VMware vSphere Reviews

VMware vSphere has proven to be robust in nature, and the new features are quite acceptable. The new features in NSX network switching make it more useful in the reliability management of data centers.

vMotion has helped my organization's business continuity strategies during our planned DR drill activity. The migration of VMs from DC to DR is quite smooth with respect to the network link.

I assess the impact of VMware vSphere's High Availability feature on my infrastructure resilience as effective during DR drill activities and firmware upgrades, which we perform every six months. During those times, we rely on maintenance mode of several servers, and HA works properly. I have nothing to complain about.

We have utilized VMware vSphere's Distributed Resource Scheduler effectively. Even though we have over-provisioned the vCPUs, it efficiently manages the CPU cores and memory of the servers intelligently, so I am not experiencing any bottleneck in resource utilization.

Distributed Resource Scheduler has affected my resource allocation performance positively, providing a 20 percent advantage over my old hardware.

I think VMware vSphere could be improved by simplifying the packages and add-ons, which are continuously accumulating. Each feature is offered as a separate add-on, making business support and operation complex. For example, if I want to add micro-segmentation for a particular set of VMs, I need to purchase it as an add-on, but after purchasing, I cannot utilize it due to license limitations. I need to purchase more licenses if I need to provision more VMs, which delays business operations.

I have been using VMware vSphere for the past four years.

Regarding its stability and reliability, I would give VMware vSphere a stability rating of 8.5 and a reliability rating of 8.5 out of 10.

Most features will not fail, such as vMotion, snapshot recovery, and disaster recovery points. Everything works on time. The generic and advanced features do not have issues, and we find very minimal issues in the advanced features, which is bearable.

I evaluate how scalable VMware vSphere is and find that it supports both horizontal and vertical scaling. There are no questions about its scalability, as it is quite supportive.

In terms of scalability, I would rate it an 8 out of 10.

I often communicate with the technical support of VMware vSphere.

I find the technical support satisfactory. They follow the escalation matrix and adhere to timelines. Some critical cases may get delayed, but overall my experience is a solid 8.5 out of 10.

Before VMware vSphere, I used KVM, which is open source.

I decided to switch from KVM to VMware vSphere because KVM is a very traditional virtualization platform, and being open source, it requires manual management of everything, even though it integrates with automation tools. It does not have the robust security and nature to support enterprise-level applications. Managing it would require a vast team for operation and maintenance.

To describe my experience with the initial setup of VMware vSphere, typically we go with ESXi with the server hardware, and each node will have a different ESXi installation. We set up a management IP and an ESXi host IP. After installing the ESXi host, we set up a separate vCenter host, which we add all the ESXi nodes to and apply the license. Then it is up and running, and afterward, we can configure HA, Fault Tolerance, or whatever we want.

I have found the initial setup process straightforward. I did not face any challenges along the way.

I have played both roles. I am an implementer and a customer as well.

When it comes to pricing and licensing of VMware vSphere, I think it is the costliest option in the market. When comparing to any product, VMware is the costliest, and because of that, the business top-level people are looking for alternatives.

Before choosing VMware vSphere, I did not evaluate other options, as VMware was the only option in the market at that time.

I am currently working with VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, and Nutanix as well.

Both VMware vSphere and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure have their own advantages and disadvantages. We have implemented both Nutanix and vCenter with VMware vSphere 8.0. In Nutanix, sometimes there is an appliance where it is not getting supported for some features such as snapshot functionality.

Currently, we are not using vSAN configuration as we are using a separate SAN.

We have a 96 core server cluster provisioned in a manner of 1:4 provisioning, meaning four times the physical core of the server cluster. We have provisioned 192 VMs, and everything is running smoothly. We have not experienced any VM downtime for the past eight months.

My overall review rating for VMware vSphere is 8.5 out of 10.

My main use case for VMware vSphere involves managing virtual machines, and I can provide you with a quick specific example if needed.

VMware vSphere offers excellent features that have proven invaluable to my organization. The best feature is vMotion, which allows the migration of a running virtual machine from one ESXi host to another with zero downtime and without impacting business users. The main benefit is no service interruption, as no downtime is required for the users, and the application continues running during the migration without any interruption. Users do not notice the migration action.

Another excellent feature is load balancing, which works with DRS to distribute the workloads across hosts automatically and prevents resource bottlenecks.

VMware vSphere has impacted my organization positively in multiple ways. Multiple virtual machines can run on a single physical server, which reduces hardware needs including power, cooling, and data center space requirements. From a high availability perspective, features like HA automatically restart virtual machines during host failures and minimize business downtime while improving service availability. The platform improves resource utilization, as CPU, memory, and storage resources are shared efficiently and prevent the underutilization of physical servers.

VMware vSphere simplifies management through vCenter, which provides centralized management of hosts and virtual machines, reducing the administrative effort and operational complexity. Maintenance is very easy, as vMotion allows live migration of virtual machines without any downtime. Enhanced security features include Secure Boot, VM encryption, RBAC, and lockdown mode to help protect the infrastructure and data. These security features add significant value to my organization. I have approximately five years of experience managing all of these components, and managing the infrastructure with VMware vSphere is straightforward.

Regarding how VMware vSphere can be improved, I suggest that the licensing cost can be expensive for small and medium-sized organizations, even though it is beneficial for large scale operations. More flexible licensing models would help reduce the adoption cost. Additionally, simplifying management could make the initial setup and advanced configurations less complex, with more guided automation and simplified workflows to reduce the learning curve. Enhanced cloud integration is also needed, such as stronger native integration with public cloud platforms to simplify hybrid cloud management. Additional automation around ESXi and vCenter upgrades could reduce the maintenance effort and risk. These are the main areas for improvement in VMware vSphere.

I have been using VMware vSphere for approximately four and a half years to manage virtual machines and centralized management.

I can share details about how much time and money my organization has saved since using VMware vSphere, and I have some specific numbers and rough estimates.

Regarding time savings, server provisioning has been reduced from days or weeks to minutes. Using golden templates makes it easy to clone virtual machines for server commissioning, which reduces the time significantly. Maintenance activities are completed with minimal downtime through vMotion and centralized management via vCenter. For example, if I need to log into an application host and then log into a web host, I would need to log into two different hosts separately. However, in vCenter, I can manage everything in a single platform, which reduces our time by 30 to 50%. Automated features like DRS and HA reduce manual intervention during outages and performance issues.

From a cost perspective, server consolidation can reduce the physical server count by 60 to 80%, resulting in less spending on hardware purchases, data center rack spaces, power consumption, cooling space, and maintenance contracts. The cost savings are approximately 60 to 80% on a percentage basis, although I am not certain about the exact numbers. Before virtualization, an organization might require 20 physical servers for 20 applications, but with VMware vSphere, these workloads can often run on four to six powerful hosts, significantly reducing capital and operational expenses.

I have experience with VMware administration including patching and data center operations. VMware vSphere consists of main components including VMware ESXi and VMware vCenter Server to manage virtual machines and physical servers, along with datastores such as VMFS, NFS, and vSAN and clusters. To manage virtual machines effectively, VMware vSphere is essential.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give VMware vSphere a rating of 9. VMware is the industry-leading virtualization platform, and VMware vSphere has excellent features including vMotion, HA, DRS, storage vMotion, and Fault Tolerance. This platform provides strong scalability for enterprise environments and centralized management through vCenter.

Regarding VMware vSphere's AI capabilities, specifically its governance and security, I believe it is robust enough for my needs, especially when compared with other solutions I have encountered. I rate VMware vSphere a 9 out of 10 overall.

Our main use case for VMware vSphere is virtualization of the servers.

The features I find the most useful and valuable in VMware vSphere are Hypervisor, storage management, and operation management monitoring.

Operation management is valuable because another powerful feature is monitoring, specifically monitoring of storage, IO, server CPU usage, and all operations. Operation management is very powerful, so mostly you won't need any other monitoring or observation tool to monitor all environment because of the operation management of VMware vSphere.

I always use VMware vSphere vMotion; we work with this feature all the time. vMotion is very useful; that's why we use the virtualization. This is one of the main reasons for using VMware vSphere in the server environment. vMotion makes all the administrative tasks easy during operations.

It affects the resource allocation performance by balancing the resources and providing better resources to the servers. That's why we use it.

Integration with VMware NSX and vSAN helps improve data center operational efficiency because we migrated to the vSAN ESA, Express Storage Architecture, which is a built-in feature within the product, so there's no need to integrate with third-party storage providers or software-defined storage products. We are not using any integration feature for this kind of feature of VMware vSphere because it's built-in, and that capacity, capability, and feature set are enough for us.

The high availability feature's resilience is not bad, but it could be better. For example, whenever you lose any hardware, you will have interruptions on the services, and it reboots again on the other hardware host which is available at the crash time. That's good, but we would prefer to have zero downtime instead of the rebooting on the other server. We would prefer to have a zero downtime always-on configuration. VMware vSphere has a built-in feature called Fault Tolerance, but it's very limited for very limited VMs or very limited core count or CPU count, so it's not so useful for all the environment because of the limitations.

The Fault Tolerance (FT) feature is very limited to very little core counts or very little VM counts, so you can't run the Fault Tolerance for all the servers or all the VMs, and that's very bad.

If VMware vSphere could have any kind of built-in patch management environment with a repository, offline repository option, with test, non-production, and production environment separated, this would be perfect. Management of patch management with operating systems and including third-party applications which are running on the servers would enhance the VMware vSphere environment.

VMware vSphere is very expensive. The worst aspect of VMware vSphere is the price. I can't tell you the exact cost at this time because the other team members in my teams are working on it, but I remember that the prices are very high.

VMware vSphere is easy to scale, but it could be better, similar to a Kubernetes environment. It should have an automatic scale-out feature when the load gets high; if it gets some scale out automatically, it would be better than this, similar to Kubernetes or OpenShift.

My overall experience with VMware vSphere is about 18 years.

Mostly we don't have issues, but sometimes we have faced some stability issues because of some bugs and some CPU compatibility issues with Intel CPUs. Some specific particular CPUs had particular compatibility issues with the VMware vSphere environment, but most of the time, we don't have any compatibility issues, although we had a few times.

I have contacted VMware vSphere support several times. Most of the time, our problems and incidents have been resolved, but sometimes we had difficulties getting some resolution from the support. The quality of support should be improved; overall quality.

Positive

Setting up VMware vSphere is easy and reasonable.

We are currently running the vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler, which is actually automatic vMotion; we are running on it all the time.

I recommend that those considering VMware vSphere carefully scale their environment and their needs. VMware vSphere is an industrial standard nowadays for the hypervisor environment and virtualization environment, but they have to carefully scale their environment and their needs. Scale and sizing is very important in the IT world, so they have to size their environment for the required licenses and features, and it's very expensive nowadays. They have to be careful about resizing.

On a scale from one to ten, I rate VMware vSphere a seven.

I am using Nutanix and VMware for virtualization solutions. I work with VMware vSphere for virtualization, and this is the major use case.

VMware vSphere is more fault tolerant than Nutanix, which stands out as a benefit.

The High Availability feature is very good and it is very convenient for IT operators.

Distributed Resource Scheduler is convenient and affects resource allocation performance positively. I am using Distributed Resource Scheduler in Nutanix.

I am using the backup feature to back up VMware vSphere while operating using the backup service.

I see some areas for improvement regarding VMware vSphere. VMware vSphere could be better because it is too expensive now, and I am considering dropping down the VMware vSphere solutions.

Recently, VMware vSphere has raised the license fee very much, making it difficult to manage.

There is no big problem on VMware vSphere's side because there are many engineers who can handle VMware vSphere solutions, which is a very good point.

I have been using it for about 10 years.

VMware vSphere is stable in my current usage.

There are limitations on scalability. I cannot expand the hardware capacity, which is a problem because it is too expensive.

The technical support from VMware vSphere, from Broadcom, is not good and it is too expensive.

VMware vSphere is not difficult to install.

I do not use VMware vSphere for hybrid cloud deployments.

I am not using integration for VMware vSphere.

I buy VMware vSphere directly from vendors.

I would rate this review a 6 out of 10.

Our main use cases for VMware vSphere are making virtual machines, sharing the storage with an MSA storage, and utilizing several servers. We share the data on the MSA, and we have about 80 virtual machines running on several ESXi servers with a vCenter, and we run it smoothly.

The most useful aspect of VMware vSphere is that I can see the machines by folders regarding activities. I may gather several VMs on the same activity in the same folder, and I can easily move them from one server to another, from one host to another to be more specific. It's really easy to use and manage, and the whole process, whatever I do, whether it's networking or other tasks, is always easy and logical. This is a great product; it's mature and well done, and I have no problem with it.

Although it is really easy, I do not have the Enterprise solution, which is now mandatory with the new pricing of VMware vSphere, so I am now forced to go to the Enterprise, which is a very good solution but too expensive for our small activity. VMware vSphere Enterprise offers plenty of extraordinary features regarding the drives as well; I could move drives from one MSA to another and it has many possibilities. It is really smooth and professional, making it a really good product; it's mature and does everything I want, but it is too expensive for my usage.

When I want to put a vSAN and other features in place, it is not really easy to do.

To integrate other features on VMware vSphere, I find that it is not really easy to know exactly what I need and how it will work. It is more challenging to grasp exactly how it works and to implement it. Another aspect is VDI, which is also difficult because I need additional products and licenses. It is not as easy as it could be.

It should be better integrated. If I want to put VDI in place and also set up containers, I need to purchase additional products. I need new licensing for those things that are not really required with other products, which is also a reason why I try to move from VMware vSphere.

The integration level is not the same; it feels another product and it is a kind of add-on, but it is not fully integrated. I do not use it with the same ease as the core product; it is not as easy, though it should be nice, although it is difficult to put in place.

I have been working with VMware vSphere and MSA for about 10 years now.

VMware vSphere is really stable and perfect; I have no problems with it.

It is really easy to add a new server; I have many possibilities. I start with a new USB key, and it is really straightforward. I just put in an IP address, a password, and it discovers all my hardware, provided I am on the list of recognized hardware. It has the same restriction for the selectivity of the hardware, but otherwise, it is really easy. If I have lots of machines to set up, I can script and automate the setup, making it really professional and nice.

I do not have problems with documentation; they have very good documentation.

Positive

With the old licensing model, it was nice, but now it becomes too expensive to maintain because I have to go to the new versions.

The setup is really easy, but I have to pay attention to the requirements. The setup is very good, but it is only compatible with specific hardware. The hardware list is good, but not as open as other products, making it a bit too selective.

They should keep the old alignment with normal indexation, which would be fine, but now the gap is too much.

Currently, I start AI with Proxmox and another server with Proxmox, so I do not use VMware vSphere for this.

To use VMware now, you must be a very big company because it is too expensive to maintain. It is definitely enterprise level, and if not, there are lots of other possibilities that are less expensive and work perfectly.

Red Hat also has its own advantages. Red Hat is nice, especially regarding containers. For containers, VMware vSphere is not as perfect as others because it is an add-on and a bit hybrid, and other solutions are better implemented.

I would rate VMware vSphere a 9 because it has many features but also some missing elements. It is not as easy as it could be for containers and whatever hybrid solutions they have.

I work with VMware vSphere and all VMware products as well as cloud systems.

I have worked with VLAN setup in VMware vSphere.

I have also worked with vMotion for the migration of physical systems and other systems in VMware vSphere.

I have used the Distributed Resource Scheduler in VMware vSphere.

I have worked on hybrid cloud deployments using VMware vSphere.

I consider vMotion to be a valuable feature in VMware vSphere.

Very good availability is provided with the High Availability feature of VMware vSphere.

It is good for resource allocation, including memory, storage, and everything in VMware vSphere.

It supports cloud migration strategies in VMware vSphere.

Regarding integration with VMware NSX and vSAN, I do not have much experience with the migration of NSX or any other Hyper-V. Hyper-V is very good. I did not integrate NSX. I have a basic idea, but that is all.

In my opinion, compared to cloud, VMware vSphere is not online and it requires disk space and everything.

I see weaknesses in VMware vSphere because, compared to cloud systems, it is not that advanced. It needs more space, storage, and everything. Physical systems are required, not only online capabilities.

I have used the solution for an extensive period, though I did not specify a precise duration.

Response time is acceptable for the first-level support quality of VMware vSphere. Quality and everything is acceptable and fine.

Positive

I rate their technical support at seven out of ten.

For additional features, I request that artificial intelligence interventions be implemented on VMware vSphere. It should be increased to artificial intelligence data centers and should perform tasks automatically.

I give this review an overall rating of four.

The primary use case for VMware vSphere is to reduce the amount of hardware requirements and its simplicity. It is used to optimize server management and is crucial for critical applications, especially for Tier 1 telecommunications companies that need high availability and 24/7 uptime.

The most valuable features of VMware vSphere include its user-friendly interface, which simplifies the usage and reduces costs for engineers. Additionally, the tool is highly available, which is crucial for implementing critical applications requiring 24/7 availability. Its ability to keep costs down and ensure high availability makes it an essential tool for telecommunications customers.

The price needs improvement. It is currently too expensive, which is a significant drawback of the solution.

I have used VMware vSphere for about four years.

Customers require 24/7, 365-day uptime, and it's crucial that the virtual machines are stable. While they are generally stable, if outages occur, they tend to be due to brands like HP or Dell, not VMware vSphere itself, making it reasonably strong and stable.

VMware vSphere is highly scalable in terms of the number of users and the number of servers it can handle. I would rate the scalability as ten out of ten.

I haven't had to use VMware's technical support much, but their websites are useful, although recently, support has been less friendly and slower, especially after the company was acquired by Broadcom. Their support has become more centered around price.

Neutral

The initial setup does not require a master's degree, and it is reasonably intuitive. However, some parts can be difficult to understand, requiring a professional-level technician or engineer.

The solution is too expensive. Licensing has become more difficult to obtain. About three or four years ago, I would have recommended VMware vSphere more strongly, however, currently, the price and licensing issues are deterrents.

Considering the current cost and licensing challenges, I would recommend looking into another product if possible. I rate VMware vSphere a six or seven out of ten overall.

The primary use case is for virtualization, including the implementation of vSphere, vCloud Foundation, vCloud Director, and cloud automation with vSphere.

My customers, particularly SMBs, mainly utilize High Availability (HA), DRS, and vMotion features. The vMotion feature is beneficial for online migration of virtual machines from one host to another without downtime. High Availability and vMotion are significant features used in the standard edition to support SMB customers.

Customers face challenges due to increased costs after VMware's acquisition by Broadcom. The cost changed from perpetual to subscription, and there is a need for alternative solutions. Additionally, there is no AI functionality in the basic or standard editions.

I have been working with VMware's vSphere since 2004 or 2005, which amounts to approximately 16 or 17 years.

The stability of vSphere is rated a ten. It is a very stable hypervisor solution.

Scaling is easy, whether it is hyperconverged or a three-tier architecture. Adding a compute host is a quick process, taking about half an hour. For scalability, I would rate it eight.

As a partner, my team solves most tickets, needing support only about once or twice a year. Based on customer feedback, I would rate support as a seven or seven and a half out of ten due to issues such as support timing.

Neutral

The initial setup of VMware vSphere is straightforward, and I would rate it as nine out of ten regarding ease.

Customers experience cost savings in terms of hardware footprint, high availability, and no hardware dependency with vSphere standards.

Costs significantly increased from perpetual to subscription, with prices rising by two to three times over three to five years.

Customers are evaluating alternatives like Proxmox and other virtualization engines due to the increased costs of VMware vSphere.

VMware vSphere is a stable hypervisor. Competing hypervisors still face challenges, except for Nutanix, which requires changing hardware for hyperconvergence. VMware optimizes hardware and virtual machines better than others. Overall, I rate vSphere nine out of ten.

Private cloud is the use case for VMware vSphere. Private cloud is the purpose I use it for because there are customers who need a cloud in their on-premise environment or co-location.

In that use case, we use VMware Cloud Foundation.

The life cycle management and the ease of deployment are the best features in the product from my integrator perspective.

Load balancing is a separate product because they have some enterprise load balancer, which needs to be purchased additionally. In VMware Cloud Foundation, there is only a basic load balancer.

This is a suite of products, so it's a single bill of material. We get all their product versions which are compatible with VMware Cloud Foundation.

VMware vSphere is able to save time and money for my customers. We can say 10% is the approximate amount of savings because most of the things are automated and streamlined, so the manual work is eliminated in most cases.

The pricing is an area for improvement in the product. The solution is a bit expensive.

Not having a perfect score means some room for improvement exists.

There is no way to reach the engineers directly. If we create a case, then for other OEMs, we get the assigned engineer and we can connect to them and work closely. In Broadcom, this is not possible.

I have been dealing with this product for three years so far.

The solution is easy to deploy, which means it is also easy to set up; the initial setup and installation are straightforward.

It's a very stable product.

The solution is completely scalable and can be hybrid as well. You can stretch to any public cloud, which is also possible.

I am happy with the technical support from VMware. I would rate technical support eight out of ten points, with one being bad and ten being good.

Positive

I have never been dealing with something similar to VMware vSphere or solutions from other vendors for the same purpose.

The solution is easy to deploy, which means it is also easy to set up; the initial setup and installation are straightforward.

I still use those things regarding the technology I work with.

VMware vSphere is able to save time and money for my customers. We can say 10% is the approximate amount of savings because most of the things are automated and streamlined, so the manual work is eliminated in most cases.

I have never been dealing with something similar to VMware vSphere or solutions from other vendors for the same purpose.

I am not interested to be a reference for Broadcom. I am using basically VMware vSphere and Cloud Foundation.

They released a new version of the VMware vSphere solution on June 17, so I'm yet to explore that version completely. I am not using the latest version because it was only released 10 days ago, so we are just exploring it.

Currently, I do not feel that there are complexities or challenges from a technical standpoint.

I rate VMware vSphere a 9 out of 10.

I am currently working on creating infrastructure for VMware, implementing new infrastructure, and addressing troubleshooting and error problems. 

Additionally, I have completed a project on VxRail, specifically focusing on configuration and operational knowledge.

VMware vCenter is extremely useful as we can manage between 100 and 1,000 hosts using just one management tool. It provides high availability and DRS. 

VMware also offers a free version of the vSphere application, which is vital. For larger deployments, a paid version is available that offers additional site-related features. VMware's scalability is based on standard metrics conducted through load testing. 

The most supportive features of VMware vSphere include high availability and DRS. The vSphere application is free and very useful, ensuring effective management and improvement in operations. With vCenter, we efficiently manage a vast number of hosts with just one management tool.

One area for improvement is the documentation, especially after VMware was transferred to Broadcom. Sometimes, it is difficult to find documentation for specific tools and solutions.

I have five years of experience in the IT field and have worked for three years with vSphere.

In India, many organizations are using VMware for distribution and management purposes, which indicates its capability to scale efficiently within a company.

VMware provides good support. Priority one issues are usually addressed by engineers within one to two hours. However, for priority two issues, it often takes one to two days, which can be improved to a single day.

Positive

Alternatives involve using Nutanix and VxRail alongside VMware.

The setup depends on the scale and configuration. For a simple setup with ten host servers, deployment takes about one to two days. With sufficient manpower, v ESXi and vCenter installations can be completed in a day.

The implementation depends on manpower. With the involvement of two to four people, the deployment tasks can be seamlessly completed.

VMware vSphere is rated at ten on a scale of one to ten. It is a perfect solution.