VMware vSphere pros and cons

We primarily use vRealize to troubleshoot any issues that may arise with our virtual machines, which is the main reason why we believe this solution is excellent.

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

Stable and secure management console for virtual environments, with a diligent technical support team.

Once you have everything configured, it is relatively straightforward.

The stability of the solution is excellent.

The fact that we have the ability to easily scale out, and the ability to do maintenance on the underlying hardware without impacting our business applications, are important aspects.

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.

It affords us different views of the VMs created by vSphere so we can control them better.

The features that I have found most valuable are the overall good ease of use and the good interface which makes it very easy to migrate from one bare metal to another. These are the two things which I like about it.

Technical support is helpful and always available.

They must work on the price, as well as the technical support.

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

The VMware vSphere app is faster, compared to its web-based client. The web-based client is very slow, freezes, and is challenging to use.

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

The licensing costs for the solution are quite high.

The challenge that we have is keeping the system up to date, as well as having the internal resources to maintain that platform. We're not an IT company, so it's challenging for us to keep the IT resources in-house.

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.

There are some challenges around ESXi hosts — converting them into VMs.

They should improve their storage management part. vSphere has its own file system type, called VMSS, and that file system doesn't report on proper data usage or things like that. There are certain loopholes wherein it sometimes shows you erroneous data. Again, their VMSS file system, their data storage management system, and its reporting must be improved a lot.

If they improve on the knowledge base and documentation, it would be extremely helpful.