VMware vSphere Reviews

We had almost 100 servers and we wanted to consolidate them and also make them movable, especially when we have to upgrade hardware. It also allowed us to create more testing environments, because we tended to buy new iron every time. We also want users to be able to “own” servers themselves, so that we would build them for them, hand them over and say, "Have fun".

• Flexibility
• Ease of management

Maybe it's there and I don't know about it, but I would love to be able to build a standard server set and be able to give users, who want to build another server, the ability to click in and have a pool of 20 options for the five groups that are using them. I could just say, “Hey if you want a server click here," and then the server is built for them, tells them how to connect, how to login to it. Done. That would be so cool.

It's stable. It has only crashed once.

We're not a very big shop, so it's not really appropriate for me to answer this question.

I would give technical support about 7.5 out of 10.

I waited until version 5 because, prior to that, I thought it was too difficult to set up. With that version, the setup was fairly easy. And it has gotten a lot easier since.

On the server side, we have definitely seen ROI. If servers fail we just restart them, if a piece of hardware fails we just move it. We haven't saved any money but we have been able to double our load without adding any more staff. That's our ROI.

In real terms, because of the cost of the product, I don't know that we really save anything. We're a public institution and we tend to have very long time frames for holding onto hardware, not like a corporation. I would say it's a wash on a pure ROI, unless we can look into the future and say, “I'm going to be able to do increased stuff without adding any money.”

Pricing is the one "ding" I have against it. Except for VMware vSphere Essentials, it would be pretty challenging for anything but a medium or large size company to use.

If you're managing more than five servers run over and get some vSpere Essentials. I think virtualization is the only way to go, whether you do it on-premise or in the cloud, nowadays. It doesn't make any sense once you get beyond a couple.

I rate the solution an eight. Price would be the main thing, as well as the relative inaccessibility for end-users to be able to touch the product.

The primary use is to manage all of our virtual machines/servers and the ESX host. It is performing well.

We use it to incorporate our infrastructure around one product.

• Ease of access
• Manageability

We use it for our VDI infrastructure and managing virtual machines.

I would like to see the UI incorporating all of the functionality that the thick client had.

It is very stable.

Scalability is great.

I have used the product my entire IT career.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. I have been setting it up for 10 years.

Our ROI is time management savings.

Do not look at Microsoft.

We use vSphere to manage our virtual servers. We have about 50 spread across our main company as well as another company that we own. We use them to manage the applications which are attached to different tasks.

It makes managing your virtual servers easier and more centralized.

• Usability
• Convenience

It could use a smaller learning curve.

It has been very stable since we did the most recent upgrade.

It is scalable.

I would definitely recommend the product. 

We use it for call centers and providing server applications.

It's awesome. It works. It does exactly what we want it.

Code: They need to stop pushing it out so fast. Nobody in the real world is really using it yet, because it's not ready for prime time. It needs to be more stable. They need to get their product more stable before they push more code out. 

An example, in vCenter 6.5, they pushed HA, but it doesn't work. I've worked with so many engineers who finally said, "Give up! It doesn't work." 

I asked a question to one of the guys who did a demo with us on 6.7, and said, "Did you guys fix it?" 

They immediately skirted around the question. I said, "I'll take that as a no."

We don't have any downtime, because I built it right. I work a lot with VMware's engineers.

Though, it is not stable. The product was pushed out too quick, and now, there are a lot of bugs. We have seen bugs in vSphere, NSX, and ADDVOLUME, which we haven't even been able to have installed yet because of bugs. Also, with Horizon, we are constantly running into problems.

We are a bleeding edge company. We push it. Yet, we're not even touching 6.7 because it's too buggy.

It is easy to add stuff to the product.

Technical support is not that great. It is too slow. When you get them, they are honest, and about what is going on, which is helpful. Because if they lie to you, then you're even more screwed. So once you get somebody, but it's too slow. We've had Level 1 support where it can take hours (maybe a day) to talk to somebody, and our company can affect millions of customers.

I find the initial setup easy, but it has been becoming more difficult and technical.

Pricing is insanely expensive. We spent millions of dollars on NSX. If you want anything, it costs you more. The pricing model is constantly changing. We wanted to look at HCX, but we had to get it bundled with NSX and vRNI. We already have vRNI. I will be installing, architecting, and rolling it out. However, how does it affect the cost for HCX? We still haven't received a real answer.

I'm anxious for 7.0 to come out because I'm curious to see how the HTML will function. We keep hearing the web client will be better, and it's not. Bring back the fat client!

We use it for virtualization of approximately 90 percent of all of our computing. In terms of mission-critical apps, quite honestly we use it for the majority of them on the banking side: our financial apps, loan accounting, loan origination, etc.

We have seen performance boosts for our mission-critical apps, with the ability to add compute at any time. We've been using this for so many years, so over that time we have probably seen performance increases of three to four times. As compute has increased we've been able to offer that to the apps. I don't know that I can give you a total percentage increase but it's a lot.

Other benefits include high-availability, uptime, management is a lot easier, and a lower cost of support but with increased availability. That's a win.

The most valuable features are its flexibility and the ability to move workload.

The built-in security features, such as VM Encryption and support for TPM and VBS, are all important for us, but I can't go into specifics about them.

It's also simple and efficient to manage. It's a complex environment but it is one that we can get our staff trained on, it's not like a one-off environment.

In terms of additional features I would like to see, I just heard about them here at VMworld 2018. They're rolling in security to be a core feature. Built-in app defense is something we'll take advantage of. The ability to utilize tools that are in the cloud - we don't really use the cloud - will be available for use on-premise, and that is a pretty big feature.

The stability has been huge for us. We have a very predictable environment, robust, fault-tolerant. It's great.

Scalability is the big advantage of it. The product itself allows us to scale on the fly as we need it, and plan for the future.

We are a Business Critical Support customer, so we have an engineer dedicated to our team. We use them on a day-to-day basis.

We didn't have a previous solution. We just had challenges that everybody was faced with and VMware, back in its core, back in its early days, had the capability to move compute from one data center to another and that was huge. We wanted to be able to do things in a secure, safe manner with low risk.

I was involved in the initial setup, back in 2005. Back then it was fairly complex but that's because we were early adopters of it.

I don't know that I can give you a number, but our ROI has been significant.

At that time, VMware was an innovator in this technology so it was a question of learning more about what they offered and taking advantage of it.

If you're not already looking at vSphere, you're probably behind. I don't really have any colleagues who aren't utilizing this product.

I rate this solution as a nine out of 10 because I think you can always improve. But it's a tremendous product. We consider VMware a partner, we work with them closely.

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.