VMware vSphere Reviews

This solution is used as a virtual and a clustered environment. We provide a minimum of two central storage server clusters and the maximum we have is for approximately four server clusters. 

The solution is user-friendly and easy to manage.

The solution could improve by providing better information on what other products it is compatible with. For example, we have customers that do not like AMD Chipsets used with VMware but it is not a technical issue, they need to bring more awareness. 

I have been using VMware vSphere for approximately 10 years.

I have found the stability to be good.

The solution is scalable.

we have approximately 50 customers using the solution.

The customer service is good.

The installation is straightforward because it comes with the appliance, you only have to deploy the appliance. The installation can take a long time, they need to improve on the simplicity and length of the installation.

All the customers who have the VMware have the vSphere because there is no single installation.

We have five technicians for the installation and maintenance of the solutuion.

There is a perpetual license for this solution and the support is a yearly subscription.

I would recommend this solution to others. If you use VMware, then you need to use vSphere to manage the clusters.

I rate VMware vSphere a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the product as a server. Most of the work we do for our clients. 

The product works very well for us. Over the last decade, it's been extremely dependable. 

The initial setup is very straightforward. 

The stability has been very good.

Technical support is quite good and very responsive. 

The solution can scale well.

The product meets our needs pretty well. I can't recall noticing any missing features. It's pretty complete. 

Our hopes are that it continuously keeps improving.

The cost could always be lower. 

I've been using the solution for about ten years or so. It's been about a decade. We've had it a while. 

The stability is excellent. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's extremely reliable and the performance has been good. 

The product is very, very scalable. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so without any issues. 

Our clients have users that vary anywhere from hundreds to thousands. Quite a few people are on it.

We've dealt with technical support in the past and I would rate them very highly. They are helpful and responsive. They get us answers. We're quite satisfied with the level of support we receive. 

We didn't previously use a different solution. We've basically used this product since day one. 

You can save quite a bit using this solution. 

We're just customers and end-users. We don't have any business relationship with VMware.

We use the latest version of the solution. I can't speak to the exact version number.

We're very happy with the solution overall. I'd rate it at a nine out of ten.

Using this product is a no-brainer. It's a really easy product to use. If you're looking at simply a VM or anything similar or anything cloud-based, it's pretty much exactly what you need. 

We use this solution for network virtualization.

The most useful features are ESXi, DRS, Auto Deploy, and the Lifecycle Manager.

We would like to see the container-based operating system launched soon for this solution.

In a future release, multi-cloud capability should be simplified and easy to handle for administrators. For example, if I have a private cloud and public cloud and we have a feature to run VMware between these two, currently there is some complexity. We are hoping this can improve to allow us to run the workload anywhere.

I have been using this solution for approximately 10 years.

We have had some minor issues with stability in the past that has now have been resolved. 

The architecture has been redefined and the scalability is good. In the previous editions, we had boot failing issues but they have resolved them and introduced a new model of high availability in vSphere for vCenter. Scalable is just a single click and is very easy.

We were having some network glitches and some other issues known by VMware, they were all resolved through provided patches. Now everything is working fine.

We have also been working with AWS and Azure. We normally recommend VMware solutions for private cloud, and for public cloud, AWS or Azure. However, VMware is also having capabilities on AWS and Azure which we recommend.

The setup of this solution is very easy now, it was a bit difficult before and now has been simplified.

When comparing the price of VMware solutions to other vendors, such as Nutanix, they are costly.

We have compared this solution to Nutanix.

My advice to small to large-scale enterprises companies wanting to move to virtualization, vSphere is highly recommended for effective cost savings. The future is in virtualization, the industries are moving in that direction. Everything is in virtualization, such as networks, storage, and desktop applications. We can reduce the data center space, power cooling, and hardware lifecycle. However, the licensing costs are expensive.

I rate VMware vSphere a nine out of ten.

The product is primarily used for my main server for the main business. All the servers are on it.

The interface that the product offers is very easy to navigate. I learned it quite easily. I check the hypervisor interface on it. It's much easier for one who is familiar with the technology. 

The details that I get from the solution are great. It gives a lot of detail.

The product has been pretty easy to use overall.

The stability is okay.

Technical support was helpful and knowledgeable. 

I would prefer it if there was a better connection between the storage and the server. For that reason, I'm going to HCI or dHCI. I want to integrate it all into one interface and I can't do that here. That's why I'm going to HCI or dHCI.

The initial setup is a bit complex. You likely will need some help with the implementation. It's not something just anyone can do.

I've been using the solution for 15 years at this point. it's been a long time. I have a lot of experience with the product as I've worked with it for over a decade now. 

The solution's stability is okay. For us, it's enough. There aren't issues with bugs or glitches and it doesn't seem to crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The scalability depends on the hardware. If your hardware allows you to expand, it shouldn't be an issue.

Every year we increase storage, and therefore we regularly increase usage. However, I am planning to replace our current storage.

I have dealt with technical support in the past. It was less with VMware, and more with the vSphere storage. Once or twice I needed help. It was pretty good. I found them to be knowledgeable and responsive. I would say we are satisfied with the level of support on offer.

The initial setup is not really straightforward or simple to execute. 

I didn't do it myself. That would have been a bit much for me. I needed an integrator to do it. It's a bit complex to do.

In terms of the deployment time, when we last did it four years ago, it took about one week to get everything up and running.

We have one technical person on our team that assists with deployment and maintenance. They are an admin.

I enlisted the help of an integrator that mostly did the installation for us.

We do pay for the solution. It's on a yearly basis.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this product. When I started to use it about 15 years ago, it was the only tool option to work with.

I'd recommend the solution to other users and companies. 

Overall, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. I would say that we are quite happy with its capabilities overall. 

We are using this solution to build the AD database for the server.

This solution has been very helpful to our organization. For example, if we need to run 10 servers there is a high cost attached if we buy the physical server, but if we use this solution we can buy a very large server then control everything. The most valuable feature has been the ability to utilize the vMotion when we have a problem. It has been invaluable for us when we had a problem with a broken host that we were able to redirect our traffic to a different host to keep the business operational.

I have found the solution to be flexible, and the vCenter and vMotion useful. When we have a server that is down we can use the vMotion to use another host. Additionally, the backup feature and graphics are very good. The documentations are clear and easy to understand.

There was a time we lost the password for the ESXi and we had to do a hardware reset. At this point, we had to fill up the ESXi from the bottom up. I am not sure if there was another solution to this problem but it took a long time. We were told it would only be a few hours to resolve but in fact, it took one day. Having to explain this downtime to management was not the best experience.

In an upcoming release, there could be a better ability to manage and control the synchronization of the power in the vSphere.

I have been using the solution for approximately five years.

The solution is very stable. 

The scalability is good for everything we have been using the solution for. We have three IT users using this solution, if we upgrade our hardware we might increase usage.

The technical support agents are not clear about the issues that are being discussed. They cannot address the problem or estimate the time correctly. In one particular issue, we needed to raise our ticket to the management level because they told us it would take two hours to be operational but the downtime was one day and one night. They should have first checked the vSphere technical aspects.

The installation is very easy. It was not complicated at all.

This solution has kept our business operating and has saved us money.

There is an annual cost for the use of this solution. 

The price is a little high in developing countries. If they were able to reduce the price they would receive more customers now and even more in the future.

I rate VMware vSphere an eight out of ten.

VMware vSphere gives us a complete landscape to manage the infrastructure in one view. With the REDOPS automation in place, it is easy for us to manage our VMs on top of it. 

Also, the automated builds are being done through it, and we don't have to manually do it anymore. All of my AIS platforms are completely automated now with the VM suite.

It could be more composable. At present, a fluid pool is not available to us, and it would be great to have the flexibility.

I've been working with VMware vSphere for more than eight years.

Technical support has been good. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 being the best, I would rate technical support at 4.5.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The price is reasonable.

VMware vSphere helps with large scale deployments and maintenance. On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it at nine.

We mainly use this solution to create hosts and convert them to virtual machines. We convert our physical assets into virtualized assets. We need to convert ESXi hosts into VMs.

Our entire operating team has access to vSphere. They can log into vCenter — vSphere's dashboard. We have multiple IDs and roles created. In total, we have more than 600 users. Out of our 600 users, we have around 50 admin users who can administer the entire map. 

We definitely plan to continue using this solution.

All of the features are great. It affords us different views of the VMs created by vSphere so we can control them better. It provides us with a single view into VMs as an asset. We create thousands and thousands of VMs using vSphere.

We have created more than 6,000 VMs. With this solution, through a single pane, we can see inside the vCenter. We can see our VMs that are running on-premises, the data center, and the ones that are in the Cloud.

There is some room for improvement but if we're not satisfied converting all of our physical assets into virtualized ones, since we have a scope for other technologies, we can always go for containerization.

There are some challenges around ESXi hosts — converting them into VMs. Also, it could definitely be more secure, overall.

It would be nice if other users could see or accept the VMs that we create — this has to do with the cluster.

The cluster should be able to be viewed by multiple sets of users apart from the operating team. If a developer also wants to have access to the cluster, it's complicated. Role-based access should be available to make this easier.

I have been using VMware vSphere for more than 10 years.

It's quite stable. I haven't experienced any issues as such. We have support available from an extended team of VMware professionals. It's aligned to the GTI, global technology infrastructure. VMware is a big area in our organization.

It's quite scalable. You can keep scaling up the number of VMs you want to create. As I mentioned, we create thousands of VMs, so yes, we can scale easily. That's a capability I would look at from a business goal perspective. Any business leader will want to scale up their hypervisor. vSphere is pretty much the hypervisor. 

I am satisfied with the support. There's a separate team for maintenance and a separate team for support. Whatever upgrades need to be done, it is all taken care of by the maintenance teams.

There are two ways of installing it, depending on your deployment topology. Overall, it's quite fast and easy to install. It only takes a couple of days to install it.

An extended team of VMware professionals helped us with the installation, but we mostly did it ourselves. It was onboarded into our organization in 2009 — the very first version. You could say that we're one of the earliest adopters.

The licensing has become cheaper over time. As there are multiple offerings, it depends on how you are leveraging.

We evaluated Edge containerization a while back, but we didn't notice any tools that would help us grow, so we decided to stick with VMware vSphere.

I would absolutely recommend this solution. It's better than Microsoft Hyper-V. Hyper-V has some problems. VMware vSphere is the industry leader by far when it comes to the hypervisor sector.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine.

Server Virtualization is the most important feature because that helps me to utilize 100% capacity of my physical server or box. Its redundancy, uptime, or high-availability is also valuable.

Storage-sharing is also valuable. In vSAN, I can utilize the maximum storage. In the physical boxes, if you don't require storage, it lies idle, but with VMware or any kind of virtualization, you can utilize the full storage.

Its price could be better. It is expensive, and its price is a big concern.

I have been working with vSphere for the last ten years.

It is stable. I started my virtualization career with VMware 3.0 or 3.5. At that time, it was volatile, but now it is quite sturdy. At that time, it was working with Exchange 2003. When I installed it on VMware, I found that Exchange was giving problems and servers were hanging, but nowadays, servers are quite stable. Virtualization is quite good nowadays, and that is the future. All cloud solutions are good nowadays.

It is scalable. I have around 200-plus servers with me.

Their technical support is good. I am happy with that. When I call my VMware team members for any issue, they usually guide me. I am getting good technical support. When I open a high-priority ticket, and I want the support within 10 minutes or 15 minutes, I call my local team member or my Account Manager, and they arrange it for me. I find them very good. I don't find any issue with VMware.

Their training is also good. People, who are not a part of an organization and want to get some training, can connect to their virtual labs. They are doing pretty well. 

I didn't work on something similar before vSphere. After vSphere, I tried to work on Microsoft Virtualization, which is also quite good, but I did not get much exposure to that. My organization prefers to work on VMware. In our sister concern, we're working on Microsoft, but we are planning to move them to VMware vSphere because I want to establish my DR on the other side. We had VMware DRS hosted at one of the service providers, and then we moved to Microsoft Azure, but now we're planning to move back to on-premise.

Its price is quite high. VMware licensing is quite costly. You have to pay for the CPU and Threads, but if you want good service, you have to pay the price. Its cost is not more than 1 million for us.

If you want 100% utilization of your hardware, you should definitely use it. There is also network virtualization and storage virtualization, but it would be quite cheaper if you go for physical storage.

If you are a medium to large organization, the hybrid environment is also there. If you are a small organization, you should go for the cloud because if your utilization is not much, it is always recommended to go for the cloud. Otherwise, go for VMware virtualization. It is 100% useful for an organization.

VMware is bringing a lot of features. They are quite ahead in terms of features. They have containerization, monitoring, operational manager, and all required features. vSAN and storage utilization are also there. They are bundling everything. Their Research and Development is very good. 

I would rate VMware vSphere a nine out of ten.

We are using VMware vSphere and virtualization infrastructure for IT functions in my company. It is also used in other companies or industries, such as automobile factories, energy and gas factories, and State Universities.

Valuable features really depend on different projects. We are using the traditional infrastructure based on VMware vSphere. We are also using the high availability (HA) and Distributed Switch features to extend our network and switch between different hosts. 

The VMotion and SVMotion features are very essential for us to relocate the storage of virtual machines to different storage or vSANs. We are using VMotion and SVMotion features several times of the day. We are also using another VMware product to replicate a lot of solutions to a second replication site.

The biggest problem in this solution is the incompatibility of some of the features with some of the drivers installed on servers. For example, if I want to install vSphere on an HPE server, the driver is really different from a Dell server or a Fujitsu server. I need to download different drivers and install them manually, which can be improved by VMware. They can offer a special image to match different servers. We face different problems when we install vSphere on an ESXi server and have different drivers on the storage. ESXi cannot detect different kinds of storage, and they should improve this. 

We updated our existing version to vSphere 7 in a private environment, but it seems that this version is not very stable. We are facing issues with restarting the host. In earlier versions, such as vSphere 6 or 6.5, we didn't have any such problems.

It would be good if VMware can offer specific applications for mobiles to enable us to control the management of all servers by mobile. They should also improve the vCenter GUI because it is currently not compatible, and there are a lot of problems. Some of the options do not appear well in the browser. VMware should spend more time resolving the problems in the GUI.

I have been using this solution for five years.

It is very stable. However, we are facing some issues in a private environment after upgrading to vSphere 7. We are facing issues with restarting the host. In earlier versions, such as vSphere 6 or 6.5, we didn't have any such problems, and it has been very stable.

It is scalable. In my company, we have a lot of end-users, but around 16 users are involved with VMware products. We have different projects, and each project has around 10 users. 

Our teams have a specific structure. We have an operational manager. After that, we have different technical teams. I am a Senior Infrastructure Architect, and in my team, there are around eight engineers. Out of these, five engineers are involved with VMware products, and two or three engineers are involved with the network and storage concepts.

In my country, we cannot use direct support, although the direct support and technical support from VMware is very essential and influential to help and solve many problems. 

Its installation was very simple. Because we need to install vSphere on different servers, we do customized installations by using a script. It doesn't take more than 13 minutes to install each server and configure different settings.

I did it myself. I have worked as a VMware consultant with different companies, and I am certified in VMware. We cannot use direct support and specific consultants in our country.

I recommend this solution to most of my customers because it is very stable, and it has a lot of good features. In comparison to other solutions, I prefer to use VMware. I also recommend Hyper-V, but VMware vSphere is my first choice.

I would rate VMware vSphere an eight out of ten.

I use vSphere for general server virtualization. I am not doing anything spectacular with it.

vSphere has absolutely improved the way our organization functions. This is because of the ease of management and the number of servers that we are able to virtualize. When we first went to VMware, we took 200 physical servers and converted them to virtual. Instead of running on 200 pieces of hardware, they were running on 8.

Obviously, this is much easier to manage from a hardware perspective, power perspective, and reliability perspective.

The vSphere is very good at advanced things like memory sharing between VMs, and CPU scheduling between VMs.

I use the automation tools that they have today.

Their command-line tools integrate well with other Microsoft products like PowerShell, so I can manipulate VMs using it.

The capability to add on new features like site recovery and monitoring is helpful.

The web user interface can be a bit clunky from time to time, so there may be some room for improvement in that regard.  I was a fan of the C# client for as long as I could use it.  The move from flash to HTML5 for the web interface is an improvement but still not a good as C# was.

I have been working with VMware vSphere for approximately 12 years.  Since VI 3.5 days.

In 12 years, I can think of one time that we've had a server crash. It was one of our host servers and the problem was hardware-related. It was attributed to bad memory on the physical host server, itself.

The VMware operating system is stable and I've never had it crash.

Scaling is very easy. Just build it, acquire a license from them and add it to vCenter.

We have about 2,000 people in our organization, and everybody has some server on there that they do something with. It may be file services, file servers, or Citrix XenApp servers.  Most of our VMware environment is our legacy servers because they still support older operating systems that I can't put on Hyper-V or AHV. For example, we have a couple of Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 servers. VMware is the only hypervisor that I can run those on.

It has probably been 10 years since I've had to call support for anything but from what I can remember, they were helpful and they solved our problems. It has been so long that I've had to use them that I would hesitate to give them a perfect rating, since I don't know what they're like today, so I think that rating them a nine out of ten is appropriate.

vSphere was our first hypervisor.

Since then we have added additional hypervisors in our environment. We have AHV from Nutanix and Hyper-V from Microsoft.

AHV doesn't support things like memory sharing, at all, and Hyper-V is just not very good at it.

I knew what I was doing, so I found that the initial setup was very straightforward. If an inexperienced user's initial setup involves a little bit of searching in Google then I would think that it wouldn't be very difficult.

We did use a vendor for our initial implementation, 12 years ago.  Since then we have done multiple upgrades and I have done several new implementations for other orgs.  They were competent at their work and I learned a lot from them that I used in my future implementations.

Basic vSphere, without centralized management, is free. When you get into the centralized management vCenter server, it starts adding cost. Then, it's license-based upon the number of CPUs in your host servers.

VMware vSphere is my preferred hypervisor. It always has been, and always will be. I suggest using it, and not hesitating. I'm sure that they're working on great stuff to enhance this product that I can't even think of, but from my perspective, everything that they do today is great. I don't know what they could possibly do to make my life easier, but I'm sure they'll come up with something.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.