VMware vSphere Reviews

We use vSphere to monitor our ESX hosts and VMs. We use it on day-to-day basis. vCenter one of the first things employees open when they arrive to our offices. It is a good product. It has an array of things that you perform with it, and we use it all the time.

We are planning to use AWS, but we are not using it yet. 

It's easy to use. For an admin who is just starting to use it, it doesn't matter, since it's generally widely used. This is a big advantage. Anybody can just come in and start using it from day one.

It's simple to use. I don't use it a lot, but I can get in and guide myself through the menus. That is what makes it intuitive and easy to use.

It is a single pane of glass that lets you access your hosts and VMs. This makes the solution impactful, as you have one place to go to manage everything from one console.

The encryption security is great. It is a topic we take into consideration daily. It is important that we enable all the features and make sure our data center is secure. Nobody can hack us, get in, steal information, and use it from our systems.

We run an electric grid. Our apps that run on the electric grid are going on VMs, so these are very secure apps.

I would like to see AI in future releases.

We have had downtime, like everybody in the industry.

We scale it both vertically and hortizonally. We have many data centers on it.

We have a great team behind us technically from VMware.

I did not do the initial setup.

It keeps together a lot of different environments, making it easier and faster to work. It definitely has a good turn around.

The pricing could be improved.

I would definitely recommend the product.

We use it to manage multi-site, multi-regional implementations of VMware. We use the security end roles to give different tiers of access from the VM up to the VMware installation. We manage the roles and responsibilities within the security to do this. 

We do all the functionality inside vSphere. We use VMotion and DRS to manage some of our licensing issues that we have. With bigger software vendors, like Oracle, we use it to keep licenses and requirements compliant and keep VMs running on specific hardware. 

We use it for quite a few daily tasks: cloning and testing out patching. Then, we can perform snapshots through vSphere. 

Visibility: We can easily pull reports and give access to other people to look at specs or performance metrics. This came as a bonus to us. Yet, we have been using it for quite a long time (12 to 13 years). 

The solution is simple and efficient to manage. It has brought ease of use to employees who are not at a senior level. It has been able to expose minimal tasks which can relieve some of my senior guys to do engineering tasks, as opposed to help desk, reboots, restarts, etc. We have been able to pass some of those tasks along. 

The ability to segregate roles and responsibilities, as well as regions. For example, I can give access to my Chinese team to manage the China servers and hosts. On the other hand, I could give access to my Canadian team to manage global VMware installations. Therefore, I like the flexibility of this tool.

We have just migrated most of our SQL and enterprise databases to vSphere. We don't use it for Oracle, but we do for most other things. We also use it for our communications exchange link, etc. Therefore, it is pretty business critical when it comes to the back office support and server implementations.

There has been a lot of improvement with UI: its speed and usability features. Before, it was very slow. When it comes to cross-regional (e.g., someone in the US managing the China vSphere implementations), it can be a somewhat slow. I would recommend increasing the speed. While there has already been improvement there, I would like to see more.

I haven't had any real issues. In the very beginning, there were some issues when upgrading or migrating from versions. However, our last upgrade was 5.5 to 6.5 where went from Windows to the Linux OVF version, and we did not have any issues with it. 

It is easy to scale and obtain as much power as we need. It is easy to provision and join it to the cluster. We haven't had any issues or limitations.

Technical support is very good. I haven't used them in quite some time though, because we have on-staff VMware experts. When I did use them a long time ago for compatibility with network cards (we use FCoE, which is not the industry standard), they were pretty quick to link us back to some articles to help us resolve our issues. 

When I first came on board, they had a very small implementation of Citrix. The servers at that time would cost 20K per application. They didn't allow us to centrally manage any systems. There would be a hodgepodge of vendors and versions of hardware. Therefore, it was a more difficult to track. When I came on board, we were maybe 20 to 30 percent virtualized. Since then, we're probably 99 percent virtualized. This did reduce staffing costs.

The APIs and plugins are important. We used to use NetApp. We use now InfiniteApp and Compellent. Having these types of plugins and using their APIs in the storage subsystems, allows general admins to provision storage easily, as opposed to being a storage admin. It has alleviated having to have five to 10 storage admins. We consolidated to one or two storage admins, while having the others be able to provision their own storage. 

We are spending less on buying bigger machines, which are overprovisioned. Thus, the ROI is found in consolidation and cost savings.

There are a lot of management and soft skills that we end up being able to save on. For example, my engineers in Canada could watch over systems in China, California, and Phoenix. Thus, it gives us the flexibility of administration. 

We evaluated Hyper-V four or five years ago. They weren't as fast to develop technologies or even adopting the technology. There were some tools missing. Also, they were less innovative than VMware. Now, I think Microsoft has caught up a bit. However, it seems that VMware is putting a lot more R&D money into the product. So, we've been happy. We haven't had a need to leave.

• Look at the market and see what is supportable. How long can you support the product. VMware has the history. It has the people who can support it in the industry. 
• Look at the supportability of it. Look at the job market and how many people, from a staffing perspective, can support it. 
• Then, look at the cost, because I don't think cost is everything.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They are a leader and more innovative than the competitors.

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 had almost 100 servers and we wanted to consolidate them and also make them movable, especially when we have to upgrade hardware. It also allowed us to create more testing environments, because we tended to buy new iron every time. We also want users to be able to “own” servers themselves, so that we would build them for them, hand them over and say, "Have fun".

• Flexibility
• Ease of management

Maybe it's there and I don't know about it, but I would love to be able to build a standard server set and be able to give users, who want to build another server, the ability to click in and have a pool of 20 options for the five groups that are using them. I could just say, “Hey if you want a server click here," and then the server is built for them, tells them how to connect, how to login to it. Done. That would be so cool.

It's stable. It has only crashed once.

We're not a very big shop, so it's not really appropriate for me to answer this question.

I would give technical support about 7.5 out of 10.

I waited until version 5 because, prior to that, I thought it was too difficult to set up. With that version, the setup was fairly easy. And it has gotten a lot easier since.

On the server side, we have definitely seen ROI. If servers fail we just restart them, if a piece of hardware fails we just move it. We haven't saved any money but we have been able to double our load without adding any more staff. That's our ROI.

In real terms, because of the cost of the product, I don't know that we really save anything. We're a public institution and we tend to have very long time frames for holding onto hardware, not like a corporation. I would say it's a wash on a pure ROI, unless we can look into the future and say, “I'm going to be able to do increased stuff without adding any money.”

Pricing is the one "ding" I have against it. Except for VMware vSphere Essentials, it would be pretty challenging for anything but a medium or large size company to use.

If you're managing more than five servers run over and get some vSpere Essentials. I think virtualization is the only way to go, whether you do it on-premise or in the cloud, nowadays. It doesn't make any sense once you get beyond a couple.

I rate the solution an eight. Price would be the main thing, as well as the relative inaccessibility for end-users to be able to touch the product.

The primary use is to manage all of our virtual machines/servers and the ESX host. It is performing well.

We use it to incorporate our infrastructure around one product.

• Ease of access
• Manageability

We use it for our VDI infrastructure and managing virtual machines.

I would like to see the UI incorporating all of the functionality that the thick client had.

It is very stable.

Scalability is great.

I have used the product my entire IT career.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. I have been setting it up for 10 years.

Our ROI is time management savings.

Do not look at Microsoft.

We use vSphere to manage our virtual servers. We have about 50 spread across our main company as well as another company that we own. We use them to manage the applications which are attached to different tasks.

It makes managing your virtual servers easier and more centralized.

• Usability
• Convenience

It could use a smaller learning curve.

It has been very stable since we did the most recent upgrade.

It is scalable.

I would definitely recommend the product. 

We use it for call centers and providing server applications.

It's awesome. It works. It does exactly what we want it.

Code: They need to stop pushing it out so fast. Nobody in the real world is really using it yet, because it's not ready for prime time. It needs to be more stable. They need to get their product more stable before they push more code out. 

An example, in vCenter 6.5, they pushed HA, but it doesn't work. I've worked with so many engineers who finally said, "Give up! It doesn't work." 

I asked a question to one of the guys who did a demo with us on 6.7, and said, "Did you guys fix it?" 

They immediately skirted around the question. I said, "I'll take that as a no."

We don't have any downtime, because I built it right. I work a lot with VMware's engineers.

Though, it is not stable. The product was pushed out too quick, and now, there are a lot of bugs. We have seen bugs in vSphere, NSX, and ADDVOLUME, which we haven't even been able to have installed yet because of bugs. Also, with Horizon, we are constantly running into problems.

We are a bleeding edge company. We push it. Yet, we're not even touching 6.7 because it's too buggy.

It is easy to add stuff to the product.

Technical support is not that great. It is too slow. When you get them, they are honest, and about what is going on, which is helpful. Because if they lie to you, then you're even more screwed. So once you get somebody, but it's too slow. We've had Level 1 support where it can take hours (maybe a day) to talk to somebody, and our company can affect millions of customers.

I find the initial setup easy, but it has been becoming more difficult and technical.

Pricing is insanely expensive. We spent millions of dollars on NSX. If you want anything, it costs you more. The pricing model is constantly changing. We wanted to look at HCX, but we had to get it bundled with NSX and vRNI. We already have vRNI. I will be installing, architecting, and rolling it out. However, how does it affect the cost for HCX? We still haven't received a real answer.

I'm anxious for 7.0 to come out because I'm curious to see how the HTML will function. We keep hearing the web client will be better, and it's not. Bring back the fat client!

We use it for virtualization of approximately 90 percent of all of our computing. In terms of mission-critical apps, quite honestly we use it for the majority of them on the banking side: our financial apps, loan accounting, loan origination, etc.

We have seen performance boosts for our mission-critical apps, with the ability to add compute at any time. We've been using this for so many years, so over that time we have probably seen performance increases of three to four times. As compute has increased we've been able to offer that to the apps. I don't know that I can give you a total percentage increase but it's a lot.

Other benefits include high-availability, uptime, management is a lot easier, and a lower cost of support but with increased availability. That's a win.

The most valuable features are its flexibility and the ability to move workload.

The built-in security features, such as VM Encryption and support for TPM and VBS, are all important for us, but I can't go into specifics about them.

It's also simple and efficient to manage. It's a complex environment but it is one that we can get our staff trained on, it's not like a one-off environment.

In terms of additional features I would like to see, I just heard about them here at VMworld 2018. They're rolling in security to be a core feature. Built-in app defense is something we'll take advantage of. The ability to utilize tools that are in the cloud - we don't really use the cloud - will be available for use on-premise, and that is a pretty big feature.

The stability has been huge for us. We have a very predictable environment, robust, fault-tolerant. It's great.

Scalability is the big advantage of it. The product itself allows us to scale on the fly as we need it, and plan for the future.

We are a Business Critical Support customer, so we have an engineer dedicated to our team. We use them on a day-to-day basis.

We didn't have a previous solution. We just had challenges that everybody was faced with and VMware, back in its core, back in its early days, had the capability to move compute from one data center to another and that was huge. We wanted to be able to do things in a secure, safe manner with low risk.

I was involved in the initial setup, back in 2005. Back then it was fairly complex but that's because we were early adopters of it.

I don't know that I can give you a number, but our ROI has been significant.

At that time, VMware was an innovator in this technology so it was a question of learning more about what they offered and taking advantage of it.

If you're not already looking at vSphere, you're probably behind. I don't really have any colleagues who aren't utilizing this product.

I rate this solution as a nine out of 10 because I think you can always improve. But it's a tremendous product. We consider VMware a partner, we work with them closely.