VMware vSphere Reviews

• High Availability
• vMotion
• Storage vMotion

One particular example is the ability to work less on weekends because of the possibility to patch during normal working hours.

The pricing.

I've used it since 2006.

We have not had any issue with deployment over the years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

8/10

9/10

We didn't use a previous solution to prior to vSphere.

It was very straightforward, no problem occurred at the set up stage,

It was all done in-house.

No other products were considered.

It's a simple to use solution, and along with fast implementation, you can install it and run it, so have fun.

• vMotion
• Storage vMotion
• High Availability
• DRS
• Storage DRS
• Enhanced vMotion Capability

Less time is needed to go live for workloads. We have, therefore, been able to increase our efficiency and that of the virtual infrastructure.

The web client is prone to errors and crashes. Dump this in favor of the C# desktop client.

I've used it for two years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

7/10

5/10

We have been using VMware in our environment since the company's inception.

I joined the company after it was implemented.

As far as I know, it was done in-house.

You should use vSphere for robust performance and stability.

The best part of ESXi for us is the flexibility it gives us, we can spin up a new server in minutes, we can increase VM drive space live, we can perform maintenance on our infrastructure with minimal down time – we have a blade solution, and have the capacity to move VM’s to allow us to perform updates/upgrades to individual hosts during work hours with zero disruption to the business.

Its allowed us to reduce the time needed to bring onboard new services. For example, we migrated from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010, the flexibility of running a virtualised environment allowed us to quickly build new servers to test, this is something that would have taken considerably longer using physical hardware, with VMware, we were able to tailor the system spec without having to scramble around for memory, drives CPU’s etc. This ultimately reduced the time to complete the migration.

I’m keenly awaiting multi core Fault Tolerance, so I can have all our VM’s covered by FT – currently it’s only available for single core VM’s.

Fault Tolerance is now available for multicore VM's, but, you;ll need to factor in how many cores the host has before rolling this out to the more powerfully specced VM's.

5 years

None, we found VMware support really good.

None, we had a few teething issues which were mainly due to our lack of knowledge of the product when we first installed it.

None at all, we can add hosts on the fly, we’ve expanded our SAN array from 1 to 3 shelfs without issue.

We use VM and also a 3rd party for support – no problems have been encountered which were not resolvable.

1st class – no complaints at all.

We had the implantation done via a reseller, what we did find was that the initial knowledge transfer of skills from the vendor to us was questionable (in that they came in and set it up, then really left us to it. This gave us a very steep learning curve at the outset.) If we did the project again, this is an area that I would focus on as part of the project, so that we were more comfortable with what we put in place. This doesn’t mean we had a negative experience, rather we were a little green to start with.

I’d say, understand what it is you wish to achieve from the outset. Take into account growth, be aware of VM sprawl and the associated license costs – we were all happy to add servers left right and centre, we’ve now been through a server rationalisation process to bring our VM server count down a little. Make sure that your engineers are suitably trained and make sure that you have a good support contract in place – it gives you peace of mind!

One of the best solutions has got to be the HA and DRS portion of the vCenter where it's kind of an auto-load balancing and auto-recovering of your cluster if one of your hosts happens to die. Luckily it's pretty solid and you don't really have to deal with a lot of the HA stuff, but DRS is definitely very handy.

One of the things that I really wanted to see was the catalog because it came from vCloud Director, and they are adding that in 6.0, so they have that catalog, and they are extending it to where you can really replicate those catalogs out and share them. That was one of the features I would have really liked to see, and fortunately it's there.

One of the other features that we had been wanting to see was the vMotion between clouds, which of course that was announced today, that it's one of the things that's coming. I think that's going to be a game changer really.

We have quite a lot of list of solutions that we use. Primarily we have a product called Server Virtualization, powered by VMware, and what it is, is it's a multi-tenant vCenter, but single-tenant hardware side of things. We have over 9,000 hosts in there and roughly 55,000 VMs worldwide, and six data centers globally. We also have other products called dedicated vCenter which is just that; customers get their dedicated vCenter. We also leverage vCloud Director; we have a dedicated vCloud Director product. We even have some other disaster recovery products that use SRM and vSphere replication.

In our environment -- it's pretty large -- we have roughly just less than 100 vCenters, and these things have to be up 24-7/365, and it's very rare that they actually go down. Out of all 9,000 hosts, I can count off maybe five that have crashed in that last year. That's a very stable VMware environment, in my opinion.

In a global environment with all six data centers, we have so many hosts and VMs, that we work very closely with VMware to help push their maximums, and really push the envelope of how many VMs we can fit in a vCenter, and how many hosts we can fit in a vCenter to really help drive those maximums even higher for VMware.

At Rackspace, we get mission critical support from VMware. If we have any issues, we call directly into VMware, and we usually get a response within four hours. Any major technical issues that we come across, they are very responsive; they work with us to help figure out what the problem is, and a lot of times we've found bugs in their software and helped them release patches to fix them.

Interoperability is one of the things I really like to look for: How well the VMware solution plays with other either hardware vendors, or other solutions, other service providers, other add-ons to make it even better. That's something we really look for. How well does it work in a service provider environment as well, because most service providers are different.

vCenter environment is super simple. Install ESXI; it's very straight forward. Then getting vCenter off the ground and going is extremely straightforward, especially if you use the vCenter server appliance: You can be up and running in a matter of a few hours.

We've set up a vROPS and we've found that it works really well in a service provider environment, that you can point it to multiple vCenters. We've worked with other vendors to do some deeper logging, deeper metrics gathering, and in doing so, we worked close with VMware and that other vendor and really built a full scale out worldwide global monitoring and alerting solution. That's one of the things we look for: Something that to fill a void that we don't have.

There is nothing else enterprise-ready, like they are. If you are considering similar solutions, make sure you take deep dives technically into how well they integrate with other vendors, or how well they integrate with your hardware. Like VSAN for instance, a lot of the storage vendors that are really going for it to be on the VSAN HCL, and unfortunately some of the RAID controllers are not on at that HCL, and a lot of times people don't know that. If you are looking at different solutions, make sure you check compatibility guides, not just for the whole VMware Stack, but including maybe subsets like VSAN, or other tools that you might be using.

We are looking at productizing that and making an offering for our customers, as well as using it internally. We've got it in several labs doing different things, and it's awesome. I really like it. It's resilient, in my opinion. A lot of people say if you only use the three-node minimum recommendation you might have data loss. I had a three-node cluster setup and my switch died, and when I replaced the switch and it came back online, everything was still running just fine, nothing had actually gone down; no data loss, nothing. It's actually really resilient. If you think about your data path, the data locality, it's a lot closer to the CPU, it's right there in that flash recache. It's a resilient storage solution that's cheaper than a dedicated SAN, or something of that sort.

Peer reviews are extremely important to me. I usually start Googling and looking to see, or on Twitter to find other vExperts, or other just subject matter experts that have talked about it: What benefits they've seen, or maybe pitfalls that they've seen. To me, that holds more water than a lot of the White Papers I've seen, because White Papers target maybe a specific use case, but I want to see more broadly: "How does it function? How does it integrate? How stable is it, of all things?" I really value the community involvement and opinion of others when I'm looking at solutions.

One of the most valuable features of vCenter is the high availability feature so we can have basically one of the out warehouse to DIMS and all of our important VMs are still running.

One of the benefits is that you can just deploy a virtual machine and any environment you want in seconds.

I guess all the features I'd like to see of future releases are being announced for version 6.1. All my needs are satisfied right now.

We're using VMware vCenter based on ESX for virtualization. For our development teams, we're using VMware Player as well as Workstation.

In terms of stability, we didn't have any problems yet so it's basically rock solid.

Scalability, you can just add hosts to the vSphere solution for whatever you need.

We haven't had to use tech support yet because the solution just runs.

We knew that we needed to go for virtualization because there was this big messy server wreck with all those bare metal old servers in there. It was just crazy in terms of service. We switched to virtualization, now we're good to go.

The initial setup was pretty easy. I mean, I guess, we have a pretty small environment but we had a few problems with upgrading. But those were solved by our partners.

We didn't consider any other vendors because all the other vendors didn't have the great support and the great features that you can expect from VMware.

We didn't have any problems. If you're starting to use vSphere solutions, I guess the first thing you should do is check hardware compatibility list to make sure that all your hardware is going to be compatible with your software. After that, if you run into any problems, just check the VMware knowledge base. Basically all the information you'd need is in there.

Virtually anything, it doesn't matter if you're trying to cross the balance and diversifying the application, that can't be done, won't be done or challenging the vendor in that regard or you're looking to scale. Virtualization is almost the only way to scale both vertically and linearly because applications are often bound by linear growth where you need to throw more at it in order to increase capacity. Some of that is where you need to ask for how much resources I can get on the fly. A lot of hot plug, a lot of hot add of memory, being able to be very flexible within an environment where traditional architecture from the past can't do that. Can't take a hard drive, can't take a motherboard out of a computer and put it in another one.

vCenter and VMware's products allow us to look at things and focus on things that we usually didn't have time for because you were architecting solutions based on hardware. This is VMware mix and hardware agnostics, so it's how fast you want to go.

Being able to itemize by using vApps, vApplications, to do starter priorities so that way if you had dependent NFS and database mounts, applications won't come up prior to that. If you're a one man shop it allows you to turn things on in a way that most people would have to sit there and wait for the next one to go up and the next one and watch the console. Peace of mind, that's what we really use VMware for.

I would like to see much more of a, maybe, application intelligence. Unfortunately you have storage vendors who are doing that for us right now with your XtremIO and storage IO and cards inside of something that has some application intelligence. To make MySQL work, SQL work with storage that you can just buy, but VMware being able to characterize database platforms based on use cases of MySQL or SQL, they're very different. Being able to tell the difference between the two and say, "Hey look, this will work here, but it won't work here." That would be nice.

It's challenging using MySQL with vCenter because Linux as a whole is a latency sensitive OS, so you're only as good as your slowest moving part. Doesn't matter if it's disc, memory or processor and sometimes it's shortest path to storage. In order to make MySQL work you need micron second processing and in some cases when you have monolithic sized databases you need to be able to scale that at the same time.

So, unfortunately with the way MySQL plays with storage and the way VMware is right now, it's where I went with the application intelligence, there's a lot of, not taboo if you will, but doesn't really work. You're not going to find a lot of use cases because, unfortunately, our business falls into a different sector if you will, by running Linux as a primary OS.

So, better support for newer Linux kernels would be always great. The fact that they've released open tools and made it the supported platform for just about every Linux distribution out there now sees that they're solving the problem like the VMXNET3 adapter. The driver's not there, the machine's not online. There has been some pitfalls but VMware's been able to, from a company that supplies an application and an OS, solve a lot of those.

They are listening to the customer. It's very difficult to say what's still left because after today you never really know, that could change.

Currently we use vCenter Operations Manager which is VCOPS, if you will, and that drives our storage analytics based on what's performing, where our bottlenecks are, how to quickly identify why is it slow? Is it memory? Is it computer? Is it solid state disk? What is the balance of which your application is not performing. We also use vSphere Replication Appliance, along and with vCenter Orchestrator to use the set it up once mentality. The machine is created at primary site A and then with Orchestrator it actually goes through the series of doing the replication, setting it up and then getting that VM set up on the other side. A cheap and easy way of doing it for free.

Incredibly stable, so much the point of there's times where we may not know that we're running at half-capacity or full-capacity based on a failover that happens on the back end. That says enough for not only architecting and choosing the right harbor vendors but it also shows that you can actually be failed over on your appliance and business still runs as normal. Things keep working. That constant non-disruptive change if you will.

In terms of evaluation for technical support from VMware, you get what you pay for. You have 24/7 support which allows you to leverage call centers in Ireland and other locations where they surprise me every time. There's always something I learn from every support case I've ever had to open. Even if it's just to kick the tires and make sure we're doing things sort of right.

I was luckily enough to come into a virtualization shop. They pretty much didn't want to do the physical server aspect anymore because again it doesn't scale. Walking into a virtualized shop is very easily, winning that battle can be very difficult. I've been on the other side a handful of times. It's really just showing the value, in which case, VMware can fix the problem. You got to be very specific about what problem you're fixing. Is it latency? Is it processing power? Is it being able to provide DR? Is it being able to move your workload to the cloud or move them to a different data center?

It's amazing how only a couple months out of the year you need DR. You don't need it 12 months out of the year. Moving from a standard virtualization shop, having everything on prem, leveraging the cloud, that's the next step. When you ask me about how would I introduce VMware, I think about introducing it now as a cloud based service provider. Not as an on prem, hey, let's scale this very easily.

They've been able to push out little things as the management agent which allow you to work through vCenter and allow you to connect through vCenter to see all your hosts and make automation very, very easy. On top of that they give you the vCenter Applicance so you're no longer tied to a SQL license. You don't have to worry about using SQL Express and running out of space or running out of license space and then re-licensing it. Then they've also solved the upgrade path. Every time a new B, C, D, whatever version of vCenter comes out I don't know how many times the Windows version blows up. Seeing a company being able to say okay you know what? Let's take a step back. Let's use a very similar OS and let's allow you to utilize vCenter just like ESXi, it's the same platform.

Anything that solves a problem. Find out what your biggest problem is and see how VMware can help you solve that problem. There's more principle architects out there that, especially with everything that's being added to the platform, that would be people specialized specifically in things. VMware has that capacity and the capability to help you solve that problem. Getting the vendor involved, maybe not necessarily a service provider but having VMware actually evaluated. They're going to tell you what you're doing wrong.

We operate within a 10% market of people who don't use Windows. You got to find somebody out there and one of the biggest problems you'll find is you won't find MySQL documentation in terms of what people are using and how they're using it. It's this big, there's not a lot of information that people, in a private sector, are even willing to share or in the public sector. They're still trying to figure it out themselves. Finding out who's successful is pretty much who's willing to write your review. That's something I'd like to contribute in terms of what we're doing to put it out there, let other people know who come to you guys and say, "Who else is doing this?" We can't be the first people.

The self-service portal, number one, the ease of deployments, the ability track and monitor how quickly you can provision a virtual machine guest, and the Chargeback model affiliated with that.

The simplicity of deployments, the speed to market with our application portfolios, the ability to give our developers the ability to quickly provision or stand up in an environment without having somebody to hold their hand.

Some of the features I would like to see, future enhancements of the vSphere product which starts with Virtual Center. The ability to manage more than a single host because right now, they're a challenge, because we have so many deployments, we can only manage one Virtual Center per one VMware host box. That's a limitation of the product. We would love to be able to see, we have various locations scattered throughout the US and international. We would love to see Virtual Center being able to manage more than one host at a single location because right now, we're challenging with having to login to Virtual Center at each location, instead of a single pane where the Oracle exist under one Virtual Center, our motto.

We currently use the vSphere EXSi along with their vCAC products. We are currently evaluating their vRealize products and we are also evaluating the vCloud Air.

Some of the advantages of the stability of their product is how robust VMware is, in a sense. The ability to scale on a fly. Without having to touch the system, you can literally increase the compute resources on the fly. I mean, we've been running their products since 2002. I have not had any major issues or outages since, and we've deployed this solution globally.

In my impressions of some of the capabilities and scalability of the vSphere products, it allows you to, without having to invest in a large hardware portfolio, it gives you the opportunity to scale on the fly through consolidation efforts.

We were challenged a couple of years, several years back with figuring out ways to cut cost and save money through ingenuity and automation and innovation, and this is one of the tools that was recently released in the early 2006. That's when VMware, I want to really feel like they really ironed out their niche and made this product usable and feasible for our infrastructure. By doing so, we saved a ton of money.

The efforts required to set up vSphere is extremely simplistic. In our market, we have a large turnover from time to time, so it's easy to train and educate those on setting up the vSphere products from the ground up. It's very simplified. The installations are very easy.

Typically, what we do is the installations are done by our own premise resources with little or no experience, so that goes to show you how easy and simplistic the product is to install and or to manage overtime.

There were other competitors out there that we've evaluated that just fell short of this implementation because of their feature set or some of their security vulnerability.

I have not tested Virtual Volumes. That's why I'm here, to learn more about the Virtual Volumes feature along with the NSX platform. I'm excited about it because we have a huge SAN infrastructure where we would like to be able to move workloads from point A to point B and I think that's a good starting point.

I've seen a lot of hypervisors out there, but 10, hands down, in the market.

If I were to recommend this particular product to some of my peers or co-workers or somebody else in another industry, I would clearly state the reliability, the stability, and the ease of use, is which they would fall in love with and they're always innovative. I mean, that's what we love. Every year, we come back to the conference and you learn something new. There's always some good takeaways.

Typically, I would like to hear from the source. I always find myself as an IT technical resource. I tend to like to talk to the people that's actually doing the work and I like to read some of the guys that have the hands-on experience. I don't go out and read a bunch of documents or books per se. I like to engage with the resources that have actually deployed, implement it, because those are your viable resources that have the hands-on experience.