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Densify vs VMware vSphere comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Densify
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (11th), Cloud Management (28th), Virtualization Management Tools (8th), Cloud Analytics (5th), Cloud Cost Management (18th)
VMware vSphere
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
461
Ranking in other categories
Server Virtualization Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Virtualization solutions, they serve different purposes. Densify is designed for Cloud Management and holds a mindshare of 2.4%, up 0.9% compared to last year.
VMware vSphere, on the other hand, focuses on Server Virtualization Software, holds 19.1% mindshare, up 16.2% since last year.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Densify2.4%
VMware Aria Automation5.5%
IBM Turbonomic4.7%
Other87.4%
Cloud Management
Server Virtualization Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware vSphere19.1%
Hyper-V19.8%
Proxmox VE10.4%
Other50.699999999999996%
Server Virtualization Software
 

Featured Reviews

AbhishekGupta2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr PreSales Cloud Architect at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
Optimized cloud costs and automated right‑sizing have reduced spend while reporting needs improvement
The best features Densify offers are actionable optimization recommendations, which tell you how to reduce costs while maintaining performance; the ML-powered predictive analytics feature, which considers historical patterns to provide recommendations; multi-cloud coverage for optimization across AWS, Azure, and GCP; and a solid balance between performance and cost. Out of those features, I find myself relying on actionable optimization recommendations and predictive analytics features the most because Densify goes one step beyond by providing recommendations considering historical patterns, especially for workloads that only spike during certain times of the month. Densify has positively impacted my organization by providing significant cost savings through right-sizing and eliminating inefficient resources, allowing faster decisions based on data, and reducing manual intervention for cloud operations, thus providing automation of basic cloud routines. I usually see a twenty-five to thirty percent cost saving in my customer's environment, and from a time-saving perspective, it has almost halved the time of the operations team.
RajeshK10 - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Architect at Central Bank of India
Reliable virtualization has supported smooth DR drills and efficient resource allocation
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.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Densify were deemed to be the best for us at the time and they still are, for now."
"The ability to increase server density inside of my environment, which has helped me drive reduction in costs."
"Our team members are now spending more productive time on other priorities and are handling much more effective tasks."
"The solution's tech support is excellent."
"From my perspective, this product is really good, and we are not even using each and every feature."
"I would say that the initial thing is that it provides us with a technological basis to expand capacity management beyond Excel."
"We switched to Densify because it gave us a more complete end-to-end picture of the environment and really became the system of truth across all of our environments versus having to aggregate information from many dissimilar systems."
"One would be the automatic rebalancing of the environment. That was one feature which helped. With that, we could improve our efficiency of our VMware infrastructure."
"VMware has a great customer service department."
"It is one easy to install and manage virtualization technique and it is pretty fast also, compared to some other virtualization techniques, because it has a very small amount of resource overhead."
"VMware Server is a free, easy-to-use Windows and Linux application that provides a superior introductory experience to server virtualization for businesses to optimize utilization of their technology assets."
"It's a big difference compared to having everything on hardware."
"Unlike VMware Workstation where we have to log in to the desktop to run VMs, with VMware Server we can run VMs in the background and it also has a web-based management interface so you don't have to install software on your desktop to manage VMware Server."
"It’s changed my life – I’ve been in IT since 1989 and very few technologies have been life changing and VMware is one of them."
"The scalability of VMware vSphere has been very good for what we use it for."
"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."
 

Cons

"Normalization of CPU utilization is required. At present, the data is available based on entitlement level."
"In terms of integration, the tool has great data. However, it's not always meaningful because the true business attributes of how most Fortune 500 companies operate are not maintaining in one tool, they're in a school of many tools."
"The solution's stability is the primary concern for me."
"Service management level integration is probably the biggest area for improvement."
"There are times when results are very slow when we search for servers."
"A closer integration to the service management processes."
"It seems that the mechanism for integration is, it goes so far but I think there could be some standard integration to normal remedy service now etc. I think that should be out of the box."
"Densify can be improved in a couple of areas: the learning curve for new users, where it feels like an advanced optimization tool that needs time for full leverage; enhancements in reporting and filter options for more detailed custom reports; and improvements in UI performance since some users feel that the UI is a bit slow or outdated, especially with certain interfaces such as the Kubex Console or the Cloud Decks."
"I think the updates allowing me to run through the VCSA appliance could be better."
"I'd like to see small VMDKs in the next version since Hyper-V provides that option."
"The way that vSphere manages the alerts on the data machine is not easy to configure."
"We want to see improvement from VMware with security. We want minimal downtime. We want automation. We want to deploy more efficiently."
"The technical support is good. However, it could be more seamless when it comes to chat support and lower response times."
"OS templates should be readily available, so there is no need to get an OS separately. Only the activation part should be different, which is not presently available due to the need to get the OS from a different location, then create VMs."
"The biggest pain when it comes to VMware is that licensing costs are pretty high."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cost is always involved, but then I feel that this solution is better than other products that we have."
"There was some sticker shock, as this is not just another software product to spit out graphs."
"Setup cost is negligible, as it scales fairly well."
"Densify has licensing setup so you can collect data without licensing. It gives you the ability to collect on everything, then choose later what you would like to license."
"The product is very expensive."
"Do not buy based on price alone. Many of my customers chose the lowest cost option only to discover that the additional funds needed to access even a few more features would have been money well spent. Likewise, if you are going to spend more money on additional features, then have a plan to actually deploy and integrate those features into your infrastructure. Many customers never take full advantage of the many features that they are paying for and that can be avoided by being proactive in developing your overall vision for the infrastructure."
"The solution comes with a yearly subscription license."
"I currently use the yearly licensing option, and I think that the pricing is fine for this solution."
"The licensing cost is strictly based on the number of CPUs that your hosts have."
"This is not the cheapest solution, but when you consider the stability of VMware vSphere, it is a great solution."
"The tool is a bit expensive."
"There are some competitive vendors out there who are sticking to the original model that VMware seemed to have, which includes a lot of additional features and functionality in the initial pricing, and I think they are gaining a lot of market share based on the fact that they are keeping their licensing simple. The only argument I have with VMware is that, when I ask about a new solution to our VMware team, I hear comments like, "For a nominal fee we can upgrade your license and you can have that." For the large number of Hypervisors and the scale we have, it's frustrating to hear that I have to go ask for additional money for very small, additional features that I think should be included."
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Comparison Review

it_user234735 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Consultant, ASEAN at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
May 10, 2015
Hyper-V 2012 R2 vs. VMware vSphere 5.5
I was won with Hyper-V 2012R2 recently and the table below based on customer RFP (edited). This articles all about technical, there is not related with TCO/ROI, licensing cost, “political”, etc. Another to noted is the Windows Server 2012 licenses is based on 2 socket CPU, meanwhile…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business177
Midsize Enterprise138
Large Enterprise261
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Densify?
Densify can be improved in a couple of areas: the learning curve for new users, where it feels like an advanced optimization tool that needs time for full leverage; enhancements in reporting and fi...
What is your primary use case for Densify?
My main use cases for Densify include cloud cost optimization, predictive resource sizing, assistance in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments, and reducing the manual analysis of the environme...
What advice do you have for others considering Densify?
My advice for others looking into using Densify is to focus on setting up governance policy early, integrate optimization results into your usual sprints, and train FinOps and engineering teams tog...
What is IOMMU?
DEEPEN DHULLA did explain well IOMMU. IOMMU has to be activated at the bios level. It exists on Intel and AMD platforms. It is used a lot inside virtualization platforms like VMware VSphere. It pr...
Why KVM??? Help please!
We use VMware and KVM. We find that KVM is a lot simpler to use and it provides the virtualization we need for Linux and Windows. For us, VMware does not offer any advantage. Moreover, KVM is free.
Proxmox vs ESXi/vSphere: What is your experience?
For me the biggest impact is the cost of licensing in the case of VMware despite its overall intuitiveness and ease of handling and management. However, KVM-based Open Source solutions are becoming...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AIG, Bank of America, Cigna, Citi
Abu Dhabi Ports Company, ACS, AIA New Zealand, Consona, Corporate Express, CS Energy, and Digiweb.
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