The product is primarily used as a way to consolidate systems and leverage hardware resources more efficiently.
Senior IT Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Stable and reliable with very few people needed to manage everything
Pros and Cons
- "You don't need too many people to manage the solution once it's up and running."
- "The HTML 5 client has always lagged behind."
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
The solution has offered very good stability so far. It doesn't give us any issues.
You don't need too many people to manage the solution once it's up and running.
What needs improvement?
The HTML 5 client has always lagged behind. It would be nice if this wasn't the case. It's one of the key areas that they need to improve on.
In a previous company, I did not have a very good experience with technical support.
The main problem with the product is how it manages its snapshotting technology, which would need a complete ground-up rebuild. Likely, they won't put that in, however, basically, if you have an old snapshot, you want to get rid of it. It crushes the environment. This is due to the fact that all of your changes have to be written back to disk when you're deleting something versus just deleting it.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've only been working with the solution for as long as I have been working for the company, which has been less than a year at this point.
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is very stable. It's quite reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's been good.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We've never tried to scale the solution. I can't speak to how easy or difficult it is to expand it out if a company needs to.
How are customer service and support?
While I've never had to reach out to technical support while at this company, I have had to use technical support in the past when I was at a different organization. It was no a very good experience. I wasn't satisfied with the level of support provided at all. They were pretty bad.
How was the initial setup?
The solution was deployed by the company before I arrived. I wasn't a part of the process. Therefore, I can't speak to how easy or difficult it was or how long the deployment process actually was. I don't have any visibility or insights into that.
There are two main people that can go into the management console and perform maintenance duties as necessary.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I don't handle the licensing or payments process and therefore don't have visibility into how much the solution costs or what the payment structure is.
What other advice do I have?
We are just customers and end-users. We don't have a business relationship with the company.
It's my understanding that we are using the latest version of the solution, although I don't know the exact version number.
I would definitely recommend this solution to other organizations. For the most part, I've been very satisfied with its capabilities.
I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

Senior Distributed Platform Administrator at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
Can run for 50 years on its own without crashing
Pros and Cons
- "Tech support is very knowledgeable."
- "Sometimes it's impossible to prevent problems from happening. With vSphere, you never know where the problem is going to come from, but you will always know that there is a problem. This is the problem."
What is most valuable?
The feature I find the most valuable is that vSphere doesn't break unless integrated with Veeam or vCenter.
What needs improvement?
When you run vSphere on its own, that thing can run for 50 years without crashing. The problem starts when you start integrating it to clusters, migrating the virtual machines, doing the DRS, and applying the resource pool. The problem is with the memory.
Sometimes it's impossible to prevent problems from happening. With vSphere, you never know where the problem is going to come from, but you will always know that there is a problem. This is the problem.
I would make integration much better and improve speed. I would also make the errors more visible to the user.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for many years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
This solution is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
This solution is scalable.
How are customer service and technical support?
Tech support is very knowledgeable.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Buyer's Guide
VMware vSphere
June 2025

Learn what your peers think about VMware vSphere. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2025.
860,711 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Owner at Computech Associates
Feature-rich, stable, scalable, and useful for running multiple virtual machines from a single server
Pros and Cons
- "This product is useful for running multiple virtual machines from a single server so that people can utilize the hardware resources in their organization. Its ability for backups is also valuable. In case of a disaster, you can recover the entire server from the images. It is easy to use. In terms of features, whatever they are providing is more than sufficient for us. We are not exploiting this product up to a hundred percent."
- "Its price should be better. Their support should also be more customer-friendly, and they should train people like us so that we know more about the latest technologies and features. If there is some program and drive from their side to teach us, it is definitely going to help us. Pricing and support are the most important features for mid-level companies. We are not implementing this solution for big tech companies."
What is our primary use case?
We are a service provider, and we give services to our customers. Whenever we provide the solution, we give the latest version available at that time.
What is most valuable?
This product is useful for running multiple virtual machines from a single server so that people can utilize the hardware resources in their organization. Its ability for backups is also valuable. In case of a disaster, you can recover the entire server from the images. It is easy to use.
In terms of features, whatever they are providing is more than sufficient for us. We are not exploiting this product up to a hundred percent.
What needs improvement?
Its price should be better. Their support should also be more customer-friendly, and they should train people like us so that we know more about the latest technologies and features. If there is some program and drive from their side to teach us, it is definitely going to help us.
Pricing and support are the most important features for mid-level companies. We are not implementing this solution for big tech companies.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been dealing with this solution for seven to eight years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is a scalable product. Very few people are using this product because of less awareness in our area. We are based in a small town in India where we don't have IT and IT companies. IT is a part of the production process. There are very few people who are using this service.
How are customer service and technical support?
They should be more customer-friendly.
How was the initial setup?
Its installation is almost straightforward. The basic installation is easy, but it also depends upon the customer requirements.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Its price is slightly higher for India. It is a little bit expensive on a monthly basis when considering the value of the Indian rupee.
What other advice do I have?
There is no other perfect solution as compared to this solution. If you want to go for virtualization, there is no other stable and sustainable option.
I would rate VMware vSphere an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Partner
CIO at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
A perfect solution that is easy to use, easy to implement, stable, and scalable
Pros and Cons
- "vRealize Operations Manager is the most valuable feature, but it is not embedded in vSphere; it is a part of vSphere. It is used for forecasting and checking the consumption of CPU, memory, and other resources. It has the capability to do the forecast based on the history and give advice on consumption. VMware vSphere is easy to use and easy to implement. Its learning curve is not sharp. Any engineer with little or medium knowledge of hypervisors and virtualizations can implement vSphere with a few clicks."
- "Its performance is an issue in version 6.5, but with the inclusion of HTML files in vSphere version 6.7, the experience is seamless. In version 6.7, VMware has included the HTML file protocol for the web browser or web console, which has changed the console's response and improved the performance. We are using the trial version of vRealize Operations. It would be nice if some of those capabilities could be included in future versions of vSphere, not as a part of vRealize Operations, but in vSphere itself. It can provide some kind of forecast about your resource consumption based on the actual workload and modeling or testing scenarios. It can give you some advice or tips for the future growth of your infrastructure."
What is our primary use case?
Basically, our operation cluster is hiding under vSphere.
What is most valuable?
vRealize Operations Manager is the most valuable feature, but it is not embedded in vSphere; it is a part of vSphere. It is used for forecasting and checking the consumption of CPU, memory, and other resources. It has the capability to do the forecast based on the history and give advice on consumption.
VMware vSphere is easy to use and easy to implement. Its learning curve is not sharp. Any engineer with little or medium knowledge of hypervisors and virtualizations can implement vSphere with a few clicks.
What needs improvement?
Its performance is an issue in version 6.5, but with the inclusion of HTML files in vSphere version 6.7, the experience is seamless. In version 6.7, VMware has included the HTML file protocol for the web browser or web console, which has changed the console's response and improved the performance.
We are using the trial version of vRealize Operations. It would be nice if some of those capabilities could be included in future versions of vSphere, not as a part of vRealize Operations, but in vSphere itself. It can provide some kind of forecast about your resource consumption based on the actual workload and modeling or testing scenarios. It can give you some advice or tips for the future growth of your infrastructure.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is stable enough. We are satisfied with its stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Its scalability seems to be straightforward. Obviously, you have to check if you have the correct license. Otherwise, you will have to change the license. Licensing can sometimes stop you from growing.
We currently don't have any plans to increase its usage.
How are customer service and technical support?
We haven't raised any case with VMware so far. We didn't require any support from vSphere tech support.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We moved from legacy servers to VMware Hyperconverged Infrastructure. We were using the ESXi version from vSphere, and then we moved to the cluster version. We have multiple servers in one cluster.
One of the main reasons for choosing vSphere was that it is one of the most known hypervisors in the market. It is easy to use, easy to implement, and straightforward. It was very good for our proof of concept, and we went for it. Eventually, we moved to a cluster infrastructure. Obviously, we use vSphere as the hypervisor.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was straightforward. The deployment took one to three days.
What about the implementation team?
We bought the local service from vSphere. The experience was overall good.
We have three people for its maintenance. They are system integrators and infrastructure administrators.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We also tested Microsoft Hyper-V, but at that time, it was unstable. It was not stable enough to be implemented in our environment. That's why we didn't use it.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend this solution. I would rate VMware vSphere a ten out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Entrepreneur at WindiS
A straightforward setup with good documentation and excellent stability
Pros and Cons
- "The documentation is very good."
- "Sometimes you can't find items and you need to log onto different physical servers to do technical tasks. I don't fully understand why this is the case."
What is our primary use case?
The solution is primarily used to house VMs, virtual machines.
How has it helped my organization?
Virtualization changes radically the IT landscape. Rare are our customers who have not implemented it. vSphere is #1 in hypervisors and offers the flexibility and the fastness our customers need.
What is most valuable?
VM models is a great feature. It allows to create VMs very fast and already patched with the different configurations that the are needed.
The ease to move a VM from a host to another or even to another storage/DC is very convenient. That all this can be done while users work on the VMs is awsome.
What needs improvement?
The graphical vSphere vCenter interface is now in HTML. I'm not very found of it. Sometimes you can't find items and you need to log in to the different hosts.
Some work has to be done with this admin console.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have many years (lost the count...) of experience with this solution, beginning with version 4.0, then 5.0, 5.5, 6.7 and finally 7.0 and use it daily.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability has been very, very good. I didn't have any crashes. There aren't bugs or glitches. I find it to be a very, very strong architecture.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
In terms of scalability, I haven't really had the opportunity to address this as my customers are not very big companies and we have relatively small data centers.
How are customer service and technical support?
I've never had to call VMware. You basically can find everything on the web. VMware's website is very good and there is a lot of information everywhere about vSphere on the web with real experts of the product.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
No
How was the initial setup?
The setup is straightforward, only a few questions to answer, and you have your hypervisor ready !
What about the implementation team?
Always in house.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The cost of the solution is relatively low. VMware proposes the Essentials kits which are very affordable for SMB companies.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I didn't really evaluate any other solutions. I haven't even really looked at Hyper-V, although my clients sometimes ask about it.
What other advice do I have?
We are implementors and our customers don't sometime have any dedicated IT guy. But, as vSphere works well once implemented, there's relativally less to do.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Head of Technical at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
A virtualization platform with useful standard features
Pros and Cons
- "I like the standard features."
- "The price could be better."
What is our primary use case?
We use vSphere primarily for data center solutions. We migrated most of the physical workloads to a virtual environment. Even physical data center migrations were made possible because of VMware workloads. We had replication workloads using such technology for DR purposes. I've also deployed a Nutanix cluster with the VMware Hypervisor.
What is most valuable?
I like the standard features.
What needs improvement?
The price could be better.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using VMware vSphere for eight or nine years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's a stable product. I have a little reservation about their vSAN product, which I don't think is well suited for co-work loads that require performance. In that aspect, I tend to favor Nutanix, but other than for vSAN, I think it's a good product.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's a scalable solution.
How are customer service and technical support?
Technical support is very good.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup becomes simpler by the day. It's very easy. But it wasn't easy before and was pretty tedious. But these days, it's easy.
The deployment time depends on the workload and how large the environment is. If there are a lot of hypervisors and migration work, it could take anywhere from two to six days or more to install and deploy.
What about the implementation team?
I work as an integrator, so I implemented this solution.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It could be cheaper. But not only cheaper because Nutanix's hypervisors are free of charge out of the box. You don't even have to pay for the hypervisor's enterprise version. Given that, I don't think VMware should be charging so much for the hypervisor. The hypervisor is a commodity now.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend it to potential users.
On a scale from one to ten, I would give VMware vSphere a nine.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Integrator
IT TECHNICAL/ SERVER ADMINISTRATOR at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Valuable features, user-friendly, and priced reasonably
Pros and Cons
- "I have found the Storage vMotion feature to be the most valuable."
- "One problem that needs fixing is when we run the backup for the servers, the servers become inaccessible to everybody on-site while it is creating a snapshot."
What is our primary use case?
We use it to host our business-critical applications and servers on-premise.
What is most valuable?
I have found the Storage vMotion feature to be the most valuable.
It is a very user-friendly solution.
What needs improvement?
One problem that needs fixing is when we run the backup for the servers, the servers become inaccessible to everybody on-site while it is creating a snapshot. If your server size is large you will have to wait longer when the server is unavailable.
In the future, it would be a benefit for VMware to improve on the Storage vMotion feature by making it become faster between host. It takes a lot of time to transfer files between hosts currently.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for six years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is very stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability in my experience is good.
How was the initial setup?
I was not at the company when they did the deployment of vSphere version 5.5 but I did do the deployment of a host on version 6.7, which is quite straightforward.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing is reasonable and you are able to purchases licencing for certain time frame intervals, monthly, yearly etc.
What other advice do I have?
I would definitely recommend the solution to others working in IT.
I would give the solution a nine but the vMotion feature takes too long for transferring files between stored data sources.
I rate VMware vSphere an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Database Administrator at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Robust and easy to use with good performance and efficiency
Pros and Cons
- "The performance is efficient."
- "One of the areas creating a crash is when you are cloning."
What is our primary use case?
We have Hyper-V on a physical machine and another virtual machine. We are using this because of iSCSI, and we are using VMware for performance and production.
What is most valuable?
The performance is efficient. You can log the performance and report on the bottlenecks or any other problems you encounter.
What needs improvement?
One of the areas creating a crash is when you are cloning.
If you are cloning a virtual machine and you have any license on another system it will crash and we have to contact third-party support for assistance.
It's not cloning 100%.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using VMware vSphere for eight years.
We are using version 5 and 6.7.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's a stable solution, we have not had any issues with stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's a scalable solution. We have three people in our organization who are using this solution.
How are customer service and technical support?
We did not contact technical support. It wasn't necessary.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We are working with Hyper-V. It was so poor that we started using VMware.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was straightforward, it was easy.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The price could be lower.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We are looking for other solutions, specifically for Hyper-V and domain controllers.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend this solution. It's robust, it's working and it's easy to use.
I would rate VMware vSphere a ten out of ten.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

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