VMware Software Defined Data Center Reviews

We use this solution to help centralize our office.

We have two Data Centers. One of them is for our DR and the other is for production. This is an on-premises deployment.

We have a lot of VMware hosts and this solution is needed for them. If you have more than two VMware hosts then you definitely need this solution to connect and manage them.

Using this solution will provide you with a lot of features for working with multiple VMware hosts.

The most recent web-based interface has given us some problems. For example, if you delete a virtual machine or you delete storage then it takes a long time to refill it. In prior versions that were a client installed directly on the PC, the interface was more responsive. Things happened on time. I had a problem last week where one of my VMs was deleted, and it took perhaps thirty minutes to repair it.

This product is one hundred percent stable.

After we installed it, we have not had any issues with the core product.

Scalability depends on the hardware. If you have a server with low performance when you will have problems. On the other hand, if you use high-performance servers then you will have no trouble with scalability.

We have not needed to contact technical support regarding this solution.

We used another virtual environment prior to this solution, but it was not as stable. Stability is important because if you need to restart the server then it will restart all of the virtual machines inside it.

The initial setup of this solution is not a problem.

We handled the implementation and we do the support for this product ourselves.

It is hard to find things that this product needs. Whatever we have needed, we found it.

We are completely satisfied with this product.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use this solution for public-private partnership healthcare projects (hospitals).

Our environment includes Dell PowerEdge Servers, Arista Networks Data Center Ethernet Switches, Coraid SRX Block Storage SAN, GeNUA Security Appliances, Xirrus Wi-Fi Arrays, Mushroom Networks BBNA SD-WAN, and MobileNets.

This solution has improved our organization in several ways, including:

• Convergence and Consolidation of Server Hardware
• Data Center Ethernet Switching
• Bare Metal Ethernet SAN "dramatically improved" performance, stability, and reliability of the VMware Healthcare Solution Architecture.

The most valuable feature is the ability to "leverage third-party vendors" disaster recovery/business continuity applications supporting complex VMware SDS deployments, namely Zerto.

The solution needs performance optimization of the VMware IO technology.

I use this in an enterprise and as a service provider for the banking industry in Paraguay.

The most valuable feature is the strong support. Also, the H-Appliance feature that supports MPLS is very important to us.

The storage utilization needs to be improved. It is not a perfect product. It needs to be more secure and it needs more aesthetics. 

It is very scalable. 

The tech support team has a lot of practical experience. 

We looked at other solutions, but we found this to be the strongest solution. The other products in the same category include Amazon, Azure, and Google, but they do not have the same features and the same "open solution" policy.

The setup was complex. You need to be knowledgeable in using a physical data center in order to implement this solution. 

Automation. Using features like NSX. You can automatically create new networks, simplifies the process greatly.

I think it's less user intensive to set up new bits of the network now that we are using SDDC net features.

I hadn't given that much thought. A lower price. It's a fairly polished solution, but there are some things that are a bit clunky still.

Two years.

Seems stable so far, we've been using it for a couple of years. We have had problems, but that's probably more down to the user than the products.

It scales very easily. You can just add more racks of compute and expand sideways mostly.

We have used VMware support for this solution on occasion. Some people you speak to are very helpful. Others, not so much. They give you the run around. You speak to somebody to start with, they log your ticket, then they pass the details onto somebody else and then they'll eventually call you when they're free. If you're lucky enough to get through to somebody competent, then they are brilliant, but there have been times that they have not been particularly helpful.

No. You're always creating, to try to simplify and automate things to make it less user intensive, to make changes to the network.

We've used VMware for a long time now and had quite a bit of confidence in their products so that contributed towards the reason we chose VMware.

I was involved from the start to the finish. I suppose it was complex because cause it's a different way of working to what we're used to, but now that we've migrated, we're happy with our choice.

We had some help from a solutions architect with them, but mostly it was off our own back.

We looked at some Cisco products.

Sit down and work out what you want to do before you actually try and move your move to SDDC.

The virtual networking and being able to make changes on the fly without having to deal with physical cabling. Easy to use, easy to connect. It seems to be more simple than some of the other products out there.

Reduced cost of manpower for running cabling, ability to put a lot more extra infrastructure and smaller form factors and less power.

Possibly iBGP. It is just not clear to me yet. I have had some talks with folks who are helping networks internally. But, my understanding is no one supports eBGP.

So far, pretty good. I think it's getting better.

The company told me to. We have been using it ever since I've been here.

You should really investigate VMware.

VLAN and virtualization are the most valuable features. It is cost saving and effective with the government's money.

We can scale to the needs of the customer and find them solutions that ten years ago would cost them double the price.

Maybe, by just incorporating encryption and making it cheaper are some of the improvements needed. Right now, encryption is still expensive and then encryption is a requirement for DoD, so maybe if encryption got easier and cheaper it would be helpful. That's what I want to see.
The license is sort of confusing, but hopefully, it can get better.

Overall, it's pretty stable. The performance is pretty good as well, i.e., as long as the hardware and everything else is up to par.

Scalability is a big factor of the whole thing, so that's the whole point of consolidating hardware beta center and the footprint is what they are looking for. They don't want to house, hundreds of servers and now just have maybe ten to do the job of about a hundred.

We have onsite support that comes out to our site. Those guys are excellent, they're hardcore professionals.

The DoD requirements, more than everything else, is what drives us to come up with a solution for them so they give us what they want in terms of the requirement; we just reach out to VM and come up with a solution for them.
We were not using another solution before. VM is pretty much the-go-to for anything in the department of defense.

The setup was straightforward. Then, we brought them in to give us a blessing, make sure that the components are properly configured and do an assessment on it.

We had HPE in there but a lot of our hardware is HPE. So, we looked at just VM and HPE.

The reason why we ended up choosing VM is the reputation in the industry; for the last twenty years, VM has been there.

Licensing is the most important criteria while selecting a vendor. We were going to go with Citrix Systems but due to factors such as cost saving, one vendor doing everything, tons of VDI, etc. are why we decided on this solution. VM was a better solution.

Talk to the sales team, have them come and bring their team out, go through what the requirements are and they'll come up with a solution.

Just like anything else in IT, something you must deal with is the limitation. That's why you must have your requirements before you come up with a solution. You have to talk, get all the requirements that you need and you can find your expansion plan so that your requirements don't outgrow your solution.

The ability to automate both provisioning of the environment that you're trying to create as well as operationalizing some of the pieces they happen throughout the day is the most valuable feature. It is important because if you are in an environment that you're trying to scale or do a greenfield deployment, then it's easy to automate that process and remove some of the human errors that occur while deploying these environments.

Also, in terms of the operationalizing of pieces, these tasks that often take up a lot of time of the users, can be automated and taken out of the hands of some of the operational teams. Therefore, freeing them up to do more pressing tasks that may require humans that you can't automate anymore is why it is so valuable.

It improves this whole process because you are no longer locked into solutions that the hardware provides. In other words, you're able to scale things a lot more easily and are able to define things a little more from a fluid type of perspective, so that they can change a lot more quickly.

There are still a lot of pieces that they're working through bugs because it's a new technology. There are things that need to be flushed out to allow customers to be able to troubleshoot the environment a little more easily, so certainly that is one area that I would like to see improve.

Stability is one of those things that people often worry about. So, when it comes to the stability of the VMware software-defined system, it's always growing and always changing with the new pieces which are coming in from many different vendors, third-party pieces that are plugging in. In spite of that, you still have this very secure and very solid core that is the VMware solution.

Scalability is one of the core foundations of this software-defined solution. You're able to easily define all of these things from a software perspective and can plug-in these pieces at a moment's notice. It has already been defined within the software perspective, so it's easy to scale the environment, i.e., based on these policies that are created.

The technical support is very strong and friendly. They are always able to jump into the deepest type of problems and are always looking to help resolve whatever issue that has been brought to them.

Since I'm a partner, my customers are always looking for newer technologies; so for us, it's about trying to stay ahead of what our customers are going to be asking us for. Learning this environment, building and growing it to show-off to the customers, and then also, to be that trusted advisor to the customer when it comes time to get a new one are crucial.

The setup was neither easy nor too difficult, it is somewhere in the middle. There are pieces that are very easy to install. However, when you're talking about that bleeding edge of technology, there are pieces that are complex and sometimes, those pieces that are complex do require either support/professional services to get involved, as they have a deeper knowledge of that process.

Nutanix certainly is a big competitor. Also, SimpliVity is another big one of those competitors in terms of the software-defined and hyper-converged aspect of this environment.

Whilst looking for a vendor, a deep and trusted relationship with that vendor is very important for us.

It's important that you understand who you will consider being the gold standard or the trusted partner in this whole ecosystem. Who are the other people looking to work with this? Who is looking to rule the environment? Who is leading the charge? These are important questions to consider.

I think the best way to think of it is, all the reasons why virtualization is so important to compute, SDDC gives to things like network and storage.

Things that used to take a real long time to do with compute are much faster with virtualization. Now it's the same thing with storage and network because you don't have to worry about any physical hardware. You need additional load balancing or firewall or even a VLAN stretch somewhere, it's now all done with just a keyboard.

The biggest operational change I'd like to see them do with vSAN is to change the actual underlying way the storage is done, so that every node and every disc in the cluster equally participates in all reads and writes. It isn't set up that way right now. I know that's an insane thing to ask because it would require completely rewriting the application.

For NSX I don't know if there's anything that needs to come out right away, partially because we have not started using it yet. Also, because we're so far behind the times, by the time we start using it all the features we need will already be available.

SDDC is a mix of a range of products so it's tough to kind of answer that. But, I think that by the time it makes it to first customer-ship it's usually good enough that it can be used for most use cases.

Again, two different products. I think the scalability of vSAN is good enough if you consider that most people aren't going to put clusters together larger than 12 or 14 or 16 nodes anyway. NSX doesn't really have a scaling issue so I guess it scales really well.

I haven't used it for this solution. I do have the OEM contact. We're only in the discovery phase for software designed storage with vSAN, and we're not even really in discovery for NSX which is the networking side of it. So we haven't really had any production issues because it's not in production yet.

Regarding having used a different solution, that's a tough question to answer. Software defined data center means that there were things that were in the datacenter that weren't software defined and now they are. So I guess we were using other stuff before. But, it wasn't software defined.

The switch is a business conversation, usually around cost avoidance or, potentially, return on investment. It's typically cheaper to do things in software than in hardware and that's the direction we're going.

The main reason we chose VMware is it's very attractive for us, particularly for a VxRail solution from EMC, that every single piece of hardware and software is made by the same company. So there are no inner operability issues. There's no cat and mouse, there's no one trying to play catch-up. As soon as VMware comes out with a new whatever, EMC has it and it works and it's tested.

I was not involved in the setup at this company. But, I was at a previous one.

There's a lot to it. vSAN is not as straightforward as it could be. But, partnering with Dell EMC, they put together an appliance called VxRail which is extremely easy to use. They solved all the problems.

Anybody could do setup for VxRail. It asks you 15 minutes of questions and you walk away and it's done.

Definitely Nutanix for vSAN is on our shortlist. ACI and NSX, like everybody else. They're the only two players in this space.

The most important thing to look for in selecting a vendor is total cost of ownership.

As for advice, you probably are already, but if your aren't, you need to be looking at SDDC because it's just such an easier, faster, safer, cheaper way of deploying a datacenter.