VMware Software Defined Data Center Reviews

The fact that we can troubleshoot is the most valuable feature. We can view the performance reports; we can also quickly build them using the templates and clone. The clone portion of it has a lot of things.

We were able to scale down in the data center, we were able to scale down with the physical boxes to VMs. It also released space because we actually have the data center offsite that we spend money on such as power, etc. We were scaling down on the hardware, so using VMware has really improved in cutting back/ decreasing the cost of hardware.

I would like to see the vSphere Client to have more options as opposed to the web client. I don't like using the web client and HTML. I don't like using that.

Stability is great.

Scalability is also good.

Technical support for VMware is excellent. We always seem to reach the right person, they are quite knowledgeable.

We were looking for ways to improve our environment and how we could reduce in the hardware environment and then, still have the same support that we needed for our users. That is how we decided to go for this solution.
Support factor is big for me while choosing a vendor. However, for the CEO or the director, it would be the cost.

The setup was pretty much straightforward. However, they did not send an in-house team.

It's a great product. I like it and we've been using it for years. Once you get the hang of it, you will enjoy it. It's fun to learn.

Do your homework. Make sure that it's going to work for your environment. We were trying to decrease our hardware and were finding the easy way to do so. Thus, it just depends on what it is that you are looking to do in your environment and what is the best option to choose. Once you do your research, you can talk to people who have already implemented it and go from there.

It helps me virtualize my environment. The software stack's been out there for over 10-plus years. It's a very solid stack. The feature sets have improved drastically, especially with the new release. Since they are running the same software stack both on-prem and in the cloud that means that I don't have to have different installations. It's a consistent implementation across the board.

It cuts down the sprawl of the environment. Helps use fewer tools to manage the environment.

Maturity of the features they've released just now. What they've released now has a lot of potential, but it's in the very early stages. Again, that consistent feature set across on-prem and cloud, that's what I would look for.

The product's pretty mature, so it's pretty good.

Scalability is great, too. They've made a lot of strides towards making that possible. They've come down to where you can dynamically add and remove resources.

It depends on who get on the other end of the line. Generally, it's good. Their resources are good. There's a lot of online self-help type support.

There is a lot of need for saving real estate cost and cooling, and those kinds of things. This software really helps with that.

I generally look for a company with good technical backing, as company which is constantly refining the product to make it better for the customers.

We chose VMware for the value, and for what we were doing, it was the simplest, most efficient way of deploying the services.

It's become more and more straightforward. It was never too complex, unless we were doing something crazy. It's gotten very simple. From what used to take maybe a couple of days, is down to an hour. That's a huge improvement.

Microsoft was the only other big one. Amazon Web Services is slightly different so I wouldn't put them in the same category, but they are playing in the same level right now.

I personally like to do a proof of concept, build it out, play with the product. That's how I would suggest a colleague evaluate a new product.

Do your homework, go through documentation, talk to the support engineers, sales support, pre-sales support, and just to get a good feel for what is involved. Again, doing a proof of concept helps in figuring out those issues which may come up in production.

The most valuable feature is the constant expansion of virtualization of all things in the datacenter, networking, storage. Overall it's the simplicity, they make things very, very simple and the most complex aspects of a datacenter are simplified down and extracted. That makes it available for any and all who are in administration.

It's battle tested, it's cool. I would say in a lot of cases, bulletproof. It's very simple to use, it's very easy to understand, it's easy to set up and initialize and get going, and it actually provides the enterprise class performance people want.

I would like to see something that stands out. Every year we see new products coming out from VMware and they keep packaging more and more in the software defined data center. But I would like to see something that is very much like how it was with NSX, something that's going to redefine the way that we do datacenter operations from VMware. Don't get me wrong, the product's great, they continue to improve upon it each year, but they're incremental improvements. It's not groundbreaking, it's not something that's completely changing the game.

It's very stable. I've been working with VMware for the last 10 years or so and I've never really had issues with their product as I had prior to actually working with virtualization technology. I would say it's world class, it's leading edge.

It's definitely very scalable. Every year they're coming out with new limits that you are able to push. For most enterprises, it's beyond what they actually need so they're definitely keeping up with the demand. It's beyond what I see most people requiring as far as scalability.

This is one area where I would say they need to continue to improve because unfortunately, as time has gone on, technical support has become more along the lines of: "Have you followed our knowledge base articles online?" To be quite honest, when people call they don't want to be directed to a website. And, in a lot of cases, if I've gone through and I've troubleshot these issues numerous times, I'm calling for real support and I can probably recite the KB articles better than a lot of level 1 support agents.

As far as some of the other resources they have, like BCS support, I push almost all of the customers to that because I don't really care for the support services of the level-1 types.

Given our previous experience with KVM and, say, Citrix hypervisors, honestly the reason that our company moved away from them back when I was an administrator was, again, stability. VMware was far more easy for us to use, implement. We got a whole lot more return on investment from virtualizing our workloads, and we're talking about a time when we were probably 40% virtual and 60% physical. Running and implementing VMware got us to 80% virtualization versus 20% physical.

I've been involved in initial setups, design sessions, architecture.

I've found it to be absolutely straightforward. Ever since it became ESXi and it became a hypervisor itself, and not just an additional server product, it's beyond simple. You literally just load the ISO boot and you can start loading and creating services on top.

No, to be quite honest, at that point in time we had done proof of concepts but were swinging to VMware.

I don't think everything is perfect about it. But it's very simple, very easy to use, it's very straightforward.

As far as advice to another company about implementing this product, I'd ask them what rock they've been hiding under. Learn exactly what you need to be able to do and accomplish from a virtualization standpoint, and just research the pros and the cons of doing this kind of thing. You've got plenty of information online to help out. Also, reach out, there's all kinds of companies and solutions.

Reliability, cost effectiveness, integration.

It allows us to deploy faster, more scalable. We get far more use out of the hardware we buy in our datacenters, reducing electrical costs. We own our own datacenters, so electric cost is a big priority, as is space. The more space we can rent out to customers, the more profitable. VMware allows us to virtualize very well. It also allows us to orchestrate and automate, which reduces operating expenses.

I can't keep up with what they're releasing now, to be honest. Certainly, some of the new things they announced recently, like being able to get better intellect about the virtual machines. That's always been a challenge. vRealize Operations Manager is a really good product, but it's a bear to manage. So simplifying some of that would be good; it provides too much information at times. Being able to correlate some of that would help get more intelligence out of the virtual machines. I was glad to see they announced that in the keynote at VMworld 2017.

Exceptional. From a software standpoint, a very reliable product. We're not on the bleeding edge, so we wait a little bit for patches to come out, but it runs consistently.

Excellent. I think that goes without saying. I think I covered that one, but yes it is very scalable.

I've used them mostly for critical issues. We have a lot of smart engineers that can handle most of the normal issues that they deal with. When we have a critical issue they usually get us to someone who is very good and knowledgeable.

We've been using VMware for years. I don't think that it was an actual decision. It was more along the lines of, "Wow this is a cool new product." We go back probably to 3.5, so many years ago. We really did it as most people start out, some management machines, some noncritical workloads, and started to implement it that way, and then realized the value and started to expand to the more critical workload.

So I don't know that it was this awakening that said, "We have to go in this direction." It just kind of morphed, saying, "Hey this is cool, let's try it out on some management. Wow this really works nice," and then started to expand on that, and now we're almost probably 95% virtualized.

Depends on the product. vSphere was simple. ESXi is simple. vRealize Operations is simple to set up, but a little more difficult to make it do something that's useful.

No, we started with VMware very early. We're looking at Hyper-V, but it's just not where VMware is.

When selecting a vendor, the most important aspects would be support and durability, that they stand behind the product. I have been working with EMC for years, and they have always stood behind their products. VMware does the same thing. They're owned by the same people, so that makes sense. Every software product and hardware product is going to have issues. I don't care who they are or how good they are. It's how they stand behind the product. When my sales engineers and sales guys come in and tell me this will do something, if there are some problems, the way they stand behind the product is really what makes a difference for me.

If you're starting out and you're looking to go to a software defined data center, which is really the way of the future, then you have to look at all the aspects of what something like VMware offers. They cover from soup to nuts. So you can have one vendor, one management plane, one orchestration plane. I think that makes a big difference. I think that would be my big driver towards it, because it is going to probably cost you a little more than some other solutions. But I think the combination of all those things, the operational efficiencies, make up for the difference.

If you've never dealt with it then I would get your people trained. That's a good starter. And you could certainly bring in VMware's professional services to help you start out if you don't have any expertise at this point. It's probably the best way to get started. Get your people trained, and bring in some professional services to help you get started because they have packs to help you get started with things.

It's really valuable because we're expanding our server environment constantly and it helps us manage that effectively. Because we're a company with well over 10,000 employees and offices in over 50 countries, we need a central location for us to manage all of our servers and all of our ESX nodes. It's a great avenue to integrate everything together.

Upgrading from previous versions is tricky, especially when you have an environment that spans over five operating systems, and we're using various types of hardware. So a streamlined updating process would be better than what we're currently doing, which is piece by piece rolling out the updates fairly slowly over the course of a couple years, going from 5.5 to 6.0.

It's been a couple of years. We've been VMware customers since early 2000, so we're constantly evolving what products we use. We're reevaluating what version we should be using, and it's usually a slow trod. But SDDC, in particular, it's been about three years.

Fairly consistently. We do have to open up a few technical tickets every month, but considering the sheer scale of our environment, I would say that's typical or even better than usual.

We scale up all the time. We have an automated deployment system for new servers and it's led to this server sprawl, and it's created a new issue where we have to manage our ability to shutter servers that aren't being used because it is so easily scalable that it can almost be abused.

Like clockwork, but we have a pretty high level of service because we're such a large customer.

If you already know the basics of server virtualization, I would say that it's fairly easy. It's a central hub for integrating all these different products that they use, so for what it is, it's simple enough. As simple as it needs to be.

When looking at vendors, I would say that we wouldn't be working with VMware if they weren't the industry leader in virtualization. So, reputation for one. With that comes service. We have different consulting groups that work with our company, but just to have heard from the vendor, themselves, that's very important just because they are the experts on the subject.