VMware vSphere Reviews

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.

• Cloud computing service (IaaS)
• Private/hybrid cloud
• Virtualization infrastructure
• Virtualization desktop infrastructure.

• High availability causes downtime service because it is needed to reboot VMs.
• Fault tolerance is limited by the four vCPUs.
• The service provider is not easy to integrate via API like OpenStack.

• vCloud Director, because we may use it as the dashboard for providing cloud services.
• vCenter 
• vSphere, because it helps us in the management of thousands of VMs in the coverage UI.

The SDK/API to help SPs (service providers) provide the pay-as-you-go business model in cloud service.

Standard commercial environment.

A gold standard of server virtualization.

• vMotion
• NSX
• Dynamic deployment of new servers is critical.

Improvements to the vCenter server appliance are still needed, especially the HTML5.

My primary use case for the product is testing Home Lab. I was involved in the early vSphere 6.7 beta. I wanted to see what the new features were, how it worked. I'm using it currently in my Home Lab for testing lots of the different products as a vSphere-base for vSAN, NSX, running the latest vCenter, etc.

Some of the critical workloads that I'm running in my vSphere environment are Exchange, SQL, various different application servers, and those have to be up and available at all times, and vSphere does that for us. It gives us High Availability, failover, vMotion capability for load balancing. It works great.

Since migrating over to vSphere, we're seeing a significant performance boost due to the fact that we've migrated over to an all-flash vSAN array. Previously we were running external storage SAN over fiber channel. We saw a significant increase, I would say at least a 50 percent increase, in our speeds due to our vSAN running on all-flash. It's been a huge improvement.

The way that vSphere increases our availability in our organization is that it allows us to run our critical business workloads, keep them highly-available, run them at speed, and easily scale when we need to.

The most valuable features for me are a very easily scalable infrastructure. I can have a couple of hosts to do basic workloads. I can have a lot of hosts to do a lot of workloads. vSAN integrates my storage so I don't need an external storage SAN. I love having everything integrated in the same UI. The new HTML5 interface doesn't require any plugins anymore and it's super-fast. Really liking that change.

In terms of the built-in security features that I'm using, currently I am using vSAN Encryption, using an external KMS server, and it works great. It's pretty easy to set up, very easy, especially in the UI, to integrate that and get that set up.

The way that I find vSphere simple and easy to manage is that the interface is all laid out for you. You've got various different views based on what you want to do in the UI. You have your Hosts and Clusters view, if you're doing something where you need to manage at the cluster level. You can manage at the host level in there. If you're doing something very VM-specific or on a vApp level, you can go into the VM and Templates view. It's very easy to scale and use what you need to use.

An improvement could be allowing a "dark mode" for the interface. I think the HTML5 client is a little bit hard to read. It's all white. It's a little bit bright on the eyes. A lot of us IT guys view in the dark.

The stability in our vSphere environment has gone very well. We have never actually had an outage. Due to the HA failover capabilities of the cluster, the High Availability of vSAN, Distributed Resource Scheduler allowing you to basically vMotion VMs and balance your loads across all your clusters, it's been very highly available. We've never had an outage or an issue; never any kind of a data loss incident, even when we were running external storage as well.

Scalability works pretty well. You can start out at a couple of hosts, based on your business needs, your budget. That's probably the base recommendation I would start out at for having some of the DRS and HA failover capabilities. But if your business grows, you can easily add a host and a cluster and expand your capabilities on storage and compute. If you're running vSAN, you can run on the storage side, too.

I have had several instances where I've had to use Global Support Services. They're always great. They are very knowledgeable. If they don't know the answer, they can easily escalate to another engineer and help you out and get the problem solved, usually pretty quickly.

I was not initially involved in the vSphere setup at my current company; that predated my joining the company. But I've brought up the secondary environment and integrated vSAN at that company, and setup was straightforward. It's pretty easy to get everything set up and get things done. I've done that many times in production, and torn down and rebuilt the Home Lab many times. It's pretty straightforward.

We do not currently use VMware Cloud on AWS.

If I had to rate vSphere from one to ten - version 6.7 - I would say right now it's probably about a ten.

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.

Server virtualization.

Consolidation and normalization.

Distributed vSwitch, and vSphere.

Improvement in price.

We started using this just for virtualization, but now we have gone into creating private cloud features for our customers. 

Gathering all of the hosts together to create one single pool across the enterprise is a terrific feature.

It needs to integrate better between multiple modules. 

I would rate the scalabilty as an eight out of ten. 

The setup was easy. The deployment did not take much time, as long as it was properly planned. The planning must be from an experienced side and user-acceptance front. It should not take more than two months of time. 

We used system integrators. 

The pricing is a bit complex.

VMware alone cannot offer all the features that customers require. There are times when the differential cost of the customer is not feasible. In addition, there are times when the requirements, in terms of API, build up and the connectivity to the outside world is more important. People need to decide on their own whether this is a good solution or if an OpenStack solution is the better choice.

It is a powerful solution which enables us to take a snapshot and clone any virtual machine. It is also a centralized platform for hypervisoring that speeds up the migration between the nodes. 

It has a very high speed, which is a nice feature. 

This solution should have a better backup policy. Furthermore, there should be an ability to expose the universal machine. In the current version, you need to shutdown and use an offline virtual machine to backup.

It is a very stable product.

We previously used Hyper-V, and we found a lot of problems with taking snapshots of our virtual machines. It also was not very stable. 

The setup was very easy. There were guidelines, and we simply followed the steps. The deployment took around three days. 

It is expensive. Other solutions on the market are free. We had to plan with VMware how many hosts that we needed in order to determine the price.