VMware vSphere Reviews and Pricing

Virtualization Counsultant at a tech company with 51-200 employees

May 21, 2013

The only way to use vmware features like HA, FT, and DRS.

It is best way to manage your virtualization in your company and its the only way to use vmware features like HA, FT, DRS and so many other features that vmware provides.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user6561

Virtualization Counsultant at a tech company with 51-200 employees

May 17, 2013

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Fast, manageable, and secure. But no web interface without vCenter

Pros and Cons

"Little expensive"

Valuable Features:

Fast Manageable Secure Low overhead

Room for Improvement:

Little expensive Needs a lot of dependencies No web interface without vCenter

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user2652Project Manager at a non-tech company with 10,001+ employees

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Aug 17, 2013

Which SAN is preferred over ESXi? I am using Dell Compellent so far, it seems to be fine. But I have heard people using EMC, HP. I am planning to buy one more storage. Which one do you recommend for ESXi hosts?

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it_user6405

Engineer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

May 6, 2013

vSphere 5.1 – Lesser publicized, neat improvements.

There are a lot of neat improvements in vSphere 5.1, but it’s worth mentioning some of the neat features that may not be getting as much publicity. Below are some of the features in the release documentation that aren’t in the “What’s New in vSphere 5.1” one-pager, and so-far I haven’t seen nearly enough excitement about thus far. These are features that an engineer will enjoy, but the engineer’s boss might not care so much about.

32 Nodes Accessing VMDK Simultaneously on VMFS: This is an important improvement for VMware View workloads using Linked Clones as it allows for higher density clusters. Previously, VMFS only supported 8 nodes accessing a VMDK, and to overcome that then the architect had to use NFS. VMFS and NFS now support the same number of nodes to a read-only file with View 5.1 and greater.
Virtual Machine Hardware Compatibility: Instead of simply relying on the virtual hardware version number, virtual machines are now given a Virtual Machine Compatibility. For example, VM Hardware Version 4 is now labeled as “Compatible with VMware ESX 3.x and later“. In addition, Administrators can select a “Default Compatibility Level,” which will be a great feature in mixed version clusters.
Parallel “Multi-threaded” Storage vMotions: Storage vMotion is now capable of performing four simultaneous disk copies. When migrating a virtual machine with five VMDK files, Storage vMotion copies the first four disks in parallel, then starts the next disk copy as soon as one of the first four finish. This will dramatically increase svMotion processes with many disks.
All Paths Down (APD) Events No Longer Break Hostd: Prior to vSphere 5.1, an APD event could cause hostd to become unresponsive as it would permanently retry failing I/O, which would cause hosts to disconnect from vCenter, etc. A new timeout is now being implemented via the Misc.APDHandlingEnable and Misc.APDTimeout global settings. In the event of an APD, after the default 140 seconds subsequent I/O is met with a quick “No_Connect” response preventing hostd and other processes from hanging.
Better Latency Monitoring within Storage I/O Control: A new metric ‘VmObservedLatency’ is available that replaces the datastore latency metric within SIOC. This metric measures the time between receipt of the I/O by the VMkernel from the virtual machine and receipt of the response from the datastore. Previously, SIOC only measured the latency after the IO had left the ESXi host, but it now measures and controls storage workload latency throughout the whole virtualized storage stack.
vCenter Inventory Tagging: Virtual machines can now be tagged with labels for more granular, advanced grouping. For example, Tier-1 applications can be tagged as such while also being tagged as a ‘Sharepoint’ server. This is a relatively simple additions that gives much better sorting capabilities for Virtual Machines.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

reviewer139530Systems and Security Administrator at a hospitality company with 51-200 employees

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Jul 24, 2014

Has anyone had any angst when moving from the vSphere client in 5.1 to the web client in 5.5?

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it_user6144

Technical Architect at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Apr 25, 2013

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VMware ESXi rocks

Pros and Cons

"Brilliant hyper-visor with proven virtualization stack."

"You need to learn the internals of the system to really customize and reap all benefits."

Valuable Features:

Brilliant hyper-visor with proven virtualization stack.

Room for Improvement:

You need to learn the internals of the system to really customize and reap all benefits.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user1068Tech Support Staff at a tech company with 51-200 employees

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Oct 27, 2013

That's for sure @Kleegeek.

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it_user5931

Developer at a university with 51-200 employees

Apr 18, 2013

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Formerly the Leading First Generation, Free of Charge Virtualization Server of VMware

Pros and Cons

"VMware server is a free hosted virtualization server which runs on top of various operating systems such as Linux, Solaris, Windows and Netware."

"VMware server does not fully control the scheduling of hardware resources because the complete control falls into the underlying operating system."

Valuable Features:

• VMware server is a free hosted virtualization server which runs on top of various operating systems such as Linux, Solaris, Windows and Netware • It separates single physical server into various virtual machines which can be deployed many times • The installation of the server no longer requires hardware configuration • It serves as a testing environment for experimental OS, patches and softwares but does not need installation or any configuration • It can automatically starts virtual machine at system boot • It can also take full control of virtual machines from remote computers • It provides a complete GUI VMX editor • It allows virtual machines to use two VSMP processors • VMware server 2.0 has Web Management Interface which is used to easily manage virtual machines

Room for Improvement:

• VMware has lesser functionality than the proprietary VMware ESX • VMware server does not fully control the scheduling of hardware resources because the complete control falls into the underlying operating system • VMware Server Support ended on June 30, 2011

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user1068Tech Support Staff at a tech company with 51-200 employees

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Aug 4, 2013

Precise but to the point. VMware Server is an excellent virtulization product. However, lack of support since the end of June in 2011 was quite a blow. This has seen many businesses switch to use VMware ESX for their virtualization needs.

it_user5022

Student at a university with 501-1,000 employees

Mar 12, 2013

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The best product of VMware.

Pros and Cons

"Easy to use and manage."

Valuable Features:

Easy to use and manage.

Room for Improvement:

Valuable Features:

- Enterprise class solution - Live Migration (both server and storage) - High Availability and Load Balancing - Disaster Recovery - Lots of 3rd party vendor support - Excellent technical support

Room for Improvement:

- Cost - Lack of support for virtualization (all hypervisors) - Licensing- Started with VMware ESX ver 2.1 in 2004. Currently using vSphere 4.1i and working on upgrade to 5.1 - Chose VMware for several reasons (1) Had experience with Desktop and GSX products (2) Ran on bare metal (3) No other real competitors at the time

Other Advice:

Advice: - VMware is not the only game in town anymore - Look at your requirements: - If you are a small to medium shop other server virtualization products may provide what you need - If you are a large shop I would recommendVMware

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user6186Independent Analyst and Advisory Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

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May 2, 2014

When you say a con is lack of virtualization (all hypervisors), can you elaborate?
I have multiple hypervisors running nested on my VMware vSphere environment (works better with 5.5).
Otoh, if you are referring to being able to manage other hypervisors with native vSphere (e.g. client), then fair point as you would have to add the multi hypervisor manager download part of vCenter to be able to do that.
However as you say, many options, Hyper-V is often overlooked or perceived to be expensive as from Microsoft which is not always the case. Likewise there is Xen and KVM among others. From a management perspective you can also do things such as layer OpenStack compute over different hypervisors (e.g. Hyper-V, vSphere/ESXi, KVM, etc). Hence explore your options.

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it_user3507

Senior Manager of Infrastructure with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jan 8, 2013

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Our current virtualization standar platform, but Hyper-V 2012 version functionality appears to gain on VMware vSphere

Pros and Cons

"Initial ROI analysis a few years ago did show significant savings over physical model."

"Advanced capacity management and performance management and analysis, disaster recovery, and private cloud capabilities are lacking out of the box for enterprise-level deployments."

Valuable Features:

Key business drivers and benefits for us: • Co-location data centers environmental costs are greatly reduced (rack space, power, cooling). • Allows better utilization and flexibility to segment physical resources (vCPU & vMemory) • Consolidate / centralize management of all Windows and Linux infrastructure - Administer entire virtual environment via a single pane of glass (vCenter) - Provisioning of VMs is really simple and quick. Allows easy use of templates. - Utilize Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) & VMotion - Optimizes performance of VMs - Allows flexibility for patching cycles to minimize downtime. • VMware product has been very stable • Allows for easier compliance and consistency for meeting IT audit controls • Initial ROI analysis a few years ago did show significant savings over physical model. We are looking at updated ROI and show-back / charge-back models currently.

Room for Improvement:

VMware product challenges / Areas for improvement: • Advanced Capacity Management and Performance Management & Analysis, Disaster Recovery, and private cloud capabilities are lacking out of the box for enterprise-level deployments. - Ability to “right-size” resources on all VMs is needed at enterprise installations. - Add-on / 3rd party products like vCenter Operations / VMturbo, SRM, or vCloud may be needed. - These add-on products add management complexity. They also add licensing and maintenance costs for the overall solution in a tough budget climate. • Difficulty using VMotion with Microsoft Clusters. We utilize clusters for our large SQL Farm, but we are unable to use VMotion during patching efforts. We are now looking at Hyper-V or physical servers for this functionality to minimize downtime. • Granting administrative privileges / roles can be a bit more tedious than are initially apparent.• VMware vSphere 5 is current architectural standard for 2 data centers - VMware was the major virtualization solution provider when first implemented years ago - Microsoft 2012 Hyper-V “proof of concept” is currently in progress for US - Educational discounts from Microsoft are significant - Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 version functionality appears to gain on VMware vSphere • Also have a large Solaris UNIX environment utilizing Solaris Zones. • VMware (or Hyper-V) will enable us to drive a re-platforming effort for Solaris -> Linux

Other Advice:

Things to consider before purchasing VMware or Hyper-V: • Understand your virtualization objectives and requirements before purchase. Assess all requirements against VMware or Hyper-V licensing cost and edition functionality • Define a strategy for resource intensive applications (large CPU or memory requirements) and when to stay standalone vs. virtual • Implement processes to control “VM sprawl” as VM provisioning process is so simple. • Consider other process efficiencies that virtualization may drive (i.e. Service Catalog) • Ensure IT staff gets proper training. The learning curve can be steep initially at the enterprise level. • If possible , look at processes for show-back or charge-back model early on to assess costs and ROI.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

ADM

Senior Techical Support Engineer at A Cloud Compute Company

Jan 4, 2013

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* User friendly and not complex. * Easy to...

Pros and Cons

"Highly recommended for mission critical applications and databases."

"VMware should compete against their competitors in terms of pricing."

Valuable Features:

* User friendly and not complex. * Easy to deploy, manage and troubleshoot. * Scalability and stability. * Highly recommended for mission critical applications and databases. * Aggressive in educating their clients.* User friendly and not complex. * Easy to deploy, manage and troubleshoot. * Scalability and stability. * Highly recommended for mission critical applications and databases. * Aggressive in educating their clients.

Room for Improvement:

VMware should compete against their competitors in terms of Pricing. Hopefully, they can value add some features without any additional cost.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user1068Tech Support Staff at a tech company with 51-200 employees

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Oct 6, 2013

vSphere is indeed the best in the market as a result of its web interface and compatibility with different OS (among other excellent features). Web based programs and applications are the in thing in the modern market of this kind.

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it_user1020

Head of Data Center at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Jan 3, 2013

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An excellent product with proven track record. Plan properly the deployment and use as this products is expensive.

Pros and Cons

"Despite the inherent high cost associated with using this product, I will still highly recommend this for use in production environments."

"With all the desirable features of vSphere and its proven track record, it's no wonder that it's also the most expensive virtualization platform out there."

Valuable Features:

VMware vSphere is a proven product with an established track record. We bought it as part of our server system upgrade project to accommodate our new student management system from Oracle. At first, we had a taste of vSphere as part of a demonstration system. We got to play around with it and really liked its features and the capabilities that it can bring to our organization.VMware is also a Cisco partner, and as such Cisco has a validated design for using vSphere together with their blade servers for Oracle PeopleSoft. This was critical in selecting vSphere as our virtualization platform foundation, as the application which we envisioned to run on the servers is fully tested and verified by Cisco and Oracle to work with vSphere.

Room for Improvement:

With all the desirable features of vSphere and its proven track record, its no wonder that it's also the most expensive virtualization platform out there. This is the first major disadvantage when using VMware. Other vendors have competing products with similar capabilities. However, these products are not proven and tested.Another thing to watch out for when using vSphere is that you really need to plan your deployment and use thoroughly. With the high cost associated with this product, proper diligence must be taken in the planning on how to use this product to achieve the desired results.Lastly, make sure the hardware that you run vSphere on is fully supported. Hardware compatibility issues can limit the functionality of vSphere or worse render the hardware useless.Despite the inherent high cost associated with using this product, I will still highly recommend this for use in production environments. The benefits that will be enjoyed far outweighs the consequences as long as proper planning is done.

Other Advice:

It is also recommend to get a reliable partner for integrating the software with the hardware system. As vSphere has numerous features, an inexperienced integrator or un-trained in-house administrator might not be able to configure fully all features necessary to maximize the product.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.