VMware vSphere Reviews

We use this solution for production workloads.

This solution provides production uptime with its DRS and failover features.

The most valuable feature is vSAN, as it reduces the cost of SAN storage and maintenance. 

Reporting on vCenter needs to be improved.

I have used VMware products at five different software companies, and it was mainly used for the following functions: development environments, QA systems, internal infrastructures like wikis or ticketing. 

It was brilliant to consolidate systems, and it provided the best way of doing it at the time, as far as I was aware.

Snapshot and clone: make VM backups for fast recovery options, build systems and reduced setup times.

When I needed to equip a new startup, I was unable to get the budget for vSphere past finance, so I ended up adopting a cheaper alternative even though it meant more work.

It's very stable

Depends on your budget

Good

I also used Citrix Xen which was really great, but ended up mainly using Qemu and Libvirt with KVM because of costs.

Simple

In house

Great flexible infrastructure 

Depends on your budget and skill set.

Virtualbox, Xen Server and KVM

Linode, AWS and Digital Ocean now use KVM

Our primary use case is controlling our virtual machines, as well as our host machines.

We are able to create virtual machines and move them from one host to another, controlling the resources.

I love all of the features in this solution, but moving VMs between host machines is one that stands out.

The solution should be more user-friendly for upgrading host ESXi units, bringing them into the control unit of vSphere.

Generally, the user interface needs to be improved for non-technical people. A technical person can hover around and find the right tool or task that needs to be done. But, for people who are new, they require guidance because it is not intuitive. They have to ask for help from here and there to get it right.

The solution has been very stable up to now, and we are very happy with that.

I cannot make a prediction about the scalability, but I can tell you that we have close to five hundred users at this time. We must keep up with technology so we do plan on expanding the use of this solution.

Until now, I have not used their technical support.

The deployment of this solution was completed before I joined the company, although I don't think that it was complex.

In terms of maintenance, it depends on the task that you are doing. Normally, it doesn't take too much time. There are two of us that handle the maintenance.

There were consultants who assisted with the deployment.

It took quite a long time, but in the end, I think that it benefits us in terms of ROI.

The licensing fees are on a yearly basis.

When I hear that somebody is willing to deploy a similar solution, I suggest this product to them and even help with the deployment. I love this product.

Once this solution is deployed, only fine tuning needs to be done. Once complete and everything is in place, you don't have to do much. From the technical end, the product is great.

I would rate this product a ten out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is High Availability Industrial Control Operator Interfaces, and Historian & Regulatory Compliance Data.

This solution offers an easy OS upgrade and safe migration in a live environment, where downtime is extremely costly.

The most valuable feature is its ability to revert to previous snapshots during testing of various guest and application deployments.

Two improvements that I would like to see are higher resolution console modes for guests and easier switching between consoles.

Our primary use case is to implement a high availability server environment.

It helps to automate the data replication and DR.

The feature that I have found most valuable is the auto recovery during failure.

The scalability of the solution should be improved.

The scalability needs improvement.

We are virtualizing our x86 server infrastructure with VMware vSphere. It consolidates our environment dramatically. Our virtualization ratio is over 92%.

Using vSphere we have virtualized over one thousand servers and this gave us management, cost and datacenter space advantages.

vSphere offers the High Availability feature which serves automatic recovery of failed host's virtual machines on another host or hosts in the cluster. Also, DRS makes the cluster balanced.

Although vSphere is a nearly perfect product, it does need a little improvement. Datacenter and Cluster structure should be mixed so that the management of clusters would be easier.

The company I work for is a global company and has many data inflection issues. Quality control decisions are not actually made at the local level. It is made at the headquarter level in Europe. 

We have our cloud site solution, our production environment, and our data recovery environment. We use VMware solutions integrated with HP solutions for hardware replication and storage-to-replication facilities. We use vSphere with ESXi 6.0, primarily for VM migration. We have an HP storage replication system in place for our first storage requirements with the VMs. Every other one is managed by VMware vMotion. vSphere and ESXi 6.0 are used to host our application servers, operational applications, and additional HR applications.

For extensions, we have vMotion to manage the virtual machines so that we can watch the network. For all of our backup requirements currently, we use the HP Data Protector. 

We have some downtime, but we can quickly recover from a disaster depending on the magnitude or the extent of the disaster using vSphere. The software will recover from any disaster that happens. We have also reduced our cost of production as well. vSphere has also improved our operational productivity. We have isolated servers that we couldn't integrate together, but now we can with vSphere, despite the fact that they are different models. Where they're different physical models, different memory models, you can integrate all of them. It makes our resources more available and our services more reliable to our users.

The features in vSphere data recovery are excellent. Sometimes I've deleted an entire server before and was able to recover the deleted VM. I didn't have to use the backup to restore the VM. I just used some command line tools and I was able to restore the deleted VM. I find that fascinating. 

For VM migration, I can migrate my virtual machines from one place to the other. vSphere has easy integration. I have some older server models. They are HP products. I have both old and new server models. I was able to integrate all these servers despite that fact that the date of manufacture is a five-year gap between the units.

I was using the same version of vSphere and I was able to integrate all the servers together. They are working well through it.

We want to see improvement from VMware with security. We want minimal downtime. We want automation. We want to deploy more efficiently.

If there is a disaster of any kind we want to respond quickly and recover from it. With vSphere, you get to provision server resources with ease. While we like vSphere, one problem we have is saturation. For example, if I want to deploy 10 virtual machines, I will have to install the operating system one by one. I will have to install the patches one by one, also to every kind of script. I will have to learn more, but automated deployment is not easy to implement. 

It makes you spend a lot of time on deployment. You can't have time for doing other things.

On login incidents and other events, I would prefer to have some notification in the logs.

These are the main areas of improvement that we would like to see.

The stability is good. Previously, our whole infrastructure couldn't support our operations. We are always having downtime, we are always having system instabilities. 

Since we implemented a new solution with vSphere, we have a greater capacity of infrastructure relative to our virtualization that almost doubled what we used to have before the implementation. 

It makes our services more reliable. We have also had more uptime of our operational applications.

VMware vSphere is a very scalable solution. The only thing is if you are to upgrade, i.e. from ESXi 6.0 to 6.7, you might not be able to use your older servers. I believe VMware will not support these after ESXi 7.0.

For newer servers, VMware is scalable. We can always use it at least. The only issue I may have is we may not be able to use our older servers with the newer versions of VMware ESXi. 

In-house users number about 110 to 115. We have customers that login into our servers. We have web applications that customers log into from outside.

Around 2000 to 5000 customers use our vSphere installation per day.

We have billing people that are working there with our customers. We have operation people that are in the field that are using various equipment that is connected via wifi to our systems. Then we use the VMware network to carry our own operations and activities. 

We have customer service people that attend to customer inquiries, to try to resolve customer issues, but are still logged into the same application. There are various roles from read-only customers that want to pick one information or the other about their product on our sites. They don't actually update anything except they want to transact business with us. 

We use vSphere to help the users as well as to manage users that need information regarding a particular product or report. Users generate various reports from our SaaS/PaaS applications.

The staff we currently have are about five in IT. We have the manager, we have infrastructure persons that consist of system and network. We also have a database specialist that manages our applications. Our database specialists also serve as the developers for the application support. We have user support teams. The various support people that we have dedicated for the maintenance of the VMware vSphere deployment is about five in total.

We should still be able to support our users, at least, for the next five years. After five years, we may now be thinking of upgrading the infrastructure. This solution is being used every day, i.e. 24/7/365 days a year.

We believe that there's been increased usage, but we just implemented it last year. From our plan, we know that at least for the next five years we may not upgrade.

We also have a maintenance contract with HP. Any event that we could not handle locally, we escalate to HP to be aware of and also to the application vendors. 

For technical support, we have people that maintain the solution. We have a network of experts and specialists. We have a cloud computing specialist as well. We have a database specialist that does VMware integration and so does our software application developer. 

Even with all these people, we still also have a customer service contract with VMware and another with HP, the hardware vendor. We don't actually have any contract with Cisco, but we use Cisco devices. The main vendors that we have a contract with are the application vendors Dell and HP. We have a maintenance contract with VMware in case there are any issues beyond local resources. VMware will escalate them quickly when they respond to our queries.

We didn't use anyone before we procured VMware. Before we procured the product, we didn't use any other advisor. We were using HP hardware and servers. 

For the implementation period prior to 2015, we first implemented on-premise attached solutions. Prior to that time, all our applications were stand-alone IDS servers.

Our initial setup was outsourced, possibly it wasn't that complicated. Because it was outsourced, the consultant made it easy for us. 

After the initial setup, the subsequent ones were relatively easy for us. We trained in the VMware settings for the hardware. Depending on the part of the initial setup, we had older models of servers than we had new models. For the initial setup for the older models, we employed a consultant that did it for us. We implemented the newer models ourselves last year. 

We consulted with HP to do the initial setup for us which was relatively cheap. We did the integration of the old and the new servers. Running the new server models with our VMware vSpehere license, we used our own local resources to do that work.

Implementation actually took longer than planned because of some issues that we did not envisage at the start. When we called HP for price assessment, they came and discovered that our power solutions were not good for their product. We had to spend extra buying new UPS units and installing them. That made the implementation take an extra month. 

For everything together, both the implementations, it was four or five months or so for us to install the new server models and the integration as well. We used the VMware ESXi as the VMware vSphere hypervisor, prepared the servers, and installed the hardware from an HP reseller. 'The installation, especially the setting up of partial integration, was actually done by HP Nigeria. Everything went great because we didn't have any issues. 

Some of the administrative tasks we were supposed to carry out by ourselves. HP gave us direction on how to go about it and it went pretty well.

This is really a niche area, but we have an enterprise license for our business. We have many users on our cloud applications, so we went with a costly enterprise license.

VMware does provide organizations with discounts. The customer service license fee we got discounts on from the supplier in order for us to get the best out of the license fees. That's our experience. We possibly paid less than our partner company. The partner is only local and not global like our firm.

Even if I decide to use a product, I cannot deploy it because my superiors have to determine the policy. Those superiors are not here locally. They are in Europe. 

We don't use Veeam here, though I've used it at some point. Right now we don't use it in our production environment. We currently use HP Data Protector. 

We evaluated other options like Salesforce and Microsoft Active Directory, which we only tested for production. The policies were on central management, so we only tested these solutions with our time. The applications we used were effective only when activated.

The advice I would give is that there should be proper planning for implementing VMware solutions. With us, the content management suppliers and the various vendors provided this. 

If VMware vSphere is the particular product you are choosing, consider where the sellers were located and if they have a knowledge of the product.

• Do the suppliers have the right models for your business?
• Do the suppliers have different VMware licenses available?
• Will you be able to enjoy the VMware license discount with the manufacturer?
• Does the integrator company have good partners in the supply chain?

If you just launch a VMware deployment without planning, it is not advised. Engage with all management and staff, then do proper planning before going into vSphere implementation.

No product is perfect but VMware vSphere is absolutely excellent. It has issues, i.e. the result of insufficient speeds, but no product is 100% perfect. That is why I would give it a nine out of ten rating.

• Cloud computing service (IaaS)
• Private/hybrid cloud
• Virtualization infrastructure
• Virtualization desktop infrastructure.

• High availability causes downtime service because it is needed to reboot VMs.
• Fault tolerance is limited by the four vCPUs.
• The service provider is not easy to integrate via API like OpenStack.

• vCloud Director, because we may use it as the dashboard for providing cloud services.
• vCenter 
• vSphere, because it helps us in the management of thousands of VMs in the coverage UI.

The SDK/API to help SPs (service providers) provide the pay-as-you-go business model in cloud service.