VMware vSphere Reviews

We are just beginning on vSphere. In the next two and three years, I would like to explore the virtualized automation.

Virtualised automation is a useful feature.

The pipeline feature can be improved, as it doesn't allow for specific situations.

We have been using vSphere for about 2 years. 

Because vSphere is a minimal interface, it tends to be stable.

As you can set up various environments, vSphere is very scalable. In the future, we may consider switching from vSphere to Hyper-V.

We purchased the OEM, but not from VMware. We bought it from HPE. The first year of support provided by HPE is okay for now.

IBM Power. We switched to vSphere from IBM Power because the hardware is cheaper.

The setup of vSphere is straight forward. I have set up a few vSphere environments.

vSphere is very expensive.

I would give vSphere 9 out of 10, as it is easy to use, and there is good support available.

It is a private cloud and it's on a standalone Bare Metal system. On the private cloud environment we provide virtualized computers for different users.

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. There are certain things as well which I don't like.

In terms of what could be improved, 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.

There are certain features which are called VCE which are available as a separate suite for this VMware cloud. The networking is almost integrated within the vSphere so it would be really helpful for the implementation team if they also had an orchestration for a different storage. There might be multiple OEM storage in the back-end, for example, that could connect with the vSphere while the vSphere shows it to the front-end user as a single storage. There is a lot of scope in terms of managing hybrid storage at the back-end of vSphere.

I have been using VMware vSphere for around six years.

VMware vSphere is stable in terms of the computer virtualization and it's also scalable. We can go ahead and make HA clusters, but as I said, in terms of the storage stability, there are certain issues because sometimes it gets confused when showing you the actual status. The back-end of the CLI shows you certain data and the front-end shows you different data. That's where there are certain issues with the reliability, but otherwise, it is quite robust and it's scalable.

We have more than 60 people using the different platforms. The functions include several web developers and a lot of finance applications which are running on Oracle and on different RDBMS's.

They have a wonderful technical support team. Additionally, there are a lot of blogs, forums and community support available over the internet where you do get a lot of support as well. So it's not always necessary to reach out to their technical assistance team. They also have wonderful documentation available that is quite helpful in terms of resolving a lot of issues.

This was a first implementation of vSphere for us. They have a hybrid environment where there is a Hyper-V running their Oracle with VirtualBox running across. We found this to be much stronger and much easier to deploy and hence we thought to continue with it.

Also it supports a wide range of operating systems.

The initial setup is very simple, not complex.

I would say from a completely blank bare metal to the private cloud, it took us around a few hours. Not more than that.

We implemented it ourselves.

I would recommend VMware vSphere to potential buyers. I will always do that. It's highly recommended to go with the entire vSphere Cloud Suite rather than only just going with the Hypervisor. But if you go with the entire suite, it's really wonderful.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate VMware vSphere an eight.

We are using vSphere as a multi-tenant platform. We are hosting VMs for a few of our customers.

We are utilizing all of the features and they are good.

I don't see any challenges in using this product. 

We have been using VMware vSphere for between three and four years.

This is a stable product and I haven't heard any negative feedback from my implementation team about it.

We implement this product for medium and large-sized companies. It is easy to scale.

I have not personally been in touch with VMware support.

We have not used another similar solution.

The implementation is an easy process for us, which is why we're using VMware cloud as a product. The length of time required for deployment depends on the customer. We need to know their requirements, and then we proposed timelines and inform them accordingly. It is defined by the number of nodes and the number of workloads.

We deploy vSphere for our customers. We also offer maintenance and support as part of a managed service.

This is quite an expensive product, although everything is included in the standard licensing fee.

Overall, for me, everything with this product looks good and I can recommend it.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

I use vSphere for general server virtualization. I am not doing anything spectacular with it.

vSphere has absolutely improved the way our organization functions. This is because of the ease of management and the number of servers that we are able to virtualize. When we first went to VMware, we took 200 physical servers and converted them to virtual. Instead of running on 200 pieces of hardware, they were running on 8.

Obviously, this is much easier to manage from a hardware perspective, power perspective, and reliability perspective.

The vSphere is very good at advanced things like memory sharing between VMs, and CPU scheduling between VMs.

I use the automation tools that they have today.

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

The capability to add on new features like site recovery and monitoring is helpful.

The web user interface can be a bit clunky from time to time, so there may be some room for improvement in that regard.  I was a fan of the C# client for as long as I could use it.  The move from flash to HTML5 for the web interface is an improvement but still not a good as C# was.

I have been working with VMware vSphere for approximately 12 years.  Since VI 3.5 days.

In 12 years, I can think of one time that we've had a server crash. It was one of our host servers and the problem was hardware-related. It was attributed to bad memory on the physical host server, itself.

The VMware operating system is stable and I've never had it crash.

Scaling is very easy. Just build it, acquire a license from them and add it to vCenter.

We have about 2,000 people in our organization, and everybody has some server on there that they do something with. It may be file services, file servers, or Citrix XenApp servers.  Most of our VMware environment is our legacy servers because they still support older operating systems that I can't put on Hyper-V or AHV. For example, we have a couple of Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 servers. VMware is the only hypervisor that I can run those on.

It has probably been 10 years since I've had to call support for anything but from what I can remember, they were helpful and they solved our problems. It has been so long that I've had to use them that I would hesitate to give them a perfect rating, since I don't know what they're like today, so I think that rating them a nine out of ten is appropriate.

vSphere was our first hypervisor.

Since then we have added additional hypervisors in our environment. We have AHV from Nutanix and Hyper-V from Microsoft.

AHV doesn't support things like memory sharing, at all, and Hyper-V is just not very good at it.

I knew what I was doing, so I found that the initial setup was very straightforward. If an inexperienced user's initial setup involves a little bit of searching in Google then I would think that it wouldn't be very difficult.

We did use a vendor for our initial implementation, 12 years ago.  Since then we have done multiple upgrades and I have done several new implementations for other orgs.  They were competent at their work and I learned a lot from them that I used in my future implementations.

Basic vSphere, without centralized management, is free. When you get into the centralized management vCenter server, it starts adding cost. Then, it's license-based upon the number of CPUs in your host servers.

VMware vSphere is my preferred hypervisor. It always has been, and always will be. I suggest using it, and not hesitating. I'm sure that they're working on great stuff to enhance this product that I can't even think of, but from my perspective, everything that they do today is great. I don't know what they could possibly do to make my life easier, but I'm sure they'll come up with something.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use VMware vSphere for virtualization and to deliver VDI.

The  vSphere plataform allow us to consolidate our datacenter and give us more availability.

The most valuable features are the vCenter, and SRM. 

Technically speaking, there is nothing that I don't like. I think that the solution is perfect. It's the best on the market.

I have not used all of the features but the features that are provided are perfect. There is nothing that this solution doesn't have.

I don't think that the solution must be improved.

I have been using VMware vSphere since 2007.

We have the latest version and 6.7. 6.5, and 6.0.

It's stable, we have not had any issues with stability.

We have 100,000 employees in our organization.

it's very scalable. It's easy to scale.

I would rate the technical support an eight out of ten. They need to improve the time it takes to resolve a case.

Response time could be improved.

Yes, a used Microsoft Hyper-V, I switched because vSphere is more mature and stable.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's easy.

It takes can take 10 to 15 minutes to deploy a new server into the vSphere platform. It's so easy.

It may take more time for testing and implementation.

Deployment varies, if you are referring to the deployment of the full solution, it includes deploying the vCenter, deploying the servers, the host, and creating our clusters can take up to three hours.

The implementation were with VMware consultant team.

I don't like the price because it's too expensive.

No, I evaluated just vSphere and Hyper-V.

It's important to contract a good level of support from VMware.

I would rate VMware vSphere a nine out of ten.

We deploy this solution for our clients, from small to large enterprise. We are resellers and I'm the company's principal engineer. 

A valuable feature is the provisioning setup of VMs. It's the most common feature used by our clients. 

I'd like to see a simplified integration with services automation. At the moment it requires a lot of network from partners and solution providers to do this - there are a lot of third party components that require integration. If they could improve this it would mean less integration for some key products and services.

I've been using this solution for five years. 

This is a stable solution. 

We have no complaints about the technical support. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

Licensing costs aren't too expensive, although you pay extra for additional features. 

It's important to understand your requirements before choosing a solution. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

Our primary use case of this solution is for server consolidation and high availability. We are customers of VMware and I'm a senior systems engineer. 

The solution is highly reliable and suits our needs - it's highly popular. Support and the overall community are great. You can find a solution to any issues you have. 

I think what they need to improve on is their pricing. They're starting to get a little high-end in terms of price compared to other solutions and the other solutions are catching up. Everything with VMware is very modularized and you can't just buy one piece and be done with it.

In my opinion, they would be wise to include a high availability out of the box type set up and not just for cloud, but site to site.

I've been using this solution for close to 15 years. 

Technical support is excellent. They stay on the line and track down the problem. Usually it's on the first call. I have had some complex issues that took a day or two to resolve but for the most part, they're resolved in the first call.

For the most part, the initial setup is pretty straightforward. If you start getting into the more complex setups, it can get more complex. For most use cases, it's just stick the disk in, let it run, and it sets most of itself up. It's almost out of the box ready.

As far as I know, there is a standard licensing fee. It all depends on the options that you choose and what you need for each business. Every company that I've worked for has had a different pricing model and a different set of use cases. So pricing can range anywhere from $700-$800 per server core, all the way up $2,000-$3,000 per core.

It's important to do your homework and make sure that it's the right solution for you. It's the same with anything, there are other options out there and you need to figure out what fits your business use case at the time.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We have a variety of customers with different use cases. Many can't go to a public cloud, and so we give the option of a private cloud. If they can go to a public cloud, may use a hyperscaler such as AWS or Azure on their applications. 

vSphere is easy to integrate with multiple third-party tools. We're using Carbonite, for example, for migration. We are also using vSphere and vCenter for integrating with a CA product. 

The solution allows for very good virtualization.

It makes migration processes easy.

The product offers a lot of functionality. It helps use manage everything for the client.

The solution can be integrated with multiple other technologies. If you have Cisco CSA solution, for example, it integrates well. 

If you want to use third-party tools, you are able to do so. 

With respect to the Windows environment, it's very, very easy to use.

Commercially, you see other products, like Nutanix, which offers a free hypervisor. It would be ideal if this solution was the same in that regard.

There are certain tools the can't run in parallel and occasionally, in those instances, we have trouble migrating customers from one source to our data center.

If I'm replicating workload from the data center and, I have to migrate some of the workload to my location, I have to stop that application. Only then I can run vSphere. That is the biggest challenge. If both the tools cannot run in parallel, it becomes a problem. There should be some sort of way to run these two products in parallel.

We've been using the solution for a number of years. It may be about eight at this point.

The stability has been very good. We haven't had any issues thus far with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The scalability is quite good. You can scale it horizontally and vertically if you need to. It's quite flexible in that sense. A company that needs to expand it shouldn't run into any issues.

The solution can have ten to 15 nodes. 

Currently, we use the solution quite extensively in our organization. We do plan to continue to increase the usage of the product in the future.

Technical support is okay. We're pretty satisfied with the level of service we are provided. They seem to be pretty knowledgeable and responsive. 

We also use Nutanix, however, we don't use that solution quite as extensively.

VMware has much better functionalities. They have integrated IDs and some functionalities. as well as load-balancing which Nutanix doesn't have right now. 

The initial setup is not complex. It's rather straightforward.

We can deploy the solution in three to four days, typically. We deploy multiple clusters and we take three to four days in terms of grid installing. 

In terms of pricing, a little bit of improvement is required. There is a lot of competition in the market. If you talk about Nutanix, Nutanix is much cheaper than this product. Very recently, we lost out on a contract due to the pricing.

We're a partner with VMware.

We are a data center service provider. We sell these services to customers. We are not using it for ourselves only. We are also selling the solution to our customers. In that sense, there's always a plan to increase vSphere.

Overall, we're pretty satisfied with the solution. I'd rate it a seven out of ten.