VMware vSphere Reviews

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.

My primary use case for this solution is the DRS feature of the solution.

When checking the utilization reports, the operational reporting and matrixes are a little weak.  In terms of what has been the starting growth or trend analysis is something which, currently they have an add-on which we have not used  because it's an add-on product, which we have not bought. As of now, they have this capability but I've not seen these features to be more integrated on the base product itself rather than having as a special add-on.

I really value the DRS feature of the solution. Apart from that, there is a high availability in the feature called VMotion. In addition, the centralized management throughout the V-Center software is useful.

When checking the utilization reports, the operational reporting and matrixes are a little weak.  In terms of what has been the starting growth or trend analysis is something which, currently they have an add-on which we have not used  because it's an add-on product, which we have not bought. As of now, they have this capability but I've not seen these features to be more integrated on the base product itself rather than having as a special add-on.

As I mentioned, the necessary improvement would be to add additional features that would integrate reporting and management in terms of automation. Those are the two things I would say it's a lot of, or the third item could be of some service important to integration. Right now everybody is talking about private clubs, but these are the base foundation so, the effect it has had on embedded software attack, running on the hypervisor for self-provisioning, it definitely has an edge.

Its highly scalable, we have never had to make radical changes to the design to make it more, or to put in more capacity. So, as we are growing we have been adding the servers into the existing pool without even worrying about a need for redesign. As we grow, we find that our company is more dependent upon this product. 

Technical support usually we have online support, where we can log a call if there is any trouble. But so far in the last three years that I have been here, we rarely, or I cannot collect any one instance where we had necessity to log a case with the support team, the forums and the community are, have enough knowledge based articles to make us pass through any technical challenges that we have faced.

We have prior use knowledge of Hyper-V. First, it did not have this automatic scalable capability which are scored to move across from one specific hardware to another without impacting any downtime. And secondly, it did not have a lot of automatic configuration capabilities, based on the utilization of the specific hardware it could re-balance what goes around on top of it. So these two are they key features that I feel were lacking at that point in time and it's hard to use another feature that I feared was lacking. In addition, it relied a lot upon the physical machine.

It was very straightforward setup. 

The way we had done it is it came pre-installed with as part of the hardware stack that we purchased so the new servers that we purchased we bundled that ESXi software on top of it from the hardware vendor itself. So from that perspective, the implementation strategy was to have it as an OEM100 by the hardware vendor itself and then the way we designed it from our side is we designed it into two different data centers. One for production, one for test and development. So just have a logical separation there in terms of the hardware that was used for production and what was used for distribution.

Overall timelines are approximately two to three weeks time-frame. After the hardware was developed, they came in and installed the base software and considered it based on our requirements.

Deployment was done by the hardware vendor itself. The hardware came from HP and there was a HP reseller who shipped us the hardware. The resellers team only came and did all the installation and confirmation after the design was agreed with us.

Pricing is competitive I would say, because usually we buy the software, along with the hardware stock so it's usually a bundle thing that we try to squeeze the hardware windows in to get us proper discounts. So, it is regularly higher than what a Microsoft overall solution turns out to be. But, the capabilities are worth it. The price is justified.

Licensing is pretty standard.

In my previous organization, we used Hyper-V for over eight years.

From my side, the advice would be to design it properly the first time. Have proper capacity planned out, and don't just create over-provision in the production environment. Best you can do with provisioning with production, you definitely need to have some capacity sizing done properly. And, that goes in not for just this product but any virtualization product that a company implements. You do not want to overload the hardware. You have to think about the capabilities of the end-user.

Our main use case for the product is we want to do virtualization. We want to save costs on the physical hardware because we were running some big workloads on the physical hardware that we migrated over to VMware. In terms of the retail applications which we are running on the physical hardware, we have now virtualized them.

The product has improved the organization in terms of the infrastructure stability and security, balancing the resources, and providing cost saving. The cost savings and the TCO with vSphere are very good.

We are using our vSphere for our new workloads in terms of Federation Services as well as for our VDI workloads. These are mission critical for us because they are the customer-facing.

Day-to-day, the most valuable feature on vSphere is its DRS feature: Distributed Resource Scheduler. We don't need to manage or balance resources. As soon as you come to the office in the morning, it's automatically balanced.

We work in a retail company, so you don't know what time the customer will be coming in or what time the work load is high. We are not uniform in terms of our workload. Therefore, it is important for us that when the workload is high, it is automatically optimized.

In terms of the vSphere security, the most important feature is the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), which was launched in 6.7, as well as the encrypted vMotion. These help us to bridge the gap if there is a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack or suspicious activity, so at least our VMware workloads are secure.

The best feature that we like is the Web Client. We just login and there is the data center. We don't have to walk to the data center everyday. We just open our laptops, log into our vCenter, and we have our full data store and data center ready. 

I can see the room for improvement still in the user interface (UI). 

There is still room for improvement with the HTML5 Web Client. They are working on it, as I can see on their blog. However, there is still room for improvement in the newer features that they can push into it.

Stability is perfectly fine. In the past eight months, we have been able to achieve 100 percent uptime. Therefore, the stability is quite impressive.

We are using it on a big scale. vSphere is one of the biggest product of VMware, and we have around five vCenters with around 80 hosts.

Scalability is one of the best things about vSphere. You don't need to change your design if you have a new demand for workloads or if a new product is coming in. Thus, the scalability feature is awesome.

Tech support is sometimes good and sometimes bad. We work in the Southeast Asia region where sometimes we have a language barrier. Therefore, their tech support is 50/50 for us.

With the initial setup, server workloads were running on an open source. When we had planned to go with VMware, we faced a bit of complexity. It was just a one time thing. After that, everything went smoothly. So, there were some complexities that we did face.

In the past six months, we have saved around 110TBs of storage, which is almost equivalent to $200,000 USD. That is a huge savings.

We have seen a tremendous performance boost. From when we started this VMware engagement in 2016 until now, we have seen around a 70 percent performance boost. This is a good number.

When we started with VMware, we also tried Citrix XenServer. We considered them as well as Red Hat's platform.

I will rate vSphere a ten out of ten, as I'm a huge fan of vSphere. 

Please look into this solution. You can have it, test it, and download it for 60 days, then you can test it yourself decide what is best for you.

We don't have VMware cloud on AWS, but we have plan to go on it in six months.

The most important thing when choosing a vendor: We look for performance, return on investment, and tech support. Tech support is very important for us in day-to-day tasks. These are the things that we look for in a vendor.

My primary use case of VMware vSphere 6.7 is that I manage some 100 clients who are using this product in their day-to-day work. These are businesses that use it. It runs the core of their networks. It runs their business. It is critical for them to be up and running, so vSphere is pretty important for them.

The mission-critical application that we run on vSphere is our main program that we use to actually monitor all of our customers. We have hundreds of customers. Our main application of remote monitoring runs in our vSphere environment. We also run our Exchange, which is critical. That's how we get our alerts about all of our systems that we're managing. We also run our ticketing systems. When a customer will submit a ticket via email we get it. All of that is running on vSphere.

While I don't have percentages to share, I can say that I have received a performance boost (using vSphere).

The solution has improved our organization because it's made our jobs a lot easier. We're able to monitor all these customers and, with vSphere, they're much more stable than they were previously when they were on physical servers. The fact that they're more stable makes our jobs a lot easier.

The most valuable features of vSphere are really the scalability and its reliability. It's really helped us, as a managed service provider, because we have so many customers that we have to be pretty much on call for, so that when it's up and running and it's working well, that makes our jobs a lot easier.

The built-in encryption of vSphere really helps us to secure our customers, especially customers in the medical field who need to be HIPAA compliant. Being able to encrypt the VM itself helps out a ton.

I find vSphere very simple and easy to manage. It has a very good GUI that you're able to use. Anybody can log in and start clicking around and figure out how to power on a VM, how to create a new VM. It's pretty streamlined for the most part.

As far as the ease of use goes, if you ever were in a situation where something was down, I feel like the logging in VMware makes it really easy to report what's going on. The logging is a really helpful feature. Also, some of the features built in, like vMotion - if you do have a server that's down - you can use something like vMotion to get it back up and running.

As far as room for improvement goes, I really feel like each release they're coming out with new features, making it better and better. The new HTML5 client is almost there. It needs just a little bit more and then it will definitely be ready.

Stability has been awesome. Like I said, we have 100 clients who are on vSphere and it has made all of their systems a lot more stable, which is great for us.

Scalability is really great. Being able to have a customer who decides, maybe a year after they've purchased their hardware, that they need to add another server because maybe they've decided to purchase a new product - being able to scale that system out really helps a lot.

Getting vSphere set up for the first time is pretty straightforward. The installation process is not that painful. It really guides you through it so it makes it a lot easier, especially if it's your first time doing it.

As far as our ROI goes, vSphere actually reduces time to set up a server by a ton. By a server, I mean a virtual machine. In the past, you'd have to order in hardware, wait weeks for it to come in, and then install Windows, patch it, and actually go deploy it at the customer location. Now, if the customer's already running vSphere, all we have to do is log in to that, build the VM, and install Windows and we're good to go. We've gone from days to an hour, probably.

When we were looking at vSphere, we did look at some of the competitors. Of course, we looked at Microsoft Hyper-V because we're a Microsoft partner as well. However, it lacked a lot of the things that vSphere had.

The best advice I could give somebody looking to implement the solution is definitely to download the trial because you can try it out for free. Put it on some test equipment and run it and you're going to love it.

We don't have a customer that uses VMware Cloud on AWS, but we've been very involved in hoping the price gets cheaper so we can sell it. 

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.

Our main use case of vSphere is as the lower layer of a cloud service provider. It's the basis for offering our services through vCloud Director to our customers.

The HTML 5 is valuable in the measure of time saved, day by day.

The most valuable feature of vSphere 6.7, is the HTML 5. I find it really awesome because it speeded up all our daily operations.

It's reliable, stable, and much easier than the previous version.

vSphere now is even simpler. It was simple even before, but going through the HTML 5 interface - and 90 percent of the features are on HTML 5 - it's even easier than the previous ones. Version 6.05 still was, it had HTML 5, but not one 100 percent.

A slight improvement could be made to the interface of the management of vCSA, so that they answer on the 5480 ports. That kind of graphical interface could be improved, but it is not a main point.

The stability of vSphere has reached a good point. Especially without the Flash and the so-called FLEX Client, with HTML 5 it is much more stable than it was before. Previously we used vCenter on Windows. We're adopting the vCSA now, it's much faster and more stable.

vSphere is much more simple to scale than before, thanks to vCSA instead of the monolithic installation on VMware.

We use VMware support. We use it quite often, but not because the product is bad, just because we have so many customers. We are talking about 5,000 virtual machines, so it's statistically probable that we would need to access support. The support is really great.

When we chose VMware, of course we checked other vendors like Microsoft because it's present everywhere; even the open-source KVM. But we decided Microsoft wasn't at an enterprise stage and the open-source one was nice to use but, since there was no support, it wasn't suitable to offer to our customers. We didn't have any doubt choosing VMware.

The built-in features such as encryption - even including TPM module 2.0, are good, but still not useful for us, just because we don't have a lot of requests for this.

The mission-critical applications - more or less all are critical applications. vCenter keeps all the virtual machines of our customers and we don't know what's on those virtual machines. For us, every one of them - not knowing what is inside - is critical. That is for the vSphere used for resources. For the vSphere that we use for management, the critical ones are the infrastructure applications, the ones that keeps the infrastructure working. So from the databases to vCenter itself, to vCloud Director, to NSX. All those machines are critical in that they keep the system working.

As for VMware Cloud on AWS, we have only tested it.

I rate vSphere at eight out of ten. Ten is perfection and I, more or less, never give a ten because people can improve. It's eight, not nine, because I still don't have complete control of the interface.

It's running mission-critical and business-critical workloads for our customers, and the experience has been positive.

The mission-critical apps include core banking systems, core healthcare systems, artificial intelligence. And highly transactional workloads are also great fits for vSphere 6.7.

We've seen an increase of about five to ten percent for the mission-critical apps. Their code is a lot more optimized now that they're using it in the public cloud with VMware Cloud on AWS.

In our organization, the lifecycle management has improved. What that means is our customers are spending a lot less time on "keeping the lights on." Day 2 Operations are being simplified a lot.

• The move towards feature-parity with HTML5 for the user interface.
• Also, increasing the release of features, which is partly through the use of that technology stack with VMware Cloud on AWS, so it's a much more robust product right now.
• It is a lot more simple and efficient to manage. It has improved a lot from the early days of vSphere 5.x. Lifecycle management and reducing the number of clicks that an administrator has to do to actually do a task have been greatly optimized, particularly with the HTML5 interface.
• In terms of more easily managing networks and improving visibility, the two go hand in hand. Compared to the vCloud Air days, it's come a long way. It's a solution that actually works now, and you can use your vSphere staff - who have been trained on and understand vSphere - to actually consume that hybrid cloud with very little or no training.

vSphere is the Rolls Royce of hypervisors. Moving forward, they just need to continue integrating and simplifying that user interface experience. With VMware Cloud Foundation, that's the Day 2 lifecycle management. You've got the VMC offering that's obviously all public cloud. They need to keep on integrating the APIs and simplifying the user experience. And they're definitely moving towards the one-click experience that you have with other technology vendors.

The stability has been good. Now that the VMC on AWS codestream is 6.7, and they're following a DevOps methodology, the stability of vSphere obviously has increased greatly.

It scales very well. Now, with vSphere 6.7, it's 128 hosts. Talk about scale with vSphere is now a non-issue. Typically what we do with our customers is deploy vSan clusters, typically 20 to 30 hosts, because that's a natural failure domain. Going beyond that, it really makes no sense, because you want to have separate failure domains.

In the early 6.x days, their support went down. Now with 6.7, being with VMware Cloud on AWS, their support level has increased, because they've had to. It's definitely a better experience now.

Regarding knowing that it is time to switch to this solution, our customers tend to be existing vSphere customers. End-of-life, end-of-support tend to be the trigger for, "Okay, we need to upgrade our infrastructure stack."

The other big trigger is end-of-life of the hardware stack that they're going with. That's typically a conversation about moving from legacy, three-tier infrastructure to a hyperconverged infrastructure stack. And then there's a hypervisor conversation about the best-of-breed to use to meet their business requirements.

Nutanix AHV, Hyper-V is commonly on the list, and Red Hat KVM is the other one.

Partner with the right partner because not all partners are the same. And have a strategy in mind. Have a design in place, the logical design. What functions are you trying to achieve? What business problems are you trying to solve? And then go ahead and do your due diligence with testing, etc. Once you involve the partner and you're implementing, make sure you have proper testing, have a soft launch, and then a go-live, so that you've got a risk-free solution.

That's where a lot of customers go wrong. They don't do their due diligence, and they don't properly launch, and they have the wrong partner that they partnered with, who is not quite up to the task of doing this type of thing.

For our customers that are very security conscious, in the financial space and the healthcare space, they typically will have clusters where TPM and virtual machine encryption are enabled to provide a more secure experience for those services.

We sell a lot of VMware Cloud on AWS. It integrates natively through hybrid cloud extensibility into VMC on AWS. That's actually been a big selling point with 6.7.

I rate the solution at nine out of ten. What would bring it up to a ten is feature-parity with the HTML5 interface.

We are using the VMware vSphere product to virtualize our servers and we are very succesful. We are very satisfied.

It provides a new environment in an expedient manner. It is a better use of resources between the servers. As we can use these resources better, it helps our TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) analysis.

We would like VMware to add capacity to add more equipment. We also think it could improve with the hyper-converged.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. We like that it is very functional and it has ability to access hyper-conversions. There is a capacity to grow the environment by adding the same type of equipment, and that really interests us. 

I do not have experience with the technical support team.

We looked at Microsoft Hyper-V, but it does not have all of the systematics of VMware vSphere.

I think that vSphere is an expensive solution.