSphere an eight.

The solution is primarily used to house VMs, virtual machines.

Virtualization changes radically the IT landscape. Rare are our customers who have not implemented it. vSphere is #1 in hypervisors and offers the flexibility and the fastness our customers need.

VM models is a great feature. It allows to create VMs very fast and already patched with the different configurations that the are needed.

The ease to move a VM from a host to another or even to another storage/DC is very convenient. That all this can be done while users work on the VMs is awsome.

The graphical vSphere vCenter interface is now in HTML. I'm not very found of it. Sometimes you can't find items and you need to log in to the different hosts.

Some work has to be done with this admin console.

I have many years (lost the count...) of experience with this solution, beginning with version 4.0, then 5.0, 5.5, 6.7 and finally 7.0 and use it daily.

The stability has been very, very good. I didn't have any crashes. There aren't bugs or glitches. I find it to be a very, very strong architecture.

In terms of scalability, I haven't really had the opportunity to address this as my customers are not very big companies and we have relatively small data centers.

I've never had to call VMware. You basically can find everything on the web. VMware's  website is very good and there is a lot of information everywhere about vSphere on the web with real experts of the product.

No

The setup is straightforward, only a few questions to answer, and you have your hypervisor ready !

Always in house.

The cost of the solution is relatively low. VMware proposes the Essentials kits which are very affordable for SMB companies.

I didn't really evaluate any other solutions. I haven't even really looked at Hyper-V, although my clients sometimes ask about it.

We are implementors and our customers don't sometime have any dedicated IT guy.  But, as vSphere works well once implemented, there's relativally less to do.

We use vSphere primarily for data center solutions. We migrated most of the physical workloads to a virtual environment. Even physical data center migrations were made possible because of VMware workloads. We had replication workloads using such technology for DR purposes. I've also deployed a Nutanix cluster with the VMware Hypervisor.

I like the standard features. 

The price could be better.

I've been using VMware vSphere for eight or nine years.

It's a stable product. I have a little reservation about their vSAN product, which I don't think is well suited for co-work loads that require performance. In that aspect, I tend to favor Nutanix, but other than for vSAN, I think it's a good product.

It's a scalable solution.

Technical support is very good.

The initial setup becomes simpler by the day. It's very easy. But it wasn't easy before and was pretty tedious. But these days, it's easy.

The deployment time depends on the workload and how large the environment is. If there are a lot of hypervisors and migration work, it could take anywhere from two to six days or more to install and deploy.

I work as an integrator, so I implemented this solution.

It could be cheaper. But not only cheaper because Nutanix's hypervisors are free of charge out of the box. You don't even have to pay for the hypervisor's enterprise version. Given that, I don't think VMware should be charging so much for the hypervisor. The hypervisor is a commodity now.

I would recommend it to potential users.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give VMware vSphere a nine.

We deploy this solution for our clients, from small to large enterprise. We are resellers and I'm the company's principal engineer. 

A valuable feature is the provisioning setup of VMs. It's the most common feature used by our clients. 

I'd like to see a simplified integration with services automation. At the moment it requires a lot of network from partners and solution providers to do this - there are a lot of third party components that require integration. If they could improve this it would mean less integration for some key products and services.

I've been using this solution for five years. 

This is a stable solution. 

We have no complaints about the technical support. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

Licensing costs aren't too expensive, although you pay extra for additional features. 

It's important to understand your requirements before choosing a solution. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

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.

We have Hyper-V on a physical machine and another virtual machine. We are using this because of iSCSI, and we are using VMware for performance and production.

The performance is efficient. You can log the performance and report on the bottlenecks or any other problems you encounter.

One of the areas creating a crash is when you are cloning.

If you are cloning a virtual machine and you have any license on another system it will crash and we have to contact third-party support for assistance.

It's not cloning 100%.

I have been using VMware vSphere for eight years.

We are using version 5 and 6.7.

It's a stable solution, we have not had any issues with stability.

It's a scalable solution. We have three people in our organization who are using this solution.

We did not contact technical support. It wasn't necessary.

We are working with Hyper-V. It was so poor that we started using VMware.

The initial setup was straightforward, it was easy.

The price could be lower.

We are looking for other solutions, specifically for Hyper-V and domain controllers.

I would recommend this solution. It's robust, it's working and it's easy to use.

I would rate VMware vSphere a ten out of ten.

We use it in the data centers of our customers for server consolidation and new deployments.

The ease of movement of these machines is the most valuable. It is very easy to move these machines between physical hosts. The fast deployment of services is another valuable feature.

Its price can be better. It is very expensive.

I have been using this solution for ten years.

It is very scalable. It is great in terms of scalability. We have 50 to 60 users in our organization.

Their technical support is great. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

In general terms, it is easy to deploy, but it depends on the size of the project. The deployment duration varies. A basic deployment doesn't take more than one hour.

It is expensive.

I would advise others to go ahead with this solution. It is a very functional product. Only its price needs improvement.

I would rate VMware vSphere an eight out of ten.