VMware vSphere Reviews

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.

Primary use case: data center virtualization. It's performing well. We're really happy with vSphere as a virtualization platform. 

In terms of the built-in security features, we use none of them. I really couldn't tell you much at all about that.

Mission-critical apps would be our student information system - that one is running on PeopleSoft - student portals, also PeopleSoft. Those are the mission-critical ones that we're running on VMware. There's other stuff that is critical, but I wouldn't say that it's mission-critical.

Benefits of vSphere: It saves me a ton of time, I can really quickly spin up new things to test them out or to respond to a need from the business. The way that it improves the way that the organization functions is that it makes us a lot quicker to respond to the needs of the business.

Most valuable features are 

• quick provisioning
• High Availability
• DRS for balancing workload.

I definitely find vSphere to be simple and efficient to manage. A key feature that enables this is vCenter. It is super simple to stand up, and once you're in there, especially with the new HTML5 client, everything is easy to manage.

I find the stability of vSphere to be pretty great. We've had some issues, like everybody. Most of them were around hardware, so we thought it was really important to check the compatibility lists and make sure that you're running the right driver versions. But once you've got that running, it's solid. We don't have any stability problems.

Scalability is great. It's easy to scale.

I honestly found that I spent too much time in "back-and-forth hell" with help desks that are offshore. I found that VMware Support - it used to located in North America and that's who I would get when I would pick up the phone - the last few support cases that I opened didn't go that well. I ended up finding the solution myself and just telling them, "You know what? Forget it."

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Straying a little bit from vSphere, but on vROps, the ROI that we're getting from that is that we're able to reclaim a lot of idle and oversized VMs, and we're actually saving money or actually giving ourselves more time with the resources we have, before we have to purchase new stuff. So that's an ROI.

Aim for simple, go for fewer hosts with bigger resources, depending of course of on what you need. Don't try to do everything at once. Start with a basic setup and work up from there.

We did not really see a performance boost with version 6.5.

Regarding the most important criteria when selecting a vendor, it needs to be an industry-leading solution, needs to be easy, simple to set up, not an entire ecosystem of things that I need to deploy to get their system working. Ideally, I want something that we can set up in a day.

I'd give vSphere about a nine out of ten. There is still stuff to work on, but it's definitely the best for me. As I said, I find that the support never blows me away, and maybe that's because I don't pay for the most premium level of support, but I find that what we got on the last few tickets that we opened was not great.

Our main use case for this is that it's the foundation of our company. What our company, MacStadium, does is provide virtual environments for customers to do iOS development on Apple hardware. And the foundation for that, for creating the private cloud, is vSphere.

In terms of mission-critical apps, it's utilized mainly for iOS development. So customers will use the API for vCenter to automate things. They can do CICD, where they can spin up and spin down virtual machines, rapidly, and provide them to their internal groups or to their customers to do iOS development.

It has actually been performing a lot better than you'd think for an initial release. It's very smooth and I've been pretty impressed with it so far.

As a connection for our business, it goes hand-in-hand. It being the only hypervisor that runs on top of Apple hardware the way we want it, there is no "us" without that.

The most valuable feature would be the slight changes they've made to VMFork instant cloning, in which they have abstracted out the parent-child relationship in cloning, in which certain features, like HA and DRS, are now usable on that parent virtual machine. That is wildly amazing and something that wasn't available until 6.7.

We are actually making a lot of use of the VM Encryption feature. We're using that mainly because it's a customer requirement, especially after all the changes in the European Union for security. And that's a major issue. We've been adding in NSX and that, combined with the ability to have encrypted VMotion as well, has been huge.

In addition, the simplicity and efficiency in managing it has always been one big thing with the entire vSphere suite. It has been very straightforward if you're just using it from the user interface. Hitting the API has always been great, and they're continuing to grow that, which has been really good for us.

I know, coming out in 6.7 Update 1, that the HTML Client is going to reach full parity and have all the same features that they had in the now-deprecated thick client that used to be on Windows. That's one really neat feature I'm actually looking forward to.

There are always little "gotchas." In the past, little changes have broken things in vSphere. Going from 6.0, which worked perfectly fine on the Mac Pro, there were certain changes in hardware drivers, when 6.5 came out. Some were no longer present or had been deprecated. As a result, it didn't work on the Mac Pro anymore, which was business-critical. Okay, everybody could stick on one version and wait until it was fixed. We were able to take drivers out of the 5.5 version, add them to the build package for installation and it worked. It was not the most efficient, and storage I/O was kind of slow. Since 6.5 Update 1 came out, that has been solid, no real issues with that.

The stability has been very good. I've run several builds on 6.7 from pre-release and it's been good.

As far as scalability goes for us, I've run it as far as having up to 100 hosts in the cluster and I haven't noticed any degradation. It's been running well.

I actually have gotten quite a bit of tech support for initial installations. Even though they're on the hardware compatibility list, Mac Pros and Apple hardware are very different than your traditional Dell, Cisco, or HPE Blade. Apple hardware is kind of like a black box, so it's very hard to interact with, but ESXi has been perfect.

My experience with tech support has been pretty good. The response times are really good. If the engineer that I'm working with is not directly knowledgeable on that idea, usually he'll get back to me in a short time and hand me off to a guy knows exactly how to help me out with the problem. And then, the follow-up is good as well.

We've always been using vSphere from the beginning, starting with 5.5. We actually worked with William Lam from VMware on getting ESXi working on Minis at that point in time. It's been a wonderful relationship since then.

One big thing that I know a lot of people talk about, when looking at why go with vSphere, is the ecosystem. You have other products that were built solidly to work with the vSphere product and the integration is always completely solid. The continuous development on the vSphere product and all the other products in the ecosystem, and the community, also play a part. There's pretty much nothing that I have run into where I say, "Hey, I want to do something outside of what vSphere does," and there hasn't been somebody within the community who has been able to say, "Oh yeah, I got that running, it is really easy, this is how you do it." That's not something I have seen in any of the other ecosystems.

It was pretty easy upgrading any of the older hosts from 6.5 to 6.7. Everything was pretty straightforward.

In terms of advice, especially if you are on things like Hyper-V or other products that I've touched, the simplicity and scalability of the vSphere product has been solid. For another individual who is in the IT or engineering fields, I wouldn't go with anything else.

One thing a lot of people don't realize or know about is that Xcode and OS X are closely tied to the versioning of vSphere and what features will be enabled. Coming out this September is MacOS 10.14 and that brings with it the need and requirement to run APFS, which is only supported in 6.7. So we have an abundance of customers, all of which are iOS developers, who require 6.7. So having that coming out was a major need and requirement for us.

I haven't noticed a direct performance boost, but the performance is no less than it was in 6.5, which is always generally a good thing. With the addition of features, nothing slowed down, everything is still exactly where it was.

The primary use case is to save us a lot of money. Really, the primary use case is to be flexible, to be scalable, to be agile, as the company changes. As a non-profit, we really change often. New programs come in every day. vSphere gives us the ability to be flexible The mission-critical apps we use it for include Exchange, SQL, Active Directory, document management systems. We use it for everything.

While we haven't seen a performance boost for these apps, they're flexible. That's really what it's about. I'm still learning how to make it boost performance.

We haven't used any of the built-in security features.

It saves us a lot of money.

VMotion is the biggest feature. It gives us the ability to move things on the fly. That's it.

I do not find it to be simple and efficient to manage. The tools, the interface to manage it, are a pain. In the latest version, they moved us to web-only, the Web Client and it's terrible. It's slow. It crashes. It's annoying. I used the Web Client in the older version and was happy. I would go back to the regular thick client but I don't have that option anymore, so I am always fighting it.

The solution itself is really stable.

The scalability is insane. It's great.

We were all physical and it wasn't scalable. Every time they came to me and said that they wanted to start a new project with a new piece of software, I had to buy hardware for it. One day we looked at it. Quick, funny story: big presentation to the Board. Spent an hour explaining what virtualization was. I said, "Okay. I can do this by spending less over the next five years and we've already budgeted more." And the Chief Financial Officer looked at me and said, "Why did you just waste our last hour? If it's going to cost us less, then just do it." Why didn't you start with that? Way to bury the lead!"

It was a no-brainer to move.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor is support, absolutely. US-based support that doesn't pass the buck, that takes ownership of a situation and deals with it.

The initial setup was straightforward. I built the whole thing myself, without knowing anything about VMware to begin with, just learning it as I went.

Our ROI is huge. We put, in hardware and software, probably $80,000 dollars into the solution and have never spent another penny in the last five years, other than for support. Compare that to a budget of $30,000 a year, we'd be at $150,000 in those five years. So, the return on investment is huge.

For our initial look into vSphere versus others, we started with Cisco's version of virtualization. It was cool. It was free. But it was a pain. It didn't scale. When I started looking at the software we wanted to run on it, nobody supported it. That made the decision.

In terms of advice to a colleague, I'm giving it every day. I take the guy out to lunch to beat him up with vSphere. I've got a buddy who is a Hyper-V guy. He's says, "But it's free," and I keep saying, "Well, you get what you pay for." He says, "But it never gives me any problems." I say, "Then why are you calling me every week asking me why Exchange is doing stupid things? I don't have those problems and I run exactly the same version you do."

It's stable. It just works. I don't have to think about it.

Some of the new stuff that's coming out is pretty exciting, as we start thinking of moving to the cloud. But, as a non-profit, at this point, it doesn't make sense to do so, yet. But as we move to the cloud, some of the new stuff they talked about yesterday, here at VMworld 2018, is really going to help us do that.

I give vSphere an eight out of ten because of the web interface. It would be a ten otherwise.

• Reliability
• HA
• DR
• Ease of deployment
• We had a lot of disparate hardware and now able to consolidate into one platform
• Easy to keep hardware up to date

So much easier to back things up now. We had Oracle, SQL, everything was just a one-off, but we now have just one process for all our VMs.

We have vCloud suite, Hyperion was a pain, but now they've just announced integration into vCenter, so everytime I have a complaint, they’ve already started to address it.

• Great stability, no complaints at all
• More we move to appliances
• Easy to keep up to date

• We had a lot of standalone boxes, and management wanted to go to VMs
• We were able to consolidate all hardware without purchasing anything extra
• Able to carry us through several years when unable to purchase hardware

They've always been excellent, but we rarely contact them maybe one or two times a year. When we’ve had issues, it’s resolved in hours. We have TAM (tech account manager) so helped things along.

We had vendor come out and it set up on 3.5, and once we got our feet wet, it's easy to maintain and upgrade.

Only purchase what you’re going to use, our management makes decisions, and buy lots of products we’re not using.

We chose vSphere because of it's ease of use, especially that it's easier than Hyper-V. Deployment would have been more labor intensive, and wouldn’t have saved any more money in the long run.

Key business drivers and benefits for us: • Co-location data centers environmental costs are greatly reduced (rack space, power, cooling). • Allows better utilization and flexibility to segment physical resources (vCPU & vMemory) • Consolidate / centralize management of all Windows and Linux infrastructure - Administer entire virtual environment via a single pane of glass (vCenter) - Provisioning of VMs is really simple and quick. Allows easy use of templates. - Utilize Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) & VMotion - Optimizes performance of VMs - Allows flexibility for patching cycles to minimize downtime. • VMware product has been very stable • Allows for easier compliance and consistency for meeting IT audit controls • Initial ROI analysis a few years ago did show significant savings over physical model. We are looking at updated ROI and show-back / charge-back models currently.

VMware product challenges / Areas for improvement: • Advanced Capacity Management and Performance Management & Analysis, Disaster Recovery, and private cloud capabilities are lacking out of the box for enterprise-level deployments. - Ability to “right-size” resources on all VMs is needed at enterprise installations. - Add-on / 3rd party products like vCenter Operations / VMturbo, SRM, or vCloud may be needed. - These add-on products add management complexity. They also add licensing and maintenance costs for the overall solution in a tough budget climate. • Difficulty using VMotion with Microsoft Clusters. We utilize clusters for our large SQL Farm, but we are unable to use VMotion during patching efforts. We are now looking at Hyper-V or physical servers for this functionality to minimize downtime. • Granting administrative privileges / roles can be a bit more tedious than are initially apparent.• VMware vSphere 5 is current architectural standard for 2 data centers - VMware was the major virtualization solution provider when first implemented years ago - Microsoft 2012 Hyper-V “proof of concept” is currently in progress for US - Educational discounts from Microsoft are significant - Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 version functionality appears to gain on VMware vSphere • Also have a large Solaris UNIX environment utilizing Solaris Zones. • VMware (or Hyper-V) will enable us to drive a re-platforming effort for Solaris -> Linux

Things to consider before purchasing VMware or Hyper-V: • Understand your virtualization objectives and requirements before purchase. Assess all requirements against VMware or Hyper-V licensing cost and edition functionality • Define a strategy for resource intensive applications (large CPU or memory requirements) and when to stay standalone vs. virtual • Implement processes to control “VM sprawl” as VM provisioning process is so simple. • Consider other process efficiencies that virtualization may drive (i.e. Service Catalog) • Ensure IT staff gets proper training. The learning curve can be steep initially at the enterprise level. • If possible , look at processes for show-back or charge-back model early on to assess costs and ROI.

The solution is server virtualization software. VMware is totally for virtualization.

We only use it for a few of its features, such as DRS, vMotion, and fault tolerance. We aren't using the NSX, cloud-based, or any other features. 

The solution is 100% stable.

The scalability is very good.

We find the user interface to be very nice.

The initial implementation process is simple.

It's easy to use and very user-friendly.

Technical support has been very good. They are helpful and responsive. 

The solution could be cheaper and less expensive.

I've been using the solution for five to seven years. 

We have found the solution to be extremely stable. The performance and reliability are great. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution is thoroughly a scalable solution. It's easy to expand it if you need to.

There isn't a specific number of users. We are using it for hosting services.

Technical support is excellent. We have no complaints at all.

The installation process is quite simple, quite straightforward. It's not overly complex or difficult. I'm certified and find the process very easy.

We did not need the assistance of outside help. I can easily handle the implementation myself. 

You do have to purchase a license in order to use the solution.

The solution should base its prices on what the market can handle. Right now, it's a bit expensive.

The price is a little bit higher when you go for the enterprise edition. The Standard edition is quite low and the enterprise edition is quite high.

I have two clusters, version 7 and version 6.7. Both are there.

I'm not using the cloud-based version and other stuff, so I couldn't comment on it. On the on-premises version, however, it's a very good solution. It has a nice interface and nice everything and is a very stable product. We have never faced any issues yet.

I'd recommend the solution to others 100%.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

On-premises

A typical use case for vSphere would be general virtualization, primarily, where we're deploying either Linux or Windows-based workloads. We do have a lot of design-ready nodes we use for some of our clients. We also use Tanzu, from an application development container, microservices type of solution as well. 

VMware vSphere is replete with about a gazillion different features. In the context of vCenter, everything has been amalgamated into a single appliance. It's much more simplified at deployment. Because of that, immediately I would say the most useful feature is the Lifecycle Manager, VLCM, that is now available. So, what used to be the VMware of Data Manager has now changed to the Lifecycle Manager. Those changes are really, really useful.

I'm a big fan of vSphere; I have used it since the days of 3.5, all the way up to now. When you deploy it as a complete stack, from vSphere to vCenter to the vRealize Operations, Orchestrator, all the way up, you're into your NSX login site, the entire cloud stack. By the time you're done, you begin to feel, "do you really need so many different pieces that you need to connect? Could it not just be a single, unified product?" I'm not saying the integration is difficult. It is seamless. But it gets to you at a point. There are times where you really begin to think, "I got this." Not, " it should be much easier than this."

I can't think of anybody on the planet who would actually have issues with vSphere. vSphere is as stable as the word stable gets. When you do the entire stack scenario unless you're doing something like VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail, wherein it becomes a much more seamless solution where you are using discrete hardware, you're creating the entire cloud platform. It gets a little tedious doing all those workflows at times.

From a management center, particularly referring to the private cloud stack, I would prefer for it to be a lot more seamless. There are competitors, Cloud Management Platform or Morpheus, for example. It's a product you deploy and you're good to go. With this, there are so many different pieces to connect. It grows on you.

I've been using VMware for a long time. As as a DC architect, I use it day in and day out.

If you're looking for any hypervisor, vSphere is not a gold standard, vSphere is the gold standard. There's no single other option. When it comes down to it, if I can afford it, vSphere is the only one that I'm going with.

There have been cases with vSphere itself, but the fact is that VMware support is great. 

I have had clients who have faced issues in the context of hyperconverged infrastructure. A problem in the networks assumes a lot more significance in the context of HCI, and VMware support is awesome.

I have no complaints about the setup. The integration is seamless. When you put together all the various pieces, you build an entire private cloud stack. At that stage, once you have everything configured, it is relatively straightforward. But it is not a single homogenous unit.

The licensing is perpetual licensing that you pay for once.

As far as the price of the license, I can't think of anyone who will say, "I'm happy with the pricing." There's always room for improvement. But, you get what you pay for. It's as simple as that. With vSphere, from my perspective, I don't want problems. I want it to be as seamless as possible. That's unfortunately why you've got to pay for it.

Regarding this solution, vSphere is the gold standard. It has been there for 15 years, and you're not going to find people who are dissatisfied with vSphere. You're not going to find people complaining about vSphere. The only thing you will find is when we talk about things like VxRail, things like that, where issues can come. vSphere by itself, I can't think of anybody who's not happy with it.

I would rate vSphere a ten out of ten. You're not going to find anything better.

Hybrid Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)