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.

• 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.

Standard commercial environment.

A gold standard of server virtualization.

• vMotion
• NSX
• Dynamic deployment of new servers is critical.

Improvements to the vCenter server appliance are still needed, especially the HTML5.