VMware vSphere Reviews

vMotion between the hosts, deployment of the virtual machines via templates and distributed switches are some valuable features of this product.

It allowed us to move from a physical environment to a virtual environment. It also allowed us to install much more of the hardware, i.e., up to 30+ virtual machines on a single physical server.

There is need for high availability for the vCenter and also a faster/responsive vCenter web interface. True high availability for a vCenter is required in the current virtualised world. With the introduction of 6.5, VMware has now introduced true HA with heartbeat monitoring.

As VMware have gradually decided to move from the C++ thick client to the flash based web portal, and now to the HTML5 web based portal, the legacy flash based web portal for vCenter 5/6.0 was sluggish and slow. On many occasions when going through nested windows for VMware configuration, the flash plugin or browser would crash. Fingers crossed with the new HMTL5 based web portal as so far it's been solid. Even though it doesn't currently have all the features of the flash based portal, I hope VMware releases a fully-functioning HTML5 in the next release of vCenter.

I have used this solution for six years.

Sometimes we have encountered vCenter/vSphere issues that requires the service to restart or the server restarts. The web interface has a lot going on and if the browser crashes, then any progress is lost on the vCenter.

I did not encounter any scalability issues for the VMs.

The technical support is good. I had to use it for iSCSI related issues and was told to upgrade to latest build. However, it didn't fix the issue.

I was not using any other solution previously.

I set up a clustered virtual environment and distributed switches with integration into EMC VNX using VLANs for each SP for iSCSI traffic.

It is expensive for the private sector but it does have a good pricing policy for the charity sector.

We tested Hyper-V - but this was back in 2009. It was very basic then.

You need to place more time into the design phase. You should also build higher spec servers in order to save costs on the licensing.

I value the support for this application.

If you compare the trend of each version, you can see that the practical features add to this product's value.

It would be very useful if they would configure the built-in backup application on this product.

I have used it for more than five years.

There were some stability issues. If you assign a non-dedicated resource to this product, you can see the issue in storage.

There were no scalability issues as such. However, it depends on the license that you buy.

Technical support was at a high level.

If you have a good understanding from the system how the solution works, it can be simple. Otherwise, it can be confusing.

If you compare it with the applicable features provided, the cost is reasonable.

We evaluated Microsoft Hyper-V.

You should at least try this product once.

VMware is the market leader in virtualization. I like the following vMotion improvements in the current version:

• vMotion across virtual switches: There are no restrictions now to migrate VMs across switches (standard/distributed). It is valuable to me for an upgrade or when moving my datacenter.
• vMotion across vCenter Servers: This leverages the migration with unshared storage. In simple terms, VM1 is running on a certain host/cluster, which runs on a certain datastore and is managed by vCenter 1. It can be vMotioned to different ESXi hosts, which have different datastores managed by another vCenter server, called vCenter 2.
• Long Distance vMotion: I can now perform reliable migrations between hosts and sites that are separated by high network round-trip latency times. This is an official definition. For me, it helps me to manage main and DR sites simultaneously and in an effective way.

• Reduces the data center footprint: Fewer servers and less power consumption
• Reduces the overall footprint of your entire data center

They still have restrictions on fault tolerance features and managing snapshots.

I've been using VMware products since 2009 and this version for more than six months.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

I am satisfied with the technical support. Some support cases needed to be escalated, but overall it is good.

I used different solutions from different vendors. VMware products are the most stable/scalable products on the market. VMware can integrate easily with other vendors.

The setup was easy. Some basics should be taken into consideration first.

Just focus on the features you need. Sometimes we misunderstand feature and pricing equations.

I tested it myself in my lab. Also, I visited some companies which work with this product to see it in action.

This solution has lots of features. Just be aware of all of them and you will get the most out of it.

The most valuable features are high availability and DRS.

• High availability: High availability is particularly valuable to my company because I know that if one of my hosts should fail, we will experience minimal interruption. The VMs affected will be booted back up in minutes on another host. This is critical to our business continuity.
• DRS: Prevents us from having to micromanage the placement of our VMs. They stay running in optimal spaces on our hosts. If we were to license Fault Tolerance (FT), we could potentially lose a host and have all the VMs continue to run without interruption. However, this is unnecessary in our line of business.

It allows multiple VM servers to live and move across several hosts, as resources change.

I would like to see better licensing and less complexity of use.

• Licensing: Any licensing after essentials plus becomes very granular. In turn, it is very expensive to license the features that you want. This is unfortunate, because IT for most companies is perceived as a “black hole” for costs. It becomes hard to justify because you cannot directly pin a value to it. Because of the perception, it is sometimes difficult to approve such large purchases, especially for something you can’t physically hold in your hands.
• Complexity: There is a benefit in having granular controls. In many cases, this is largely unnecessary. You may need to look for a feature that maybe you don’t have to change often. Maybe you only have to change it once. You can sometimes spend large amounts of time and effort to find it, which can be fairly frustrating.

We have used this solution for about six years.

There have been some stability issues. Adding plugins and vendor modules sometimes causes some pretty unexpected results.

There have been some scalability issues. The Essentials Plus licensing is very restrictive and has no upgrade paths to other licensing models.

Technical support is very good. That is, if you can get a support rep on the phone in a timely manner with whom you can overcome language barriers.

The initial setup was fairly easy. Adding on and configuring made it complex pretty quickly.

Skip Essentials and Essentials Plus. You will outgrow it, and then you will be stuck with a very expensive jump to Professional.

Consider alternatives like AHV before jumping in feet first.

A lot of the features of this product are valuable to us such as vMotion, HA, online modify VM specs, etc.

vCenter provides a centralized management interface for ESXi hosts. It's not only a management tool but also a performance monitor. It's easy for us to update hundreds of ESXi hosts in a few weeks. It helps us manage thousands of VMs.

vCenter is much more important than ever. The vCenter HA solution is the area in which VMware should improve. (I know vCenter version 6.5 has a similar feature, but it's not released yet.)

I have used this solution for more than 10 years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

VMware's strategy is a step away from Windows. In the future, they will focus on virtual appliances. The only pain is it's risky to migrate from vCenter Windows to a virtual appliance.

I'm also using Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 along with SCVMM 2012 R2. It's really painful for VMware users since Microsoft's hypervisor solution has a lot of bugs/problems and is hard to fix.

The initial setup is a wizard. You just need to follow default settings to finish the setup, then it is ready to work with. If you are using a virtual appliance, then the only thing you need to do is import to the ESXi host.

vCenter is expensive. It's worse to buy if you have a high volume of ESXi hosts.

We evaluated another solution namely the SCVMM 2012 R2 solution.

For new users, virtual appliance is the best choose as it is saving costs and is much easier to set it up as well.

• Storage vMotion helps a lot when migrating from one storage vendor to another
• Storage vMotion migrates a virtual machine and its disk files from one data store to another while the virtual machine is running, with no down time.
• We can move virtual machines off of arrays for maintenance or upgrade
• We have the flexibility to optimize disks for performance or to transform disk types

We migrated our storage from IBM DS4700 & V7000 to VNX 5400 smoothly through storage vMotion.

I would like to see data recovery responsible for the virtual machine snapshot. It is not reliable as the parent snapshot gets corrupted and the whole corresponding snapshots collapse.

We have been using this solution since 2009.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

The initial setup is straightforward. The only complexity appears with inherited network security policies.

Pricing is a little bit high, but you have to value stability, scalability and the support level which are the most valuable parts of any solution.

Choose VMware to gain the proper stability, scalability, and flexibility with premium support.

One of the most valuable features of this product is the integration of VMware vSphere. If you have experience with this product, it is very simple to configure and use. With minimal studying, you can configure and manage it.

The main improvement we found is the simplification of configuration. No more SAN configuration is required; no more complex configuration of LUN and presentation to the VMware infrastructure.

I think this product has a lot of areas for improvement.

First of all, there’s no agnostic option of vSAN to use it with another hypervisor. The only option is to present the storage via NFS (iSCSI will be available with version 6.5). The problem with this configuration is that you lose all the benefits of HCI. Essentially, you transform the vSAN into a network data store.

Also, no PIN to SSD: If you have a hybrid mix of disks, you can’t configure a PIN for a particular VM on a particular SSD.

Additionally, some features are only available on the all-flash version.

Deduplication and compression are enabled cluster-wide. There is a way to disable these options, but the problem is that you can’t enable this option in any combination you want. Essentially, compression and deduplication are either both on or both off. This is not good if you intend to use it for an application like SQL server and Oracle DB.

The vSAN license not very cheap.

I’ve been testing and studying it for about 6 months.

The scalability with these kind of nodes is fantastic, because you can scale out with any resource you want.

• Storage space (each server has 24 hard disk slots).
• RAM can be upgraded to 1.5TB for each node.

The only problem is that it’s not possible to scale on CPU. So if you want to scale on CPU, you have to buy 3 CPUs in one shot (with numbers of core), or buy another node. We know HCI work in this way.

I have never used support until this point. We have good enough skills to fix problems without support for now.

We used old-style infrastructure with a SAN data store and blade center. We changed to simplify infrastructure management.

Installing a complete VMware with three nodes, vSphere Software Appliance, and all things related took some time. So its not so easy and not so fast.

We evaluated lot of alternatives, both standard infrastructure and HCI infrastructure. Coming from a previous VMware vSphere installation, we choose the same product for continuity.

Its important to have experience with VMware products, and licensing is not very cheap.

Its compatibility with LUNs and its vMotion, HA, FT and VDS. It works very smooth with LUNs. When we talk about its Cluster feature, then the HA, FT, and DRS features are just great in how they support large scale servers and VMs without any trouble in the production environment.

VMware offers VDS switches which are very efficient and useful regarding network configuration in your virtual environment. The configuration should be the same on your cluster-joined ESXis to improve performance and when running a production environment or VMs on any ESXi.

These features are very good for us.

While using its HA feature, we don’t need to worry about usage of servers. Our VM automatically shifts to another server which has resources using vMotion. VDS provides its NIC which is available on all ESXis. You have to configure it one time at Center level and after that you don't need to worry about any ESXi configuration or its failure. When DRS or HT transfers your VM to another host, then that VM will get the same NIC via VDS.

When we talked about its Vmotion feature so we see we are able to move our Vms in running state from one host to another host within cluster and shared storage but we are unable to move VMs accros cluster and storage in running state so here is vsphere 5.5 suffer little bit.

I guess in vMotion it should have the ability to move VMs across clusters of vCenters and different type of CUPS.

We have been using this solution for many years.

We did not have any issue so far in stability.

We have had scalability issues; we have backup plans if ESXi crashes.

I would rate technical support 5/10.

We didn’t use anything previously. We chose VMware ESXi 5.5 over Hyper V due to its features.

It was complex because you have to prepare for every situation.

Its pricing is affordable for a small company as well.

We evaluated vMotion, HA, FT, and VDS.

I advise you to review your needs and then look into the features. I am sure you will get solution of your needs.