VMware vSphere Reviews

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. 

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.