VMware vSphere Reviews

Primary use case: data center virtualization. It's performing well. We're really happy with vSphere as a virtualization platform. 

In terms of the built-in security features, we use none of them. I really couldn't tell you much at all about that.

Mission-critical apps would be our student information system - that one is running on PeopleSoft - student portals, also PeopleSoft. Those are the mission-critical ones that we're running on VMware. There's other stuff that is critical, but I wouldn't say that it's mission-critical.

Benefits of vSphere: It saves me a ton of time, I can really quickly spin up new things to test them out or to respond to a need from the business. The way that it improves the way that the organization functions is that it makes us a lot quicker to respond to the needs of the business.

Most valuable features are 

• quick provisioning
• High Availability
• DRS for balancing workload.

I definitely find vSphere to be simple and efficient to manage. A key feature that enables this is vCenter. It is super simple to stand up, and once you're in there, especially with the new HTML5 client, everything is easy to manage.

I find the stability of vSphere to be pretty great. We've had some issues, like everybody. Most of them were around hardware, so we thought it was really important to check the compatibility lists and make sure that you're running the right driver versions. But once you've got that running, it's solid. We don't have any stability problems.

Scalability is great. It's easy to scale.

I honestly found that I spent too much time in "back-and-forth hell" with help desks that are offshore. I found that VMware Support - it used to located in North America and that's who I would get when I would pick up the phone - the last few support cases that I opened didn't go that well. I ended up finding the solution myself and just telling them, "You know what? Forget it."

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Straying a little bit from vSphere, but on vROps, the ROI that we're getting from that is that we're able to reclaim a lot of idle and oversized VMs, and we're actually saving money or actually giving ourselves more time with the resources we have, before we have to purchase new stuff. So that's an ROI.

Aim for simple, go for fewer hosts with bigger resources, depending of course of on what you need. Don't try to do everything at once. Start with a basic setup and work up from there.

We did not really see a performance boost with version 6.5.

Regarding the most important criteria when selecting a vendor, it needs to be an industry-leading solution, needs to be easy, simple to set up, not an entire ecosystem of things that I need to deploy to get their system working. Ideally, I want something that we can set up in a day.

I'd give vSphere about a nine out of ten. There is still stuff to work on, but it's definitely the best for me. As I said, I find that the support never blows me away, and maybe that's because I don't pay for the most premium level of support, but I find that what we got on the last few tickets that we opened was not great.

The primary use case for the product is, we use it as our core infrastructure to power all of our servers as well as any kind of application that runs tolling for the region.

For mission-critical applications that we use this for, it's mostly for proprietary applications that were specifically built to run tolling. So all of our tolling applications run on vSphere 6.7.

In terms of a performance boost, we have seen about a 10 percent boost; not by much. Our workloads aren't CPU or memory-intensive, they're more idle-intensive with storage.

The solution has improved our organization in terms of compliance. In the past, we struggled with VM encryption. We couldn't encrypt the virtual machines with older versions of vSphere without some kind of third-party tool. Now, with 6.7, it's all in the application itself, in vSphere. We no longer have to procure additional products to meet that requirement. We can just do it on the fly, and pass our audit with no issues.

In terms of managing it, it's a lot simpler now with the vSphere HTML5 client. With the phase-out of the Flash client, which everyone doesn't like, it allows us as administrators to do our jobs far more efficiently than it did with the Flash client.

The most valuable feature would be enhanced, what we call, Linked Mode to link our disaster recovery site to our primary site across different vCenters, without being required to be broken apart. Meaning, we have identity management and the actual vCenter servers split. We can actually do embedded now, thanks to vSphere 6.7.

For the security features for vSphere 6.7, VM encryption was really critical because we're required to protect virtual machines. We have to adhere to PCI DSS for credit card protection. So the VM encryption was very critical to passing our audit.

There is definitely room for improvement and that improvement should be in the licensing and the simplicity of procuring additional licenses or additional VMware products. Right now, it's very complex.

Stability for vSphere 6.7 has been a little rocky at times compared to 6.5, but I believe that's because it's a very new product. With updates later, I think it will stabilize out.

We have especially had an issue with our backup software communicating with vSphere 6.7, but that's been remediated so that has kind of gone away. Initially, it was a little rough, but now it's smoothing out.

Scalability for vSphere 6.7 has been a major enhancement compared to 6.5. That is because of the technical features they've added that allow you to scale further away from your primary data center, such as vMotion over long distance, etc. It's made things better for us.

Only for vSphere 6.5 did we use tech support. We have yet to need tech support for 6.7, but I can't imagine it would be any different than 6.5. Any tech support, period, with vSphere, I have never had an issue. Even when it was a really strange issue, we've always resolved the problem.

I was involved with this design, the procurement, the deployment, and the management.
In terms of complexity, it was very complex for the licensing aspect. That's because in 6.7 it's changed, compared to what I procured years ago with 6.5 and 5.5. It has gotten a little bit more complex, but it's easier once you do it.

Nobody else was on our short-list. Hyper-V had come up because another IT office in our agency does use Hyper-V, but for mission-critical applications that are powering an operation, my opinion was "vSphere-only" and my manager's opinion matched mine. So there really was no other option, it was just vSphere.

We do use AWS, but not for VMware Cloud on AWS. We only use it for storage.

I'd give vSphere a nine out of ten. The only reason I give it a nine is because VMware has amped up how frequently they release new versions and that adds instability to a stable environment. But other than that, I would've given it a ten.

Our primary use case for vSphere is not a primary use case, because we actually offer a pretty wide breadth of services. Our key use cases revolve around hosted private cloud, as well as being the underpinning virtualization platform for our multi-tenant vCloud Director based cloud.

We don't use VMware cloud on AWS.

vSphere has improved our organization by allowing us to deliver rock solid stability to our clients in a cost competitive fashion. The industry has moved far beyond bare metal infrastructure, other than for very specific us cases. As an operator of mission-critical applications on behalf of our clients, we chose vSphere because we needed the operability we get from features like vMotion, the stability that it gives us, and the ability to run pretty much any workload.

We host infrastructure for a very large number of clients. In many cases, we're running all their mission-critical applications in our data centers on top of vSphere. So, there is no single industry vertical. However, for each of our clients, we are their operator, and this is their mission-critical infrastructure.

When I think about the performance aspects of vSphere, we've been using it since before there was vSphere. We were actually a very early partner of VMware. I've been with NaviSite for a very long time, and I recall doing a VMware GSX Server deployment, from a number of years ago. 

When I look at the performance aspects, I've definitely seen a reduction over versions from the virtualization penalty. This has been significantly reduced over the years. The size limitations of VMs, number of CPUs, amount of memory which can be allocated, and amount of storage which can be allocated are no longer of practical consequence. So, the monster VM that we talked about over VM Worlds of three to five years ago, they're here to stay, and those limits are no longer practical impediments to virtualization. 

1. The most valuable feature of vSphere is vMotion, because it rocks. It radically changes the way we think about how we can operate a large infrastructure, and notably, in terms of proactive maintenance. 
2. The second biggest feature is HA, because complexity around IT resilience is a difficult problem to solve, especially at the application level. Therefore, being able to rely on the infrastructure to provide a 90:10 or 99:1 rule is more than enough resilience for most applications, and getting that directly from the infrastructure is fantastic.

These features are useful day-to-day, because we operate a very large number of single-tenant private ESX deployments, managed by vCenter, as well as VCD-based public cloud. Frankly, with hundreds and thousands of hosts under management, there's no way we could operate that infrastructure without the use of vMotion. The ability to migrate those workloads to free up the physical infrastructure for maintenance activities, patching, BIOS updates, etc., is a critical requirement to operate.

An important vSphere feature from a security perspective is VM encryption. As is the right thing to do in this day and age, security needs to be the number one concern for any IT operator. While there are security solutions which can be delivered at the physical, hardware layer, they don't necessarily address all of the requirements from an encryption perspective. Being able to have VM-centric, VM-level encryption is a great feature of vSphere.

As with any piece of technology (hardware or software), there's always room for improvement. vSphere is incredibly mature from a core feature and function perspective. As we continue to push mission-critical workloads into vSphere, and those workloads are not readily protected at the application layer for availability, continuing to increase the size limitations on FT-protected VMs would be a great advance.

vSphere management has evolved over time. It's inherently complex. Operating a large virtual infrastructure is not an easy task for anyone. That's why certifications, such as VCP exist, because you have to have the right skill set to operate the environment. As the product evolves and starts to take advantage of things, like DRS, workload placement becomes less of an issue for humans to worry about, because the system takes care of it for you. Of equal interest is SDRS, storage management and storage placement, as historically, it was one of the most challenging things to mange in a large production VMware environment. With SDRS, we've actually seen our need to babysit it and manage it as a human go way down.

vSphere has been very stable. It would be where it is in the market overall if there were any sense of instability. No software nor hardware is perfect, so really it comes down to the failure rate that we see running workloads on vSphere. Is it significantly, materially, measurably different than running those workloads on bare metal? I would say absolutely not. 

Equally important is the stability better because, when things happen, hardware is lost. In response, VMware HA automatically restarts those workloads and the effective downtime is radically minimized. This is compared to what it would be for a human response.

Scalability on vSphere has always been important for us, because of the scale at which we operate. We had a client, who maxed out under the VMware 5 limit of 32 hosts per cluster. So, it has been great to see the continued improvements in scalability. At the VM level, the limits are no longer practical impediments. Now, at the VMware cluster level, we're also seeing sizes which can operate pretty much any large client environment.

We've had to use vSphere and VMware tech support on a fairly regular basis, but not because there are fundamental flaws in the platform. Things happen. Client environments are complex, and in some cases, the interoperability with other third party products requires engagement with support. We have found the engagement able to solve our problems pretty much all the time.

I'm not directly involved in the day-to-day operations of our vSphere environments, but we stand up private vSphere-based clouds on a fairly regular basis. We manage those on a go forward basis in terms of patching, upgrading, etc. Deploying vSpheres is pretty easy. The biggest feature that has made that easier, as compared to three or four years ago, is the vCenter Server Appliance. Its ability to deploy the management plane as a virtual client and bootstrap an ESX environment. That's a big step forward.

1. Compared to deploying traditional infrastructure models, like bare metal, and the ability to virtualize and maximize the utilization of the physical infrastructure speaks well for ROI. 
2. In today's market, agility is the new currency. Without virtualization, and vSphere in particular, we wouldn't have the level of agility in the business that we have today. Frankly, it's needed by pretty much any industry. Regardless of whether you're technology-centric or not, you are a technology company.

If I had to give a rating of one to ten for vSphere, I would give it a nine. No software nor hardware is perfect, but vSphere is good. That's why I would say a nine. There is still some room for improvement, like larger FTVMs, continued evolution, and keeping pace with the scalability of underlying physical infrastructure.

For somebody looking to evaluate a virtualization platform such as vSphere or any of its competing open source solutions, like KVM or other virtualization platforms, one of the key considerations is to look at TCO. vSphere may seem expensive upfront, and there may be some sticker shock there, but if you look at it over the long-term and from a human capital perspective to operate the platform over a period of three or more years, the manageability of vSphere drives the total cost of ownership way down.

The main use case of this product and its performance is server virtualization, and the performance is pretty good compared to what we were used to with the previous version. The previous version for us was version 6.0.

There are built-in security features, TPM and encryption, which are something we're going to use at a later stage. Right now, we are waiting for a hardware refresh to be able to support a TPM version too. But it's something I'm really looking forward to.

The mission-critical apps and workloads running on vSphere are just about everything. Our municipality covers everything from cradle to grave. We are running a retirement home, nursing home, schools. The most important are the healthcare applications.

Since we started using vSphere, there hasn't been as much of a performance boost, but more flexibility and stability. We've actually been running vSphere or ESX since 2003.

How vSphere has improved our organization is that we have a lot of fewer admins today than there were 15 years ago, and we have a lot more servers than at that time. But because of the flexibility and stability we encounter with vSphere, it's manageable.

For me, the most valuable feature would be the EVC, but EVC has been changed to be per-VM which makes it possible for us to migrate the VMs to cloud and not take into account what hardware they're running on.

Also, a big improvement from the previous version is that I'm now able to schedule backup for the VCSA. That is, in my opinion, a huge improvement.

The last thing that I think is really great is, I'm now able to boot the OS and not the entire server. That's going to save me a lot of time.

I find vSphere easy to manage, especially because of both the vCenter and probably because I've been doing it for 15 years.

Where I think there is room for improvement is in the HTML5 interface in vCenter. What it lacks, for me, is integrating into VMware's other products, especially NSX.

The stability of vSphere is, in my opinion, just fantastic. I can't remember the last time we had a breakdown in the hypervisor. 

The scalability of vSphere, for my company, is perfect. It easily fits in, but we are way ahead of what is the theoretical limit.

I have used VMware technical support and the experience has been variable. But I have seen an improvement in the last year.

I was involved in the setup of vSphere. The setup was, in my opinion, very simple. It was very easy to get started.

When we initially chose vSphere, there weren't any other products, so it was simple to select the direction we were going in.

My advice would be just get started as soon as possible.

At the moment, we are not using VMware Cloud on AWS, but that's because we're still trying to get ahold of legislation because of GDPR.

If I had to rate the product from one to ten, I would rate it at a nine. What could they do to bring it to a ten? In my opinion, it would be alignment with other products, and a more automated upgrade, where you take the other products into account, so you can upgrade the entire VMware stack from a single interface.

We are in the IT manufacturing industry. This solution has performed wonderfully. We do research and development into how our products can be best used in a vCenter/vSphere environment.

Mission-critical applications we use it for include vSan, HA, DRS. They're all very, very important to us.

We have a lot of customers that use VFRC, so the ability to put that together and now, with 6.7, to have full multipathing support, we do a lot of fiber channel work, we do a lot of fiber channel support. That makes it really easy with some of our own items to get them out there to the customers who need them.

The redundancy, the failover, the ability to stay up and running 24/7, all the various tools that are in there, high-availability, DRS, are very critical to us. All of that has helped improve our organization.

The vCenter management is huge: ease of use, the simplicity of it.

It gives us, with the Enterprise Plus version, pretty much all the tools that we need right on hand that work great with our products. We can help our customers make their data centers run a lot smoother.

My biggest suggestion would be some kind of a mechanism - and it's almost an AI-type thing, a Siri/Cortana - for where to find how to do certain things. If there was the ability to just type in a basic question and say, "How do I change the VM settings for this?" and it could bring me right there, that would be really awesome.

It's very, very stable. The amount of times that we have to reboot vCenter or any of the VMs is very rare. It's only gotten better over the last couple of years. You expect a certain number of reboots and it just seems that the number needed is going down every single year.

Scalability is awesome because, for us, we do a lot of pods. We create pods and nodes and small clusters to do some of our R&D products. The ability to bring them up very quickly, very easily, without adding lots and lots of additional hardware, and without taking excessive amounts of time, and then tear them down, but just shove them on the back burner in case we ever need to come back to it - that for us is one of the biggest features that we could ever have.

They're very awesome, quick to respond to us. Sometimes you get the email exchanges for a while, but once you get somebody on the phone, they get in, they dive in, they fix it, it's done.

We were previously using standalone servers. Once I came on board and I started talking to them about the features, we made the decision to virtualize some of our more urgent applications. We did it and everything has been running really great since. As a result, we are bringing more and more in, to the point where those standalone servers are basically sitting idle on a shelf now. 

The initial setup was very straightforward, very easy. For me, it's been about eight years using VMware, so it's very fluid, very easy for me to do. I've never really had any kind of a problem.

Being a field engineer, it's a little more difficult for me because I'm not involved with the finances of the company. But we know that we're getting a strong ROI because the amount of money that we're spending on external assets seems to come down every year. We're getting by with what we have longer and making more efficient use of it.

We did take a look at Hyper-V, we considered KVM, but it really came down to Hyper-V and VMware and, in the end, because of VMware's market share, it became a no-brainer solution for us. We went that way. Once our management made that decision, I was able to push and show them all the features and the abilities that they were unaware of at the time they made their choice, to really enhance what we were doing.

Do your homework, figure out what you need. This really relates back to the question about the licensing. Do your homework, find out what version you need, think to the future, and figure out what you might need in five years and invest in that now, because that stepping stone just gets easier and easier if you plan for the future now.

We have not done a lot with the built-in security features. Some of our customers are inquiring about it. That really is their own choice to use. It's not something that we develop products for when we have not begun to use it internally in our own environment, yet. We also do not use VMware Cloud on AWS.

Regarding a performance boost, there is nothing that I've noticed but, to be blunt, it's so robust, we've never pushed it to the max.

As far as simplicity, it is the easiest solution, especially with the vCenter management tools. As far as specific examples, I started way back in the days when we were using the Client, the individual 4 Client, and trying to manage multiple servers was really a headache. The ability to do it all, multiple data centers, multiple areas, from one centralized location, is huge. It's just gotten easier and easier. There are still some areas where it would be nice to be able to find things quicker, but it's improved so much over the last two to three years that it's phenomenal.

It's so versatile, so feature-rich, but there is some of that add-on confusion. What version do I need for this? What licensing do I need for that? What comes free? What doesn't come free? If that was a little cleaner or eliminated entirely - here's your product and everything comes with it - that would probably raise it to at least 9.5; nothing's perfect.

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.

We use vSphere for our production and DR infrastructure. We have all our critical machines on there: domain controllers, monitoring systems, ticketing systems, financial systems, billing systems, Test and Dev environments. For the most part, as far as vSphere is concerned, it's performed pretty awesomely. Sometimes the hardware doesn't work as well.

Once we got VMware vCenter, once we got all that setup - did a PoC, proved that it worked - we did a big push. I led the project to move our entire internal infrastructure from physical to virtual.

We haven't worked with VM Encryption or support for TPM and VBS.

Between vMotion and all the HA, it has made my life a lot easier, and similarly for a lot of my colleagues, and my boss.

The most valuable features are the seamless HA with vMotion and being able to run vCenters in HA mode. We use a company called SimpliVity, it's a hyperconverged system that sits on top of VMware. They have a product called RapidDR which automates the entire DR process for us. So in a DR event, we just run a script, and that's it. Between vMotion and vCenter, everything moves over to the DR environment.

Also, once you start using it and you get your hands dirty with it, it's very intuitive. I find the menus make sense. Other UIs, specifically Salesforce, for example, can sometimes be weird. Things are in weird places, there are a lot of menus, a lot of dropdowns. Especially, in the new HTML5 Client with vSphere and vCenter, everything is pretty straightforward and easy to find and easy to use.

I'd like to get rid of the Flash Client. There are still some things that require us to go into it and use it, some plugins and other things aren't supported in the HTML5. I love the HTML5 Client. I think it's a lot smoother, a lot faster. Version 6.5 was kind of slow. From our testing, from what I've seen, 6.7 is supposed to be better. That would be my biggest complaint right now: that the 6.5 Flash Client is slow. It takes a while to load.

It's very stable. We had one "pink screen," which is basically equivalent to the "blue screen" in Windows, and that was hardware-related.

The scalability has been good, as far as the vSphere and vCenter go. We've had to add more hardware, but it's scaled pretty well. We haven't really had any issues with it.

The move to vSphere was really just a business-continuity initiative. Vestmark makes a financial platform. It's important that we are able to be up as much as possible.

I work on the internals teams, so none of the stuff that I work with is customer-facing, but for our customer-facing teams to be able to correctly support customers, our internal side has to be up as much as possible. It was really just business-continuity, coming down from the executive level, saying, "We need as much HA as possible. We want our systems to be up as much as possible because we need to support our customers as best we can."

When you're looking at HA and seamless DR and the like, there's really one decision, and that's going virtual, whether it's on-prem or in the Cloud. VMware has been a leader in the virtual industry for years. It was a pretty simple decision to go with VMware.

It took some time to really research vSphere as a whole, as far as what the best setup would be for our company, for both the present and the future growth of the company, and to correctly size it. There was a lot of research beforehand that needed to be done to get to the appropriate solution. Once that work was done, the actual install and implementation of it were very smooth, for the most part.

When I first started at Vestmark, a little over four years ago, everything was physical. We had a row of about seven to ten racks - I forget the exact number - of just physical machines. After going virtual, using VMware, vCenter on Cisco UCS, we dropped that down to two racks.

Take your time to do the appropriate research and planning, so that it's sized appropriately. A lot of issues that I've seen are from either underlying hardware or resource constraints that aren't necessarily related to vSphere or VMware, rather that things weren't implemented appropriately.

We do not you use VMware Cloud on AWS. Right now we just have on-prem for both production and DR. We are starting to move some small Dev environments to AWS. I haven't been a part of that project. From what I hear, there have been some ups and downs but, for the most part, I believe there has been positive feedback.

I would rate vSphere a nine out of ten. Ten means everything is perfect. As much as everyone tries to strive for that goal, it's unattainable because there are just so many moving parts, hardware, software, user input, end-users. It's the best that it can be in a nonperfect world.

The primary use case for us was to virtualize a small data center of about 30 guests. We use it for our Active Directory and Exchange servers. The solution has worked well.

We're not yet using VMware Cloud on AWS or vSphere's built-in security features.

Going from a purely physical environment before, we have seen a performance value boost. It also gives us greater flexibility and it allows us to adapt to our environment much more quickly than a standard hardware solution would.

The most valuable features are the simplicity and ease of use for, a small IT department like ours. It's simple and efficient to manage.

I would like to see continued support of the HTML5-based utilities.

It's been very stable for us.

We have a pretty static environment but, for our needs, it has been very good.

We have had to use technical support a couple of times. It has been very good, a very good experience.

We had outside help from a partner, but the initial setup was pretty straightforward.

We're a small, privately held company, so ROI is not something we concentrate a lot on. But just from the surface appearance, it has really helped us.

Make use of the resources that are there. That's something we failed on when we first started. We started out thinking, "We're going to go with this company for storage, we're going to use Vsphere, etc.," and we just went in with a partner. As I went further along, I learned that there were a lot of built-in resources that I really didn't know I had access to. That was a bit tough.

When selecting a vendor, the most important criterion for us, being a smaller IT department, is the support. Also, to a certain extent, the name is important, because when you're a small department you don't have the opportunity to evaluate as many companies as you'd like to. Sometimes you end up going with the main name brand. When you're a small shop, you need all the help you can get.

I rate vSphere a solid nine out of ten, especially since, with 6.5 and beyond, it has matured and it's full-fledged. It's tough to think of anything I'd want to add to it at this point. I would have rated vSphere 5.5  as an eight out of ten, so it feels like 6.5 is a progression towards ten. There's really no feature that I can explicitly name that would make it a ten. They just need to make more progress, have more stability, and continued simplicity.