VMware vSphere Reviews

Thanks to vSphere we have improved our availability and scalability, and we are now able to dynamically move to a cloud paradigm. vSphere for us, is not a simple computer virtualization; it provides a complete infrastructure which combines computer storage, and networking elements in a single software layer, that we are calling SDDC.

Previously, we thought it was a simple server consolidation, where bulk and power consumption were drastically reduced. Now we are moving to a software-defined storage and software-defined networking to keep control of all IT environment, from service to a single infrastructure components.

We hope to keep all the physical datacenter elements under the same software layer, and we are hoping that that dream will comes true in the next years.

The introduction of a web console could be a great improvement for sysadmin, but the poor responsive interface has been solved in v6.0. The previous sysadmin/design experience with vSphere client could become a dangerous loop for its development.

At the moment, VMware admins say that the vSphere client will never die!

The vSphere installation, and operations are fully documented. I think that VMWare spent a lot of time writing documents which could be useful during the platforms lifecycle.

Before installing this product, try to design all the components, and don't be shy asking for comparisons or sharing your experience. Often design guidelines are the result of customer implementations, and different points of view. Before bringing it into production in your environment, execute hardening procedures.

If you are working for an ISP, where network admin rules an IT organization, try to get control of all networking devices connected to all services provided by your platform. Often, ISP network administrators are specialized in internet networking, and often they don't know data center networking issues and design impacts.

One of the worst savings to do when trying to consolidate, is to use less networking devices; for this reason I suggest you never play around with them when you need to use eight interfaces per host. If you need them there is no reason to have less than you have asked.

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.