VMware vSphere Reviews

I use vSphere 7.0.1 for a few reasons. My primary use case is for my lab, as vSphere offers a great versatility to use VDI, containers, distributed Storage, and SDN on the same hardware. I also use vSphere for non-production tasks on Rasberry Pie 4, and it offers a great deal for working with Docker on cheap hardware with a single management interface, vSphere. 

My lab is composed of three white-box servers with vSAN, a 10 gig network, a local SAN, and all storage with SSD to deliver fast VM.

I also have vRealize operating to monitor all the VMware components. 

The new version of vSphere now integrates with containers and offers some new improvements inside vSAN, like file sharing. So, with VDI there is no need to add a VM to build a file server.

With containers, NSX is no longer mandatory and with the VMware operation manager, you can get an integrated monitored platform that can scale easily.

You will get both hands on the wheel because all of the products are fully interconnected.

vSphere 7 also adds better certificate management than before (less certificate) and vSAN is also improved in terms of the space management for reconstruction, so you will need less reserved space for this kind of operation. 

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.

The integration of Tanzu inside the base version of vSphere, without the need to install NSX-T, is a great addition. Many IT people don't know NSX-T and NSX can cost a lot, so it could save a lot of money. However, you will not get the enhanced network function due to the lack of NSX-T. 

The improvements to vSAN with a file server service is also a very valuable feature for many companies because they will be saving with the management of an NFS storage or a file server.

The HR proxy is actually a little bit harder to install and setup than other vmware products. So, direct integration with a vSphere distributed switch would be great addition, but you can bypass this setup if you chose an NSX-T switch.

The distributed switch, which is the networking part of vSphere, should have more functions. It should be like VMware NSX-T so that network management with VMware Tanzu will be better, although it is already good.

vSphere 7.0.1 is not available on ARM computers for production loads. I hope that it will become available soon so that we can run our production web server container on it, for example.

I have been using VMware vSphere for a few months.

This product is very stable and reliable. Now certificate management is also improved, the new version of vsphere has only 2 or 3 certificates so it is easier to manage.

vSpshere 7, like the previous version, is easy to scale up and down. vSAN is the same, and Tanzu as well. vSan need less space for is own management and it is integrating some features like a virtual witness node that improve the scalability. Other new functions inside vsan like file sharing is also a great addition for vsan scalability.

I always get great support from VMware technical team.

I did use the previous version of vSphere and I upgraded for the Tanzu support and VSAN improvement.

The initial installation of vSphere 7 is straightforward. If you try the ARM version, it is a little more complex but just follow the step-by-step process and it will work.

For Tanzu, the HR proxy is more complex because you will need to do some network design. For vSAN, VMware gives you a great tool to set your solution up easily.

I'm a VM expert so my level of expertise is great. My solution is an in-house one.

The ROI is very fast due to virtualization, perhaps a couple of months.

vSphere 7.0.1 offers a lot more than the previous version. Container support is the last great addition for VMware and it is worth the money you spend on it.

I did not evaluate other container solutions. For storage, I also use FreeNAS.

The virtualization is set by itself. vSphere is the best way to have a non-host based fixed solution. We always try to find an agnostic environment where we can restore agnostics or just say, "I need resources capacity." That's why VMware vSphere in particular, has been the best in the past but now also with the evolution of their product. Nowadays, you don't have to use any STEM infrastructure anymore because the bandwidth and the LAN speeds are getting steeper. 

If you look at the interconnection if you have a dark fiber connection, you can have data sent between locations. It's getting much cheaper.

If you use Zerto on top of that, then you are protected against any cyber threats or attacks. If you do it right, if you configure it from the hypervisor layer to external storage and then you have always a way back. It's blocked by the application of the journal. You can always go back to a point in time if you want to restore. If the point in time is as short as possible then you have the best solution. You can leave any additional solutions like CrowdStrike.

The only way for it to be a complete product is if you integrate all the functionalities. Then you don't need any backup solution anymore and you can do it by yourself. Integration needs improvement. They should improve a lot of the functionality because normally it's half of a product. You're only protecting yourself against technical failures but not against any cyber threats or any other stuff. It's not about prevention, it's about time to recovery because it's going to happen anyway. 

I have been using vSphere for twelve years. 

It was very easy to install. If you have the right piece of hardware or blade server in place, you can use it in a VM where you try XYZ and then install it. You go forward with that and it's ready to install, so it's not a big problem.

I would rate vSphere and 9.5 out of ten. 

I really like it because it's a storage restoration additional add-on but it's really expensive now. 

Firstly, we use it to provide an infrastructure for a development environment. Secondly, we use it to provide services to end-users. A kind of clustered services, where underneath, there are plenty of virtual machines. Thirdly, these solutions were chosen because of the easy way of providing backups and zero downtime between accidents and issues. 

VMware vSphere provides 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. 

Mostly, we use a gap solution for PaaS and IaaS levels of solutions. We also use Kubernetes on the application layer and downtime to move to a different layer of workloads. 

However, we still use plain virtual machine platform environments because we are leveraging just on-premise servers. We can't, or we don't want to fully move into clouds. That's why it's important for us to use a solution like VMware vSphere. 

I'm not aware of every option that our solution provides, but I see mostly two things. Provide a better solution for hybrid clouds and migration to the cloud. That could be one thing. The second one is providing some integration with different solutions at the application level, such as Kubernetes.

There is always a problem that the application level solutions are not aware of lower levels of infrastructure, of architecture. Some bundled applications with a stack of new VMs with better templates, including the deployment of such things. Monitoring could also be improved.

I have been using VMware vSphere for more than 10 years.

I think it's stable. We have encountered a major issue twice during the last four or five years. But it was not related only to vSphere but solutions like extensions to the software we use. 

However, there was no downtime, there was some issue, but I would say that the solution is quite stable. We have been using it for a few years without any major incidents that I am aware of.

To my knowledge, it's quite scalable and elastic in terms of providing bigger throughputs and managing higher volumes of requests at the end, but our cases currently are not like the biggest. 

I think most of the solutions available right now are set up for the infrastructure. The hardware is enough for the performance level we want to have. It's enough, and if we wanted to improve it, there is space for that. 

However, I can tell you that this solution was stable in my first project. Between 2010 and 2014, at a different company, the solution provided everything that I needed at that moment. There were no problems with scaling this solution.

However, we had problems with the hardware limits. We reached the limit, but it was quite good with vSphere solutions because even if we reached the point of having no hardware, like memory and computers, we managed to provide stable workloads for our customers. We gained the level of performance we wanted to have.

We were dealing with a complex situation dynamically, and the solution provided us with the tools, and the scalability was not an issue. However, we had problems with the hardware limits.

The support could be better when it comes to opening and responding to a ticket. But it was within a reasonable time. However, I'm don't have direct contact with the support, and my team's not giving me information about any issues.

My experience was with the public sector. That was rather complex from the start. In my previous experiences, if we wanted to use vSphere, that was after we tried some different techniques, and we had reached the limit of it or the complexity of the setup. 

That's why we wanted to move to simplify it. The setup was immature, and we needed to provide better service for customers. That's why we choose to use vSphere. The complex one was the other option.

The setup takes about one or two days or something in-between.

VMware vSphere is a top enterprise solution, so we pay the price for a major product.  We use vSphere because when we get the project, the customers were already using it. But currently, for example, if we have a new project and we are setting up our environment, and we have no constraints about the technology, like using vSphere, we rather go for Proxmox.

We are using it because it was already there before. The cost of migration, for example, is too high to move into different solutions, and the cost of keeping it is enough, and so we accept it. 

Overall, I would like to have cheaper licensing costs and maybe a different policy for licensing. However, we don't see that as a big issue because we are paying for a good solution. 

That's why I think it's a fair price. We are using it on the production side, and everything is good from our experience. That's why I would say that the cost isn't too high. However, it would always be nice if it was cheaper.

Proxmox is cost-effective and good. For example, if we have some projects where the hardware is provided by our customers, and we can use any technology we want.

Proxmox, in most cases, is good for creating some development and staging environment. Because it's cost-effective, we can afford to have a solution based on that technology. 

In most cases, I know that it's not limiting us in terms of the operating systems we use, and my team is quite happy when using such solutions. But it's not the production solution that we use at the end. It's mostly temporary for a few months, and we are using it because of the cost and because there will be an easy way to deploy. We can start to use it and move our environment between the projects. It's quite easy and quite quick.

With different technologies like Grafana, we gain information from infrastructure and application-level from different sources, and we integrate it into a different solution.

However, monitoring information could always be improved. Integrating with the application level could be improved, and monitoring could also be extended to that. Providing us with a more complex and just a one-click solution for seeing everything, how the infrastructure and how integrations are behaving, and the levels of infrastructure and application services would be a nice solution to have.

I think the decision needs to be made by the architects of the solution. They need to be aware of the cost of such solutions, their requirements, and the constraints of such technologies. From a technological point, it's always a good solution. However, it might not be the best solution in terms of the total cost of ownership, and maybe there are better solutions like Proxmox.

I would give VMware vSphere a solid eight out of ten. 

I'm always sort of working with the servers, therefore, whenever there is a requirement for a different kind of server, I deal with it. For example, one of my departments asked me to provide one server where they can store some files. Instead of getting a full physical server, we created some virtual machines on vSphere and gave it to the department so they could store their data there. That is one where we are using the server. Sometimes we buy software from outside, and there are specific requirements on hardware - for example, X amount much of RAM is required, Y amount of CPU is required, etc., so we try to use the vSphere to create the virtual machines for that.

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.

Our company has very limited requirements. We just create VMs and deploy VMs on the machine and give the users access. It's solving our problems perfectly. I'm not using any advanced features right now, however, it is sufficient. 

It's very simple and I really like it overall. 

I can't think of any features that are missing. I'm not really using any advanced options and don't have complex requirements.

The solution could be a bit more user-friendly.

I've been using the solution for eight years now. It's been quite a while.

The solution is very stable. We've never had any issues. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution can scale. If a company needs to expand it out, they can do so with relative ease.

There are four or five users that work directly with the solution, however, we have it deployed to many departments, so it's used quite a bit in the company. We have about 10-20 servers that are running on the machines.

Right now, we're happy with it, however, we may move to a different product that is even more scalable in the future, That's yet to be decided.

I've dealt with technical support in the past. Whenever we've logged a ticket, it's resolved very well. Everyone is quite knowledgeable, and whenever there is a requirement to follow a query, their tech team resolves those queries very efficiently and our problems were always resolved. We're pretty satisfied with their level of service.

We didn't previously use a different product.

We're considering moving to a different product in the future that could potentially scale even better than this. The reason we haven't moved yet is the fact that it's not easy for us to deploy and migrate all the machines from VMware to any other product.

We didn't actually handle the installation, and therefore I can't really talk about the process, as I wasn't involved directly.

The company that we bought had installed the vSphere for us and that server is still running from last year. We haven't touched it.

The solution was actually installed by the company that we ended up buying, and therefore we didn't directly handle any aspect of the implementation.

We have the licensing for the solution and the perpetual license which we have allows us to choose whether we want a support license separate or not. It's not an overly expensive solution. The pricing is average.

We're currently in the process of evaluating other options on the market to see if there are open-source options that could work for us or products that scale even better than vSphere.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with vSphere.

We aren't using the latest version of the solution. The near version is sufficient for us and it's solving our requirements.

Overall, I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

While I would recommend it due to the fact that it's solving my problems, I am evaluating other products that may be better. There may be an open-source option that could also work for us.  That said, this product is great in that we are using it hassle-free.

We use it mainly to host virtual machines. We have the standard version, so we do VMotion. Sometimes it's easier when you need to do some maintenance on a whole server to be able to move the virtual machine from one host to another, so there is no downtime for the users. For virtual machine management, it's more fluent to dynamically set the resources on the servers, for example, if we need to increase the storage volume on a virtual machine or increase the RAM or adjust the CPU cores. It's easier to handle this on vSphere or any other hypervisor than on bare metal.

The VMotion feature is the solution's most valuable aspect. The fact that you can move the load without service interruption to the users is great.

The initial setup is easy.

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

I've been using the solution for the last eight years. It's been a while.

The solution is very stable. It's quite mature. There used to be a more pink screen of this in version five, however, since then, since maybe version 5.5 or version six, it's very stable and it's very rare that the application hangs.

The solution should be scalable. However, I've never managed one of the node clusters, so it's hard for me to comment. It's easy from a small cluster to add nodes. How well they behave when you go beyond the 20, 30 nodes, I don't know.

It's been too long since I've contacted them, so I don't have any meaningful comment on this.

The initial setup is not complex at all. It's relatively easy. It's a fairly basic process for pretty much any network administrator.

In terms of deployment, the environment we have is not that big. We have less than 10 physical servers, so we tend to still do it manually instead of automating everything. This will change eventually, however, right now we set up everything manually. In regards to the time it takes to set up a vSphere cluster, you're looking at maybe two hours overall if you include all the hosts and the license configuration and the cluster configuration.

Everything is always too expensive. Of course, they could improve on that side and then probably they will have to. I know they revisited the licensing costs of the user charge. Now they charge per core instead of per socket. 

This will make them more expensive than they were and maybe it will make them also less price competitive with some other solution on the market. On a Windows environment, Hyper-V is pretty much free, however, you need to license all the cores anyway if you're going to install any Windows on the physical server. Therefore, when you use Windows servers and virtual machines, you have to pay an additional tax, let's say, for vSphere if you want to use vSphere for the hypervisor. That's something that you don't need to do with Microsoft Hyper-V. Of course, there are other hypervisors that are free - like KVM. On the cost, right now, they pretty much are the most expensive solution Ion the market.

We don't have a business relationship with the product. We're just customers.

If we speak about version five or plus five, I'm pretty knowledgeable about those as I was a network administrator back then. However, version six, version seven, I deal with these versions maybe two times per year, so I'm not very good on them.

Overall, I'd rate them at an eight out of ten, mostly due to the high pricing and container management.

I'm a Solutions Architect. I advise clients on how to leverage VMware products to provide resiliency in the face of disruptive events. VMware's platform is the most robust for running VMs upon, and it also has the most mature technology. Therefore, it is much more reliable and predictable, and those are the key characteristics needed to ensure a successful business continuity solution. Bleeding edge newcomers have yet to prove themselves production worthy compared to VMware's long history of success.

Portability of infrastructure is the greatest asset of any virtualization platform. By using VMware solutions, there is no lock-in with a particular hardware vendor for compute, network, or storage needs. Likewise, the ability to run various guest operating systems further amplifies that flexibility. The overwhelming majority of my clients are able to use VMware's solutions for 100 percent of their software application needs. Finally, the ability of a running VM to be quickly relocated to another hypervisor or launched at another site via replicated storage greatly reduces downtime.

• Storage vMotion to safely migrate VMs to other hypervisors, storage solutions and sites while the VM is still running. 
• Distributed vSwitches to better manage networking across large infrastructures. 
• vRealize for operations management and automation to remove human error from complex tasks and enable more efficient processes and business activities. 
• The VCSA appliance provides a great interface for most management tasks. 

In general, the combination of VMware products that compose or plug into vSphere enable most organizations to better prepare for disruptive events.

The ability to run ARM based VMs on an x86 platform for testing purposes. With the growing use of SBCs running on ARM architectures for IoT devices, it would be very useful if developers could build and deploy VMs running operating systems like Raspbian used on Raspberry Pi devices on their existing x86 ESXi environments. Even if this is not possible through some form of emulation, the ability to add ARM hypervisors to vSphere environments would be very useful. This will enable more rapid development cycles for customers just getting started with IoT but already existing vSphere users. 

Since 1999 when they only made Workstation.

I've used Hyper-V, AHV, VirtualBox and KVM solutions. Each of these solutions has merits, but none of them are as flexible and reliable as VMware solutions. They are all rapidly improving, but are not being adopted widely enough to rival vSphere's dominance. I rarely advise clients to switch away from a VMware based solution, because of the long history of success and reliability that comes with it.

Do not buy based on price alone. Many of my customers chose the lowest cost option only to discover that the additional funds needed to access even a few more features would have been money well spent. Likewise, if you are going to spend more money on additional features, then have a plan to actually deploy and integrate those features into your infrastructure. Many customers never take full advantage of the many features that they are paying for and that can be avoided by being proactive in developing your overall vision for the infrastructure.

I am constantly evaluating many solutions. I also regularly re-evaluate other solutions. The competition is improving, and VMware has done a great job improving as well.

The entire production and development environments are running on VMware vSphere using the 6.0 and 6.5 versions with twelve-node clustered configurations. Two data centers were deployed to separate the production side virtual machines from those of test and development.

The deployment of Enterprise VMware vSphere architecture helps us provide a robust and high availability infrastructure because of the combined features of VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter such as HA, DRS and Fault Tolerance. This base metal virtualization is highly compatible with almost all of the IT hardware.

The vMotion in particular I think is the most valuable because this feature provides migrations of virtual machines in case you want to run do maintenance. This his feature comes hand-in-hand with other features of VMware like the DRS, which automatically load-balances the whole VMware farm based on the usage and recommendation.

Improve the patch and updates online and remove mandatory reboot, or move the virtual machine onto a physical host that needs patching/maintenance.

I would like to see VMware vSphere provide a centralized patch service on the VMware level, regardless of your operating systems.

I have been using this solution for eleven years.

In my long experience, I have a single incident where our whole VMware farm went down. I can say it is very stable as long as the hardware is healthy.

The scalability is great. This solution is highly scalable and compatible with almost all IT hardware on the market.

The support is very responsive and highly knowledgeable.

Prior to this solution, we used Oracle Virtual Machine and Xen Virtualizations.

I  used the profiling feature.

I set up the system myself.

The license of VMware is a one-time payment and you can continue to enroll in support for troubleshooting and also administer the licenses.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

The primary use case is spinning up lab VMs. We can spin up several hundred VMs for students to work with, which could be Windows-based or Linux-based. It's about creating these VMs, then destroying them as soon as they are done. So, there is a lot of creation and destruction. We also spin up VM environments as well. On the vSphere 6.7 product, the optimization is great. The older versions, 6.0 and 6.5 were sluggish. When your spinning and destroying things, it's a big deal to have higher performance.

We don't do a lot with the encryption, but we do have the ability to encrypt something if we send it offsite. We have multiple locations, so we can encrypt our VMs, if necessary. However, we don't have a big need for it, but it's nice that it's there.

Our mission critical is our classroom. If we have college students who can't work, they paid to be there, and are paying us for the environment. Therefore, if we're down for a day, that's a real problem. Given that people have a choice of where they can go for education, we have to be always available. Otherwise, they will go next door. For us, it's about a student's success and you can only do that if you're up and running.

1. A big feature for us was Quick Boot. You don't have to wait for the host to do a recheck on memory. You do an upgrade, and it's not a 10-minute reboot cycle. You can bring your host online and offline. 
2. Database optimization. They did a lot in enhancing the performance. They took down the memory utilization and increased what it brought in. You see more responsiveness, especially now with having the HTML5 client. It feels like a much snappier product.

The biggest feature that everybody wanted was the HTML5 client. This has made everything native where you're able to surf through it. Going into our web page, you're no longer refreshing it. It feels more like an enterprise product now. With Adobe Flash, it didn't feel that way.

The biggest thing to improve is to have more self-service in the portals. I would like to receive more help through the web interface. 

I would like to see continual improvements of the client. It doesn't need to go much larger for support on the number of VMs or its size, because there are pretty high limits already. However, it needs a bit more in the management and the reporting aspect. We have to get a third-party for that. It would be great if it was a bit more integrated.

Stability has been good since the 6.0 days. The biggest issue with stability is the SSO. That is still an issue as far as integrating it with Active Directory, and any large scale of it. That is still a work in progress. However, the core stability aspect of it has been there and hasn't changed. This has just gotten better.

I have no issues with scalability. As large as we have wanted to go with as many VMs, we have never had an issue pushing its limits. 

The majority of the issues are truly integrating it into the Active Directory structures. This doesn't seem to be there yet.

VMware tech support has always been good to us. Our biggest challenge is getting them the logs, but once they have them, the logs are so detailed that any possible issue usually is resolved within a few hours. So, it has always been a positive experience.

Given that we spin up and down hundreds of VMs, we physically couldn't do that with physical hardware. It would just be financially impossible. Having a virtualized infrastructure and being able to bring up Windows, Linux, and VMware within a virtualized environment brings more technology into the classroom. Without it, we couldn't do what we do.

There wasn't a short list. It was the only solution. It's the only thing that made financial sense as far as being able to do what we needed it to do. Nobody out there had it.

I would rate it as a nine out of ten.

Go big with your hardware. You have to be willing to invest in the hardware platform. Storage is key. Make sure you have enough performance with it. When you're looking at the actual overall product, make sure you understand what third party offerings you need to put in. It could be something from VMware or one of the partners, but it's going to be more that just the VMware Suite. There will be one or two things you need to add to it. Specifically, monitoring or reporting will be the big draws.

I don't have a percentage for the performance boost of the apps. However, there is noticeably different speed of how the database is working and how you move through the client. Everything is a bit more responsive. Part of that was getting rid of the flash client as well. We're seeing an overall general performance increase in everything we do, whether it's the monitoring aspect or deploying.