VMware vSphere Reviews

The primary use case is enterprise virtualization for server consolidation, energy conservation, data center space conservation, and overall efficiency and scalability.

The mission-critical apps we use it for are everything from machine-learning to business processing to scientific research and development.

We have absolutely seen a performance boost, in particular with some of our legacy applications. For some of the legacy apps, we have seen at least a 75 percent increase. In addition, some of the newer applications have also seen a boost because they're just more efficient running on VM rather than on bare metal. For the newer apps, depending on how they're optimized, the increase has been at least 10 percent.

Another benefit we have seen is the many-to-one relationship of VMs to hardware, versus one-to-one. It's a real win-win for our data center. It's a win-win for taxpayer dollars. And from a scalability point of view, we're able to rapidly scale workloads where we weren't able to do so before, working with just our pure hardware.

In addition to that, it really fits nicely into our automation efforts, where we can dramatically reduce the deployment times for applications and the services we provide.

The most valuable features for us are DRS, VMotion, and, of course, some of the analytics that we were able to define to quantify our workloads and tell us how we are able to make our data center more efficient.

It's absolutely efficient and simple to manage in general. Set it up, configure it, then monitor, manage, and maintain. That's it. What makes it simple to manage is that we use a flavor of Auto Deploy, storage policies, among other features around policies, where they come online and their policies are in them. Everything conforms to a policy. It's pretty much set up for good.

I'd like to see a little bit more integration for VDI. I think that Composer servers, security servers, broker servers with connections, I'm not sure they are necessary at this point. Perhaps they could have a lot of those functions baked directly into the hypervisor. It seems to me that if the hypervisor is scalable and flexible enough, that the processor and compute can handle all of that. Maybe we eliminate those other components for VDIs and have more mixed workloads: server workloads and desktop workloads all in the same hypervisor.

Having been a customer for a long time, and running this for well over a decade, stability has not been a problem. It has its nuances, it's not perfect, but stability hasn't been an issue.

Scalability has been the goal all along here, to be able to meet in the middle of the scalability, horizontally and vertically. We have over 10,000 users.

We've used technical support in the past. It was "fair" in the beginning, it's certainly better now. We don't necessarily rely too much on support now because there's such a breadth of knowledge in the community and among other customers so that everybody is connected.

I've been involved from the beginning until the end. In the early days, before ESX, we worked with what was called GSX, or Ground Storm X. It wasn't easy, but once you got it configured it worked and it did what it was supposed to do. We didn't have any major issues.

It was all self-installed. A lot of it was a matter of reading the directions, following them, and going to "next".

One of the things I think a lot of people are inherently bad about is assuming ROI and never quantifying it. Where I am, we've done a pretty good job of quantifying over the years. We've not only studied everything down to the number of Velcro ties used but the number of cores, the cost per core for network, even power cords, and including the consumption of water. 

We've been able to quantify virtualizing everything we can, instead of just assuming it, for ROI. We have been able to show quite a bit of good discipline around that. Again, on behalf of tax-payer dollars, I feel confident that with our shift to virtualization over a decade ago, we can definitely quantify our ROI. It's really simple.

Data-centers grow in a different direction now. They grow smaller and they become very dense, very lean, and that, unto itself, shows an ROI. There's really not a whole lot of assuming at this point that needs to be done. It's just there. You can quantify it very easily.

I have recommended VMware over the at least 12 years now that I've been working directly with them and VMware's hypervisor products. I've recommended it to a lot of folks, and this goes back to the days when other players were involved; companies like Virtual Iron and Zen. VMware has always been a leader in that space and I foresee that they always will be.

Although I work in government, we are actively pursuing VMware on Cloud and we are awaiting certain certifications to help drive the initiative. At the moment we're at a standstill with that.

In over a decade, from where we started until where we are today, I would say that this solution is right around a 10 out of 10. And I can confidently say that for any customer. Even for those who are just starting up, you're working with a product that's tried and true. It didn't just come out yesterday. It's been here for a very long time.

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.

Our use case is virtualization of hardware infrastructure, for return on investment cases. We have done pretty well with it. I'm really happy with it.

The mission-critical apps we run on them include SQL; there is a lot of file sharing; there are a lot of websites and web servers running on them. There's some big data stuff for big science. We have to be able to digest lots of data and then pull analytics on it at a high-level, and be able to show big data in useful ways.

With the current compliance options that I have to go through, it's very nice to have a lot of the encryption built in. It checks a lot of boxes for the federal level so I don't have to either bolt something on or have something on top of it. Having it native and integrated into the system makes things much easier.

Also, being able to manage a lot of servers in one pane of glass makes things a lot simpler. Basically, a lot of things just happen in one area. You can roll things over, move things around more dynamically, without having to hit multiple systems. Being able to manage it, in its entirety, is easier and better for us.

• VHA
• DRS
• VMotion
• Redundancy, failover, any DR situation
• Reducing the overall physical footprint for electrical needs, heating, cooling
• Money-saving, in general

In terms of management, it's getting better. There were recent changes with the infrastructure and the architecture, going from a physical vSphere vCenter client to the web interface. That has slowed things down a little bit, to be honest. It's getting better. With the 5.7 release they've optimized it, the menus are a little snappier, and it isn't as cumbersome to manage through as it was on the previous website or vSphere Web Client instance.

Also, reading some of the sensors in the hardware itself, that's where VMware does a really great job in the digital infrastructure and being able to scale things and knowing what's going on in vSphere. But not having to buy something from a third-party to scan the actual hardware components, like the hard drives and the port containers and fan speeds; not having to bolt something on and go through another vendor, would be helpful.

Stability has always been really well done with VMware. I have always been very happy with the stability of the system. You can set it up, you can check your optimizations there. But as far as weird issues with being able to convert things from physical to virtual, I've really had no big problems in switching that over. It's been really seamless to the end-user as well, just doing standardized conversions. It's been very stable and easy to manage.

I haven't had any loss of data in quite some time. Data is the key to everything. Downtime and loss of data are almost unacceptable in my current position.

I can always go horizontal, vertical is a little problematic sometimes. Horizontally, being able to add storage on the fly - even hot ad-hoc remove, if we do have some higher workloads or the like - we can always scale that without re-booting, with the newer operating systems. So the scalability portion is always on key.

Technical support is pretty good. I've had to use them a couple times for smaller issues. They've always been very helpful and we've always come to a solution.

The backup solution we were using at the time was Dell's version of IBM's Tape Library with Symantec Backup Exec. We were doing tape backups at the file level, not really any virtual snaps, so incrementals every day, fulls on the weekends.

As data gets bigger it's harder and harder to back up and that's where virtualization comes in, because you can start doing analysis on data changes and deltas a little bit better. Tracking and things that are tied into VMware assist digital backup solutions to be faster, more resilient, and have less downtime in a restore situation.

In my previous job, I was a Senior Systems Administrator for a credit union. We were running VMware 3.0, 12 years ago, and having that experience - and being bleeding edge at that time - helped me really be a catalyst in getting over to virtualization. That knowledge that I had in the past has always helped me, because I've seen VMware grow and do the things that it has done. Having that knowledge was helpful in setting it up from fresh, again: making the redundancies, knowing some of the pitfalls you have when first setting it up, and seeing a lot of the capital that you can lose if you don't understand what you're doing at that time.

I set it up myself. I can get technical support, but I can't have on-prem or anyone else.

Performance is somewhat relative, but an overall return on investment comes from not having multiple physical servers and from helping to aggregate a lot of the processors and RAM, and being able to use them more efficiently. We're not really worried about speed but about more efficiency.

I've been with them for so long, I never looked to much else. I've always been happy with vSphere and seeing what they've done for VMware itself. Intel products weren't really there, and I still don't feel they're there.

I've really enjoyed the Dell partnership because I do Dell on the back-end. The hand-holding between Dell and VMware works relatively well, with their hardware control lists and being sure they stay compatible for long periods of time, without having to spend money on new hardware. You can stay in your swim lane. That partnership is really a key to success.

My advice is "do it".

I rate vSphere at nine out of 10 because the HTML version of things needs to get a little bit better. The vSphere side of things gets a little difficult to manage; right-click, in some browsers, doesn't work as well as it used to. I'm seeing a little bit of general latency that we didn't used to get with the thick client. It's getting there.

Version 6.71 brought some of those performance metrics back, but it's just hard to get from one end to the other. With the ever-changing federal requirements, we need to really strip down and minimize what can be done in the browsers. It is getting more and more difficult, Java being the key thing. Going to HTML 5, that's a great thing because Java is going to be pay-to-play next year. And you don't have the vulnerabilities with HTML 5. It works symbiotically. We're seeing that progress. There are some growing pains, but it's getting there.

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!