VMware vSphere Reviews

Virtually anything, it doesn't matter if you're trying to cross the balance and diversifying the application, that can't be done, won't be done or challenging the vendor in that regard or you're looking to scale. Virtualization is almost the only way to scale both vertically and linearly because applications are often bound by linear growth where you need to throw more at it in order to increase capacity. Some of that is where you need to ask for how much resources I can get on the fly. A lot of hot plug, a lot of hot add of memory, being able to be very flexible within an environment where traditional architecture from the past can't do that. Can't take a hard drive, can't take a motherboard out of a computer and put it in another one.

vCenter and VMware's products allow us to look at things and focus on things that we usually didn't have time for because you were architecting solutions based on hardware. This is VMware mix and hardware agnostics, so it's how fast you want to go.

Being able to itemize by using vApps, vApplications, to do starter priorities so that way if you had dependent NFS and database mounts, applications won't come up prior to that. If you're a one man shop it allows you to turn things on in a way that most people would have to sit there and wait for the next one to go up and the next one and watch the console. Peace of mind, that's what we really use VMware for.

I would like to see much more of a, maybe, application intelligence. Unfortunately you have storage vendors who are doing that for us right now with your XtremIO and storage IO and cards inside of something that has some application intelligence. To make MySQL work, SQL work with storage that you can just buy, but VMware being able to characterize database platforms based on use cases of MySQL or SQL, they're very different. Being able to tell the difference between the two and say, "Hey look, this will work here, but it won't work here." That would be nice.

It's challenging using MySQL with vCenter because Linux as a whole is a latency sensitive OS, so you're only as good as your slowest moving part. Doesn't matter if it's disc, memory or processor and sometimes it's shortest path to storage. In order to make MySQL work you need micron second processing and in some cases when you have monolithic sized databases you need to be able to scale that at the same time.

So, unfortunately with the way MySQL plays with storage and the way VMware is right now, it's where I went with the application intelligence, there's a lot of, not taboo if you will, but doesn't really work. You're not going to find a lot of use cases because, unfortunately, our business falls into a different sector if you will, by running Linux as a primary OS.

So, better support for newer Linux kernels would be always great. The fact that they've released open tools and made it the supported platform for just about every Linux distribution out there now sees that they're solving the problem like the VMXNET3 adapter. The driver's not there, the machine's not online. There has been some pitfalls but VMware's been able to, from a company that supplies an application and an OS, solve a lot of those.

They are listening to the customer. It's very difficult to say what's still left because after today you never really know, that could change.

Currently we use vCenter Operations Manager which is VCOPS, if you will, and that drives our storage analytics based on what's performing, where our bottlenecks are, how to quickly identify why is it slow? Is it memory? Is it computer? Is it solid state disk? What is the balance of which your application is not performing. We also use vSphere Replication Appliance, along and with vCenter Orchestrator to use the set it up once mentality. The machine is created at primary site A and then with Orchestrator it actually goes through the series of doing the replication, setting it up and then getting that VM set up on the other side. A cheap and easy way of doing it for free.

Incredibly stable, so much the point of there's times where we may not know that we're running at half-capacity or full-capacity based on a failover that happens on the back end. That says enough for not only architecting and choosing the right harbor vendors but it also shows that you can actually be failed over on your appliance and business still runs as normal. Things keep working. That constant non-disruptive change if you will.

In terms of evaluation for technical support from VMware, you get what you pay for. You have 24/7 support which allows you to leverage call centers in Ireland and other locations where they surprise me every time. There's always something I learn from every support case I've ever had to open. Even if it's just to kick the tires and make sure we're doing things sort of right.

I was luckily enough to come into a virtualization shop. They pretty much didn't want to do the physical server aspect anymore because again it doesn't scale. Walking into a virtualized shop is very easily, winning that battle can be very difficult. I've been on the other side a handful of times. It's really just showing the value, in which case, VMware can fix the problem. You got to be very specific about what problem you're fixing. Is it latency? Is it processing power? Is it being able to provide DR? Is it being able to move your workload to the cloud or move them to a different data center?

It's amazing how only a couple months out of the year you need DR. You don't need it 12 months out of the year. Moving from a standard virtualization shop, having everything on prem, leveraging the cloud, that's the next step. When you ask me about how would I introduce VMware, I think about introducing it now as a cloud based service provider. Not as an on prem, hey, let's scale this very easily.

They've been able to push out little things as the management agent which allow you to work through vCenter and allow you to connect through vCenter to see all your hosts and make automation very, very easy. On top of that they give you the vCenter Applicance so you're no longer tied to a SQL license. You don't have to worry about using SQL Express and running out of space or running out of license space and then re-licensing it. Then they've also solved the upgrade path. Every time a new B, C, D, whatever version of vCenter comes out I don't know how many times the Windows version blows up. Seeing a company being able to say okay you know what? Let's take a step back. Let's use a very similar OS and let's allow you to utilize vCenter just like ESXi, it's the same platform.

Anything that solves a problem. Find out what your biggest problem is and see how VMware can help you solve that problem. There's more principle architects out there that, especially with everything that's being added to the platform, that would be people specialized specifically in things. VMware has that capacity and the capability to help you solve that problem. Getting the vendor involved, maybe not necessarily a service provider but having VMware actually evaluated. They're going to tell you what you're doing wrong.

We operate within a 10% market of people who don't use Windows. You got to find somebody out there and one of the biggest problems you'll find is you won't find MySQL documentation in terms of what people are using and how they're using it. It's this big, there's not a lot of information that people, in a private sector, are even willing to share or in the public sector. They're still trying to figure it out themselves. Finding out who's successful is pretty much who's willing to write your review. That's something I'd like to contribute in terms of what we're doing to put it out there, let other people know who come to you guys and say, "Who else is doing this?" We can't be the first people.

• Virtualization
• Ability to vMotion and create servers on LAN
• HA
• DRS

The ability to build machines on the LAN as the business needs them, and the ability to have good DR and HA, with no hardware that can cause issues. If we go down, we have another host with very little downtime.

I would like them to keep the client-based system, even though they are going towards web client.

It's extremely stable rarely any issues.

It's very scalable. We currently have 10,000+ servers, and 80% virtualized, so scalability has to be there.

VMware tech support is excellent. It’s one of the best vendor tech support I’ve found.

It's extremely easy, very straightforward, and good documentation.

We have a partnership with VMware and I'm the professional service team lead. 

VMware has many good features, is stable and reliable. 

I'd like to see the snapshot feature that Nutanix has in their product. It takes a snapshot as a backup without processing as a third-party product. I'd like to see that backup feature in VMware.

We've been using this solution for seven years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable.

We're not very satisfied with the customer support. Sometimes I open a ticket and get a remote appointment with one of our customers and most of the time they're not there and I can't contact them. 

The initial setup is pretty easy and took us a couple of days. We check that the hardware is compatible, then we update the firmware and set up an IP address and then test and tune it. Most of our clients are smaller sized companies. 

This is generally a good and stable solution. It's about weighing up the cost against what the product offers for a specific use case. 

I rate this solution seven out of 10. 

Our deployments were formerly on-prem, but we have the role of a cloud provider. We have a distributed solution in our data center and several international cloud providers.

We use VMware vSphere for most of our business processes, including HR. 

We like a lot of the features, but none really stand out. It's very transparent and independent. 

We are very close to VM, all of our pain-points involve direct discussions. There are no special pain-points. This solution allows us to handle our system. It's required in business processes.

The management could be simplified for base-level customers, but of course, it would be difficult to match all customer needs. 

We have been using VMware vSphere for over 20 years.

VMware vSphere is absolutely stable.

We expand VMware vSphere daily. It's very scalable. 

The technical support is great. 

The initial setup is straightforward. The complexities lie on the TITO solution on-top.

The price could always be lower, but I think it's fair. 

I would absolutely recommend using this solution. It's clear-based, straightforward, and includes all of the options required in business. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of ten. 

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

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

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

I've been using this solution for five years. 

This is a stable solution. 

We have no complaints about the technical support. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

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

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

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

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

VMware vSphere provides an easy way of providing near-zero downtime services, the operation of the instances between clustered services, and providing the projected SLA for our customers. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use vSphere to manage VMs, route our infrastructure, changing settings, remote desktopping, and providing services for the university.

In terms of mission-critical apps, we use it for our Student Information System (SIS) to manage all student records and financial aid for all students on campus, along with databases and other web servers on campus.

I would think there has been a performance boost. I don't know exactly what percentage, but maybe five to ten percent.

For benefits for the organization, I don't know if they see a big difference, other than that performance boost, but I do know that it helps the engineers who work on the back-end to be able to manage the VMs; and improved access and experience for the engineers is a big improvement.

This version has added a lot more features to the HTML5 interface and that helps us monitor and manage the system better and faster than with the old interface.

I also think it is very easy to manage. When it moved over to HTML5, bringing all those new features into the HTML5 interface, that improved it a lot. I don't know specific performance data points, but I would say it has helped tremendously in being able to stay in one interface and not having to manage multiple, different interfaces in connecting to it.

There are still a few features that have been left out as far as updating and sending firmware to the host. You still have to go into the Flash interface to do that. But, for the most part, there are just those few missing features from the HTML5 interface.

At the beginning, it was a little rough because it was a beta. They put out some updates and it has been really stable. We haven't had any outages or downtime, as far as stability goes.

I assume it scales really well. We tested it on a few VMs at the beginning and we've rolled it out to a lot of hosts and everything has been working great.

I have not used technical support.

When I came on, they were using vSphere.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was pretty straightforward, pretty simple to set up.

I'm not very good at ROIs, but I know that it has improved the management of the VMs, and being able to help customers more easily and faster has been an improvement with this release.

In terms of advice, I've looked at many different solutions out there and, right now, VMware is the only one that can provide all the different things that we needed it to do.

When selecting a vendor, the most important criteria would be the ease of use, the benefits it has, the features. If we were to switch to someone else, they would have to have all the different features that VMware has currently. And then, price would come in last.

I give it a nine out of ten because it has almost all the features we've needed and it's pretty much simple keeping it under control.