VMware vSphere Reviews

• vMotion
• DRS
• DB switch

We’re able to leverage it for our main corporate IT infrastructure and deploying across nine smaller remote offices. We can cluster storage and make it HA-aware, and don’t need local IT staff at remote office.

For most part, pretty good, but UI could be improved. Has GUI geared towards Linux, would like to see GUI for Windows so that Windows admin can install.

Rock solid. Small issues where ESXi host re-booted, but probably related to internal configuration.

Can add multiple ESXi hosts and expand from there. We started with a minimum three node cluster with HP as backbone for storage for blueprint. We were able to move from a 1GBPS network 10 GBPS. We have now gotten up to 30-40 total nodes between all sites, but the main datacenter has 15-20 nodes.

We contact them once in a while, and have always had a good impression. Some colleagues though, have had issues however.

We were a Hyper-V shop but switched, because more robust. VMware is a gamechagner in virtualization.

It's a little bit complicated at the beginning because we did some of it on our own, and we could have engaged professional services to ease that pain. Some of the complications from a networking piece, which were a little confusing. Also confusing, was the difference between thick and thin provisioning. Logic says you should thin provision, but after taking the classes, we probably should have gone with thick provisioning.

The product is good, but the licensing gets confusing. As a technician, I don’t want to have to worry about the licensing side. If I purchase something, just tell me how many licenses I have left whenever I add a server, just something simple like that.

The HA and DRS capabilities are great. Right now, we’re able to basically use the ESXi and move all the blades without the users ever knowing anything was different.

Having all the VMs and everything work without the user experience being affected.

That’s a hard question since I don’t know what new features there are in v6 other than single-user sign-on. I’m curious to see the release of v6 here, as I want to see how the client version works. I also want to get an overall view of how it works, as well as how well the mobile management works.

Of course it has room for improvement, but it’s the best in the field as there’s not many better options.

It’s been very stable for us. I’m still on version 5.5, so one of the things I wanted to do is check out if 6 is worth upgrading to.

We don’t have many users, and right now, it’s just me who's running this solution. For the VMs, we’ve been able to get requests from my internal customers to just improve on the sizes, and it works very, very well.

I’ve had mixed results primarily because I’ve had issues that have dragged on for a while, but for the most part in terms of responsiveness and explanation they’ve been very good. Once I articulate my problem to them, they explain the steps to take next very well.

We had lots of servers, and the costs were also huge. The cost was not only in buying hardware, but also looking at, in the data center, the footprint that we were taking up, and having to pay for all of that. Thus, we knew we needed to become more cost effective, and we were able to move from many locations into one server location in a chassis.

The environment that I manage now was set up about six years ago. We had an outsourcer (third-party) set it up since we wanted a professional to setup a new technology. He royally screwed it up, and we had to come back, completely rip it up, and restart. VMware had to help us get it back up to speed since that point.

Capabilities, as we do a bake-off to essentially evaluate options. We look at multiple vendors, and see if they meet X and Y demands, and see who does it best.

I have a list of things that I think I need, but it helps to see what others need and want as well. After seeing their pros and cons, we can reevaluate on what we need in our environment accordingly.

VMWare was the vendor that won last time, nobody wanted Hyper-V. We looked at Hyper-V and VMWare only, and nobody wanted Hyper-V. VMWare delivered far better test results.

Without explicitly saying look at VMWare, understand what functions you need in your products, look at different vendors and what they claim to provide, and then bring them in house to see if they deliver on their claims. They have to pass all of the tests that your company needs.

There are no physical limitations in being able to move virtual machines around hosts and storage.

It allows us to be flexible-- every time we need a new server we don’t need a new physical box.

I’m sure there is plenty that could be better, but nothing comes to mind immediately because it just rocks.

Very impressed – rock solid.

It's infinitely scalable.

It's readily available as needed.

I inherited our setup. It's very easy to add new versions as well. As long as you know what you're doing, it's very easy.

We did an evaluation of Microsoft Hyper-V, and it's not there compared to VMware. It's where VMware was five years ago.

You can't go wrong with VMware. The stability and the flexibility it allows, they do it best compared to competitors.

Peer reviews are fairly important, but I try to form my opinion from a POC over anything else.

It enables vMotion, DRS, and HA.

The ability to consolidate and portability, flexibility, and DR. The management thereof is a single pane of glass.

The web client is botched.

There's not many problems with it.

It's very scalable and increasingly so because of what they’re doing with applicances. There's no trade-off between maximums of Windows and appliances.

Since they outsourced it, response times are not what they used to be.

It’s now very easy. It was harder, but now there are more deployment options, scripts, auto-deploy, and you can have full automation or manual, with a smaller footprint.

• vMotion
• DRS
• HA

The ability to perform consolidation and it's portability, flexibility, and DR capability.

None that I can think of. It's a nicely-evolved product.

Overall, it’s very stable. I'm very impressed, except when running on Dell, but it works on Cisco blades.

It's very scalable, and you can add more as needs dictate. It depends on the ratio and goals for consolidation, so you can scale as you need.

The quality is not quite what it used to be since it was outsourced.

It’s now very easy, was harder but now more deployment options, scripts, auto-deploy, can have full automation or manual, smaller footprint.

• Ease of use
• UI
• vMotion, migrating VMs from one physical server to another with no downtime

It simplifies the management of VMs of our 30 VMs. It's helped with disaster recovery, and we use EMC for disaster recovery, but it's managed with vCenter.

We moved the disaster recovery location from one state to another, and VMs helped us so that we didn’t have to move physical servers,

I don't use it enough to suggest improvements.

No issues, it's rock solid.

There's no issues with it.

We’ve had no need for tech support yet; my team have so far been able to solve any issues.

Make sure you get training on its use and deployment, because you won’t know what you’re getting into.

• Unified management
• UI

It simplifies the management of VMs of our 30 VMs. It's helped with disaster recovery, and we use EMC for disaster recovery, but it's managed with vCenter.

We moved the disaster recovery location from one state to another, and VMs helped us so that we didn’t have to move physical servers.

The alerting functions, right now based on performance, is not so clear now either by email or on the console.

No issues, it's rock solid.

We add one or two VMs every six months, and the only issue was with Sharepoint 2013 that required dedicated memory.

It's good, no issues with response time or knowledge.

Make sure you get training on use, and deployment because you won’t know what you’re getting into.

• vCenter
• ESXi Host
• Configuring
• Management
• Patch
• Maintenance

It has reduced the space, and power utilization, as well as allowing a much more efficient way to increase/decrease the server inventory.

I think VMware should make it easier to manage different components (ESXi Hosts, vCenter, etc.) through firewalls. Some organizations have to separate the components with firewalls for security purposes, and VMware does not act well when hosts are separated from vCenter by firewalls.

I've used it for two years.

Absolutely, numerous issues in particular HP ESXi VMware images that we utilized created a number of deployment issues. ESXi Hosts would lock up, network configs would malfunction and plenty more. We had issues deploying vCenter on windows 2012, and Windows 2012 r2, such as being unable to successfully integrate vCenter with Active Directory and plenty more.

Technical support was difficult to obtain at time because of the limited number of resources allocated to our program.

The previous solution were individual physical servers, which we replaced by utilizing VMware.

It was straightforward, and physical servers used to host web applications.

We implemented it in-house.

No other options were looked at.