VMware vSphere Reviews

vSphere provides a lots of great features. In my opinion, VMotion is a feature that helps save time, cost, and effort.

You can arrange for system maintenance at any time you want without required downtime.

We've used it to implement a virtual datacenter server for in-house applications and services and have achieved a green and efficient virtual datacenter.

After consolidating all the physical machines in our datacenter onto vSphere, we have also achieved faster server provisioning. With the help of templates, we have reduced the time from weeks to several minutes and, therefore, we can provide services for other departments nearly instantaneously.

I think that all the improvements VMware could make would be related to monitoring. vSphere should be equipped with a better monitoring solution.

I have been using VMware products for 8 years.

Starting with testing software on a VMware Workstation box, and then virtualizing all IP services such as routing, DHCP, DNS, etc with an ESXi 4.1 host. And lately transformed almost services to VMware vSphere 5.0.

As with any software, ESXi and vSphere have their own requirements, but if you meet the requirements for hardware, network, storage, etc., then deploying a vSphere system is just easy as pie.

It's efficient and very stable.

VMware helps scaling with VMware vSphere is just easy by adding more ESXi hosts to an existing cluster, and then vSphere DRS will does the work for you like monitoring resources and spreading VMs to balance workloads on all the hosts between that cluster.

I have not made any calls during the time we have been running vSphere.

I have used KVM and Microsoft Virtual Server before switching completely to VMware vSphere. With VMware vSphere, we have a good management tool, with easy provisioning, and easy troubleshooting.

It is a quite straightforward setup. It’s just a easy-to-follow wizard installer, and I don’t think that there is an easier way to do it.

Pricing and licensing models vary, and are dependent upon your organization requirements and operations. Always start with the minimal licensing model then, later, upgrade to meet your needs.

Due to the simplicity of vSphere deployment, the ease of management, and the small footprint of its hypervisor, we decided to use it without wasting time on other products.

We were seeking a green and an efficient solution for our datacenter. We found vSphere to be a great product and decided to become their customer.

When working with vSphere, I think you always have to take three things into consideration:

• Know your system requirements - are there any compatibility issues, or performance impacts etc.
• Monitor the current physical infrastructure so you have a specific resource consumption, and can then develop the best investment plan
• Make a transformation plan from the physical infrastructure to the virtualized one

vSphere has many great features. It is very hard choose just one because most of them work together. But, based on the way how vSphere manages all resources provided by the physical system, I believe that the high availability system is the greatest feature of the solution. It works with a series of sub-features that ensure customer resources are online during critical changes.

We are constantly updating and migrating systems here in my current company. With this product, we can run parallel systems with a low cost and without impacting our customers. With this solution, we can provide more resources, cheaper, quickly, and still keep the integrity and quality of our services.

This product already does this very well, but all improvements are related to how physical resources, as well as memory and CPU, are managed . These are the main problems of the virtualization, it uses more memory than CPU. We still have problems with memory in virtualization environments, and some cases can present problems of throughput with virtual disks, too.

I have been working directly with vSphere solution for about four years, but I work with virtualization about six years.

This solution is very stable. Hardly ever do critical issues appear in the environment, and most analyses that are done in the system are about performance improvements.

No, this solution is prepared to expand or decrease as necessary.

It is great. They really have a good service.

The support service is very efficient. They are fast and usually they have a great technical knowledge beyond an effort to solve your problem.

I work with more than one virtualization technology. The solution implemented varies according to client requests.

The implementation of the solution is relatively simple. Of course, you need to have some knowledge about infrastructure to be able to create an environment without performance issues. But in general, the deployment of the vSphere system is easy. Just some feature configurations need to be really studied to improve if they really have to be implemented. VMWare provides all the documentation necessary to implement and manage vSphere throughout your environment.

The most common problem in implementing this solution is the incompatibility with some physical hardware, but it was more frequent in the past. All current physical hardware can support virtualization technology.

The implementation was done in-house.

This solution is recommended for environments considered medium and above (in the number of servers and hosts). If you are intending deploy this solution to small environments, the cost-benefit is not worth it. VMware provides a free license to be put in small environments, but all the good features of the systems will be disabled. For smaller businesses, I would recommend another solution.

As prices vary, the ideal would be to contact a direct sales team, and report the company's needs so they can point out the best license to use.

As I said, I work with more than one virtualization technologies. Beyond VMWare vSphere, I've worked with Microsoft Hyper-V, which is a great virtualization solution too.

It is necessary to be sure about the systems that will be migrated to a virtualized environment. Although nowadays virtualization is at an advanced stage, some systems still present problems when they are migrated from a physical server to a virtualized one. Systems that require too much performance need to have a different configuration, then it's a necessary study on how to implement them.

• Storage VMotion
• High Availability
• Distributed Resource Scheduler

We started moving to a virtual environment using VMWare very early on, and now more than 80% of our servers are virtual. We had a big server farm before, and our data center was filled with servers, now all our servers fit in one rack. Also, on physical machines increasing resources is a very difficult task, requiring downtime, but with VMs, we can do it on the fly.

They should have a good built-in backup feature. Although there is a built-in feature already, it is called VMWare Data Protection, but it is not at all user friendly.

I've used it for more than six years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It's very good.

It's very good.

No previous solution was used.

It was straightforward.

I did it myself.

It is very high.

Pricing is high as VMWare’s cost is always high.

No other options were evaluated.

It is a very good solution and it is stable.

• High Availability
• Distributed Resource Scheduler
• Site Recovery

It has allowed us to provide services to our customers more efficiently than ever. Combined with HP Cloudsystem Matrix, it has become standard with our customers.

• VDI
• Backup solution

I've been using it for the past nine years, since v2.5 was released.

Not really, just some tuning prior to release into production.

Not at all, this is by far one of the most reliable hypervisors to date.

ESXi allows us to grow dynamically and with minimum downtime.

9/10.

8/10.

I have used Hyper-V solutions that lack many high availability features, and the idea of being a Windows based hypervisor made them not so stable.

It was pretty much straightforward. It all depends on how deep you want to go with configuration.

We implemented it for our customers.

From my position, it means lot less administration, and better ease of use. It also allows us to have fewer physical servers.

Some may say it's not cheap, compared to Microsoft or Citrix, but when you master the solution, you realize its features are unique.

We just looked at the different licensing options.

I would encourage you to try this solution not just for Labs, but for production and DRP solutions. I know there are many others out there, and some very good ones, but VMware has been evolving in the right direction, and it is still the benchmark for all the others.

Virtualization is the most valuable feature. Without it, working in the cloud and IT life as we know it is not possible.

• Fast server provisioning
• Saves energy
• It's green
• Improves disaster recovery

I have configured our environment in a way by which it will ease the process of provisioning the VMs by using automation workflows within the VMware environment.

Disaster recovery is very much helpful for any business where you require a maximum uptime or minimal downtime. We have two environments configured, hosted in two different locations, so if we encounter a disaster at one site, the network infrastructure will switch to the other site with minimal downtime (maximum 15 minutes).

I've used it for over three years.

There were challenges with the compatibility, design and architecture. If these three things are perfect on your table, then you will not face any issues while deploying anything. In our scenario, we encountered some issues with compatibility.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

7/10.

8/10.

I was using Citrix. vSphere is far better than Citrix, in my opinion. There was a time that when you wanted to deploy a VDI environment, there would be no reason not to choose XenServers. But now, VMware vSphere is providing not just the VDI platform, but also the complete virtualization infrastructure with very good features.

It is always straightforward if you follow the documentation.

I tried it myself in-house in my lab environment.

I have learned a lot and am still learning.

It's worthwhile investing as VMware is a leader in the virtualization market.

• Citrix
• Hyper-V

Go ahead and implement it as you will enjoy using it.

I think that the Fault Tolerance and High Availability features are the most valuable ones. Storage vMotion, Server vMotion, and all the flexibility that vSphere can provide to a storage environment without interruption is also very good.

In the past, many organizations had many physical servers, and with VMWare we can consolidate many servers without compromising on the performance. We can save a lot of space in the data center. It also helps us to save power that, at this time, is a very important factor. With VMWare, we can use all the resources available on the servers without losing CPU or memory resources, and we can centralize the space into just one storage space.

In many areas of IT, you can use VMWare solutions. Here we have many applications running on the VMware vSphere, such as Oracle Database, MySQL, SQL, web applications, Apache, and many more. For all solutions of course, it depends on how the applications work, but until to day, I haven't observed any applications that won't work inside the vSphere infrastructure.

I have been using it since v3.5, so more than eight years, I have experience with other VMWare solutions too.

No, I did not have any issues because it all depends on how the environment was configured.

Nothing too important yet. The new v6.0 improves upon many features in vSphere High Availability. The enhancements correct issues of recovery from storage issues with a new feature called Virtual Machine Component Protection. This feature corrects many problems that we had when the backup tool lost connection with the ESXi servers.

No, I did not have any issues because it all depends on how the environment was configured.

I haven't had any issues with customer service and most problems can be solved through their website.

I have not had any issues with technical support as they have solved any issues that I have had to contact them about.

We have other solutions in the environment such as Oracle Rac and Microsoft Hyper-V, but I believe that vSphere is the most reliable product on the market.

The initial setup wasn't complex because we have experience with other VMWare solutions.

I implemented ii in-house.

Our ROI is high because we have 800 virtual servers spread across 22 physical ones.

When compared to the impact that the product has had, I do not believe the cost to be too high.

I have tested other products such as Hyper-V and Zen, but I believe that vSphere is more stable and has many more features available.

Go ahead and get it as this product is very, very stable.

• Distributed Resource Scheduler
• High Availability
• Storage I/O Control
• vMotion
• Storage vMotion
• Fault tolerance
• vSphere distributed switch

Using vSphere, we have more confidence that the virtual servers are secured with the HA feature.

Party auditing users, as today we do not natively know what each user is doing in the virtual environment.

I've used it for 10 years.

There were no issues as we followed the documentation.

No issues encountered.

The scalability of vSphere is amazing. No other virtualization manufacturer can even come close to the limits of vSphere's standards.

99.9999%

99%

I used a different solution, but it was not even close to vSphere. It was a good solution for certain environments, but lacking some features.

Take the time to study vSphere to get to know more about the product. There are a lot of documentation and labs available to help a person develop the skills required to work with vSphere.

• High Availability
• Distributed resource scheduling & vMotion
• Robust management toolset for automating routine tasks

vSphere provides the infrastructure framework to manage server and client systems in a multitude of user environments, from dedicated virtual workstations to short-term use systems. vSphere makes the provisioning and deployment of virtual servers and clients quick and predictable, centralizing the customization process while removing common hardware problems.

Fault Tolerance, which was introduced in version 5.5 and improved in 6.0, is a promising feature that has potential to ensure highly critical system availability in the enterprise environment. It presently has vCPU limitations which makes its deployment scenarios limited, but VMware has made great strides between the two versions, indicating that its usefulness will continue to improve.

I've used it for four years.

ESXi has some specific hardware requirements that administrators should make sure they are able to meet before deploying. While the platform can run on a considerable range of hardware, various features make use of specialized virtualization instruction sets in the hardware CPU that make the hypervisor suited to only a fraction of the common server hardware on the market. This is not a bad thing, as the benefits from these advanced features are well worth the cost of more advanced hardware. This is the only circumstance in which I have encountered obstacles to deployment.

No. The vSphere hypervisor is exceptionally stable, and the higher-level vSphere environment is quite adaptable to a fluctuating datacenter environment.

No. The ability to expand the capacity of the vSphere environment is one of the core capabilities of the product.

Efficient and knowledgeable.

Good value, particularly considering a support contract is required with the purchase of vSphere licenses.

No previous solution was used.

It's straightforward, as vSphere is a mature product with well-rounded documentation, and an easy-to-understand interface.

Our system was installed by a vendor team, but was configured in-house. Our vendor team provided a solid architecture solution, but it was insufficient for our requirements.

Licensing is not a major obstacle to adopting this product in an enterprise environment. VMware does offer some specialized vSphere editions for small business environments in which cost may be a considerable factor. There is a wide range of options provided by VMware with suitable price points for each license.

We did not evaluate other options.

Have a plan for system virtualization before pursuing vSphere. Often, the actual needs of an organization, particularly small and medium sized, are overestimated which leads to spending more for a product or product license than is necessary.

I'd say vMotion, High Availability, and Distributed Resource Scheduler, which have allowed us to administer hardware resources in a better way.

With High Availability, we have had only one incident where one of the hosts failed, and the VMs were moved immediately. It took about four minutes to complete migration, thus affecting operations minimally.

Reporting, and perhaps more DRS-friendly functions.

We've used it for almost three-and-a-half years, and previously we were using older versions, such as 2.0.

No, but that is relative. Sometimes issues are raised eventually.

No, but it does become difficult to have a standardized infrastructure.

No, but I guess cost is the main obstacle.

So far, good service, but it's managed by our corporate office.

It's good, but it is relative. I have been able to resolve many of our issues using the web.

I used to manage an IBM solution - SAN with VMware technology.

It was complex, as the setup and management was not too friendly.

We used a vendor team and the expertise was good, but it could have been better.

All I am able to say is that our SLAs have been achieved over the last two years.

This depends on the particular scenarios. Ours is a big one, and requires full stability (Enterprise license). We manage four geographic areas (Mexico, China, Czech Republic and Brazil).

Review the SLAs with customers and provide several options describing cost/benefits to them.

• The out-of-box application works well even without customization.
• vCenter web UI is great.

I work on it daily and it's easy to build VM's and take snapshots. I can also test the VM's as much as I want.

• vCenter web UI has the occasional bug.
• Sometimes it takes a while until the VM responds to a mouse click.

I've used it for six months.

None.

No.

Haven't yet needed to scale.

Haven't needed customer service.

Haven't needed technical support.

No previous solution used.

Straightforward.

In-house.

We did not evaluate other options.