VMware vSphere Reviews

We use it for about 90 percent of our corporate network. 

We have a separate vSphere for an ISP that we run on a private and public cloud, because we are an anti-cloud company.

It rides our entire corporate network. Everything inside of our corporate Windows domain (e.g., domain controller, database files, etc.) rides inside VMware.

In the last three years, we have moved from a physical to a virtual environment. We have removed the need for backups and going to the office at three in the morning to change a server. I do everything during my business hours. It gave me my life back.

• Stability: Since it is riding inside of a multi-hardware environment, downtime is virtually nothing. That is a plus.
• It is simple to manage. 
  
• We use two-factor authentication.
  

• It is simple to break. 
• As far as ease of use and their front end (vCenter), it needs refreshing. They are doing some good things with HTML5. I would like them to move into having a containerized application to manage the vCenter.
• I would like having something that works on a smaller screen, so we can get to it on our iPads and have it more touch-centric versus having to sit at a laptop.

The product is very scalable. Since it is a virtualized environment where all the compute rides, it doesn't care about what is riding under it. Therefore, you can expand or shrink it as much as you want.

Most of my support goes through my third-party. The person who helped us integrate VMware is the person who we also contact for support. They have an inside support guy with VMware. While it is a middle man type of thing, it has been pretty good so far.

We started out in the Microsoft Hyper-V because it came with everything in their license. After messing with Hyper-V, we always had a small VMware environment. With some of the blade services that came out from Dell and Cisco, we moved over to VMware because they utilize all the back-end interconnects a lot better than Microsoft does. After that, we went full VMware.

I miss the Enterprise tier. When they went to Enterprise Plus, it increased the price. I was one of the guys that operated well inside the Enterprise tier. I paid a little bit more than standard but I got a lot more features. Enterprise Plus has a lot of things that I'll never use. So when they chopped that tier out, they kneecapped me. 

If you go with a standard license, it's very affordable. If you start digging into how they price all of their add-ons compared to Hyper-V, you get into the mud, because Hyper-V bundles everything together. So, at least you can customize your pricing to exactly what you need, so that is a plus.

We evaluated Cisco and Dell. We have been moving more towards Cisco's computing. We did evaluate Micro-Tech for switching since they have cheap switches.

Do your homework and build it from the ground up. Set up a plan to replace everything and get started from the beginning as a full virtualized environment. It won't bite you later, which is one thing we were worried about, and we ended up having to do extra work to do small steps into virtualization. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

1. Interoperability with what I currently have and its ability to work with others.
2. Support.
3. Price.

We use vSphere to manage the various vCenters that my group is responsible for. We use it for the main controllers. We have VMs that that manage access to buildings. Until there's a problem you don't realize, necessarily, how many key systems have been virtualized. If we shut everything down, then maybe people would realize how virtualization has really changed things.

We don't do anything active with the built-in security features, such as VM Encryption and support for TPM and VBS.

It's a big difference compared to having everything on hardware. In that situation, if you want to change memory, you have to bring your system down, open up the box, put new memory in - or a new processor, or any other hardware changes you want to make. With VMware, you may have to bring it down to make some changes, but then it's right back up again in a few minutes. It's a lot easier than if it was hardware.

There are various clients, for the environment that we have, that can be used. There's the thick client, there's the web client, there are obviously new clients when we upgrade to vSphere 6.7. One of the things I like with the web client, versus the thick client, is that we're able to access all the vCenters that we manage. With the thick client, you have to log in to one vCenter at a time.

As far as the web client goes, one of the frustrating things is that it's dependent on different browsers. One day it may work with only a given browser or there may be issues with Flash. So I look forward to being able to use the HTML 5 client. Hopefully, it will be a lot more stable and not have the kind of issues that I necessarily run into with the web client today.

One thing that is a little frustrating for me is that you have the network side with bandwidth and, if it's a system that's virtualized, obviously, you have VMware vSphere in the mix. There are all the different components. If someone has a VM and they don't like the performance or they see something that causes them to say, "Oh, this seems a little sluggish," they contact us and say, "Hey, what's going on?" And that becomes a kind of "magical mystery tour," a black box sometimes. I think, "Okay, where do I need to look? Is it even a problem within the virtualization infrastructure or is it somewhere else?" So that's what I'm hoping to find out about in some of the sessions, here at VMworld 2018, and maybe get some answers.

I haven't seen the new client with vSphere 6.7, so it's hard for me to say what additional features I would like to see.

The stability is pretty good. If there is a stability issue it's probably something else, for instance, the power for the building or something like that. It's usually not an issue with VMware.

As long as you got the ESXi hosts with the resources necessary, scalability isn't a big problem. We don't really lock down a lot of our clients which are still within our organization. We don't really limit the resources. If it becomes an issue we'll look at that, but for the most part, it hasn't been a problem. If we look like we're getting a little tight on resources, then we look at getting and setting up a new ESXi host.

I've had pretty good results with VMware technical support. It's not uncommon for us, if we're doing some kind of an upgrade that we're not necessarily familiar with, to open up an incident and tell them we're going to upgrade this to this version on this hardware. We just want to have an incident open. If something does happen, they're more than willing to work with us. I've had positive results.

I was not involved with the initial setup but I've been involved the last couple years or so with setting up some new ESXi hosts and I've gone through some practice in our test environment to upgrade to 6.7.

Overall, it's okay. There are some good resources out on the web or through VMUG that you can go through.

I don't really deal with the budget so it would be hard for me to say what our ROI is, but my boss does the budget and he seems happy. We keep getting more resources and more things are being virtualized.

I would tell colleagues to take a look at vSphere, if it makes sense for their organization. I've been working with VMware products in one way, shape, or form since the late 90s. Originally, I used it for training purposes and I wasn't even thinking about production. But I have no qualms today, if it's a production system, virtualizing it, as opposed to keeping it on hardware. 

There is always a learning curve and there are also functionality differences between the clients.

For the most part, if everything is working fine, it's efficient to manage. But if you have people say, "Hey, I see performance issues," that's where it becomes a little more of a problem. That's one issue that we're trying to address right now: being able to capture more logging for longer periods of time. Perhaps we need to use a Syslog Server to be able to help troubleshoot some issues by being able to look at particular periods of time.

I rate this solution as a seven out of 10 because of the issues with the clients, especially the web client, at times. And there is also the "black box" nature of understanding what's going on when there is a problem.

We use vSphere to virtualize or server workloads. We use the solution for all our mission-critical applications. We're an airline so our main application servers for running the airline are all virtualized on vSphere.

We don't utilize the built-in security features such as VM Encryption and support for TPM and VBS.

It decreased our overhead for our data center sizing, and it also increased our productivity by being able to deploy applications in a much more timely manner. We have also seen performance boosts. Although I can't give you an accurate number, I would estimate it at about a 40 percent increase.

Some of the most valuable features are 

• the ability to Snapshot so that when we do updates we have a layer of protection for simplified rollback
• the replication that we can leverage for data center failures and data center downtime
• the ease of migrating workloads from physical device to physical device for maintenance that we have to do on physical servers.

The stability of vSphere is fantastic. Over the 10 years that we've been utilizing vSphere, we haven't had a loss, or any downtime, of a critical application, based on the reliability and the flexibility of vSphere.

The scalability is also fantastic. We're able to add resources so that we can grow our clusters and provide more resources to our organization and to our business units. We're able to grow our application sets when required.

We have used the technical support and we haven't had any issues. Every time we've called, we have been directed to the correct servicing department and they have been able to resolve our issues in a timely fashion.

We were just utilizing physical servers with manual deployment of applications. By moving to vSphere, now it's just: Deploy VM from a template, or clone a VM now. Whereas previously, we had to order a physical hardware, wait for the arrival, deploy that into the data center, configure it. Now all of that has gone away.

I was one of the original architects deploying vSphere in our organization. At first, it seemed complex, but as we got a little more familiar with the product it became very straightforward on how to add resources and configure workloads to run on vSphere.

The biggest ROI is the decrease of the physical server in our data center. By reducing that physical server, we're able to reduce our network infrastructure, we're able to reduce the footprint in the data center, and that allows us to recover costs in just operating that data center.

At the time, Hyper-V was putting its foot in the water and Citrix was another competitor. But VMware just seemed to be a little more on - I don't want to say on the cutting edge - but they were the leader in the space at the time so we decided to evaluate them. The evaluation went fantastically so we decided to choose them as our vendor.

The advice I would give is: This is the only solution that you need to evaluate.

I'd have to say that vSphere is a 9 out of 10, just because of its flexibility and ease of use. We can slide in new resources without any impact. We can do maintenance on our clusters without any impact to applications, and we have the flexibility of migrating those workloads to other data centers, when required, in the case of data center downtime.

The primary use case is for virtualization of the Windows environment for our organization. 

It has performed wonderfully. Over the course of the last 10 years, we have implemented vSphere Hypervisor and moved from five percent virtualization up to a current rate of about 85 percent, for our Windows environment.

The mission-critical apps we use it for are for production facilities, as well as optimizers for the machine equipment that is at those production facilities. There are ancillary systems in our corporate data centers that are used for the internal customer-facing apps, to work with the business intelligence piece, which can monitor metrics as well as capacity planning, ordering, and business warehousing. All of these business-critical functions run on vSphere Hypervisor.

We are able to increase the density of the virtualized servers and, with the increased density we have a lot of page sharing as well as memory sharing. We see performance increases from Server 2012 and forward; 2003 is debatable. There were negligible differences in 2012 but we did see benchmark performance improvement from utilizing Hypervisor and the increased density that comes with it.

The most valuable feature is its stability. There are a lot of product enhancements that come out regularly but, generally, the stability the solution provides is the most important to me, as I like to go home and sleep at night.

It is absolutely simple and efficient to manage. We can bring in people who have never been exposed to vSphere or virtualized environments and they're still able to support it from a server standpoint. The training time as well as the adoption rate, for a junior technician or somebody coming right out of college, is very good.

Sometimes, the talent pool is hard to fill so having that stability and ease of use is very important to us.

VMware has expanded, from a corporate standpoint, to where they have gotten very large. I have noticed, in the last couple of years, the breaking apart of specific added benefits and charging license upcharges for them. That would be the only negative thing that I have to say: As a large consumer of the Hypervisor, we have a hard time justifying the cost of utilizing the extra products, especially when it's a couple of grand here and there, a couple of hundred dollars here and there. It's hard for an IT administrator or an architect to sell to upper management. When they're seeing so much ROI from the Hypervisor, it's hard to show them that there is extra value in the additional products that can be tied on top.

I would really like to see an assessment of which products are actually going to be beneficial to charge for, and that they then continue to keep some of the products bundled in with the initial Hypervisor.

There are some competitive vendors out there who are sticking to the original model that VMware seemed to have, which includes a lot of additional features and functionality in the initial pricing, and I think they are gaining a lot of market share based on the fact that they are keeping their licensing simple. The only argument I have with VMware is that, when I ask our VMware team about a new solution, I hear comments like, "For a nominal fee we can upgrade your license and you can have that." For the large number of Hypervisors and the scale we have, it's frustrating to hear that I have to go ask for additional money for very small, additional features that I think should be included.

I respect that VMware has to grow and there are some features that they should not bundle in and that they should ask more money for. So I would like to see an analysis of sales and what's included and what the consumption rate is. I think they could dial it in a little bit better to where they have more bundled solutions. 

Unfortunately, I think the type of model that VMware is moving toward is having an a la carte type of fee list. There are so many products that start with a "v" that I tend to get drowned with all the capabilities and I have to pick the particular thing I want to go after. Whereas, if there were more bundled services, or a package that included more bundled services, I might be able to swing that more easily than asking for money here and there. 

We're able to scale with density. I think that's the most important part. The clusters are allowed to go to so many nodes. We don't even touch the number of nodes per cluster. We traditionally have multiple fault zones in the data center, really for a comfort level, not because of a technological level. I know we could push the equipment a little bit harder but we generally like to keep things in a comfort zone that is constantly moving northward. So scalability is limitless and we have not really touched the capabilities yet, but we know the capabilities are there when we are ready to use them.

The environment has changed hands several times over the years. Currently, I work to architect any new deployments but I was not involved in the initial bringing in of GSX, when the company first adopted virtualization, roughly 10 years ago. I have turned the environment over two or three times since I've been here. Now we have new staff in my group who are constantly evolving and changing with the adoption of new architecture and business cases for the Hypevisor and other products in the suite that complement it.

It's hard to calculate the ROI but I know that in our main, corporate data center we have gone from 700-plus Hewlett Packard servers down to fewer than 50 physical servers for the Hypervisor. We still have some legacy physicals that have not been virtualized yet but, over the course of this current refresh and into next year, those should go away.

In addition, in our paper mills and pulp mills we have heavily adopted virtualization, and in our box plants, where we make container boxes for shipments, we have seen a ratio of five servers down to one, and that's over a couple of hundred sites.

While an actual ROI number is hard to calculate, if you think about the yearly maintenance on all of those systems, it's very vast and deep. It also allows us the portability to expand rapidly and add virtual machines with virtually no overhead, once the initial architecture has been built.

If you are not already virtualizing, existing-wise, you are doing yourself a severe disservice. Anybody who is continuing down the road of physical servers, any justifications that they think they have, should be challenged. If you have an environment that is all physical servers, a very easy win would be to present virtualization and denser workloads to your management. That would definitely make you look good in your career. I really don't see any negatives to moving to virtualization, even at a 100-percent adoption rate. We have yet to find a workload that is unable to run successfully in a virtualized manner, with the proper configurations and tuning.

We have not quite adopted vSphere 6.5 or 6.7. We do have some locations that have 6.5. On the radar will be utilizing the encryption capabilities, but as of yet, we have not really implemented that. We have a large organization so we move at a little bit of a slower pace. But implementing that is on the very near horizon, at least for our external-facing systems, as well as some internal.

We are also investigating the VMware Cloud on AWS initiative. That will probably be in the 2019 forum for dabbling or moving a percentage. With our being a manufacturing company, we move a little bit slower in adopting newer technologies and we have not really built the framework for a cloud initiative yet, but that will be something we investigate shortly.

I would definitely rate vSphere a 10. If you rate the Hypervisor alone, it's a 10. It has been one of the staples of technology for the last 15 years, and the key player for virtualization, for the whole industry during that time - or since Dell spun VMware off, or created the organization. It has been the premium, platinum product for Hypervisor. There are a few other players in the industry, but they are nipping at the heels, and that's about it. I do think that VMware is going to continue to lead, as far as Hypervisor goes, for the foreseeable future.

I have the whole server park in VMware and I have about 14 VDI desktops for Windows 7. I'm not happy with the performance. It's slow. Maybe it's the graphics, because I don't have a graphics card in this server.

It's easy to use.

The problem often is that when I use VMware and Citrix there are conflicts.

The stability is very good.

The scalability is also very good.

It's easy to get support.

The setup is pretty easy.

About two years ago I tried XenServer, but it stopped because I tried to use Veeam's software which wasn't compatible with XenServer. So I chose VMware.

VMware is a safe solution and it's a stable solution. I would recommend it.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor is integration. VMware has the most support for other software solutions, such as backup. That's important to me.

I would rate VMware at eight out of 10. It's good but it's too expensive.

It saves us a lot of money on physical infrastructure through virtualization. Also, you can roll back in case a machine crashes. That saves a lot of money and time. It also saves physical space, energy, and it removes physical limitations, with virtualization you can go anywhere in the world.

vSphere is very stable, reliable.

In the next release, I would like to see programming. I'd like to see a lot more about customization for people who want to customize programming API, SDK.

So far, so good. So far it's very reliable and stable.

Scalability depends on the infrastructure. The software can handle a heavy load.

Technical support is excellent.

It's not complex but I have a lot of experience.

vSphere is fantastic but the reason I'm doing research is that I deal with different vendors, they use different technology, they use Red Hat KVM. The other one is using Hyper-V, so that's why I want to do some research. vSphere is the most popular virtualization technology worldwide. Ninety percent of the world uses vSphere.

vSphere is managing virtual machines in VMware infrastructure, ESXi, and it has performed very well. It's actually an excellent product.

The benefit of the solution is that you can create template-based servers within minutes. If you were to use a physical server, it would probably take several hours, if not a whole day, to get everything set up the way you need.

The UI is very intuitive, you don't have to spend hours before you figure it out. All in all, compared to other environments, like Hyper-V, we find vSphere a lot more user-friendly and intuitive to use.

One thing that would be helpful is, these days we have an environment where we are often using clouds as well. A solution that would be a little more cloud-aware would be really helpful. I know there is a product from VMware that is more specifically for the cloud, but it would be nice if VMware Cloud Manager would be cloud-aware. It would simplify certain processes. It's all about doing things faster. If it were more cloud-aware it would be easier to work it into a hybrid environment and literally have seamless interfacing with the leading cloud solution. That would be nice.

I've been using it for years. It's super stable. There are a few glitches, but really nothing major. The stability is one of the reasons we selected this solution.

It's scalable. It's comparable to other similar products. 

I do use VMware support but not for vSphere. Full disclosure: I'm a VMware developer. I've been working with VMware for many years. But their support is excellent.

We had straight physical before. Of course, it is clear that when you use physical infrastructure, depending upon the type of application you're implementing on that infrastructure, often you do not use the infrastructure's capability to the maximum. You use anywhere between 10 and 25 percent of the potential of the infrastructure, and that has to do with the specifics of what application you're implementing and how well this application plays with other applications. A typical example is SQL Server and SharePoint. They both try to steal resources from each other so it's very hard to have those components sharing the same hardware. There are many other examples. This is just to illustrate, a little bit, the benefit of the virtualization solution.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are a reasonably priced solution that the vendor maintains well, one they stand behind, so that when we use their solution, we keep up with the state of the art. Some vendors - and I'm not going to cite names - tend to invest in creating a solution, and then they don't stand behind it, and the customer is left to fend for himself. The solution has never been improved, it's no longer a key part of the vendor's line of business. At this point, for us, the important point is that the vendor keeps pushing the state-of-the-art and keeps improving the solution while maintaining a top level of support for the customer.

I would rate this solution at around nine out of 10. There are ups and downs, but essentially it is an excellent solution.

My advice: Just go for it. At this point, I have had a lot of experience with competing products, but in terms of finish, in terms of flexibility, in terms of user-friendliness again, I would say vSphere, in my book, is still about as good as a solution can be. They are near the top. There is always room for improvement, but they are in front of the pack.

We have a lot of different machines running on this solution.

It has reduced our costs.

• Its consolidation.
• Its simplicity of usage.
• It is easy to maintain our data machines and take snapshots with the solution.

I would like to start to using NSX in the next release.

It is very stable.

It is very easy to go up with servers and licensing.

We do not use the technical support because we do not have problems with the solution. Sometimes we may have a small problem, but we start by using the web support and find a solution there.

We started using Hyper-V from Microsoft, then we changed to VMware, because VMware is more stable. It is easier to manage this solution.

The initial setup was easy.

It is easy to understand the licensing of vSphere. We have standard enterprise licensing.

The pricing is more expensive than Microsoft.

I also evaluated the Microsoft solution.

It is easy to manage the solution. It is scalable and very stable.