VMware vSphere Reviews

• 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.

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. 

I primarily use vSphere for management. It is very fast, responsive, and easy to use.

It has high clustering and availability features. These features are not found with other hypervisors.

I would like to see VMware head towards a more GPU friendly environment. 

The stability is high. 

I also have experience with Citrix ESXi.

The other options that we considered were Cisco, Dell EMC, and Nutanix. 

We virtualize our infrastructure with this solution. 

We saved a lot of time and hardware with this solution. It also prevents fewer incidents. 

I would like to see more software as a service solutions.

The tech support is very good.

The setup was a bit complex at first. Now, it is more simple. 

The implementation was fast.

The pricing is a little expensive, and the licensing is a bit complex.