VMware vSphere Reviews

My primary use case of VMware vSphere 6.7 is that I manage some 100 clients who are using this product in their day-to-day work. These are businesses that use it. It runs the core of their networks. It runs their business. It is critical for them to be up and running, so vSphere is pretty important for them.

The mission-critical application that we run on vSphere is our main program that we use to actually monitor all of our customers. We have hundreds of customers. Our main application of remote monitoring runs in our vSphere environment. We also run our Exchange, which is critical. That's how we get our alerts about all of our systems that we're managing. We also run our ticketing systems. When a customer will submit a ticket via email we get it. All of that is running on vSphere.

While I don't have percentages to share, I can say that I have received a performance boost (using vSphere).

The solution has improved our organization because it's made our jobs a lot easier. We're able to monitor all these customers and, with vSphere, they're much more stable than they were previously when they were on physical servers. The fact that they're more stable makes our jobs a lot easier.

The most valuable features of vSphere are really the scalability and its reliability. It's really helped us, as a managed service provider, because we have so many customers that we have to be pretty much on call for, so that when it's up and running and it's working well, that makes our jobs a lot easier.

The built-in encryption of vSphere really helps us to secure our customers, especially customers in the medical field who need to be HIPAA compliant. Being able to encrypt the VM itself helps out a ton.

I find vSphere very simple and easy to manage. It has a very good GUI that you're able to use. Anybody can log in and start clicking around and figure out how to power on a VM, how to create a new VM. It's pretty streamlined for the most part.

As far as the ease of use goes, if you ever were in a situation where something was down, I feel like the logging in VMware makes it really easy to report what's going on. The logging is a really helpful feature. Also, some of the features built in, like vMotion - if you do have a server that's down - you can use something like vMotion to get it back up and running.

As far as room for improvement goes, I really feel like each release they're coming out with new features, making it better and better. The new HTML5 client is almost there. It needs just a little bit more and then it will definitely be ready.

Stability has been awesome. Like I said, we have 100 clients who are on vSphere and it has made all of their systems a lot more stable, which is great for us.

Scalability is really great. Being able to have a customer who decides, maybe a year after they've purchased their hardware, that they need to add another server because maybe they've decided to purchase a new product - being able to scale that system out really helps a lot.

Getting vSphere set up for the first time is pretty straightforward. The installation process is not that painful. It really guides you through it so it makes it a lot easier, especially if it's your first time doing it.

As far as our ROI goes, vSphere actually reduces time to set up a server by a ton. By a server, I mean a virtual machine. In the past, you'd have to order in hardware, wait weeks for it to come in, and then install Windows, patch it, and actually go deploy it at the customer location. Now, if the customer's already running vSphere, all we have to do is log in to that, build the VM, and install Windows and we're good to go. We've gone from days to an hour, probably.

When we were looking at vSphere, we did look at some of the competitors. Of course, we looked at Microsoft Hyper-V because we're a Microsoft partner as well. However, it lacked a lot of the things that vSphere had.

The best advice I could give somebody looking to implement the solution is definitely to download the trial because you can try it out for free. Put it on some test equipment and run it and you're going to love it.

We don't have a customer that uses VMware Cloud on AWS, but we've been very involved in hoping the price gets cheaper so we can sell it. 

The primary use case is spinning up lab VMs. We can spin up several hundred VMs for students to work with, which could be Windows-based or Linux-based. It's about creating these VMs, then destroying them as soon as they are done. So, there is a lot of creation and destruction. We also spin up VM environments as well. On the vSphere 6.7 product, the optimization is great. The older versions, 6.0 and 6.5 were sluggish. When your spinning and destroying things, it's a big deal to have higher performance.

We don't do a lot with the encryption, but we do have the ability to encrypt something if we send it offsite. We have multiple locations, so we can encrypt our VMs, if necessary. However, we don't have a big need for it, but it's nice that it's there.

Our mission critical is our classroom. If we have college students who can't work, they paid to be there, and are paying us for the environment. Therefore, if we're down for a day, that's a real problem. Given that people have a choice of where they can go for education, we have to be always available. Otherwise, they will go next door. For us, it's about a student's success and you can only do that if you're up and running.

1. A big feature for us was Quick Boot. You don't have to wait for the host to do a recheck on memory. You do an upgrade, and it's not a 10-minute reboot cycle. You can bring your host online and offline. 
2. Database optimization. They did a lot in enhancing the performance. They took down the memory utilization and increased what it brought in. You see more responsiveness, especially now with having the HTML5 client. It feels like a much snappier product.

The biggest feature that everybody wanted was the HTML5 client. This has made everything native where you're able to surf through it. Going into our web page, you're no longer refreshing it. It feels more like an enterprise product now. With Adobe Flash, it didn't feel that way.

The biggest thing to improve is to have more self-service in the portals. I would like to receive more help through the web interface. 

I would like to see continual improvements of the client. It doesn't need to go much larger for support on the number of VMs or its size, because there are pretty high limits already. However, it needs a bit more in the management and the reporting aspect. We have to get a third-party for that. It would be great if it was a bit more integrated.

Stability has been good since the 6.0 days. The biggest issue with stability is the SSO. That is still an issue as far as integrating it with Active Directory, and any large scale of it. That is still a work in progress. However, the core stability aspect of it has been there and hasn't changed. This has just gotten better.

I have no issues with scalability. As large as we have wanted to go with as many VMs, we have never had an issue pushing its limits. 

The majority of the issues are truly integrating it into the Active Directory structures. This doesn't seem to be there yet.

VMware tech support has always been good to us. Our biggest challenge is getting them the logs, but once they have them, the logs are so detailed that any possible issue usually is resolved within a few hours. So, it has always been a positive experience.

Given that we spin up and down hundreds of VMs, we physically couldn't do that with physical hardware. It would just be financially impossible. Having a virtualized infrastructure and being able to bring up Windows, Linux, and VMware within a virtualized environment brings more technology into the classroom. Without it, we couldn't do what we do.

There wasn't a short list. It was the only solution. It's the only thing that made financial sense as far as being able to do what we needed it to do. Nobody out there had it.

I would rate it as a nine out of ten.

Go big with your hardware. You have to be willing to invest in the hardware platform. Storage is key. Make sure you have enough performance with it. When you're looking at the actual overall product, make sure you understand what third party offerings you need to put in. It could be something from VMware or one of the partners, but it's going to be more that just the VMware Suite. There will be one or two things you need to add to it. Specifically, monitoring or reporting will be the big draws.

I don't have a percentage for the performance boost of the apps. However, there is noticeably different speed of how the database is working and how you move through the client. Everything is a bit more responsive. Part of that was getting rid of the flash client as well. We're seeing an overall general performance increase in everything we do, whether it's the monitoring aspect or deploying.

Our main use case of vSphere is as the lower layer of a cloud service provider. It's the basis for offering our services through vCloud Director to our customers.

The HTML 5 is valuable in the measure of time saved, day by day.

The most valuable feature of vSphere 6.7, is the HTML 5. I find it really awesome because it speeded up all our daily operations.

It's reliable, stable, and much easier than the previous version.

vSphere now is even simpler. It was simple even before, but going through the HTML 5 interface - and 90 percent of the features are on HTML 5 - it's even easier than the previous ones. Version 6.05 still was, it had HTML 5, but not one 100 percent.

A slight improvement could be made to the interface of the management of vCSA, so that they answer on the 5480 ports. That kind of graphical interface could be improved, but it is not a main point.

The stability of vSphere has reached a good point. Especially without the Flash and the so-called FLEX Client, with HTML 5 it is much more stable than it was before. Previously we used vCenter on Windows. We're adopting the vCSA now, it's much faster and more stable.

vSphere is much more simple to scale than before, thanks to vCSA instead of the monolithic installation on VMware.

We use VMware support. We use it quite often, but not because the product is bad, just because we have so many customers. We are talking about 5,000 virtual machines, so it's statistically probable that we would need to access support. The support is really great.

When we chose VMware, of course we checked other vendors like Microsoft because it's present everywhere; even the open-source KVM. But we decided Microsoft wasn't at an enterprise stage and the open-source one was nice to use but, since there was no support, it wasn't suitable to offer to our customers. We didn't have any doubt choosing VMware.

The built-in features such as encryption - even including TPM module 2.0, are good, but still not useful for us, just because we don't have a lot of requests for this.

The mission-critical applications - more or less all are critical applications. vCenter keeps all the virtual machines of our customers and we don't know what's on those virtual machines. For us, every one of them - not knowing what is inside - is critical. That is for the vSphere used for resources. For the vSphere that we use for management, the critical ones are the infrastructure applications, the ones that keeps the infrastructure working. So from the databases to vCenter itself, to vCloud Director, to NSX. All those machines are critical in that they keep the system working.

As for VMware Cloud on AWS, we have only tested it.

I rate vSphere at eight out of ten. Ten is perfection and I, more or less, never give a ten because people can improve. It's eight, not nine, because I still don't have complete control of the interface.

It's running mission-critical and business-critical workloads for our customers, and the experience has been positive.

The mission-critical apps include core banking systems, core healthcare systems, artificial intelligence. And highly transactional workloads are also great fits for vSphere 6.7.

We've seen an increase of about five to ten percent for the mission-critical apps. Their code is a lot more optimized now that they're using it in the public cloud with VMware Cloud on AWS.

In our organization, the lifecycle management has improved. What that means is our customers are spending a lot less time on "keeping the lights on." Day 2 Operations are being simplified a lot.

• The move towards feature-parity with HTML5 for the user interface.
• Also, increasing the release of features, which is partly through the use of that technology stack with VMware Cloud on AWS, so it's a much more robust product right now.
• It is a lot more simple and efficient to manage. It has improved a lot from the early days of vSphere 5.x. Lifecycle management and reducing the number of clicks that an administrator has to do to actually do a task have been greatly optimized, particularly with the HTML5 interface.
• In terms of more easily managing networks and improving visibility, the two go hand in hand. Compared to the vCloud Air days, it's come a long way. It's a solution that actually works now, and you can use your vSphere staff - who have been trained on and understand vSphere - to actually consume that hybrid cloud with very little or no training.

vSphere is the Rolls Royce of hypervisors. Moving forward, they just need to continue integrating and simplifying that user interface experience. With VMware Cloud Foundation, that's the Day 2 lifecycle management. You've got the VMC offering that's obviously all public cloud. They need to keep on integrating the APIs and simplifying the user experience. And they're definitely moving towards the one-click experience that you have with other technology vendors.

The stability has been good. Now that the VMC on AWS codestream is 6.7, and they're following a DevOps methodology, the stability of vSphere obviously has increased greatly.

It scales very well. Now, with vSphere 6.7, it's 128 hosts. Talk about scale with vSphere is now a non-issue. Typically what we do with our customers is deploy vSan clusters, typically 20 to 30 hosts, because that's a natural failure domain. Going beyond that, it really makes no sense, because you want to have separate failure domains.

In the early 6.x days, their support went down. Now with 6.7, being with VMware Cloud on AWS, their support level has increased, because they've had to. It's definitely a better experience now.

Regarding knowing that it is time to switch to this solution, our customers tend to be existing vSphere customers. End-of-life, end-of-support tend to be the trigger for, "Okay, we need to upgrade our infrastructure stack."

The other big trigger is end-of-life of the hardware stack that they're going with. That's typically a conversation about moving from legacy, three-tier infrastructure to a hyperconverged infrastructure stack. And then there's a hypervisor conversation about the best-of-breed to use to meet their business requirements.

Nutanix AHV, Hyper-V is commonly on the list, and Red Hat KVM is the other one.

Partner with the right partner because not all partners are the same. And have a strategy in mind. Have a design in place, the logical design. What functions are you trying to achieve? What business problems are you trying to solve? And then go ahead and do your due diligence with testing, etc. Once you involve the partner and you're implementing, make sure you have proper testing, have a soft launch, and then a go-live, so that you've got a risk-free solution.

That's where a lot of customers go wrong. They don't do their due diligence, and they don't properly launch, and they have the wrong partner that they partnered with, who is not quite up to the task of doing this type of thing.

For our customers that are very security conscious, in the financial space and the healthcare space, they typically will have clusters where TPM and virtual machine encryption are enabled to provide a more secure experience for those services.

We sell a lot of VMware Cloud on AWS. It integrates natively through hybrid cloud extensibility into VMC on AWS. That's actually been a big selling point with 6.7.

I rate the solution at nine out of ten. What would bring it up to a ten is feature-parity with the HTML5 interface.

We are using the VMware vSphere product to virtualize our servers and we are very succesful. We are very satisfied.

It provides a new environment in an expedient manner. It is a better use of resources between the servers. As we can use these resources better, it helps our TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) analysis.

We would like VMware to add capacity to add more equipment. We also think it could improve with the hyper-converged.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. We like that it is very functional and it has ability to access hyper-conversions. There is a capacity to grow the environment by adding the same type of equipment, and that really interests us. 

I do not have experience with the technical support team.

We looked at Microsoft Hyper-V, but it does not have all of the systematics of VMware vSphere.

I think that vSphere is an expensive solution.

• Enterprise Infrastructure.
• We are distributed across the nation and are primarily all remote employees. I was able to build our private cloud with the tool.
  
  

We are distributed across the nation and are primarily all remote employees. I was able to build our private cloud with the tool.

Virtualization of our environment has made our carbon footprint, the real estate necessary and the ease of deployment in time savings significant.

The thick client had features that were removed from the HTML5 web console and it has caused a learning curve deficiency. Training could be more customer-centric.

My primary use case for vSphere 6.7 is that it's used strategically as a management plain for all 2,100 ESXi hosts across our environment.

In terms of mission-critical apps, I couldn't tell you, because I operate the public cloud and we don't really care what our customers use it for.

We do not use VMware Cloud on AWS yet but it is something we are exploring.

In regards to a performance boost, I don't know at the application level, but I can tell you, purely at the vCenter level, that we have seen improvements in our ability to migrate from Windows to the appliance, now that there is full feature-parity across the stack. We're seeing reduced resource usage from the appliance, it's way more efficient in 6.7. Operations are able to complete faster, so we're happy.

It has streamlined things for us. We've been able to standardize on the newer 6.7. It's definitely given us a path forward, where we might be able to look at expanding into the public cloud, augmenting our on-prem solution now that we have some sort of feature parity.

Most valuable features of vSphere 6.7, for us, at the management level would be:

• VCHA is a nice redundancy feature that they added in 6.7.
• I like the quality of life improvements with the VMFS-6 for using auto UNMAP on the data stores.
• We really appreciate the improvements to the Clarity UI where we can manage Update Manager (VUM) and our vSAN stack within the modern interface.

The solution is also very simple and efficient to manage. Features that have made it simple and easy to manage include the newer VAMI for the V-center appliance, it's very easy to see what version we are at, and very easy to upgrade to the next version. The fact that we can now use VCHA at the appliance level just decreases our chance of having an outage, because so many of our customers rely on the API interface for V-center. 

There are a few things I wanted to see in the next version of vSphere 6.7 which, it turns out, were announced today (at VMworld 2018) so I haven't had time to explore them. But one of the things that was most important to me was the ability to automate or improve deployment of VCHA in an advanced configuration, where it's not hosting itself. I'm looking forward to playing with the new release and seeing where it's at.

The solution has been very stable for us. Since we rolled the 6.7 we have seen consistent uptime.

Being that it's reduced our resource footprint, I think its very scalable.

We have had to open up support cases for vSphere 6.7. We have gotten generally good feedback, but it's still fairly new for them, like it is for us. A lot of things work differently in production then they do in the lab or in your QA environments, and they're willing to help however they can to stabilize the product.

As we're a partner, we do get generally good help pretty early on.

I was not using any other solution before vSphere.

I was involved from all the early stages of planning to move to vSphere 6.7.

We were already considering moving to 6.5 and, for us, there were so many added benefits of going to 6.7, and being that it's not a real major bump - it's more like 6.5 "Update 3" with a lot of quality of life improvements - it made it very easy for us to make that decision.

When I'm working with a vendor, some of the most important criteria are 

• their release cadence
• how much support they're giving to the product
• what kind of R&D they're investing in
• generally, anecdotally, the response we're getting when we're asking for support.

Moving to 6.7, like I said, has standardized a lot of our environment for us so we have definitely seen a reduction in the amount of time we are spending trying to troubleshoot things. It's very consistent. Everything has performed exactly how we expected it to.

We don't use any of the built-in security features but I do appreciate that vSphere 6.7 is inherently more secure in that it's limited, by default, to using TLS 1.2.

I would rate the solution to be a nine (out of ten) but I think they're steadily creeping towards a ten with some of the post-GA releases I've seen.

The use case is that we want to upgrade to the new features and functionality of version 6.7.

We run several SQL Servers on there, Active Directory Servers, file servers, web servers; multiple servers running on it.

The new HTML5 interface is much more robust; a lot fewer bugs in it, more features. It's an overall better experience for us.

It's hard to say there has been a performance boosts for these apps but I would say it is a boost because the servers are much more responsive, the end-users complain less about it. So it must be a good thing.

The main benefit of the solution is that it makes end-users able to use the interface much more effectively. They don't have to install a client on their machine, they can do it from their phone, their laptop, their tablet, any OS, anytime. It's a better experience for the end-user.

The HTML5 interface is much better, it's faster, faster than the old C# Client, which was very nice to have. But with the HTML5 interface, it's smooth, fast, responsive. I can do it from any device, from my Mac, my PC, even from my phone.

The solution is very simple to use and to manage. Updates are simple. The biggest feature that enables the ease of use is the fact that you can update via the web interface. With a couple of clicks, the update is done; no manual intervention, you just click Update and it automatically reboots the server for you and you're back up and going again.

As far as additional features go, they've already added the VMware Update Manager to this version, which has been great; it's been very nice to use.

It would be nice to see it a little more tightly integrated with the patching solution so you could do it in one pane of glass. Right now, you have to jump back and forth. It's still not difficult, but you have to jump back and forth to do your update definitions and then go back and actually do the updates themselves.

In terms of stability, so far the impressions of this solution have been very good. It's been very stable. We haven't had any downtime at all with this new solution.

So far, we haven't had any issues at all with scalability. We've got over 1,500 VMs, about 84 hosts right now, so it's been very scalable for us.

I have used technical support before, via the web interface. You ask questions there and they respond with email or a phone call back to help you solve your problems.

I was an initial installer and I was actually a beta customer as well. The setup was very straightforward. Compared to the previous versions, it's much easier. You can upgrade from a Mac or a PC or via a web interface.

The biggest ROI has been technical. Technically, it's much easier to deploy, much easier for the end-user to use, we have much happier end-users. As they manage their systems, they're much happier without having to install a client, which takes time, takes resources on their machine. They can do it from any device, anywhere, at any time, which is very nice for them.

Anybody who's looking to research this, to upgrade in the future, should go for it. It's a very easy upgrade. The features are very beneficial. It's very worth the time to update. It's a much easier solution for the future, and it's a better experience for all involved.

Regarding using VMware Cloud on AWS, we use AWS right now, but for our backup solutions, is all. Cold backup, long-term storage out to the cloud, is all we do right now.

For us, the biggest criteria for selecting a vendor, right now, are the pricing and the support. Because we are higher education, we have to find the best price, and support comes right behind that. We need the best support as well.

I would rate the solution as about a nine out of ten right now. It could be better but it's very close to perfect right now.