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Systems Engineerineering Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 51-200 employees
Real User
Sep 5, 2018
We use its customization to prevent network and DNS collisions to the router
Pros and Cons
  • "The VMware community is always there and it is a valuable resource."
  • "I use the ESXi a lot for my users to create their own templates and control their own VMs without my interaction."
  • "I use customization to prevent any network and DNS collisions to the router."

    What is our primary use case?

    Our primary use case is for labs, development workloads, and engineering. I use it for our processing development on our product. Our company does printing technologies for gaming, particularly for gaming casinos in the gaming industry.

    It's working great.

    We are looking at going to VMware Cloud on AWS. I'm familiar with the SDDC software solutions, but cost always comes in to play. I would like to find out more, as it sounds a lot cheaper now. We already use Azure for our deployment packages. Right now, it is just FTP, but we could use somewhere to actually manage the infrastructure ourselves. It is much easier to manage it than relying on customer infrastructure to do the hosting for us. We are mostly on-premise, but we are looking to move to the cloud since there are more opportunities there. It should help us gain more customers and expand the market share for our company.  

    How has it helped my organization?

    We are able to replicate and create customer environments. We can do an upgrade path in production and see what the expectations of the upgrade will be on production by testing it in the lab internally first. Then, once everything is approved by the customer and it works well, we can roll it out to production. Therefore, the downtime is planned.

    The solution is simple and efficient to manage. With VMotion, I don't have to worry about resources. It can move things around. For example, I use Confluence and JIRA as part of our documentation to establish a process within the app. 

    What is most valuable?

    • The hypervisor
    • I use the ESXi a lot for my users to create their own templates and control their own VMs without my interaction. 
    • The stability of the networking site
    • I can automate deployments.
    • I use customization to prevent any network and DNS collisions to the router.

    Our mission critical apps are mostly database servers. We are pretty much a Windows platform company.

    What needs improvement?

    Flexible pricing would be nice. Some of the pricing models are fairly big.

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    For how long have I used the solution?

    More than five years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    We take whatever the customer has and make sure we use our application to upgrade them. If there is anything unexpected, we already know internally instead of doing it during production or go live. It is bad for business to extend planned downtime more than expected.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    It is very scalable. Soon as I switched to a vSphere environment, ESXi, and vCenter, I was able to buy hardware and add it in. I just had to buy another license, since the infrastructure is there. It takes me a short amount of time to add something that benefits everybody.

    It scales vertically. In terms of horizonal scaling, it depends on what the requirements are for it.

    How are customer service and support?

    The VMware community is always there and it is a valuable resource. Just go to support.vmware.com, type in your question, and one or two users probably have experienced the same problem. 

    I haven't called them. I mostly go online.

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    The previous development team at my company used Workstation. When I joined the company, I didn't like the product. So as soon as I joined, I transformed our entire infrastructure to vSphere along with vCenter. This made things easier with our directory and for other users in the company to deploy and perform their own VM development. Managing users has become more streamlined.

    As soon as we switched over from Workstation to ESXi and vCenter, the downtime was very minimized. Growth and flexibility are now there. If I want to add more hosts, servers, and devices, it is not a big deal. The infrastructure is there. As far as having more job requirements, we wanted to explore our development lifecycle more without making major changes.

    How was the initial setup?

    I started the setup from scratch. The hardware was already there, and it is just a matter of getting software in. It is straightforward to set up. I have built many infrastructure environments.

    What about the implementation team?

    I worked with my internal team who did the installation. Mostly, my responsibility was to the VMware infrastructure, lining up the VMs, and what applications that needed to be installed.

    What was our ROI?

    Most of our current customers are pretty happy. They don't utilize VMware, but we just sell the software for them. Internally, we use VMware for support.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    We would like it to be affordable to use the manage services on the cloud, then let VMware manage it and have AWS a part of it. This would make the easier transition from on-premise to cloud and be of value. We don't want to go through a third-party vendor.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    Some of our customers use Hyper-V because it is much cheaper (free). I've seen it and it has the features. It does its job if there's a problem to solve for a small company. However, if you're going to grow, I am not totally impressed with it. There's no support. I didn't see any add-on development features in the pipeline. 

    What other advice do I have?

    Go for it. It's easy to use and manage.

    Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: support.

    Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
    PeerSpot user
    IT Analyst I at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees
    Real User
    Sep 4, 2018
    Virtualization makes it easier for us to back up, maintain, and manage our servers
    Pros and Cons
    • "Ease of support is one of the main features that we have with it. We're able to take Snapshots before doing updates to make it easy to roll back if something does happen to go wrong."
    • "The visibility that we have of our VMs is also important. What's being applied? Who has management of them? Laying it out in a virtual environment allows us customization for our students. We're able to respond to the students' needs much more quickly than we could in a physical environment."
    • "I would like to see a little bit more visibility regarding errors. When an error does occur, there are times where it says "Unknown error" or something to that effect, and it doesn't necessarily give you a lot of metrics. If you go online and you give a description of it, normally the VMware forums can help you find out what it is, but I'd like to see a little bit more visibility from the software itself regarding what's going on: "This went wrong, this is why.""

    What is our primary use case?

    vSphere allows us to virtualize our campus servers and our student environment. We run vCenter within vSphere, so we have about 300 or 400 student desktop workstations that we run at any given time. We are able to customize our students' experience very quickly, very easily, and are able to make it mobile from different computer labs on campus.

    We're also exploring opening it up so students would be able to remote into their VDI workstations from offsite. We're also looking into wrapping everything up with Workspace ONE, so we can virtualize more applications and let them have more of an MDM experience as well.

    We're not really virtualizing the apps themselves, yet. We're trying to move towards that. Our mission-critical things rely on our servers that we have virtualized. We have web servers, security servers, database servers that we have virtualized and that makes it easier for us to back up and maintain them. Really, vSphere plays a part in our management.

    How has it helped my organization?

    We have seen a performance boost. As we keep moving up to different versions it gets more seamless, it gets easier to maintain, to do updates to our virtual environment and to the physical end. We're also moving towards virtual storage. Moving to flash arrays and virtual storage is even speeding up our students' experience when using the virtual desktops. I would estimate a 25 percent boost.

    Another benefit we've seen is with our IT technicians. It used to be this IT was assigned to a specific area, and that was what they worked on. They had 300 or 400 machines that they would have to run around to, to maintain them; re-image them every semester. Now, with the virtual environment, they are able to keep more up-to-date on their applications, on their Windows updates, and do it in the background. They are able to refresh entire labs within less than an hour, rather than sitting there all day or all week refreshing all of the labs.

    We have a better, faster management. We have more productivity from our IT staff and more productivity from our students, as well.

    What is most valuable?

    Ease of support is one of the main features that we have with it. We're able to take Snapshots before doing updates to make it easy to roll back if something does happen to go wrong.

    The visibility that we have of our VMs is also important. What's being applied? Who has management of them? Laying it out in a virtual environment allows us to customize for our students. We're able to respond to the students' needs much more quickly than we could in a physical environment.

    I found it a little bit daunting at first when I was coming into it raw, but now the management of it is very simple.

    What needs improvement?

    I would like to see a little bit more visibility regarding errors. When an error does occur, there are times where it says "Unknown error" or something to that effect, and it doesn't necessarily give you a lot of metrics. If you go online and you give a description of it, normally the VMware forums can help you find out what it is, but I'd like to see a little bit more visibility from the software itself regarding what's going on: "This went wrong, this is why."

    For how long have I used the solution?

    One to three years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    The downtime that we have experienced has not been that much, and normally it's the result of a mistake on our part, not necessarily the software. We've misconfigured something or we haven't thought about a configuration setting that we should have put in place or we didn't do our research. It's not normally the software that has a problem. When we do have a software glitch, it is normally a reboot and it's back up and running, so we have not had much downtime.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    So far, we've really enjoyed the scalability of it. The main thing that we have to accommodate for is licensing, making sure that we have enough license to cover our expansion.

    Otherwise, we just throw a few more hard drives into our server array and make sure that we have enough storage.

    How are customer service and technical support?

    On those occasions where we do run into a problem, we have had great help from VMware's customer support. Recently I had problems getting new certificates for our servers to be able to bring them into our vSphere and Horizon environment. VMware support was able to help me diagnose what was going wrong with those, come up with a plan for the future to be able to more accurately get the certificates I needed, and integrate them into the environment.

    I would rate the technical support a solid eight out of 10, maybe even nine. They are responsive, always quick to answer questions, and knowledgeable.

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    I don't think we were using anything before vSphere. I think we led off with it. My partner was thinking for a time about Microsoft, but he decided that Hyper-V wasn't for us and we went with VMware, and we haven't regretted it a day since.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    Pricing can be an issue in terms of scalability, depending on how quickly you want to expand. If you budget every year, put some aside that you know you need to get another host and you plan for it, then it shouldn't be that hard. If you're going to try to all of a sudden say, "I want to add six hosts to my environment," then it's going to a little bit pricey and you're not going to want to spend the budget on it.

    What other advice do I have?

    Plan your environment well, determine what your needs are, and then try to bump that up by 20 percent; give yourself a little bit of future expanding. That way you don't have to leap off and buy a lot right away. Budget for the future if you can. Put a little bit away here and there. Look at the virtual storage, you will save yourself a lot of headaches on configuring. The physical storage can be a pain. The virtual storage, once you get it in place then you don't have to manage it much.

    Make sure that you really have spec'd out your ESXi host so it can support your environment. Normally, that's been fairly easy. Companies like HPE and Lenovo are more than eager to help you make sure that you have a server that is spec'd out for the VMware environment, and help you get solid on what you need.

    We haven't done a lot with the built-in security and encryption yet, but from what I've been looking at so far in vSphere 6.7, it looks like something that we would like to integrate. Before I became an analyst I helped manage TPM and BitLocker on laptops. It was a pain. It had to touch each device physically. I'm looking forward to 6.7 where I can utilize TPM 2.0 and encrypt all of my stations on the fly, and make it a more seamless experience.

    We are not using VMware Cloud on AWS. Being just a local community college, it's a little bit expensive for us right now, but one day we would like to.

    The product is a good, solid nine out of 10. The only reason I would knock it down any is, as I said, I wish the error messages would, at times, be a little bit more verbose and more explainable.

    Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
    PeerSpot user
    Buyer's Guide
    VMware vSphere
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    ITAnalysac7f - PeerSpot reviewer
    IT Analyst at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
    Real User
    Sep 4, 2018
    We have seen an improvement in uptime. The whole hardware lifecycle process is easier.
    Pros and Cons
    • "We have seen an improvement in uptime. The whole hardware lifecycle process is easier."
    • "On Vista, there should be a lot more new features. We would like to see more security features to harden our environment in the future."

    What is our primary use case?

    It's a virtualization service.

    The product is performing well. We are quite satisfied with it.

    We are looking into using VMware on AWS in the future.

    How has it helped my organization?

    We have seen an improvement in uptime. The whole hardware lifecycle process is easier, which was previously a pain.

    I find the solution simple and efficient to manage. It is not rocket science. It is easy to install and maintain. I didn't need to read a lot of books. The solution is quite handy.

    What is most valuable?

    • The high availability (HA)
    • VMotion
    • The seamless 24-hour uptime

    We have a lot of databases running on mission critical apps which control our end production line: Exchange, virtualize, and the main controller. We are at about a 85 percent virtualization rate. We also have mission critical apps which conform our factory.

    What needs improvement?

    On Vista, there should be a lot more new features. We would like to see more security features to harden our environment in the future.

    From a technical point, there is not much room for new innovation in the hypervisor. It is more about improving the environment or the landscape, not the product.

    The licensing should be more competitive based on its price. There should be more features for the licensing that you own. Money is a factor, because our management is looking right now at its money. The most annoying thing is to tell people that I would like to continue using VMware, and have them argue the other solutions are free.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    More than five years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    Maybe 80 percent of the time, our issues were hardware problems caused by HPE. Crappy driver issues leading to a blue screen of death. If you have a corrupt driver, is it the fault of the VMware or is it the fault of the vendor who should support it? These were mostly our outages.

    This was due to the product cycles being too quick. Neither VMware nor HPE could test the stuff properly. The cycles were too quick and they had to push out the software, then errors happened. Both software companies needed to fix or address issues in their old versions, but then they also implemented new bugs in their newer versions. Software will never be error-free, because the product cycle frequency is too high. 

    We are version 6.0, but these issues happened on 5.0, 5.1, and 5.5. We haven't seen them on the current version. It is annoying because we work with clusters, and we can't really have one node fail.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    It can scale linearly. At some locations though, we are using HPE SimpliVity to scale.

    How are customer service and technical support?

    The technical support is very good. I have nothing to complain about, as they are quick and try to respond quickly. Sometimes, they don't have a solution right away, but that's reasonable. 

    If you track down an issue and you don't have a solution or work around, you have to give it to the engineers who will take sometime fixing it. That's fair.

    We have PCS support. It has better support compared to HPE. Maybe Cisco is better, but it is still good.

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    We were not previously using anything from a virtualization perspective.

    How was the initial setup?

    If you figure out how to do it, it's quite easy. 

    There are so many options on the market, and if you switch from a SAN to an S environment, you have to look for white papers and guidelines from Windows. It is also hyper-converged. Yet, if you can follow the guidelines, it's easy. 

    What about the implementation team?

    We did the implementation on our own.

    What was our ROI?

    The business is able to gain in faster services because you are provisioning the ends more quickly due to templates. Thus, the provisioning is quite good. 

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    The pricing is too expensive. The reason why we implemented Hyper-V is because of the licensing costs. 

    They are way too high. This is tough when you have to present to management with a flat budget, and everything will be more expensive. 

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    We are currently using VMware and Hyper-V.

    Our shortlist consisted of KVM, Hyper-V, and VMware. We went with VMware back then because of its reporting, it was market leader, it has good support, and the price was previously fair. 

    What other advice do I have?

    I would recommend trying the solution.

    Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
    PeerSpot user
    SeniorSyb3f0 - PeerSpot reviewer
    Senior Systems Administrator at a consultancy with 5,001-10,000 employees
    Real User
    Sep 4, 2018
    We have seen a significant performance boost for legacy apps, and we're able to rapidly scale workloads
    Pros and Cons
    • "The most valuable features for us are DRS, VMotion, and, of course, some of the analytics that we were able to define to quantify our workloads and tell us how we are able to make our data center more efficient."
    • "I'd like to see a little bit more integration for VDI. I think that Composer servers, security servers, broker servers with connections, I'm not sure they are necessary at this point. Perhaps they could have a lot of those functions baked directly into the hypervisor. It seems to me that if the hypervisor is scalable and flexible enough, that the processor and compute can handle all of that. Maybe we eliminate those other components for VDIs and have more mixed workloads: server workloads and desktop workloads all in the same hypervisor."

    What is our primary use case?

    The primary use case is enterprise virtualization for server consolidation, energy conservation, data center space conservation, and overall efficiency and scalability.

    The mission-critical apps we use it for are everything from machine-learning to business processing to scientific research and development.

    How has it helped my organization?

    We have absolutely seen a performance boost, in particular with some of our legacy applications. For some of the legacy apps, we have seen at least a 75 percent increase. In addition, some of the newer applications have also seen a boost because they're just more efficient running on VM rather than on bare metal. For the newer apps, depending on how they're optimized, the increase has been at least 10 percent.

    Another benefit we have seen is the many-to-one relationship of VMs to hardware, versus one-to-one. It's a real win-win for our data center. It's a win-win for taxpayer dollars. And from a scalability point of view, we're able to rapidly scale workloads where we weren't able to do so before, working with just our pure hardware.

    In addition to that, it really fits nicely into our automation efforts, where we can dramatically reduce the deployment times for applications and the services we provide.

    What is most valuable?

    The most valuable features for us are DRS, VMotion, and, of course, some of the analytics that we were able to define to quantify our workloads and tell us how we are able to make our data center more efficient.

    It's absolutely efficient and simple to manage in general. Set it up, configure it, then monitor, manage, and maintain. That's it. What makes it simple to manage is that we use a flavor of Auto Deploy, storage policies, among other features around policies, where they come online and their policies are in them. Everything conforms to a policy. It's pretty much set up for good.

    What needs improvement?

    I'd like to see a little bit more integration for VDI. I think that Composer servers, security servers, broker servers with connections, I'm not sure they are necessary at this point. Perhaps they could have a lot of those functions baked directly into the hypervisor. It seems to me that if the hypervisor is scalable and flexible enough, that the processor and compute can handle all of that. Maybe we eliminate those other components for VDIs and have more mixed workloads: server workloads and desktop workloads all in the same hypervisor.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    More than five years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    Having been a customer for a long time, and running this for well over a decade, stability has not been a problem. It has its nuances, it's not perfect, but stability hasn't been an issue.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    Scalability has been the goal all along here, to be able to meet in the middle of the scalability, horizontally and vertically. We have over 10,000 users.

    How is customer service and technical support?

    We've used technical support in the past. It was "fair" in the beginning, it's certainly better now. We don't necessarily rely too much on support now because there's such a breadth of knowledge in the community and among other customers so that everybody is connected.

    How was the initial setup?

    I've been involved from the beginning until the end. In the early days, before ESX, we worked with what was called GSX, or Ground Storm X. It wasn't easy, but once you got it configured it worked and it did what it was supposed to do. We didn't have any major issues.

    It was all self-installed. A lot of it was a matter of reading the directions, following them, and going to "next".

    What was our ROI?

    One of the things I think a lot of people are inherently bad about is assuming ROI and never quantifying it. Where I am, we've done a pretty good job of quantifying over the years. We've not only studied everything down to the number of Velcro ties used but the number of cores, the cost per core for network, even power cords, and including the consumption of water. 

    We've been able to quantify virtualizing everything we can, instead of just assuming it, for ROI. We have been able to show quite a bit of good discipline around that. Again, on behalf of tax-payer dollars, I feel confident that with our shift to virtualization over a decade ago, we can definitely quantify our ROI. It's really simple.

    Data-centers grow in a different direction now. They grow smaller and they become very dense, very lean, and that, unto itself, shows an ROI. There's really not a whole lot of assuming at this point that needs to be done. It's just there. You can quantify it very easily.

    What other advice do I have?

    I have recommended VMware over the at least 12 years now that I've been working directly with them and VMware's hypervisor products. I've recommended it to a lot of folks, and this goes back to the days when other players were involved; companies like Virtual Iron and Zen. VMware has always been a leader in that space and I foresee that they always will be.

    Although I work in government, we are actively pursuing VMware on Cloud and we are awaiting certain certifications to help drive the initiative. At the moment we're at a standstill with that.

    In over a decade, from where we started until where we are today, I would say that this solution is right around a 10 out of 10. And I can confidently say that for any customer. Even for those who are just starting up, you're working with a product that's tried and true. It didn't just come out yesterday. It's been here for a very long time.

    Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
    PeerSpot user
    IT Operations Services Manager at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
    Real User
    Sep 4, 2018
    It is a single pane of glass that lets you access your hosts and VMs
    Pros and Cons
    • "It is a single pane of glass that lets you access your hosts and VMs."
    • "We scale it both vertically and hortizonally. We have many data centers on it."
    • "I would like to see AI in future releases."

    What is our primary use case?

    We use vSphere to monitor our ESX hosts and VMs. We use it on day-to-day basis. vCenter one of the first things employees open when they arrive to our offices. It is a good product. It has an array of things that you perform with it, and we use it all the time.

    We are planning to use AWS, but we are not using it yet. 

    How has it helped my organization?

    It's easy to use. For an admin who is just starting to use it, it doesn't matter, since it's generally widely used. This is a big advantage. Anybody can just come in and start using it from day one.

    It's simple to use. I don't use it a lot, but I can get in and guide myself through the menus. That is what makes it intuitive and easy to use.

    What is most valuable?

    It is a single pane of glass that lets you access your hosts and VMs. This makes the solution impactful, as you have one place to go to manage everything from one console.

    The encryption security is great. It is a topic we take into consideration daily. It is important that we enable all the features and make sure our data center is secure. Nobody can hack us, get in, steal information, and use it from our systems.

    We run an electric grid. Our apps that run on the electric grid are going on VMs, so these are very secure apps.

    What needs improvement?

    I would like to see AI in future releases.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    More than five years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    We have had downtime, like everybody in the industry.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    We scale it both vertically and hortizonally. We have many data centers on it.

    How is customer service and technical support?

    We have a great team behind us technically from VMware.

    How was the initial setup?

    I did not do the initial setup.

    What was our ROI?

    It keeps together a lot of different environments, making it easier and faster to work. It definitely has a good turn around.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    The pricing could be improved.

    What other advice do I have?

    I would definitely recommend the product.

    Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
    PeerSpot user
    Senior Systems Administrator at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
    Real User
    Sep 4, 2018
    Having a lot of the encryption built in helps us with federal compliance
    Pros and Cons
    • "With the current compliance options that I have to go through, it's very nice to have a lot of the encryption built in. It checks a lot of boxes for the federal level so I don't have to either bolt something on or have something on top of it. Having it native and integrated into the system makes things much easier."
    • "being able to manage a lot of servers in one pane of glass makes things a lot simpler. Basically, a lot of things just happen in one area. You can roll things over, move things around more dynamically, without having to hit multiple systems."
    • "Valuable features include VHA, DRS, VMotion, and redundancy and failover; any DR situation."
    • "Not having to buy something from a third-party to scan the actual hardware components, like the hard drives and the port containers and fan speeds; not having to bolt something on and go through another vendor, would be helpful."
    • "the HTML version of things needs to get a little bit better. The vSphere side of things gets a little difficult to manage; right-click, in some browsers, doesn't work as well as it used to. I'm seeing a little bit of general latency that we didn't used to get with the thick client, although it's getting there."

    What is our primary use case?

    Our use case is virtualization of hardware infrastructure, for return on investment cases. We have done pretty well with it. I'm really happy with it.

    The mission-critical apps we run on them include SQL; there is a lot of file sharing; there are a lot of websites and web servers running on them. There's some big data stuff for big science. We have to be able to digest lots of data and then pull analytics on it at a high-level, and be able to show big data in useful ways.

    How has it helped my organization?

    With the current compliance options that I have to go through, it's very nice to have a lot of the encryption built in. It checks a lot of boxes for the federal level so I don't have to either bolt something on or have something on top of it. Having it native and integrated into the system makes things much easier.

    Also, being able to manage a lot of servers in one pane of glass makes things a lot simpler. Basically, a lot of things just happen in one area. You can roll things over, move things around more dynamically, without having to hit multiple systems. Being able to manage it, in its entirety, is easier and better for us.

    What is most valuable?

    • VHA
    • DRS
    • VMotion
    • Redundancy, failover, any DR situation
    • Reducing the overall physical footprint for electrical needs, heating, cooling
    • Money-saving, in general

    What needs improvement?

    In terms of management, it's getting better. There were recent changes with the infrastructure and the architecture, going from a physical vSphere vCenter client to the web interface. That has slowed things down a little bit, to be honest. It's getting better. With the 5.7 release they've optimized it, the menus are a little snappier, and it isn't as cumbersome to manage through as it was on the previous website or vSphere Web Client instance.

    Also, reading some of the sensors in the hardware itself, that's where VMware does a really great job in the digital infrastructure and being able to scale things and knowing what's going on in vSphere. But not having to buy something from a third-party to scan the actual hardware components, like the hard drives and the port containers and fan speeds; not having to bolt something on and go through another vendor, would be helpful.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    More than five years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    Stability has always been really well done with VMware. I have always been very happy with the stability of the system. You can set it up, you can check your optimizations there. But as far as weird issues with being able to convert things from physical to virtual, I've really had no big problems in switching that over. It's been really seamless to the end-user as well, just doing standardized conversions. It's been very stable and easy to manage.

    I haven't had any loss of data in quite some time. Data is the key to everything. Downtime and loss of data are almost unacceptable in my current position.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    I can always go horizontal, vertical is a little problematic sometimes. Horizontally, being able to add storage on the fly - even hot ad-hoc remove, if we do have some higher workloads or the like - we can always scale that without re-booting, with the newer operating systems. So the scalability portion is always on key.

    How are customer service and technical support?

    Technical support is pretty good. I've had to use them a couple times for smaller issues. They've always been very helpful and we've always come to a solution.

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    The backup solution we were using at the time was Dell's version of IBM's Tape Library with Symantec Backup Exec. We were doing tape backups at the file level, not really any virtual snaps, so incrementals every day, fulls on the weekends.

    As data gets bigger it's harder and harder to back up and that's where virtualization comes in, because you can start doing analysis on data changes and deltas a little bit better. Tracking and things that are tied into VMware assist digital backup solutions to be faster, more resilient, and have less downtime in a restore situation.

    How was the initial setup?

    In my previous job, I was a Senior Systems Administrator for a credit union. We were running VMware 3.0, 12 years ago, and having that experience - and being bleeding edge at that time - helped me really be a catalyst in getting over to virtualization. That knowledge that I had in the past has always helped me, because I've seen VMware grow and do the things that it has done. Having that knowledge was helpful in setting it up from fresh, again: making the redundancies, knowing some of the pitfalls you have when first setting it up, and seeing a lot of the capital that you can lose if you don't understand what you're doing at that time.

    I set it up myself. I can get technical support, but I can't have on-prem or anyone else.

    What was our ROI?

    Performance is somewhat relative, but an overall return on investment comes from not having multiple physical servers and from helping to aggregate a lot of the processors and RAM, and being able to use them more efficiently. We're not really worried about speed but about more efficiency.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    I've been with them for so long, I never looked to much else. I've always been happy with vSphere and seeing what they've done for VMware itself. Intel products weren't really there, and I still don't feel they're there.

    I've really enjoyed the Dell partnership because I do Dell on the back-end. The hand-holding between Dell and VMware works relatively well, with their hardware control lists and being sure they stay compatible for long periods of time, without having to spend money on new hardware. You can stay in your swim lane. That partnership is really a key to success.

    What other advice do I have?

    My advice is "do it".

    I rate vSphere at nine out of 10 because the HTML version of things needs to get a little bit better. The vSphere side of things gets a little difficult to manage; right-click, in some browsers, doesn't work as well as it used to. I'm seeing a little bit of general latency that we didn't used to get with the thick client. It's getting there.

    Version 6.71 brought some of those performance metrics back, but it's just hard to get from one end to the other. With the ever-changing federal requirements, we need to really strip down and minimize what can be done in the browsers. It is getting more and more difficult, Java being the key thing. Going to HTML 5, that's a great thing because Java is going to be pay-to-play next year. And you don't have the vulnerabilities with HTML 5. It works symbiotically. We're seeing that progress. There are some growing pains, but it's getting there.

    Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
    PeerSpot user
    reviewer924948 - PeerSpot reviewer
    Senior Manager Systems/Network, Global Information Systems at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
    Real User
    Sep 4, 2018
    We can easily pull reports and give access to people to look at specs or performance metrics
    Pros and Cons
    • "Visibility: We can easily pull reports and give access to other people to look at specs or performance metrics."
    • "When it comes to cross-regional (e.g., someone in the US managing the China vSphere implementations), it can be a somewhat slow. I would recommend increasing the speed. While there has already been improvement there, I would like to see more."

    What is our primary use case?

    We use it to manage multi-site, multi-regional implementations of VMware. We use the security end roles to give different tiers of access from the VM up to the VMware installation. We manage the roles and responsibilities within the security to do this. 

    We do all the functionality inside vSphere. We use VMotion and DRS to manage some of our licensing issues that we have. With bigger software vendors, like Oracle, we use it to keep licenses and requirements compliant and keep VMs running on specific hardware. 

    We use it for quite a few daily tasks: cloning and testing out patching. Then, we can perform snapshots through vSphere. 

    How has it helped my organization?

    Visibility: We can easily pull reports and give access to other people to look at specs or performance metrics. This came as a bonus to us. Yet, we have been using it for quite a long time (12 to 13 years). 

    The solution is simple and efficient to manage. It has brought ease of use to employees who are not at a senior level. It has been able to expose minimal tasks which can relieve some of my senior guys to do engineering tasks, as opposed to help desk, reboots, restarts, etc. We have been able to pass some of those tasks along. 

    What is most valuable?

    The ability to segregate roles and responsibilities, as well as regions. For example, I can give access to my Chinese team to manage the China servers and hosts. On the other hand, I could give access to my Canadian team to manage global VMware installations. Therefore, I like the flexibility of this tool.

    We have just migrated most of our SQL and enterprise databases to vSphere. We don't use it for Oracle, but we do for most other things. We also use it for our communications exchange link, etc. Therefore, it is pretty business critical when it comes to the back office support and server implementations.

    What needs improvement?

    There has been a lot of improvement with UI: its speed and usability features. Before, it was very slow. When it comes to cross-regional (e.g., someone in the US managing the China vSphere implementations), it can be a somewhat slow. I would recommend increasing the speed. While there has already been improvement there, I would like to see more.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    More than five years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    I haven't had any real issues. In the very beginning, there were some issues when upgrading or migrating from versions. However, our last upgrade was 5.5 to 6.5 where went from Windows to the Linux OVF version, and we did not have any issues with it. 

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    It is easy to scale and obtain as much power as we need. It is easy to provision and join it to the cluster. We haven't had any issues or limitations.

    How are customer service and technical support?

    Technical support is very good. I haven't used them in quite some time though, because we have on-staff VMware experts. When I did use them a long time ago for compatibility with network cards (we use FCoE, which is not the industry standard), they were pretty quick to link us back to some articles to help us resolve our issues. 

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    When I first came on board, they had a very small implementation of Citrix. The servers at that time would cost 20K per application. They didn't allow us to centrally manage any systems. There would be a hodgepodge of vendors and versions of hardware. Therefore, it was a more difficult to track. When I came on board, we were maybe 20 to 30 percent virtualized. Since then, we're probably 99 percent virtualized. This did reduce staffing costs.

    The APIs and plugins are important. We used to use NetApp. We use now InfiniteApp and Compellent. Having these types of plugins and using their APIs in the storage subsystems, allows general admins to provision storage easily, as opposed to being a storage admin. It has alleviated having to have five to 10 storage admins. We consolidated to one or two storage admins, while having the others be able to provision their own storage. 

    What was our ROI?

    We are spending less on buying bigger machines, which are overprovisioned. Thus, the ROI is found in consolidation and cost savings.

    There are a lot of management and soft skills that we end up being able to save on. For example, my engineers in Canada could watch over systems in China, California, and Phoenix. Thus, it gives us the flexibility of administration. 

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    We evaluated Hyper-V four or five years ago. They weren't as fast to develop technologies or even adopting the technology. There were some tools missing. Also, they were less innovative than VMware. Now, I think Microsoft has caught up a bit. However, it seems that VMware is putting a lot more R&D money into the product. So, we've been happy. We haven't had a need to leave.

    What other advice do I have?

    • Look at the market and see what is supportable. How long can you support the product. VMware has the history. It has the people who can support it in the industry. 
    • Look at the supportability of it. Look at the job market and how many people, from a staffing perspective, can support it. 
    • Then, look at the cost, because I don't think cost is everything.

    Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They are a leader and more innovative than the competitors.

    Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
    PeerSpot user
    SystemAd3999 - PeerSpot reviewer
    System Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
    Real User
    Sep 4, 2018
    Gives us flexibility and provides our user base with ease of use

    What is our primary use case?

    We use it for VMware AirWatch/Workspace ONE: managing mobile devices.

    How has it helped my organization?

    We haven't seen a performance boost at all because we haven't been using the product long enough to be able to fairly evaluate it. But I have no complaints with the performance at this point.

    What needs improvement?

    The roadmap VMware has for Workspace ONE is on target with what we want to do. A year from now I might have a different opinion, but right now, I'm good. I see no negatives at this point.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    It is a stable product. It has been stable since we installed it eight months ago.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    It's a scalable solution. We went from 200 test devices to 11,000 devices in three weeks, without any issues.

    How is customer service and technical support?

    So far, we haven't used technical support a lot but I would rate it a three out of five. They have to earn my trust.

    How was the initial setup?

    The setup is not difficult but there a lot of details that may or may not be documented clearly in the installation guides. What made it difficult for us was that we had to keep asking questions that should have been documented but were not.

    What was our ROI?

    Our ROI is the ease of use for users.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    We abandoned one vendor and looked at two others but I can't name them. We dealt with one vendor for five years and we bailed as quickly as possible.

    What other advice do I have?

    I would recommend it highly. I have no complaints. We did a PoC with them and we have been using other products from VMware for years.

    The important criteria involved in choosing it were flexibility and ease of use for our user base.

    My advice, if you are going to implement it, is: Read the documentation and question the vendor carefully when doing the install.

    Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
    PeerSpot user
    Buyer's Guide
    Download our free VMware vSphere Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
    Updated: January 2026
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