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Instructor at Milwaukee Area Technical College
Video Review
Real User
You see more responsiveness now with the HTML5 client. It feels like a much snappier product.
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Pros and Cons
  • "You see more responsiveness, especially now with having the HTML5 client. It feels like a much snappier product."
  • "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."
  • "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."
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

  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.

What needs improvement?

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.

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VMware vSphere
July 2025
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and support?

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.

What was our ROI?

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

PeerSpot user
Brian Kirsch - PeerSpot reviewer
Brian KirschInstructor at Milwaukee Area Technical College
Real User

With more virtualization the experience level with the products has grown and the admins today are able to troubleshoot a wide range of issues with less help. Ideally getting more technical information in the client will help to shorten issue resolution time and improve overall uptime.

System Administrator at City of Sioux Falls
Video Review
Real User
HA and DRS make sure our machines are always available, while encrypted VMs enhance security
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Pros and Cons
  • "One of the most valuable features that vSphere has is its HA and DRS protection, where it can simply make sure that all the machines are always where they need to be and how they need to be taken care of. We have a lot of servers and services for emergency services for police, fire, and the like. We have the ability to use DRS as Anti-Affinity Rules to make sure that those redundant server pairs always stay away from each other. But then, if anything would happen to one of them, we have HA to be able to come up and bring it right up and going again."
  • "Security-Features; vSphere does offer quite a bit of security stuff built-in. It is nice to know that we can have the virtual machines encrypted, so that if somebody were to get a hold of any of those files, we don't have to worry about them actually being used. Since we do have so many different departments and areas with a lot of people that need access into the solution, we can use the role-based access controls to really restrict and control who can do what, so everybody can do what they need to do, but they can't do anything else past that."
  • "vSphere does offer quite a bit of security stuff built-in. It is nice to know that we can have the virtual machines encrypted, so that if somebody were to get a hold of any of those files, we don't have to worry about them actually being used."
  • "I met with the lead solutions architect for vSphere, and one of the things that I really kind of sat him down on was, "What's the deal between these Custom Attributes and these Tags? What are you trying to do with that?" He said, "So here's the deal. I know that they're halfway done and we have a vision of where they're all going, but we'll get it there." That that would be a great ability, to keep all that metadata about your virtual machines inside the solution and staying with the machines."

What is our primary use case?

The primary use case for vSphere is managing and controlling all of our virtual environments from the servers, and the storage resources, to all of the guest virtual machines.

As far as mission-critical apps go, the most important that I see is our computer-aided dispatch software which runs all of the police, fire, and ambulance services for the city. That that is the most important thing that we do, to simply protect lives and protect property.

Other kinds of very critical workloads that we have to have include an enterprise-resource-planning system that most everything goes through. The city also has a lot of geographical information about everything that is in the city. The citizens use that data constantly.

We do not use VMware Cloud on AWS.

How has it helped my organization?

As far as performance on vSphere goes, the performance is great. We've been running everything virtualized from VMware forever, so I can't really say that there has been a boost in performance, but I can tell, from version to version - and now out on version 6.7 - that everything is continuing to be better, faster, and stronger in everything that it does.

vSphere has improved our organization and what we do because it easily enables all of us as IT professionals to provision and manage the vast quantity of servers and other resources that we have. For the about 400 virtual servers that we run, it takes less time to manage and take care of those than it does for the 25 physicals that we have, just because it's so easy to simply take care of it all in one common solution, in one pane of glass.

What is most valuable?

One of the most valuable features that vSphere has is its HA and DRS protection, where it can simply make sure that all the machines are always where they need to be and how they need to be taken care of. We have a lot of servers and services for emergency services, for police, fire, and the like. We have the ability to use DRS as Anti-Affinity Rules to make sure that those redundant server pairs always stay away from each other. But then, if anything would happen to one of them, we have HA to be able to come up and bring it right up and going again. A lot of companies will say, "Oh no, we lose so much money per hour when something goes," but in our particular use case, if our emergency services would go down, people could actually die. That's a little bit more important.

vSphere does offer quite a bit of security stuff built-in. It is nice to know that we can have the virtual machines encrypted, so that if somebody were to get a hold of any of those files, we don't have to worry about them actually being used. Since we do have so many different departments and areas with a lot of people that need access into the solution, we can use the role-based access controls to really restrict and control who can do what, so everybody can do what they need to do, but they can't do anything else past that.

I do find vSphere simple and easy to manage. Most of the common tasks that you would do are very quickly available. One particular case that we go in all the time for is provisioning new servers. If you take that to the analogy of the physical world, that was something that, by the time you got it and you plugged it in and you stacked it, you did everything, you got the firmware up and going, you got the OS loaded and patched, you were easily in it for a day to two days, trying to prep up something that way. Just yesterday, I was sitting in a session (here at VMworld 2018) and I got a request for a brand new SQL Server for somebody and it was literally: right-click from template, new machine, here's its name, here's its IP address. Oh, by the way, tag it out as an SQL machine, and in 10 minutes the machine is up and running and is already installing SQL on its own, automatically. So it's pretty cool stuff.

What needs improvement?

I see room for improvement in the vSphere product just a little bit. I know they are doing all that transition from the traditional fat client to the new HTML5 interface. I've watched that grow from being technical previews to where it's at today, and it's probably 90 percent there. But I think that VMware could continue to put improvements into that UI, so that all the tasks can be performed as quickly as they used to be done in the fat client. 

Just yesterday, I met with the lead solutions architect for vSphere, and one of the things that I really kind of sat him down on was, "What's the deal between these Custom Attributes and these Tags? What are you trying to do with that?" He said, "So here's the deal. I know that they're halfway done and we have a vision of where they're all going, but we'll get it there." That that would be a great ability, to keep all that metadata about your virtual machines inside the solution and staying with the machines.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability is great. We keep all of our stuff up to patch and keep up on drivers. I actually couldn't tell you the last time I've had one of them crash on me. It's been a while.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

For our environment, the scalability has been great. I've been with the city for about three-and-a-half years. We had about 100 VMs at that time, and now our account is well over 500 and the solution has simply grown to fit that need.

How is customer service and technical support?

I am going to be honest that their level-one support is actually not that helpful. It's been something that I talked about with some of the people in the Inner Circle discussions and they're changing some of those processes around. But I do find that once you get up to the level-two and level-three techs, that they are very competent and very capable engineers who have been able to resolve any problems that we've had.

How was the initial setup?

I was involved with the initial vSphere setup. For the most part, the setup is fairly straightforward. The last time, when we set up the vSphere 6 environment, we went into fully redundant HA platform, services controllers, so I think we chose to make the solution a little bit more complicated than it needed to be. But with 6.5 and 6.7 there are some enhancements and they want all that stuff embedded and the process is a lot simpler and it's a lot easier to get everything going.

What was our ROI?

For return on investment, I don't know that I can give you any real hard and fast numbers on things, but I can tell you, from a time perspective, what vSphere has been able to do for us. When I started out, provisioning servers was a very long and drawn out process. Now, we're to a point where literally, from the moment I decide I want a server to the time that Windows is up and running is less than ten minutes, and that's fantastic to me too. 

It saves me a lot of time because I'm now provisioning several servers a week and that's just par for the course. All that time that you do that repetitive, tedious type work, is time that you're not being able to deliver meaningful, value-added work for the company.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did take a look at Microsoft's Hyper-V platform. The city's always had a philosophy of, "Just because we've always used something doesn't mean that that's always going to be the right way to continue to go forward." So we did take a look at the Hyper-V Server 2016 type stuff. But honestly, in my opinion, it's not there yet. VMware was still the superior choice for the hypervisor. 

What other advice do I have?

As an overall solution, I'd probably give it a nine out of ten. It is very rock solid in everything that it does and it simply works with everything, and it does a pretty darn good job doing it.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.

PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
VMware vSphere
July 2025
Learn what your peers think about VMware vSphere. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: July 2025.
864,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.
IT Analyst I at Los Rios Community College District
Real User
Virtualization makes it easier for us to back up, maintain, and manage our servers
Pros and Cons
  • "Ease of support is one of the main features that we have with it. We're able to take Snapshots before doing updates to make it easy to roll back if something does happen to go wrong."
  • "The visibility that we have of our VMs is also important. What's being applied? Who has management of them? Laying it out in a virtual environment allows us customization for our students. We're able to respond to the students' needs much more quickly than we could in a physical environment."
  • "I would like to see a little bit more visibility regarding errors. When an error does occur, there are times where it says "Unknown error" or something to that effect, and it doesn't necessarily give you a lot of metrics. If you go online and you give a description of it, normally the VMware forums can help you find out what it is, but I'd like to see a little bit more visibility from the software itself regarding what's going on: "This went wrong, this is why.""

What is our primary use case?

vSphere allows us to virtualize our campus servers and our student environment. We run vCenter within vSphere, so we have about 300 or 400 student desktop workstations that we run at any given time. We are able to customize our students' experience very quickly, very easily, and are able to make it mobile from different computer labs on campus.

We're also exploring opening it up so students would be able to remote into their VDI workstations from offsite. We're also looking into wrapping everything up with Workspace ONE, so we can virtualize more applications and let them have more of an MDM experience as well.

We're not really virtualizing the apps themselves, yet. We're trying to move towards that. Our mission-critical things rely on our servers that we have virtualized. We have web servers, security servers, database servers that we have virtualized and that makes it easier for us to back up and maintain them. Really, vSphere plays a part in our management.

How has it helped my organization?

We have seen a performance boost. As we keep moving up to different versions it gets more seamless, it gets easier to maintain, to do updates to our virtual environment and to the physical end. We're also moving towards virtual storage. Moving to flash arrays and virtual storage is even speeding up our students' experience when using the virtual desktops. I would estimate a 25 percent boost.

Another benefit we've seen is with our IT technicians. It used to be this IT was assigned to a specific area, and that was what they worked on. They had 300 or 400 machines that they would have to run around to, to maintain them; re-image them every semester. Now, with the virtual environment, they are able to keep more up-to-date on their applications, on their Windows updates, and do it in the background. They are able to refresh entire labs within less than an hour, rather than sitting there all day or all week refreshing all of the labs.

We have a better, faster management. We have more productivity from our IT staff and more productivity from our students, as well.

What is most valuable?

Ease of support is one of the main features that we have with it. We're able to take Snapshots before doing updates to make it easy to roll back if something does happen to go wrong.

The visibility that we have of our VMs is also important. What's being applied? Who has management of them? Laying it out in a virtual environment allows us to customize for our students. We're able to respond to the students' needs much more quickly than we could in a physical environment.

I found it a little bit daunting at first when I was coming into it raw, but now the management of it is very simple.

What needs improvement?

I would like to see a little bit more visibility regarding errors. When an error does occur, there are times where it says "Unknown error" or something to that effect, and it doesn't necessarily give you a lot of metrics. If you go online and you give a description of it, normally the VMware forums can help you find out what it is, but I'd like to see a little bit more visibility from the software itself regarding what's going on: "This went wrong, this is why."

For how long have I used the solution?

One to three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The downtime that we have experienced has not been that much, and normally it's the result of a mistake on our part, not necessarily the software. We've misconfigured something or we haven't thought about a configuration setting that we should have put in place or we didn't do our research. It's not normally the software that has a problem. When we do have a software glitch, it is normally a reboot and it's back up and running, so we have not had much downtime.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

So far, we've really enjoyed the scalability of it. The main thing that we have to accommodate for is licensing, making sure that we have enough license to cover our expansion.

Otherwise, we just throw a few more hard drives into our server array and make sure that we have enough storage.

How are customer service and technical support?

On those occasions where we do run into a problem, we have had great help from VMware's customer support. Recently I had problems getting new certificates for our servers to be able to bring them into our vSphere and Horizon environment. VMware support was able to help me diagnose what was going wrong with those, come up with a plan for the future to be able to more accurately get the certificates I needed, and integrate them into the environment.

I would rate the technical support a solid eight out of 10, maybe even nine. They are responsive, always quick to answer questions, and knowledgeable.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I don't think we were using anything before vSphere. I think we led off with it. My partner was thinking for a time about Microsoft, but he decided that Hyper-V wasn't for us and we went with VMware, and we haven't regretted it a day since.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Pricing can be an issue in terms of scalability, depending on how quickly you want to expand. If you budget every year, put some aside that you know you need to get another host and you plan for it, then it shouldn't be that hard. If you're going to try to all of a sudden say, "I want to add six hosts to my environment," then it's going to a little bit pricey and you're not going to want to spend the budget on it.

What other advice do I have?

Plan your environment well, determine what your needs are, and then try to bump that up by 20 percent; give yourself a little bit of future expanding. That way you don't have to leap off and buy a lot right away. Budget for the future if you can. Put a little bit away here and there. Look at the virtual storage, you will save yourself a lot of headaches on configuring. The physical storage can be a pain. The virtual storage, once you get it in place then you don't have to manage it much.

Make sure that you really have spec'd out your ESXi host so it can support your environment. Normally, that's been fairly easy. Companies like HPE and Lenovo are more than eager to help you make sure that you have a server that is spec'd out for the VMware environment, and help you get solid on what you need.

We haven't done a lot with the built-in security and encryption yet, but from what I've been looking at so far in vSphere 6.7, it looks like something that we would like to integrate. Before I became an analyst I helped manage TPM and BitLocker on laptops. It was a pain. It had to touch each device physically. I'm looking forward to 6.7 where I can utilize TPM 2.0 and encrypt all of my stations on the fly, and make it a more seamless experience.

We are not using VMware Cloud on AWS. Being just a local community college, it's a little bit expensive for us right now, but one day we would like to.

The product is a good, solid nine out of 10. The only reason I would knock it down any is, as I said, I wish the error messages would, at times, be a little bit more verbose and more explainable.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

PeerSpot user
Senior Systems Administrator at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Having a lot of the encryption built in helps us with federal compliance
Pros and Cons
  • "With the current compliance options that I have to go through, it's very nice to have a lot of the encryption built in. It checks a lot of boxes for the federal level so I don't have to either bolt something on or have something on top of it. Having it native and integrated into the system makes things much easier."
  • "being able to manage a lot of servers in one pane of glass makes things a lot simpler. Basically, a lot of things just happen in one area. You can roll things over, move things around more dynamically, without having to hit multiple systems."
  • "Valuable features include VHA, DRS, VMotion, and redundancy and failover; any DR situation."
  • "Not having to buy something from a third-party to scan the actual hardware components, like the hard drives and the port containers and fan speeds; not having to bolt something on and go through another vendor, would be helpful."
  • "the HTML version of things needs to get a little bit better. The vSphere side of things gets a little difficult to manage; right-click, in some browsers, doesn't work as well as it used to. I'm seeing a little bit of general latency that we didn't used to get with the thick client, although it's getting there."

What is our primary use case?

Our use case is virtualization of hardware infrastructure, for return on investment cases. We have done pretty well with it. I'm really happy with it.

The mission-critical apps we run on them include SQL; there is a lot of file sharing; there are a lot of websites and web servers running on them. There's some big data stuff for big science. We have to be able to digest lots of data and then pull analytics on it at a high-level, and be able to show big data in useful ways.

How has it helped my organization?

With the current compliance options that I have to go through, it's very nice to have a lot of the encryption built in. It checks a lot of boxes for the federal level so I don't have to either bolt something on or have something on top of it. Having it native and integrated into the system makes things much easier.

Also, being able to manage a lot of servers in one pane of glass makes things a lot simpler. Basically, a lot of things just happen in one area. You can roll things over, move things around more dynamically, without having to hit multiple systems. Being able to manage it, in its entirety, is easier and better for us.

What is most valuable?

  • VHA
  • DRS
  • VMotion
  • Redundancy, failover, any DR situation
  • Reducing the overall physical footprint for electrical needs, heating, cooling
  • Money-saving, in general

What needs improvement?

In terms of management, it's getting better. There were recent changes with the infrastructure and the architecture, going from a physical vSphere vCenter client to the web interface. That has slowed things down a little bit, to be honest. It's getting better. With the 5.7 release they've optimized it, the menus are a little snappier, and it isn't as cumbersome to manage through as it was on the previous website or vSphere Web Client instance.

Also, reading some of the sensors in the hardware itself, that's where VMware does a really great job in the digital infrastructure and being able to scale things and knowing what's going on in vSphere. But not having to buy something from a third-party to scan the actual hardware components, like the hard drives and the port containers and fan speeds; not having to bolt something on and go through another vendor, would be helpful.

For how long have I used the solution?

More than five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability has always been really well done with VMware. I have always been very happy with the stability of the system. You can set it up, you can check your optimizations there. But as far as weird issues with being able to convert things from physical to virtual, I've really had no big problems in switching that over. It's been really seamless to the end-user as well, just doing standardized conversions. It's been very stable and easy to manage.

I haven't had any loss of data in quite some time. Data is the key to everything. Downtime and loss of data are almost unacceptable in my current position.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I can always go horizontal, vertical is a little problematic sometimes. Horizontally, being able to add storage on the fly - even hot ad-hoc remove, if we do have some higher workloads or the like - we can always scale that without re-booting, with the newer operating systems. So the scalability portion is always on key.

How are customer service and technical support?

Technical support is pretty good. I've had to use them a couple times for smaller issues. They've always been very helpful and we've always come to a solution.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

The backup solution we were using at the time was Dell's version of IBM's Tape Library with Symantec Backup Exec. We were doing tape backups at the file level, not really any virtual snaps, so incrementals every day, fulls on the weekends.

As data gets bigger it's harder and harder to back up and that's where virtualization comes in, because you can start doing analysis on data changes and deltas a little bit better. Tracking and things that are tied into VMware assist digital backup solutions to be faster, more resilient, and have less downtime in a restore situation.

How was the initial setup?

In my previous job, I was a Senior Systems Administrator for a credit union. We were running VMware 3.0, 12 years ago, and having that experience - and being bleeding edge at that time - helped me really be a catalyst in getting over to virtualization. That knowledge that I had in the past has always helped me, because I've seen VMware grow and do the things that it has done. Having that knowledge was helpful in setting it up from fresh, again: making the redundancies, knowing some of the pitfalls you have when first setting it up, and seeing a lot of the capital that you can lose if you don't understand what you're doing at that time.

I set it up myself. I can get technical support, but I can't have on-prem or anyone else.

What was our ROI?

Performance is somewhat relative, but an overall return on investment comes from not having multiple physical servers and from helping to aggregate a lot of the processors and RAM, and being able to use them more efficiently. We're not really worried about speed but about more efficiency.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I've been with them for so long, I never looked to much else. I've always been happy with vSphere and seeing what they've done for VMware itself. Intel products weren't really there, and I still don't feel they're there.

I've really enjoyed the Dell partnership because I do Dell on the back-end. The hand-holding between Dell and VMware works relatively well, with their hardware control lists and being sure they stay compatible for long periods of time, without having to spend money on new hardware. You can stay in your swim lane. That partnership is really a key to success.

What other advice do I have?

My advice is "do it".

I rate vSphere at nine out of 10 because the HTML version of things needs to get a little bit better. The vSphere side of things gets a little difficult to manage; right-click, in some browsers, doesn't work as well as it used to. I'm seeing a little bit of general latency that we didn't used to get with the thick client. It's getting there.

Version 6.71 brought some of those performance metrics back, but it's just hard to get from one end to the other. With the ever-changing federal requirements, we need to really strip down and minimize what can be done in the browsers. It is getting more and more difficult, Java being the key thing. Going to HTML 5, that's a great thing because Java is going to be pay-to-play next year. And you don't have the vulnerabilities with HTML 5. It works symbiotically. We're seeing that progress. There are some growing pains, but it's getting there.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

PeerSpot user
reviewer924948 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager Systems/Network, Global Information Systems at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
We can easily pull reports and give access to people to look at specs or performance metrics
Pros and Cons
  • "Visibility: We can easily pull reports and give access to other people to look at specs or performance metrics."
  • "When it comes to cross-regional (e.g., someone in the US managing the China vSphere implementations), it can be a somewhat slow. I would recommend increasing the speed. While there has already been improvement there, I would like to see more."

What is our primary use case?

We use it to manage multi-site, multi-regional implementations of VMware. We use the security end roles to give different tiers of access from the VM up to the VMware installation. We manage the roles and responsibilities within the security to do this. 

We do all the functionality inside vSphere. We use VMotion and DRS to manage some of our licensing issues that we have. With bigger software vendors, like Oracle, we use it to keep licenses and requirements compliant and keep VMs running on specific hardware. 

We use it for quite a few daily tasks: cloning and testing out patching. Then, we can perform snapshots through vSphere. 

How has it helped my organization?

Visibility: We can easily pull reports and give access to other people to look at specs or performance metrics. This came as a bonus to us. Yet, we have been using it for quite a long time (12 to 13 years). 

The solution is simple and efficient to manage. It has brought ease of use to employees who are not at a senior level. It has been able to expose minimal tasks which can relieve some of my senior guys to do engineering tasks, as opposed to help desk, reboots, restarts, etc. We have been able to pass some of those tasks along. 

What is most valuable?

The ability to segregate roles and responsibilities, as well as regions. For example, I can give access to my Chinese team to manage the China servers and hosts. On the other hand, I could give access to my Canadian team to manage global VMware installations. Therefore, I like the flexibility of this tool.

We have just migrated most of our SQL and enterprise databases to vSphere. We don't use it for Oracle, but we do for most other things. We also use it for our communications exchange link, etc. Therefore, it is pretty business critical when it comes to the back office support and server implementations.

What needs improvement?

There has been a lot of improvement with UI: its speed and usability features. Before, it was very slow. When it comes to cross-regional (e.g., someone in the US managing the China vSphere implementations), it can be a somewhat slow. I would recommend increasing the speed. While there has already been improvement there, I would like to see more.

For how long have I used the solution?

More than five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I haven't had any real issues. In the very beginning, there were some issues when upgrading or migrating from versions. However, our last upgrade was 5.5 to 6.5 where went from Windows to the Linux OVF version, and we did not have any issues with it. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is easy to scale and obtain as much power as we need. It is easy to provision and join it to the cluster. We haven't had any issues or limitations.

How are customer service and technical support?

Technical support is very good. I haven't used them in quite some time though, because we have on-staff VMware experts. When I did use them a long time ago for compatibility with network cards (we use FCoE, which is not the industry standard), they were pretty quick to link us back to some articles to help us resolve our issues. 

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

When I first came on board, they had a very small implementation of Citrix. The servers at that time would cost 20K per application. They didn't allow us to centrally manage any systems. There would be a hodgepodge of vendors and versions of hardware. Therefore, it was a more difficult to track. When I came on board, we were maybe 20 to 30 percent virtualized. Since then, we're probably 99 percent virtualized. This did reduce staffing costs.

The APIs and plugins are important. We used to use NetApp. We use now InfiniteApp and Compellent. Having these types of plugins and using their APIs in the storage subsystems, allows general admins to provision storage easily, as opposed to being a storage admin. It has alleviated having to have five to 10 storage admins. We consolidated to one or two storage admins, while having the others be able to provision their own storage. 

What was our ROI?

We are spending less on buying bigger machines, which are overprovisioned. Thus, the ROI is found in consolidation and cost savings.

There are a lot of management and soft skills that we end up being able to save on. For example, my engineers in Canada could watch over systems in China, California, and Phoenix. Thus, it gives us the flexibility of administration. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated Hyper-V four or five years ago. They weren't as fast to develop technologies or even adopting the technology. There were some tools missing. Also, they were less innovative than VMware. Now, I think Microsoft has caught up a bit. However, it seems that VMware is putting a lot more R&D money into the product. So, we've been happy. We haven't had a need to leave.

What other advice do I have?

  • Look at the market and see what is supportable. How long can you support the product. VMware has the history. It has the people who can support it in the industry. 
  • Look at the supportability of it. Look at the job market and how many people, from a staffing perspective, can support it. 
  • Then, look at the cost, because I don't think cost is everything.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They are a leader and more innovative than the competitors.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

PeerSpot user
Chris Childerhose - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Architect at ThinkON
Real User
ExpertTop 5
Has kept our business running with very little downtime and our clusters balanced with DRS/HA
Pros and Cons
  • "We are able to patch our hosts during production hours with the ability to keep services running."
  • "Get the HTML5 client to 100% parity to replace the Flash client."

What is our primary use case?

vSphere 8.0 is the primary virtualization technology in use at our firm and supports the entire organization infrastructure.

How has it helped my organization?

Has kept our business running with very little downtime and our clusters balanced with DRS/HA.  We are able to patch our hosts during production hours with the ability to keep services running.  It has also given us the HA capabilities for our vCenter servers using the new built-in HA option for the appliance and never having to worry about downtime.

What is most valuable?

vCenter Appliance, DRS, HA, Update Manager and SRM help us keep our business running smoothly.  Having the vCenter Appliance has allowed us to save costs on Windows licenses and have a more stable platform for managing hosts.  Also having Update Manager now as well it makes the move to VCSA that much better.  SRM has allowed us to failover our Tier1 services in under 30 minutes for each whereas it would take over an hour the old fashioned way.  DRS and HA have kept our cluster stable and VMs running optimally.  With the built in Update Manager now in the vCenter Appliance it is easy to scan and remediate our Hosts even during Production hours as we can use HA/DRS with Maintenance Mode.

What needs improvement?

Get the HTML5 client to 100% parity to replace the Flash client.  When the next release comes out ensure all bugs/fixes are implemented as there was some pretty nasty ones on initial releases.

For how long have I used the solution?

More than five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There were some initial bugs with PSOD and certain hardware vendors but patching and updates have resolved most.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

There are no scalability issues other than purchasing additional licensing when adding hosts or scaling up/out.

How are customer service and support?

Technical Support has been good but better communication at times could help improve it even more.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No other solution has been used.

How was the initial setup?

It was simple and straightforward as we have upgraded as versions have come out.  8.0 will be our last upgrade as it will be a hardware refresh next.

What about the implementation team?

In-house implementation as we have VMware certified users.

What was our ROI?

Has allowed us to run our HPE DL580 G7 servers still without issues so spend on hardware has been next to nothing.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

VMware is costly versus other competitors but is still one of the market leaders and expanding now with partners like AWS.  Ensure you get the right licensing for the feature sets you want within the product and research what those are.  Setup can be easy if you have someone that has worked with VMware before or costly when hiring external help, but research in to implementers prior to hiring them is always the best method to get good ones.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

No other options were evaluated as VMware has been the primary hypervisor since I have been with my company.

What other advice do I have?

vSphere 8.0 has been a great release with the vCenter Appliance and will only get better in the next release with the HTML5 client becoming 100% in parity to the flash client.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Private Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Other
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
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PeerSpot user
Chris Childerhose - PeerSpot reviewer
Chris ChilderhoseEnterprise Architect at ThinkON
ExpertTop 5Real User

Great review on vSphere.

Myo Ko - PeerSpot reviewer
General Manager at Access Spectrum Company Limited
Real User
Top 20
A highly stable and easy-to-implement solution that can be used for virtualization
Pros and Cons
  • "Virtualization, VDI and application publishing are the most valuable features of VMware vSphere."
  • "The solution’s pricing is too high and could be improved."

What is most valuable?

Virtualization, VDI and application publishing are the most valuable features of VMware vSphere.

What needs improvement?

The solution’s pricing is too high and could be improved.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working with VMware vSphere for more than five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

VMware vSphere is a very stable solution.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

VMware vSphere is a scalable solution.

How are customer service and support?

The solution's technical support team is good because if we open a priority ticket, they call within 30 minutes.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

What about the implementation team?

VMware vSphere can be installed in just two days for a normal project. However, it would take at least three months to implement everything, depending on the scope of the customer's requirements.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The solution’s licensing terms keep changing, which is too complex for our customers. If a user purchases a new license, it cannot be mixed with the existing perpetual license.

What other advice do I have?

Overall, I rate VMware vSphere an eight out of ten.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Partner

PeerSpot user
reviewer1347297 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineering Manager, R&D at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Simple installation and good scalability
Pros and Cons
  • "The scalability is good."
  • "The performance of the solution could be better and there could be an extra level of security."

What is our primary use case?

We use VMware vSphere in order to get access to the data center worldwide.

What needs improvement?

The performance of the solution could be better and there could be an extra level of security.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using VMware vSphere for approximately three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability could be improved because there can be some connectivity issues. There are times the networks disconnect and then reconnect, this could improve.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is good.

Mostly everyone in our company is using this solution including the technical team and managers, approximately 400 people.

How are customer service and support?

We have an internal team that is providing us with technical support.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The installation is not difficult it is self-explanatory.

What about the implementation team?

We did the implementation ourselves.

There are some maintenance tasks needed, such as updating and upgrading.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

There is an annual subscription to use this solution.

What other advice do I have?

I would recommend this solution to others. It is one of the best tools.

I rate VMware vSphere a nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free VMware vSphere Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: July 2025
Buyer's Guide
Download our free VMware vSphere Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.