VMware vSphere Reviews

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. 

The primary use case is documentation.

I use this solution on AWS, which is pretty standard. It is fairly easy to use and has enhanced security. 

From a feature set point of view, I am quite comfortable with it. 

The pricing and tech support need improvement. 

I have not scaled it very high. I have only used it in small implementations. I only have a total of 190 people using the solution.

The technical support is poor. We are in Australia, but we do not have the same level of support as the US and Europe. 

Setting up this solution is not a problem. 

The price is high. It would be nice if VMware made a price reduction. 

I looked at native AWS as an option. My preference is Oracle VM versus this solution. 

It is user-friendly and easy to use. 

We stopped using a lot of cloud services. However, I see that VMware has integrated with Amazon Cloud. We will now to have to move everything to the cloud. My goal is to uplift our environment to the cloud, which will be probably in two years, but it will happen. It is where everyone is heading, since it is the next big step.

It is very stable. Once you have it in production, there are rarely any issues, which is a nice thing about VMware.

It is highly scalable. We need to scale out and up, and we can do that with vSphere. We can easily add more storage, drives, or memory. 

I do not have any problems with tech support. It is very good. I usually start in-house, then outreach to VMware support if there is a need to do so.

It is easy to set up. Once you get it running, it doesn't break down. It just runs.

The deployment took a week to complete. I do not fault the solution, as it was our personal systematic issues that had to be dealt with internally.

ROI is hard to measure because it depends upon the customer's relationship with the solution and how much they spent on it.

VMware licensing and pricing are a bit more expensive compared to others, like Hyper-V. However, you get what you pay for.

We considered Hyper-V, but decided to go with VMware since there are certain applications which run better on VMware. 

Price is not everything to me. Even though price may put a burden on a company, if you are trying to solve something for your company, the more expensive solution may help you run your environment smoothly. Then, it is worth the expense. 

We use this product as a solution for backups and security.

The functionalities and management of the product demonstrations need improvement.

It is a stable solution.

It is highly scalable. We can add new hardware and expand the infrastructure easily.

The tech support is good. 

The setup was easy to install and deploy. It took one or two days for deployment.

The pricing is expensive but we really do not have a choice.

I advise anyone looking to use this solution to take the VMware webinars to familiarize themselves with the product. 

It is primarily for virtualization. 

As an enduser, I would say it has allowed us to have the flexibility of moving around our workloads on different machines, and not having to worry if anything is down. Since we are a small organization, we don't have a lot of hardware resources to spare. So, this consolidation helps us to aggregate a lot more services and solutions utilizing the same hardware. Of course, it also allowed us to upgrade our skills, which helped us when deploying other solutions.

We truly value the security of the solution. We also value the consolidation, which can be done in terms of releasing the hardware footprint, and the service call. Furthermore, the automation and ease, as well as source utilization are key features of this product.

I think the cost should be reconsidered. VMware is not the cheapest solution out there, despite the fact that it may be one of the best.

In addition, I think some of the backup features or the prediction features can be improved. The legacy workloads are not prone to be virtualized. Some users may want to see a common deduction product across the physical service.

It has been a very stable solution for us. We have not had any downtime in the past three years. 

The scalability is excellent. I do not see any other solution that comes close to this product.

The response time from tech support is efficient. The tech support team there is very knowledgeable. 

The initial setup is straightforward, and not complex at all. 

The cost is a bit high.

Another solution in the same sphere is Hyper-V, which is quite good in terms of basic plain virtualization software. However, vSphere offers a scaled-up version. 

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.

We primarily use this solution for replication purposes we have, and to back up information in HR (High Resolution) mode.

I think they should consider lowering the pricing of entry-level products.

In addition, I think they should come up with a backup feature that is more product enrichment-based. It should be a full-fledged backup solution. It just is not there right now.

The stability of the solution is quite stable.

The scalability of the solution is good. You can scale up to maximum levels. We currently have 2000 users. This requires four engineers to run the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

It was complex, and not straightforward. The deployment took six hours initially to setup. Then, we migrated our virtual-physical servers to virtual machines and now coming projects were also built on virtual machines.

The pricing is justified. It may be a bit high, but the features are worth it.

I would advise others to go with this product if they want to scale their enterprise, definitely if there is no budget constraint.