VMware vSphere Reviews

• Reliability
• HA
• DR
• Ease of deployment
• We had a lot of disparate hardware and now able to consolidate into one platform
• Easy to keep hardware up to date

So much easier to back things up now. We had Oracle, SQL, everything was just a one-off, but we now have just one process for all our VMs.

We have vCloud suite, Hyperion was a pain, but now they've just announced integration into vCenter, so everytime I have a complaint, they’ve already started to address it.

• Great stability, no complaints at all
• More we move to appliances
• Easy to keep up to date

• We had a lot of standalone boxes, and management wanted to go to VMs
• We were able to consolidate all hardware without purchasing anything extra
• Able to carry us through several years when unable to purchase hardware

They've always been excellent, but we rarely contact them maybe one or two times a year. When we’ve had issues, it’s resolved in hours. We have TAM (tech account manager) so helped things along.

We had vendor come out and it set up on 3.5, and once we got our feet wet, it's easy to maintain and upgrade.

Only purchase what you’re going to use, our management makes decisions, and buy lots of products we’re not using.

We chose vSphere because of it's ease of use, especially that it's easier than Hyper-V. Deployment would have been more labor intensive, and wouldn’t have saved any more money in the long run.

• Virtualizing everything
• HA
• DRS

When I came, it was already being used, but it helps with consolidation of our 750 machines. We have 50 ESXi hosts, and they’re all consolidated, being able to share memory, computing.

As a partner we have VSPP (VMware Service Provider Program in which we pay per memory usage).

The web client needs to be moved from flash-based to HTML5. I would like an app as well for remote access.

I've had hardly any issues. The ESXi host can stay up and running, and the hardware compatibility is very good, and we're moving towards a virtual appliance (vCenter).

It's easy to scale.

I rarely contast them as I had a terrible experience. The made me take down all the linked nodes, and I need to escalate if I want resolutions.

It's extremely easy, and you can set it up in less than a day. We do nesting virtualizitions and labs all the time.

Go ahead and buy it. I always go with VMware.

The ability to spin up machines when we need a test and dev environment for client work.

It saves me time, and at the end of the day, that’s it for me.

It fits my needs right now, I honestly don’t need anything else.

It’s stable – no crashes, no bugs, knock on wood, but it’s been great.

We have scaled, from about one server to three now. Its very easy to just scale up.

I've used them just once. They were responsive, quick, somebody got on the phone and it worked to a resolution quickly.

We were limited on space in our data center, with physical servers, and we needed more.

It was very straightforward.

I did it, and it was easy.

Just VMware, my previous job we used it, and it was great. I’ve been a customer for a long time now. I just want something to work, and I know VMware does.

It’s been great. I would recommend it all the time, it’s great. Peer reviews are quite important, as I need to know what others are experiencing before I do.

• Virtualization
• Ability to vMotion and create servers on LAN
• HA
• DRS

The ability to build machines on the LAN as the business needs them, and the ability to have good DR and HA, with no hardware that can cause issues. If we go down, we have another host with very little downtime.

I would like them to keep the client-based system, even though they are going towards web client.

It's extremely stable rarely any issues.

It's very scalable. We currently have 10,000+ servers, and 80% virtualized, so scalability has to be there.

VMware tech support is excellent. It’s one of the best vendor tech support I’ve found.

It's extremely easy, very straightforward, and good documentation.

Accessibility and the ease of use is unparalleled. The clustering and ability to move virtual machines around on the fly has been amazing.

We’ve been able to consolidate our footprint and decreased the number of hardware hosts we were running.

I think everything we’re looking at should be addressed in 6. I don’t like the web client, I’m sure it’s fine, but I believe 6.0 addresses that.

We just switched, but so far it’s been very stable.

Not yet, we just switched over.

I submitted a ticket about four weeks ago, and the guy called me on a Saturday at midnight. It’s been fairly hard to get hold of somebody, and when they get ahold of you, I understood about three of every five words they said. I wished it was better.

We were just running Hyper-V, and the size of our team required more. The need to consolidate our servers, as VMware is a lot better with resource management, we didn’t want a large server cluster, so VMware was needed in order to maintain it well with a smaller staff.

Peer reviews actually a huge point in us switching over from Hyper-V. It’s such an old product that it was hard to find any support for it online, and the change we’ve seen in vSphere is night and day. There’s so many peer resources available that it’s been easy to transition for us.

It's straightforward, and the documentation is nice. It's also got a good footprint on the web, that makes it easy to look for other users for knowledge and advice.

I always look at the price before purchasing technology.

Nope, it was the best from what we heard.

I would say from a 4 of Hyper-V, I would easily give this a 7 or 8, as the support definitely improved drastically.

When selecting a vendor, do your research and develop relationships. If you know the product and can get in contact with POCs, we want to see the product before we buy it.

• DRS (compute and storage) is one of the best features for practical purposes.
• HA is a great feature, but if you keep hosts patched, HA doesn’t come into play. It’s not a day-to-day feature you use.
• Ability to vMotion across clusters. We took smaller clusters and consolidated them into one mega cluster because of the ability to vMotion from other clusters live into newly-created clusters.

The consolidation. Pre-VM, we had pain transporting applications from one physical machine to another. Now, we can consolidate machines that aren't using computer resources into an environment where they can all exist without performance degradation.

I'm excited to see in 6.0 the enhanced vMotion capabilities to connect our Phoenix, AZ and Culpepper, VA datacenters. It will have the ability to geo-vMotion instead of just metro-vMotion machines.

Now, it's much better than used to be. HA doesn’t even come into play, but you must manage the environment to maintain that.

There’s some bugs (zero uptime bug, and RAM disk issue), but those were resolved. They were hiccups/annoyances.

Phenomenal. Multiple 32-node clusters and 6.0 can support 64 nodes. Don’t know if we will get that large because it gets unwieldy, and will be hard to vMotion all of that off one host onto another and patch within a reasonable amount of time. It’s so condensed in clusters that it makes it hard to maintain.

Periodically used as sounding board for things we want to do. Not high marks, though, because first-level support is not knowledgeable. I would rather rely on peers in blogs, forums, etc. Also, sometimes they're not communicative.

Involved in the beginning with v2.5, not overly difficult (in ESXi had to come up with some scripts, because at the time it didn’t have a GUI).

Consider the scale of environment, especially if you're in a position to have closeted datacenter. It’s self-contained and cost-effective.

vSphere is great, I’ve made a career of it.

The management piece of it, being able to see what all my servers are doing from one central place.

Higher return on investment, reduced cost of hardware, and central management which is key. The most important part is that it's nimble – I can deploy a server in minutes.

The product is perfect the way it is for us, for our needs.

Very stable – extremely so.

Easy to scale – able to scale out as we need.

Depending on what technical level you are on, they are responsive and very knowledgeable. Any time I have to use them a solution is forthcoming within 24 hours.

Somewhere in the middle – you have to know what you’re doing and have some knowledge. One thing with these products, is that the more you use them the easier it is.

We looked at Microsoft, and we looked at the viability of the product, technical support, and ease of use. VMware was chosen because of its ease of use, and the product itself.

We're able to centrally manage our infrastructure.

Its ability to tie into Veeam is really slick – that makes using Veeam really easy.

I'd like to see a different client. I know they are doing the HTML5 stuff with the web client, which has potential, but it could be better.

I think it’s great – we've never had any issues and we've been using it for a long time, about five years.

I think it's really good, it's good for our size and for our future growth. Our company has around 12,000 users.

I haven’t had a lot of interaction because I haven’t really needed to, but when I have they’ve been responsive and support has been good.

No. Our parent company has Hyper-V and it’s no good.

It’s pretty straightforward, not complex at all.

I would highlight compatibility with hosts, ease of use, consistency, reliability – all things that are better than Hyper-V.

Peer reviews are significant, but you can tell the most from firsthand experience.