VMware vSphere pros and cons

An easy way of providing near-zero downtime services, the operation of the instances between clustered services, and providing the projected SLA for our customers.

The solution has high availability.

It is the number one virtualization-layer platform available, and a lot of people trust it.

It's not a particular feature, really, however, I can say that the solution is just easy to maintain, and makes it easy to backup all those VMs. We can easily save our data and we can deploy VM machines very fast and create the delivery of the server in a pretty simple, dynamic way.

VMware Tanzu (container) is the most valuable addition because you get an efficient solution to manage the VM and container in a single pane of glass.

Once you have everything configured, it is relatively straightforward.

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

The stability of the solution is excellent.

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 initial setup is easy.

Monitoring information could always be improved.

The biggest pain point is probably the firmware management of the underlying hardware. It could be a lot better.

To manage it properly, you have to know this product really well.

The solution could be a bit more user-friendly.

The HR proxy is actually a little bit tricky to install and setup.

When we talk about the overall private cloud stack, I would prefer for it be a lot more seamless.

The web user interface can be a bit clunky from time to time, so there may be some room for improvement in that regard.

The licensing costs for the solution are quite high.

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.

The container management could be improved. It's far from perfect right now.