VMware vSphere Reviews

We use it for VMware AirWatch/Workspace ONE: managing mobile devices.

We haven't seen a performance boost at all because we haven't been using the product long enough to be able to fairly evaluate it. But I have no complaints with the performance at this point.

The roadmap VMware has for Workspace ONE is on target with what we want to do. A year from now I might have a different opinion, but right now, I'm good. I see no negatives at this point.

It is a stable product. It has been stable since we installed it eight months ago.

It's a scalable solution. We went from 200 test devices to 11,000 devices in three weeks, without any issues.

So far, we haven't used technical support a lot but I would rate it a three out of five. They have to earn my trust.

The setup is not difficult but there a lot of details that may or may not be documented clearly in the installation guides. What made it difficult for us was that we had to keep asking questions that should have been documented but were not.

Our ROI is the ease of use for users.

We abandoned one vendor and looked at two others but I can't name them. We dealt with one vendor for five years and we bailed as quickly as possible.

I would recommend it highly. I have no complaints. We did a PoC with them and we have been using other products from VMware for years.

The important criteria involved in choosing it were flexibility and ease of use for our user base.

My advice, if you are going to implement it, is: Read the documentation and question the vendor carefully when doing the install.

We use vSphere to manage the various vCenters that my group is responsible for. We use it for the main controllers. We have VMs that that manage access to buildings. Until there's a problem you don't realize, necessarily, how many key systems have been virtualized. If we shut everything down, then maybe people would realize how virtualization has really changed things.

We don't do anything active with the built-in security features, such as VM Encryption and support for TPM and VBS.

It's a big difference compared to having everything on hardware. In that situation, if you want to change memory, you have to bring your system down, open up the box, put new memory in - or a new processor, or any other hardware changes you want to make. With VMware, you may have to bring it down to make some changes, but then it's right back up again in a few minutes. It's a lot easier than if it was hardware.

There are various clients, for the environment that we have, that can be used. There's the thick client, there's the web client, there are obviously new clients when we upgrade to vSphere 6.7. One of the things I like with the web client, versus the thick client, is that we're able to access all the vCenters that we manage. With the thick client, you have to log in to one vCenter at a time.

As far as the web client goes, one of the frustrating things is that it's dependent on different browsers. One day it may work with only a given browser or there may be issues with Flash. So I look forward to being able to use the HTML 5 client. Hopefully, it will be a lot more stable and not have the kind of issues that I necessarily run into with the web client today.

One thing that is a little frustrating for me is that you have the network side with bandwidth and, if it's a system that's virtualized, obviously, you have VMware vSphere in the mix. There are all the different components. If someone has a VM and they don't like the performance or they see something that causes them to say, "Oh, this seems a little sluggish," they contact us and say, "Hey, what's going on?" And that becomes a kind of "magical mystery tour," a black box sometimes. I think, "Okay, where do I need to look? Is it even a problem within the virtualization infrastructure or is it somewhere else?" So that's what I'm hoping to find out about in some of the sessions, here at VMworld 2018, and maybe get some answers.

I haven't seen the new client with vSphere 6.7, so it's hard for me to say what additional features I would like to see.

The stability is pretty good. If there is a stability issue it's probably something else, for instance, the power for the building or something like that. It's usually not an issue with VMware.

As long as you got the ESXi hosts with the resources necessary, scalability isn't a big problem. We don't really lock down a lot of our clients which are still within our organization. We don't really limit the resources. If it becomes an issue we'll look at that, but for the most part, it hasn't been a problem. If we look like we're getting a little tight on resources, then we look at getting and setting up a new ESXi host.

I've had pretty good results with VMware technical support. It's not uncommon for us, if we're doing some kind of an upgrade that we're not necessarily familiar with, to open up an incident and tell them we're going to upgrade this to this version on this hardware. We just want to have an incident open. If something does happen, they're more than willing to work with us. I've had positive results.

I was not involved with the initial setup but I've been involved the last couple years or so with setting up some new ESXi hosts and I've gone through some practice in our test environment to upgrade to 6.7.

Overall, it's okay. There are some good resources out on the web or through VMUG that you can go through.

I don't really deal with the budget so it would be hard for me to say what our ROI is, but my boss does the budget and he seems happy. We keep getting more resources and more things are being virtualized.

I would tell colleagues to take a look at vSphere, if it makes sense for their organization. I've been working with VMware products in one way, shape, or form since the late 90s. Originally, I used it for training purposes and I wasn't even thinking about production. But I have no qualms today, if it's a production system, virtualizing it, as opposed to keeping it on hardware. 

There is always a learning curve and there are also functionality differences between the clients.

For the most part, if everything is working fine, it's efficient to manage. But if you have people say, "Hey, I see performance issues," that's where it becomes a little more of a problem. That's one issue that we're trying to address right now: being able to capture more logging for longer periods of time. Perhaps we need to use a Syslog Server to be able to help troubleshoot some issues by being able to look at particular periods of time.

I rate this solution as a seven out of 10 because of the issues with the clients, especially the web client, at times. And there is also the "black box" nature of understanding what's going on when there is a problem.

SAAS, SAAS, IAAS using Virtualisation of infrastructure

Work life balance as systems administrators got flexibility, robustness, scalability of current infrastructure.

The licensing part. VMware must simplify the licensing mode to help selling to business and additional products.

Almost 10years

Nope. Smooth all the way.

Never. Vmware was the easiest system i ever deployed. Did it without training.

Not yet. As long as i have the infrastructure, the system works like magic. I can add hardware and servers as i want.

I only have the online website customer service. Otherwise i have no support from anyone. Tho i love the product.

once i had to upgrade and i was adding some new hardware from DELL the company in Kenya sent very good guys to work on them directly. We have been good friends with the guys tho they are no longer in DELL.

I was deploying servers from bare metal. Once i got VMware, i have never looked back.

It was smooth. I had bought symanted brightmail and it could only deploy from VMDX. So i had to learn the hard way. I likes it. Once i learnt about VMware, i have helped no less than 20 administrators to deploy VMware in Kenya.

Dell M1000 full blade power edge, deployed by the manufacturer.

It is superb. Level of hardware investment went down. Scalability and power is superb. Next am deploying BI and warehousing on DELL poweredge using VMware and later a 4 tier (a true 4 tier) datacenter in Kenya.

This is a place VMware have to work on. Bringing in products or upgrading is difficult to sell to the finance guys.

I fell into VMware. I so far like the marriage.

Keep going guys. Best thing under the sun.

The most valuable features are high availability and DRS.

• High availability: High availability is particularly valuable to my company because I know that if one of my hosts should fail, we will experience minimal interruption. The VMs affected will be booted back up in minutes on another host. This is critical to our business continuity.
• DRS: Prevents us from having to micromanage the placement of our VMs. They stay running in optimal spaces on our hosts. If we were to license Fault Tolerance (FT), we could potentially lose a host and have all the VMs continue to run without interruption. However, this is unnecessary in our line of business.

It allows multiple VM servers to live and move across several hosts, as resources change.

I would like to see better licensing and less complexity of use.

• Licensing: Any licensing after essentials plus becomes very granular. In turn, it is very expensive to license the features that you want. This is unfortunate, because IT for most companies is perceived as a “black hole” for costs. It becomes hard to justify because you cannot directly pin a value to it. Because of the perception, it is sometimes difficult to approve such large purchases, especially for something you can’t physically hold in your hands.
• Complexity: There is a benefit in having granular controls. In many cases, this is largely unnecessary. You may need to look for a feature that maybe you don’t have to change often. Maybe you only have to change it once. You can sometimes spend large amounts of time and effort to find it, which can be fairly frustrating.

We have used this solution for about six years.

There have been some stability issues. Adding plugins and vendor modules sometimes causes some pretty unexpected results.

There have been some scalability issues. The Essentials Plus licensing is very restrictive and has no upgrade paths to other licensing models.

Technical support is very good. That is, if you can get a support rep on the phone in a timely manner with whom you can overcome language barriers.

The initial setup was fairly easy. Adding on and configuring made it complex pretty quickly.

Skip Essentials and Essentials Plus. You will outgrow it, and then you will be stuck with a very expensive jump to Professional.

Consider alternatives like AHV before jumping in feet first.

Inventory, vMotion, and cloning are the most valuable for me. Customization of VM's which include joining machines to multiple domains, changing names, IP address information, and post operation using Powershell scripts. I like the single pane of glass view for management

VM cloning speed is excellent and has allowed me to provide easy of use and speed when cloning one or more VM's using PowerCli.

I honestly can’t think of anything right now, it provides the access and management tools I need and keeps them in easy reach.

I've used it for five to six years.

It’s been very stable.

No experience of scaling.

It’s been great, no issues, they’re fast and straightforward.

It has always been vCenter, they were in a Rackspace physical environment beforehand.

I wasn’t involved.

I’ve always used VMware ever since the beginning, so I’m biased and I think they have a great product. I’ve played with Hyper-V and it’s just way behind in my opinion. Download them and try them all out and see if you like using the tool daily. Research and troubleshoot well.

It’s rock solid and there’s nothing in its class in terms of alternatives.

The ease of administration and flexibility are the most valuable features for us. Performance, stability, and functionality just keep getting better.

It enables us to move faster when we're going through the legacy systems. Before vSphere, someone had to wait between one and three months to get service which we can now implement in ten minutes.

There are a couple areas for improvement that I can see. First, I'd like to see better performance for vCenter. And, I'd also like to see NSF 4.1 fully supported. There are some NSF features lacking from version 3 to 4.1.

We've been using it for more than ten years.

We've had no issues deploying it.

The stability has been great. I have only experienced one point down and that was caused by our system.

There was also an issue with expiring licenses in 2008, but that was fixed pretty quickly and a new implementation was put in place to prevent that from happening again.

The product has been so stable that we keep using it. We also didn't want to change it too much because it would require management team training.

It has scaled for us and the workload that we have that runs on it.

We started using it because there weren't any competitors at the time. There was only VMware.

Complexity depends on how you're implementing it because vSphere has a lot of products. If you're looking looking to install vCenter, it quite easy.

If you're using a lot of the other products, you have to be careful. Today, we use almost every product from VMware and we still have to be careful with the updates.

Start small in a development environment. For $200 per year, you can get access to files VMUGs. 

You can get a 60-day free trial with a download from the VMware website, but I recommend using VMUGs and attending local VMUG meetings. They have a lot of really capable technicians who really love to share.

Of course we continue to look at the competitors to see what features are coming. In my opinion, it doesn't matter because VMware is still ahead of the competition.

VMware has polished their offerings for High Availability, fault tolerance, and live migration beyond any of their competitors.

Engineering new solutions in a difficult task. Working for a university, the student experience is our number one priority. Solutions can be tested in all manner of environments before deployment and go through rigorous testing before going live thanks to VMware's Redirect-On-Write snapshot technology.

While ESXi 6 brings fault tolerance for VMs with multiple CPU cores, I desperately, passionately need a better Web Client than the Flash-based monstrosity we've grown accustomed to. Having to perform certain tasks in the Web Client and certain tasks in the C# Fat Client make life very frustrating sometimes.

I have been working with VMware in various capacities for close to seven years.

The environment was already deployed when I arrived at each of the institutions where I've worked.

Moving to new releases is a tricky business. I highly recommend staying a version behind. It's bitten us multiple times, most recently with the suite of CBT bugs. We had to temporarily adjust our backup procedures, which involved a lot of communication and justification.

No, however, I have seen scalability issues with each of VMware's direct competitors.

I have no experience with their customer service.

I have no experience with their technical support.

I used to work with Hyper-V, but it is a very Microsoft-centric product. It has a long way to mature in terms of stability and cooperating with fringe cases. If you're an all Windows shop, Hyper-V is worth considering, but if you're a Windows/Linux mixed shop, and manage more than 200 servers, there is no good choice but VMware.

It takes a lot of upfront understanding that some shops simply don't have. I went for my VCP Certification, and the level of detail and expertise required is vast. Everybody needs to be on board: from your networking team, to your security team, everybody needs to know how it interacts with their domain and bailiwicks. It's a game changer on every level imaginable, and the implications need to be made clear. There is, without a doubt, increased complexity, but the pros far outweigh the cons.

Implementation was done in-house.

Our ROI is incalculable. We are a university and a university is its data. We can only afford to trust the very best. VMware has a reputation for being the "big player" for a reason, they really do the best. Hyper-V has come a long, long way since its first release, but it still has catching up to do.

Always pony up for one level higher than you think you need. It's so worth being able to implement new features and redundancies once your team is comfortable with how it works and what it means.

The Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) is your bible now. Read it, understand it, and do not deviate from it. If you have existing centralized storage you wish to use, it must be on the HCL. See what VAAI primitives it supports. Do not thin provision both Array Side and VMware side; pick one.

Accessibility and the ease of use is unparalleled. The clustering and ability to move virtual machines around on the fly has been amazing.

We’ve been able to consolidate our footprint and decreased the number of hardware hosts we were running.

I think everything we’re looking at should be addressed in 6. I don’t like the web client, I’m sure it’s fine, but I believe 6.0 addresses that.

We just switched, but so far it’s been very stable.

Not yet, we just switched over.

I submitted a ticket about four weeks ago, and the guy called me on a Saturday at midnight. It’s been fairly hard to get hold of somebody, and when they get ahold of you, I understood about three of every five words they said. I wished it was better.

We were just running Hyper-V, and the size of our team required more. The need to consolidate our servers, as VMware is a lot better with resource management, we didn’t want a large server cluster, so VMware was needed in order to maintain it well with a smaller staff.

Peer reviews actually a huge point in us switching over from Hyper-V. It’s such an old product that it was hard to find any support for it online, and the change we’ve seen in vSphere is night and day. There’s so many peer resources available that it’s been easy to transition for us.

It's straightforward, and the documentation is nice. It's also got a good footprint on the web, that makes it easy to look for other users for knowledge and advice.

I always look at the price before purchasing technology.

Nope, it was the best from what we heard.

I would say from a 4 of Hyper-V, I would easily give this a 7 or 8, as the support definitely improved drastically.

When selecting a vendor, do your research and develop relationships. If you know the product and can get in contact with POCs, we want to see the product before we buy it.