VMware vSphere Reviews

We use vSphere to manage VMs, route our infrastructure, changing settings, remote desktopping, and providing services for the university.

In terms of mission-critical apps, we use it for our Student Information System (SIS) to manage all student records and financial aid for all students on campus, along with databases and other web servers on campus.

I would think there has been a performance boost. I don't know exactly what percentage, but maybe five to ten percent.

For benefits for the organization, I don't know if they see a big difference, other than that performance boost, but I do know that it helps the engineers who work on the back-end to be able to manage the VMs; and improved access and experience for the engineers is a big improvement.

This version has added a lot more features to the HTML5 interface and that helps us monitor and manage the system better and faster than with the old interface.

I also think it is very easy to manage. When it moved over to HTML5, bringing all those new features into the HTML5 interface, that improved it a lot. I don't know specific performance data points, but I would say it has helped tremendously in being able to stay in one interface and not having to manage multiple, different interfaces in connecting to it.

There are still a few features that have been left out as far as updating and sending firmware to the host. You still have to go into the Flash interface to do that. But, for the most part, there are just those few missing features from the HTML5 interface.

At the beginning, it was a little rough because it was a beta. They put out some updates and it has been really stable. We haven't had any outages or downtime, as far as stability goes.

I assume it scales really well. We tested it on a few VMs at the beginning and we've rolled it out to a lot of hosts and everything has been working great.

I have not used technical support.

When I came on, they were using vSphere.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was pretty straightforward, pretty simple to set up.

I'm not very good at ROIs, but I know that it has improved the management of the VMs, and being able to help customers more easily and faster has been an improvement with this release.

In terms of advice, I've looked at many different solutions out there and, right now, VMware is the only one that can provide all the different things that we needed it to do.

When selecting a vendor, the most important criteria would be the ease of use, the benefits it has, the features. If we were to switch to someone else, they would have to have all the different features that VMware has currently. And then, price would come in last.

I give it a nine out of ten because it has almost all the features we've needed and it's pretty much simple keeping it under control.

We use vSphere for our production and DR infrastructure. We have all our critical machines on there: domain controllers, monitoring systems, ticketing systems, financial systems, billing systems, Test and Dev environments. For the most part, as far as vSphere is concerned, it's performed pretty awesomely. Sometimes the hardware doesn't work as well.

Once we got VMware vCenter, once we got all that setup - did a PoC, proved that it worked - we did a big push. I led the project to move our entire internal infrastructure from physical to virtual.

We haven't worked with VM Encryption or support for TPM and VBS.

Between vMotion and all the HA, it has made my life a lot easier, and similarly for a lot of my colleagues, and my boss.

The most valuable features are the seamless HA with vMotion and being able to run vCenters in HA mode. We use a company called SimpliVity, it's a hyperconverged system that sits on top of VMware. They have a product called RapidDR which automates the entire DR process for us. So in a DR event, we just run a script, and that's it. Between vMotion and vCenter, everything moves over to the DR environment.

Also, once you start using it and you get your hands dirty with it, it's very intuitive. I find the menus make sense. Other UIs, specifically Salesforce, for example, can sometimes be weird. Things are in weird places, there are a lot of menus, a lot of dropdowns. Especially, in the new HTML5 Client with vSphere and vCenter, everything is pretty straightforward and easy to find and easy to use.

I'd like to get rid of the Flash Client. There are still some things that require us to go into it and use it, some plugins and other things aren't supported in the HTML5. I love the HTML5 Client. I think it's a lot smoother, a lot faster. Version 6.5 was kind of slow. From our testing, from what I've seen, 6.7 is supposed to be better. That would be my biggest complaint right now: that the 6.5 Flash Client is slow. It takes a while to load.

It's very stable. We had one "pink screen," which is basically equivalent to the "blue screen" in Windows, and that was hardware-related.

The scalability has been good, as far as the vSphere and vCenter go. We've had to add more hardware, but it's scaled pretty well. We haven't really had any issues with it.

The move to vSphere was really just a business-continuity initiative. Vestmark makes a financial platform. It's important that we are able to be up as much as possible.

I work on the internals teams, so none of the stuff that I work with is customer-facing, but for our customer-facing teams to be able to correctly support customers, our internal side has to be up as much as possible. It was really just business-continuity, coming down from the executive level, saying, "We need as much HA as possible. We want our systems to be up as much as possible because we need to support our customers as best we can."

When you're looking at HA and seamless DR and the like, there's really one decision, and that's going virtual, whether it's on-prem or in the Cloud. VMware has been a leader in the virtual industry for years. It was a pretty simple decision to go with VMware.

It took some time to really research vSphere as a whole, as far as what the best setup would be for our company, for both the present and the future growth of the company, and to correctly size it. There was a lot of research beforehand that needed to be done to get to the appropriate solution. Once that work was done, the actual install and implementation of it were very smooth, for the most part.

When I first started at Vestmark, a little over four years ago, everything was physical. We had a row of about seven to ten racks - I forget the exact number - of just physical machines. After going virtual, using VMware, vCenter on Cisco UCS, we dropped that down to two racks.

Take your time to do the appropriate research and planning, so that it's sized appropriately. A lot of issues that I've seen are from either underlying hardware or resource constraints that aren't necessarily related to vSphere or VMware, rather that things weren't implemented appropriately.

We do not you use VMware Cloud on AWS. Right now we just have on-prem for both production and DR. We are starting to move some small Dev environments to AWS. I haven't been a part of that project. From what I hear, there have been some ups and downs but, for the most part, I believe there has been positive feedback.

I would rate vSphere a nine out of ten. Ten means everything is perfect. As much as everyone tries to strive for that goal, it's unattainable because there are just so many moving parts, hardware, software, user input, end-users. It's the best that it can be in a nonperfect world.

The primary use case for us was to virtualize a small data center of about 30 guests. We use it for our Active Directory and Exchange servers. The solution has worked well.

We're not yet using VMware Cloud on AWS or vSphere's built-in security features.

Going from a purely physical environment before, we have seen a performance value boost. It also gives us greater flexibility and it allows us to adapt to our environment much more quickly than a standard hardware solution would.

The most valuable features are the simplicity and ease of use for, a small IT department like ours. It's simple and efficient to manage.

I would like to see continued support of the HTML5-based utilities.

It's been very stable for us.

We have a pretty static environment but, for our needs, it has been very good.

We have had to use technical support a couple of times. It has been very good, a very good experience.

We had outside help from a partner, but the initial setup was pretty straightforward.

We're a small, privately held company, so ROI is not something we concentrate a lot on. But just from the surface appearance, it has really helped us.

Make use of the resources that are there. That's something we failed on when we first started. We started out thinking, "We're going to go with this company for storage, we're going to use Vsphere, etc.," and we just went in with a partner. As I went further along, I learned that there were a lot of built-in resources that I really didn't know I had access to. That was a bit tough.

When selecting a vendor, the most important criterion for us, being a smaller IT department, is the support. Also, to a certain extent, the name is important, because when you're a small department you don't have the opportunity to evaluate as many companies as you'd like to. Sometimes you end up going with the main name brand. When you're a small shop, you need all the help you can get.

I rate vSphere a solid nine out of ten, especially since, with 6.5 and beyond, it has matured and it's full-fledged. It's tough to think of anything I'd want to add to it at this point. I would have rated vSphere 5.5  as an eight out of ten, so it feels like 6.5 is a progression towards ten. There's really no feature that I can explicitly name that would make it a ten. They just need to make more progress, have more stability, and continued simplicity.

Primary use-case would be updating our Gold/Masters for the Horizon environment. It works pretty well. We're still getting used to the HTML5 Client versus the old Flash-based Client.

We use it for all of our servers, we have virtualized everything. The mission-critical things, for a bank like us, are the mainframe - it's the IBM iSeries - and our Saleslogix application. Those would be the two biggest ones, but we use it for all of our databases as well. We're 90 percent VMware, with hundreds of servers.

It's been a pretty smooth transition. We just upgraded to 6.5. Hopefully, we'll be updated to 6.7 soon. But it's been working really well.

It's hard to say whether we've seen a boost for these apps since we were very much first onboard a long time ago with a VMware. But performance-wise, every upgrade we do, we see it gets better. Everything gets better: the networking gets better, NSX is getting better. Security-wise, that's been a really good thing for us, separating our network out a little bit more, automating our failovers.

The most valuable feature is being able to VMotion and migrate easily, moving machines around on the host. I know DRS will take care of a lot about that, but there's still some manual intervention here and there, so the flexibility of it has been really good.

It's pretty simple. It's easy to upgrade.

I would like to see DRS for the GPU machines.

It has always been stable. We haven't had any downtime in all the years we've used it.

It's highly scalable. We've grown, we've doubled our size, and it has been easily scalable for us: slide in a new host and then attach the host to the vSphere client and then push the profile out. It makes it really easy.

I've never had to use technical support, myself. We have probably used our VMware rep here and there. We usually get our answers through our rep or our TAMs. There hasn't been anything "break-fix" where we had to call technical support and get on the line right away.

Our customer rep answers all our questions and, if he doesn't know, he comes back the next week and he lets us know. It's been a really big help.

Our ROI comes from being able to replace a lot of our endpoints, mostly on the Horizon side. But using vSphere with all the endpoints, replacing all of our physical machines as well with Dell EMC's wide clients, it has almost been invaluable to us. The cost savings have been great there: buying $300 machines instead of $1,000 PCs.

It is quick to learn, it's not overly complicated. You don't have to spend a lot of time learning about it, at least from the usability perspective, once it has been set up, of course. It's really easy to use, easy to set up, easy to find what you're looking for, easy to manage.

When selecting a vendor to work with, our biggest issue would be availability. We've had some issues with some vendors in the past where they were just too small. Being in Des Moines, we don't have a lot of options, other than bringing people in from other states, or even other countries, possibly. If we do have something come up - which, luckily, we really haven't had anything too bad - just having that immediate connection and resolution is important.

This solution has to be a ten out of ten. It's been great. It's easy to use, it's laid out very well, so it's easy to onboard.

The primary use case is to virtualize our physical environment and to decentralize management of the systems themselves. It has been performing very well. We use it for everything. 

About 95 percent of our environment is virtualized at this point. Even our ERP environment, which is AIX, runs on vSphere, ESXi is the host. We have implemented SRM for failing-over and having high availability and disaster recovery in our other data centers.

We have seen a good 20-30 percent performance boost for our apps. Our underlying infrastructure is a full HPE shop. We've gone to full SSD drives at this point, so by doing that we have actually gotten a good performance boost.

The most valuable features are the scalability and the ease of use. The latter makes it most efficient to use. It is very simple, very easy. We've been doing it for a while now. Most of that comes from having the expertise in-house to run it, and that's why we're here at VMworld 2018.

I have just been looking through what vSphere 6.7 has coming, and one of the things I'm most excited about is the fact that we won't need to use multiple Clients any longer, if all the features that are supposed to be available are, in fact, available in the HTML5 Client. That's one of the biggest things because, for me, it's all about management. For the most part, all the other things that have made VMware invaluable in our lives should be working just as well, but a little bit more speed won't hurt.

The stability is okay. For the most part, when we have issues it's because the self-connections or the VPN connections between the cloud space and our internal network go down. It doesn't necessarily mean that access to those applications is cut off from the outside, because the applications are up. It's just the connectivity on the inside. Depending on the use case, if the application is hosted on the outside and it's being used by people on the inside - which in most cases is not the case - it's usually people who manage it who can't get to it. For the most part, we're okay with it.

I rate tech support highly, for the help we get.

Prior to having this, we had physical servers. We've virtualized almost everything that we can virtualize. I wish we could virtualize our IBM iSeries, the mainframe, which is impossible to do. But for everything else, I think we are pretty okay.

When selecting a vendor, I first look at

• proven industry standards
• longevity
• security
• good customer experience
• a robust infrastructure that is scalable and tested. 

Usually, when we make recommendations, which is one of the things we do as infrastructure specialists, we evaluate several vendors and try to see which ones match up most with these criteria. Whichever one comes out ahead, comes out ahead.

The NSX part of the setup was fairly complex: Setting up the networks and setting up the VPCs was a little bit challenging, but there was good support from both sides, from the VMware side and AWS side, to get things up and running the proper way, and that helped a lot.

We see a tremendous return on investment.

If you're not on vSphere, you should get on it as soon as possible because it will only make your life easier. All the different innovations that have been coming out over the years have shown that it's only going to get better, especially with artificial intelligence, IoT, etc. With all the different technologies that are being proposed, VMware is always going to get better. From a technology standpoint, anybody who is in the industry needs to be on this because it just makes everything easier.

We have been using the built-in security features such VM Encryptions and support for TPM and VBS, and it has been hit or miss for us. In some instances we've used it and in some instances we haven't. But for the most part, I think it's okay.

We have started using some cloud technologies with it, partnering with AWS to do that. We have a couple of internet-facing applications that we have used, that we have deployed to the cloud, and the experience has been somewhat okay.

Because of the nature of our business, there is an apprehension toward actually putting information out on the cloud, if it's not a private cloud. So the latter is what we have chosen to do. We have been able to deploy applications into our own private cloud space, with dedicated pipes to the cloud, with firewalls on both sides of it. We do AD Federation Services to authenticate between the cloud space and our internal network, and we have domain controllers in the cloud as well. We have gone through the growing pains of going to the cloud and now we're working through the quirks and nuisances that come along with that.

The primary use cases for the solution are all of our production and DTQ. 

We're not using any of the built-in security features.

We run 3,000 VMs. It works for what we need it to do. All of our retail point-of-sale stuff, the back-end for that, is on VMware. We're retail, so everything is run in virtual.

The vSphere Client always feels slow, and/or like it doesn't keep up with what I'm trying to do. So I usually use the thick client most of the time.

I'm looking forward to some of the new features on 6.7 where you can record your actions in the Client and then it will spit out all the code. So if you want a script of what you just did, it gives you all the code for that. That's probably the one thing I'm looking forward to the most in the 6.7.

I feel that it's stable. We haven't had any downtime because of the VMware.

It's scalable.

Technical support is helpful. I get through to the right people and they are able to give me the support I need.

It's the only virtual solution I've ever used.

The primary use case is to save us a lot of money. Really, the primary use case is to be flexible, to be scalable, to be agile, as the company changes. As a non-profit, we really change often. New programs come in every day. vSphere gives us the ability to be flexible The mission-critical apps we use it for include Exchange, SQL, Active Directory, document management systems. We use it for everything.

While we haven't seen a performance boost for these apps, they're flexible. That's really what it's about. I'm still learning how to make it boost performance.

We haven't used any of the built-in security features.

It saves us a lot of money.

VMotion is the biggest feature. It gives us the ability to move things on the fly. That's it.

I do not find it to be simple and efficient to manage. The tools, the interface to manage it, are a pain. In the latest version, they moved us to web-only, the Web Client and it's terrible. It's slow. It crashes. It's annoying. I used the Web Client in the older version and was happy. I would go back to the regular thick client but I don't have that option anymore, so I am always fighting it.

The solution itself is really stable.

The scalability is insane. It's great.

We were all physical and it wasn't scalable. Every time they came to me and said that they wanted to start a new project with a new piece of software, I had to buy hardware for it. One day we looked at it. Quick, funny story: big presentation to the Board. Spent an hour explaining what virtualization was. I said, "Okay. I can do this by spending less over the next five years and we've already budgeted more." And the Chief Financial Officer looked at me and said, "Why did you just waste our last hour? If it's going to cost us less, then just do it." Why didn't you start with that? Way to bury the lead!"

It was a no-brainer to move.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor is support, absolutely. US-based support that doesn't pass the buck, that takes ownership of a situation and deals with it.

The initial setup was straightforward. I built the whole thing myself, without knowing anything about VMware to begin with, just learning it as I went.

Our ROI is huge. We put, in hardware and software, probably $80,000 dollars into the solution and have never spent another penny in the last five years, other than for support. Compare that to a budget of $30,000 a year, we'd be at $150,000 in those five years. So, the return on investment is huge.

For our initial look into vSphere versus others, we started with Cisco's version of virtualization. It was cool. It was free. But it was a pain. It didn't scale. When I started looking at the software we wanted to run on it, nobody supported it. That made the decision.

In terms of advice to a colleague, I'm giving it every day. I take the guy out to lunch to beat him up with vSphere. I've got a buddy who is a Hyper-V guy. He's says, "But it's free," and I keep saying, "Well, you get what you pay for." He says, "But it never gives me any problems." I say, "Then why are you calling me every week asking me why Exchange is doing stupid things? I don't have those problems and I run exactly the same version you do."

It's stable. It just works. I don't have to think about it.

Some of the new stuff that's coming out is pretty exciting, as we start thinking of moving to the cloud. But, as a non-profit, at this point, it doesn't make sense to do so, yet. But as we move to the cloud, some of the new stuff they talked about yesterday, here at VMworld 2018, is really going to help us do that.

I give vSphere an eight out of ten because of the web interface. It would be a ten otherwise.

We use it to manage our VM servers, everything we have. We're about 98 percent virtualized and we're using VMware vSphere and it works great. It performs great.

In terms of mission-critical apps, we mainly host a lot of our accountants, so we have a lot of accounting software. It's really mission-critical to where we have to have these apps running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. With vSphere, we're able to use VMotion, HA, and Fault Tolerance to keep our apps up and running for them.

We don't use VM Encryption or support for TPM or VBS. We don't yet use VMware Cloud on AWS but we're looking forward to it.

Getting rid of our physical servers and going virtual is saving us some money in overall rack space.

Server consolidation.

It's extremely simple. Installing the ESXi is a piece of cake and then putting servers on there is really simple, as is having HA and building a cluster for our VM servers. It's very easy.

The UI is great with the new HTML.

In terms of stability, so far it's been really simple. We've been running it for a few years now and it has been flawless. We haven't looked back.

It's really simple to scale. Just add another server, add it to the cluster and, bingo bango, you're done.

Our experience with technical support has not been the greatest. We currently have a ticket open and it's been open for a few months now, for our VDI solution. I can't complain. In other situations, it has been fine.

A big thing for us, and the reason we went with VDI, was for security. We didn't want folks having laptops or taking them out of our environment, out of our building, and not having them secured, where somebody could just pick one up and take it. This way, we keep it all in-house and it's more secure. It's in our hands and not theirs.

We went with VMware because we were all more familiar with VMware and our vendors, our reps. We all have a great relationship with them, so we decided to go that route.

The setup was pretty straightforward.

I honestly don't know what our ROI is, but it's a lot.

We looked at Citrix and we looked at Azure.

Give it a shot, check it out how easy it is. It just works.

I rate it a ten out of ten. I'm a big advocate of VMware.