VMware vSphere Reviews

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.

We use it to virtualize our server infrastructure.

Virtualization has made it easier for us to manage our environment. We can manage it from location, the vSphere web client.

We find the solution simple and efficient to manage. 

It provides us cost savings. We are able to virtualize instead of buying many physical servers. Therefore, we can buy one server and add VMs on top of it.

The SQL Servers are our mission critical apps.

• Keep innovating.
• Make it more efficient and stable.

It's very stable. We've had no issues with it.

It's very scalable. You can add different components to it. Moving into the future, as we do different things, we'll be able to stay with VMware.

The technical support is very helpful. VMware's technical support seems to be very knowledgeable.

We did not have a previous solution that we were using.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

It's huge. It has been a big return on investment for us. It saves us money because we don't have to buy as many physical servers. VMware seems to be the future of computing.

It is cost effective. 

We did not look at anything else. We just looked at VMware.

We are just learning about VM Encryption, TPS, and VBS right now. We just moved to VMware ESX 6.7. While I don't have a lot of experience in it yet, but we're looking to implement them.

Since we have had VMware, we've had no problems with it. It's easy to manage. It works very well. Other competitors may not offer as much. You can do a lot with VMware. You get different plugins, so it's a great product. Just go with it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Cost
• Stability.

It's how we manage our server infrastructure virtually.

It meets all of our needs.

I'm looking forward to the HTML client being finished. That's the thing that's annoying me, but I know it's coming this fall.

If they were going to make the transition from the standalone installable client to the HTML, I wish they would have done more development on it before they released. It's not feature-complete, so we have to go back to the old client to do certain things, and I don't really want to.

It's a very stable product.

We haven't had any scalability issues yet. I don't foresee us having that issue. We're small enough that, if there is a case where it wouldn't scale, it's not going to be discovered by us.

Technical support is always helpful.

I would absolutely recommend it. vSphere has been at the last two jobs that I've had and it's solid.

It's a definite nine out of 10. I'm not sure that there's anything out there that would be better. Microsoft has a hypervisor but I think VMware is more feature-complete.

I'm building a VDI center and a second-tier user. In terms of mission-critical apps, we use it for our executive pool of users to secure their everyday work. Sometimes we use it for distance education programs as well.

It has been performing pretty well.

We have seen a boost in performance in terms of delivery, but in everyday work, it's just like any other. Our delivery lift is probably more than 50 percent.

In terms of delivery, very often we would have requests for adding some new applications which were not previously there. And in previous deliveries, we would have to lose a day or so to prepare the application. Today it takes me about two hours at the most.

Its most valuable features are reliability, for sure, and quickness in getting the job done. I can spin off 100 or 200 machines in the matter of half an hour.

If I could talk to the engineers I would probably suggest a little bit different approach. There's a process that includes base-lining, then installing the program, and then doing the differentiation. That kind of approach for delivering applications, in my opinion, is way quicker. That approach would take me not more than half an hour to prepare any application. That's a feature I would like to see.

We haven't had any stability problems.

From my point of view, it scales really well; in terms of storage, I don't know.

Test it, give it a try, and see how it goes. Definitely try it.

For me, the most important criteria when looking for a vendor are

• reliability
• ease of use
• customer support.

I would rate it at eight out of 10 because there is still room for improvement. However, we are not using the full extent of the product so I might be wrong. There is some room for improvement in the ease of use.

Use case is to manage virtuals; spin them up, bring them down, create them, and a little maintenance on them. It performs okay for me.

We do DRS for load-balancing. We're looking at doing Microsoft SQL virtual on it, probably without clustering; replacing physical clusters with it; and job scheduling; all probably in Q1.

The most valuable feature is that it's not a Windows license. It's also good that it finally has the patch manager included in it. And it's simple and efficient to use.

It will be nice when it's all HTML 5.

It would be nice if it had auto-scaling, no need to select CPU or select database size. Let it auto-scale, let it use the features that VMware has, instead of having to preselect.

It's solid. Other than a host crashing, we haven't really had any downtime.

For us, the scalability is good. We haven't hit any limitations.

Technical support is a little slow to get back to you. We haven't had any mission-critical outages but we play some phone-tag. It could be better.

The initial setup could be a little convoluted. You've got the PSC or you've got something else, plus you've got to the vSphere, and then you want to do Server Linked Mode. You have different environments, you have different storages. Some support the plugin, some don't. That's a pain.

Hyper-V sucks, some of the other stuff isn't good. Cloud solutions are too expensive, if you're actually going to use them. We did a side-by-side comparison of Hyper-V and VMware and VMware was substantially better for performance and usability.

Do a side-by-side comparison. Try it, stay away from Microsoft. The Microsoft solution of being everything to everybody does not fit. Never fits.

Everything that we do is strictly within our own company. So we don't do encryption, although we might look at that. We don't really have a need for TPM. It's a pretty controlled environment.

I would rate vSphere an eight out of 10. To make it a 10 they need to get rid of Flash and then apologize for having used Flash, have it auto-scale, and no Java.

We run, easily, 98 percent of our servers out of vSphere. We pretty much have nothing physical anymore.

In terms of mission-critical apps, our entire ERP environment is all virtualized, outside of the rack. Everything in our organization, our student database records, employee records, all of our management stuff, is in VMware.

It's difficult to say if we had a performance boost when we moved to vSphere because we have been using VMware for a long time. Our ERP was actually the driving force behind our acquisition of VMware. We used that as the driver to get VMware in the door and going. Then, as we started to see what it was capable of doing - essentially running this entire heavy product - we started consuming more and more of our servers and eliminating physical machines, based on the success that we had with the ERP system.

What I like about it is being able to see my entire organization, especially with some of the newer enhanced links. All of my data centers show up in one view and I can see every server that's running. I also get performance statistics so if there are issues, major problems going on, I can see them.

Management of the solution depends on the interface you are in. The Flash interface can be a little cumbersome sometimes, but thankfully they are moving all of that into the HTML 5. I did see that with the 6.7 Update 1, every function now is pretty much capable of being run from HTML 5. I'm really happy about that and looking forward to moving to that.

Unfortunately, because I'm the infrastructure guy, some of the features, day-to-day things, require me to go back into the Flash version, but I long to go with the HTML 5. It's really fast, performance is great on that, it looks really good, and using it is not a pain.

It would be nice if they could make the upgrades a little bit smoother but sometimes that's a little tricky because, unfortunately, everyone can throw plugins into the environment and VMware can't necessarily control all of those. So I understand the headache for the engineering team there.

The EXSi hosts are rock solid. We've had a couple problems once or twice with a driver update or bad firmware on one of the devices, but I haven't actually had a problem with those in years now. They pretty much run rock solid, 24 hours a day.

vSphere itself is great when you don't need to make updates, but any time you have to touch it, unfortunately there is always a little bit of a fight to get it to do what you want. But then, once you get it there, it's great.

We have grown our environment, introduced new hosts, taken old hosts out. We have some 1,500 VMs running inside of all of our environments now and that has been a slow growth. I don't know how long it took us to get there, but we've grown to that level and it's never once given us a problem. From the interface, you see how much CPU utilization and RAM utilization that each one of those hosts is giving you. You can tell ahead of time when you need to start expanding the environment. And with VMotion, you expand the environment and then let DRS have at it and walk away.

Often, by the time I'm going for support, there's a major issue with the environment. It sometimes takes a little bit of time for them to either see what's going on or to get me to whatever support I need. The few times I have had to call them on something very basic though, they have been pretty quick.

We use the appliances, so the setups are pretty straightforward. Anytime I have to install new test stuff, I never really have much of a problem with it anymore. Obviously, in the past, there were the issues with SSL certificates, but a lot of that has been worked out and the systems are pretty straightforward now.

Upgrades, sometimes, are hit and miss. It depends upon the complexity of the environment. The more side products you are throwing into vSphere, the stickier it can get. I've had upgrades that have failed, but what's really great about using the appliances is that, when the upgrade failed, I just shrugged my shoulders, turned that new box off, turned the old box back on, and kept moving along for a while, until we figured out the issue.

In term of advice, obviously some of the SSL stuff would be good to know upfront because the requesting of the certificates, while it's gotten easier, can still be a little bit tricky. There are so many of them that you need. Knowing the right steps for selecting what you need can be challenging.

We're not using VM encryption, support for TPM or VBS right now, but we're looking at implementing some of that stuff to improve our security stance.

We're slowly attempting to push our database administrators into moving into VMware. They're reluctant, of course, but we have not given them much of a choice. They will come along and we just need to make sure that they're comfortable and we get them fully supported and happy.

I would easily rate the solution a nine out of 10. The little problems I have with it here and there notwithstanding, it's the easiest product I have ever had to use for something as complex as your entire infrastructure being in one area. I have dabbled around with other products and they never seem to quite be at the same level of stability and feature sets.

We're virtualizing the whole infrastructure of the company. We are only keeping some of the bigger servers as bare metal, but aside from that, everything is being virtualized.

We use vSphere for mission-critical apps including SAP and part of our internal development in C+, for the solution that collects everything for the buyers.

We have seen a performance boost because we have been able to more dynamically allocate either memory or processors.

It has provided us with cost reductions, a little bit more speed in deploying servers, and, of course, consolidation.

It's a very nice tool to be able to reduce your footprint, consolidate servers, and accumulate several servers in a high-density configuration.

It's pretty simple to manage.

It's simple enough right now, but some more automation tools would definitely make it simpler.

It's pretty well integrated with vROps but the integration could be improved a little bit. 

It's pretty stable. We have a wide variety of versions, starting from 4.5 all the way up to 6.5. They all work together and it's pretty stable.

It's simple to scale and the upgrades are pretty simple as well. The upgrades were straightforward. We just installed a new HPC and GN and we deployed everything in there.

However, I prefer to erase completely and reinstall, from the top.

We have Premium Support and they're excellent.

We see a high return on investment, precisely because of the higher density hardware. We're using fewer hypervisors, which results in some return. We also have more virtual servers and less cost. Everything goes hand-in-hand.

Analyze your infrastructure first, see what you want to do, and then start deploying everything from zero.