VMware vSphere Reviews

The focus is more on simulating various PM (Performance Management) products. This involves tasks like identifying bugs or testing new updates.

As for the workflow, it primarily revolves around working remotely due to the pandemic. Unlike having a physical lab where reconfiguration is feasible, I have taken advantage of VMware solutions, including VMware vSphere and related products. I have adapted them to match the specific configurations.

The emphasis isn't specifically on a particular feature, but rather on the ease of use. For instance, when building a test lab or setting up an entire environment from scratch, VMware products are notably more user-friendly compared to alternatives like Nutanix. I've had prior experience with Nutanix.

From my personal perspective, I found it easier to adapt to using VMware than when I started using Dynamics. This ease of use is a strong point. It's largely about how straightforward it is to navigate through VMware's user interface. In contrast, with Nutanix, there's a need to delve into smaller configurations and navigate vendor-specific settings. VMware, on the other hand, offers a more accessible management page. This difference primarily centres around usability and the overall user-friendliness of the interface.

Given that I've been using version seven, it seems that some of the bugs I faced during that version have already been addressed in subsequent updates. Although I haven't personally tested them yet, it appears that these issues have been resolved. In version seven, there was a problem with the network interface not responding due to certain configurations not being properly filtered. However, in version eight, this requirement has been minimized, so the mentioned bug is less likely to occur. Instead of solely addressing these fixes in newer versions, it might be beneficial for them to consider applying these improvements to the older versions as well. This approach could prevent users from feeling compelled to upgrade to version eight solely to avoid encountering the issue, and instead provide updates for version seven users.

I have been using VMware vSphere for sometime.

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten.

The case of scalability of this solution is easy in a hybrid setup so I would rate it nine out of ten. 

I lack substantial experience with technical support, as my past interactions mainly pertained to license-related matters. When it comes to addressing actual technical issues, I haven't had the opportunity to gain significant experience yet.

Positive

I would rate the initial setup eight or nine out of ten because of its easy navigation and setup.The deployment takes almost half an hour. Essentially, having the network configuration prepared is crucial, as it often represents the most time-consuming aspect when setting up an environment, whether it's on-premises, in the cloud, or anywhere else. Once the network configuration is in place, the process becomes smoother and more straightforward.

It's a common trend as many progressive IT firms are transitioning towards cloud or virtual environments due to factors like pricing, SMAX, and VMatter. In this regard, I would rate VMware as moderately satisfactory. I would rate it seven out of ten.

Our clients use the product for virtualization. Some of our internal divisions also use the product for virtualization.

The solution saves cost. We can run seven to eight different applications on it. SDDC is the best feature. The data center replication features and high availability are valuable to us. We use the product because of its HA. The HA solution is more comprehensive.

VMware is not efficient. The solution is slower than other tools. We can run applications on other platforms whose VMs are faster than VMware’s. We can also run bare metal on physical servers, but it will be very expensive compared to VMware.

I have been using the solution for seven to eight years.

The tool is stable.

The tool is very scalable.

The support could be better. The team is not very responsive. It keeps sending us to the resellers and distributors. Support is not that good compared to Microsoft’s.

Neutral

The deployment is very complex. We cannot design the tool without VMware-certified architects or professionals. We need at least five people for designing, planning, deployment, and maintenance. Maintenance does not require many people. Our operations personnel can maintain it. The deployment takes at least two weeks. The learning curve for operations is not that steep, but the learning curve for deployment is very steep.

The product is very expensive.

We use the solution internally and externally. We have different virtualization platforms. VMware is a mature solution. It's stable but a bit pricey. It doesn't have any competition. If we compare it to the full solution stack, it's a very mature solution. Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.

I use VMware vSphere primarily to provide a layer of virtualization between our Cisco hardware and existing software. It ensures high availability and redundancy for our applications, minimizing downtime in case of OS or application failures. Additionally, vSphere simplifies migration when updating hardware and makes it faster to reinstall virtual machines along with applications.

I appreciate VMware vSphere for its versatility and usability across various use cases. The solution's flexibility allows us to implement it widely. We use it extensively, and I believe soon all our servers will run through virtualization for better efficiency using vSphere. It performs as advertised and meets our needs effectively.

In terms of improvement, the license fee could be more affordable, but overall, I'm satisfied with VMware vSphere.

I have been using VMware vSphere for almost 20 years.

vSphere is very stable. I would rate the stability as a ten out of ten.

Setting up VMware vSphere is very straightforward; no issues there. Purchasing involves acquiring licenses and the licenses often come bundled with hardware from vendors like HP or Dell. The deployment process is smooth, and support hasn't been necessary as the software is stable. For deployment and maintenance, we currently have about four or five active staff members involved. However, considering buying expertise and engineers, the team can range from nine to ten individuals.

The solution is not cheap.

Overall, I would rate vSphere as a perfect ten out of ten.

The most common use case for VMware vSphere is, of course, virtualization, specifically operating system virtualization. We also have containers that are running on them.

Essentially, we have the flexibility for a hybrid cloud. We could easily move workloads from on-premises to the cloud and vice versa if we were running on-premises and cloud, which is one of the most important points in the new releases, in particular.

The quality of support could be better.

We have been using VMware vSphere for six to seven years.

We have dealt with various versions that range from 5.5 to 7.

VMware vSphere is a stable solution.

In our organization, we have at least 60,000 users.

It is being used extensively. It is one of the core products in the infrastructure.

Support has not been as good as it once was. It used to be better, but it appears that the quality of support is declining for some reason. I'm not sure why.

Previously, we were using Hyper-V, but I don't have a lot of experience using it.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. It's very simple.

The time it takes to set up will vary, but it will most likely be within a day. You could set up the environment in a day. It is determined by a variety of factors. If it is done by an experienced engineer, it will be done within a day. If not, it will take longer.

We have a team of three engineers to deploy and maintain this solution.

Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis. The license is a one-time payment. You buy it once and own it forever, but you must pay for support, which is provided by the vendor, on a yearly basis.

We are also using NSX and vSAN. We have been using NSX for three years.

It's not strictly a cloud solution; it can be on-premises as well as in the cloud. It is, in essence, a network virtualization solution. It can be used for virtualizing the network, virtual routers, virtual switches, and virtual firewalls.

Virtualization and on-demand networking are two of the benefits. On-demand networking is the best option if I can memorize it. If you need virtual switches, we can create them as well as routers.

Virtualization would be our area of expertise.

VMware vSphere is, in my opinion, one of the best in its class on the market. However, depending on the use cases, we could certainly recommend it.

I would rate VMware vSphere a nine out of ten.

It is a compute virtualization software. It is mainly used to virtualize physical servers and deploy virtual machines on top of virtual servers. So, instead of having one workload per server, you can have multiple workloads.

The fact that you can use all the CPU and memory power that the server can provide is most valuable. In a physical server, you might end up not using all the physical resources. There are a lot of benefits, such as flexibility and mobility, in virtualizing computes.

The improvement is more from a licensing perspective rather than from a feature functionality perspective. There could be more flexibility and fewer model options to make it easier to sell. Today, there are so many different options available, and sometimes, it is not really clear which one is the right version or the right model to propose. 

We have been providing this solution to our customers for 15 years.

It is definitely stable.

It is scalable. In our country, I believe 50% of the customers are running vSphere virtualization.

I don't have experience with their technical support. 

I never did an installation, but as per my understanding, it is straightforward.

The number of people required for installation and maintenance really depends on the scale of the project. Usually, one engineer can deploy vSphere very easily.

It depends on the contract they have with VMware.

I can recommend this solution. I would rate it at least an eight out of 10.

We use vSphere to host all of our business applications, as well as our in-house developed applications. We also use it for the software components that support our IT team.

The core components are the most valuable aspect of this solution. The fact that we have the ability to easily scale out, and the ability to do maintenance on the underlying hardware without impacting our business applications, are important aspects. In general, we have better control over what kind of systems are impacted when we make changes.

The challenge that we have is keeping the system up to date, as well as having the internal resources to maintain that platform. We're not an IT company, so it's challenging for us to keep the IT resources in-house. It is for this reason that we are now investigating public cloud offerings.

We would like to see VMware move in the direction of having a working model on the application level. The next level of virtualization, most likely container solutions, is what we're interested in. That would avoid us having to support the operating system and tooling. Overall, it would make it easier for us from a customer perspective to use it.

This is a fairly stable product.

Absolutely, vSphere is scalable. We have approximately 4,500 users connecting to this system and we increase our usage by approximately 10% per year.

The technical support is a combination of VMware and our integrator.

If we have major issues or we are making major changes, we typically go through the integrator. They have a partnership with VMware.

We typically deal with the less severe or impacting changes and issues. In general, that goes pretty well. The software is pretty well documented, so usually, we have a quick fix if we run into problems.

We did not work with another similar solution prior to this one.

Our deployment was a project that took a couple of weeks. It was not major. The last upgrade went smoothly, as well. In general, the time that it took to put things in place was acceptable.

Our only complaint about the implementation is about having the resources with the requisite knowledge. That's our biggest challenge.

We use an integrator to do the initial implementation. In case we have major changes to make, we will again hire the integrator to do that work.

With respect to our return on investment, this product is definitely worth it. It is not cheap and there is a cost associated with additional licenses, but there are not very many options.

The cost of the licenses is acceptable and we haven't seen any major increases from the vendor in the time we've been using it. This is not a cheap product but it's an investment.

There is a cost associated whenever we need to add licenses.

We reviewed a couple of options and at that point in time, VMware was one of the strongest players. This was especially true because they had a lot of partners and integrators in the region, which quickly led us to choose them. Selecting another solution would be more challenging for us, especially in getting the required support.

I don't think that we're going to expand further or improve upon our current solution. We are now investigating to what extent the public cloud offerings are a better match or solution for our use cases.

In summary, this is a very stable solution and it has been that way for years. So far, it's been a very good fit. The only question is today, is it still worthwhile investing in on-premise solutions, or are cloud solutions at a level where we can move production nodes to it? That's basically our question and I'm guessing a question that a lot of other companies are asking themselves.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We implement all the standard VMware data solutions. Typically, that's vSphere and sometimes DataCore, the other product we like. We use vSphere for the virtualization of data servers, and other common uses.

Our customers opt for virtualization because it's cheaper and better than non-virtualized solutions. VMware is probably the best on the market now. 

We're implementers and we started using vSphere when it was first released. We've been with VMware since the beginning. There was no ES6 at that time, only GS6 on Microsoft, so we started with Windows-based VMware. It's an old solution. We've been using it for a long time. 

We haven't encountered any limitations with vSphere's scalability. At the same time, we usually do not install huge server farms here in the Slovak Republic, so we only use VMware for small installations with a few host servers. I don't think we'll reach the limits of VMware's scalability since we only work with small organizations. 

We tried Hyper-V a few years back, but there was a problem with the 2012 version of Hyper-V, so we prefer VMware because we know it works. However, I'm not sure about the newer versions of Hyper-V. I can only speak to our experiences with the older one. We weren't satisfied with the features, and the Microsoft code had bugs that they didn't repair those errors. 

Overall, Hyper-V was a highly unstable solution at the time, so we decided to stick with VMware because it was much more reliable. Maybe Microsoft has improved Hyper-V since then. I can't say.

I rate VMware vSphere nine out of 10. It does what we need it to do, and works fine. There aren't any additional features that we need at this time.

We use vSphere for production work on defense projects.

There's a lot of things they can improve on, but it's just a matter of where they are at in their development cycle right now. I wish they would have been able to handle Apple at this point, but they can't. So it's just one of those things. They've got features I'm still trying to understand. We haven't gone to containers yet, and I'm trying to find a use for a container.

My company has been using vSphere for four years, but I've been using it since about 2003.

Everything has been stable.

VMware vSphere is easy to scale. We haven't had any problems scaling what we're scaling now.

I have contacted VMware support in the past, but I haven't needed to in a couple of years. They got back to me. Once you actually get in the queue and they actually talk to you, you're fine. It took me 48 hours to get in the queue because it wasn't a life or death issue. It was just a question. I've called them for more urgent stuff before, and they picked right up and answered the questions. They got us back online within a few hours.

This department happens to run VMware. Other departments run VMware and also use Citrix for certain things. We're looking at running BDI rather than Citrix.

It depends on how you're setting vSphere up and deploying it. They've added some products recently like vSAN and a few other things to the base loads. You have to know what you're doing with those, but it works beautifully if you're doing a standard deployment with general IP storage.

On a government contract, everything's just a base price. You don't get much of a choice. We'd always like to see the price drop, but I realize that may not be realistic.

I rate VMware vSphere nine out of 10.