VMware vSphere Reviews

The most valuable features for us are HA, DRS, and SDRS.

We have reduced our number of physical servers from 180 to 20, saving us cost and resources in our data center.

I'd suggest improvements in a couple of areas. First, the Web Client is too slow. Also, they need to improve vRealize Operations Manager.

I've used it for almost 2 years.

We were unsuccessful in a few setups, for example, installing on SD cards in some UCS blades. I think, though, that the problem was related to hardware and not to the setup process.

It’s very rare that the hypervisor has stability problems.

Only with big VMs -- over 64 GB of RAM or with disks over 2 TB -- are there scalability issues.

I've not got enough experience to comment on the level of customer service.

I’ve always received good service form technical support.

I’ve used different hypervisors and also previous versions of vSphere. I think that vSphere is the most complete and stable solution for enterprise customers.

Personally, I find the initial setup too simple, but I’ve worked several years on different versions.

I’ve implemented vSphere in my company and for several customers.

I think that in the past there have been some mistakes in the licensing policy. I hope that in the future it will be simpler.

We have migrated from the previous version without evaluating other products. For our development environment, we are evaluating whether or not to migrate to a product without license costs.

For a customer who needs to have a stable infrastructure that's scalable, for very critical applications, I recommend vSphere without a doubt. I would also recommend that you request a VMware Partner to design and implement the solution.

vSphere has been deployed in many of our customers. It improves drastically DC consolidation and proper use of available resources. At present, virtualised customers are still far from fully leveraging the potential of vSphere in part due to lack of expertise and fully understanding the concepts of virtualisation from an architecture point of view. It also improved resiliency and ease of asset management as most customers were able to reduce role segregation and have seen an opportunity for having DevOps since human resources became more available due to some degree of automation.

Having the ability to deploy fault tolerant VM’s with up to 4 CPUs is fantastic as it goes one level up from a business continuity perspective. Previously, VMware was covering, with just vSphere, backups and DR, and now it also covers a properly functional fault tolerant offering.

Single Sign On is another feature that is enhanced and solves much of the older problems, either in deploying or managing it. Cross vendor integration is in my opinion one of the best features. Although all these features are welcome and a must, they come at a price in terms of licensing.

I’d like to see a better web console or rather, transform the web console in a real single pane of glass for the whole infrastructure instead of having to go for vRealize Ops Manager. Other vendors are providing this already and vSphere (vendor) has that capability. I’d also like to see solutions such as vSAN in vSphere, really take off. It has a lot of potential and since it has been jointly done with other hardware vendors it somehow lost track of what the real purpose was, offer a whole very simple and very effective solution. Support for Virtual Volumes will be the next big thing, and although it is already implemented, it will take a while to see its light in production in customers.

The web client is sometimes slow and sluggish, other than that customers have no complaints around stability if the product is used as intended.

This is one of the strongest points in vSphere. I've had no problems with scalability. Although it is dependant on the underlying hardware infrastructure and its scalability/growth/space/etc.

Customer Service:

It's very good.

Technical Support:

Very good once you’re passed the initial “script-reading-far-far-away” operators.

My customers have used all available solutions. Some move to vSphere, some move away. In the end it will be about costs unless very well justified by a business need for high resiliency and market name.

Customers who move to or implement VMware are already aware and skilled on the implementation level. It is usually very straightforward.

My company or a partner company does the implementation. With the amount of available documentation and training, the is no excuse for a poorly deployed platform on vSphere. Know how on platform usage is a different story.

Considering the consolidation and virtualisation portion of it, for a Greenfield, very good. For brownfield and considering license costs and removing the benefits of virtualisation, it is an ROI nightmare, but focusing on the product itself vSphere delivers a good ROI, lower than competitors but still OK.

Start with the lowest and upgrade if, and only if, absolutely necessary. Customers will find that the standard edition is more than sufficient for their needs until they are internally ready to move forward to a cloud operating model.

All in the market. Hyper-V, KVM, Oracle VM, PowerVM, etc.

Start with the least expensive Licensing model and upgrade as you need. Change your operating model to virtualisation and fully leverage its potential. vSphere has it all in one package and can really change the way IT operates. We’re 12 years into virtualisation on x86 and I still find most of the virtualised customers not happy with what it offers since they don’t know how to utilise it.

• Core virtualizaton
• Basic hypervisor functions with HA

We are able to scale up far better with densities of 10:1 or 20:1 and provide robust, flexible computing to our increasing application demands.

Stability and manageability need improvement. The core product has not changed much over the years and has large deficiencies in manageability and how they implement certain features. The basic hypervisor works OK, but all the management and bolt-on products have issues and at times overwhelm the core hypervisor.

I've used it for seven years.

We have repeated reliability issues with anything other than core functionality.

SRM has been a disappointment in its scalability and reliability.

We pay for business critical support and that is still bad. I think VMware's biggest weakness is their support organization - 5/10.

We had Hyper-V, but the older versions had issues. When the 2016 version releases, we are going to re-evaluate it.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward.

We did most of the implementation ourselves, but we did have some initial consultation on some design thoughts.

VMware is consistently expensive and their pricing arrogance is what will drive us and other customers away. Compared to physical systems, it is a bargain, but compared to other solutions, it is losing its appeal due to pricing.

The core hypervisor is decent. Many issues will be with management and bolt-on products.

Usability is the most valuable feature.

There is need to resume the C# client.

I have used this solution for six years.

There are no stability issues.

There are no scalability issues.

I would rate the technical support at a seven out of 10. In practice, the IT has faced vCenter related problems very rarely.

We still continue using our other solution. We did not switch.

The setup was very straightforward and simple.

The costs are inflated for small and medium-size businesses (SMBs).

vCenter is the only way to manage vSphere. If we speak about enterprise virtualization infrastructure, there are no special preferences.

The most important accomplishment was the cost savings that were achieved by server consolidation and eliminating dependency on the physical server's environment. This also facilitated our disaster recovery by easy replication of the VM images from one site to another.

VMware's high availability which supports our SLA, VMware on the fly features like LUN expansion, P2V and API integrations are the most valuable features.

The solution could benefit by expanding the CPUs and memory from different physical nodes. A more mature dashboard is needed; currently, we rely on third-party VM Management Solutions but most of the features have matured since we first started using it in 2007.

In the early years, we faced few issues but in the last four years, the environment has been quite stable.

The software has been scalable, most of it depends on the physcial server's capacity.

Technical support has been excellent.

We did not use another solution; we started out with VMware and we now have Hyper-V and VMware.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Pricing needs to be competitive since Microsoft Hyper-V has come a long way; they are both around the same price range.

We did not evaluate other solutions, it was the only leading product in 2007.

If you need to meet your business SLA, then there is no second choice in virtualization to give you peace of mind; it is easy to manage, scalable, stable and has APIs to integrate with all the backup solutions.

• DRS
• Distributed virtual switches
• vMotion
• HA
• Extensibility - you can ring in many ecosystems

• Agility and availability
• Near-zero downtime
• Incredibly easy to use - good on one hand, but on the other, it means that when you get outside use cases, they usually target for vSphere, and you can set yourself on fire. For basic install on autopilot, it does what it does, but if you want to do something inherently complex, move out of the realm of easiness.

I’d like to be able to expand the capability of SMP fault tolerant VMs. That’s a game-changer when talking about business-critical applications (i.e. Oracle). If we had this, we’d no longer need an Oracle rack (will have better solution with this improvement).

It's extremely stable, and solid. No problems with respect to the hypervisor itself.

As a consultant, most horror stories come from people doing things they shouldn’t do. It becomes so easy, people take certain things for granted. e.g. a VM snapshot file showed that a user had let something run for three years.

That’s the kind of stuff that makes it unstable.

It's got excellent scalability. There are no applications that can’t be virtualized now.

VMware have one of the most consistent tech supports out there.

It was very easy.

This is where it loses points on sometimes perceived costs; the competition has done a good job of promoting the notion of a “VMware tax”, but the benefit is there with their licensing scheme.

Buy it, and you will be hard pressed to find a better combination, but you need to understand it, and have a plan. As simple as it is, don’t just go out and buy.

I find that the Virtual Center Management, iSCSI support, and VMotion hot migration are very beneficial. 

With these features, we have faster server deployments, additional security for development projects, and easier backups.

The fact that we are having faster server deployments has improved our organization. We are also have better security for development projects and are seeing easier backups.

1. Native multi-platform management client (not WEB based) - Last improvements in this area are huge. However, some users prefer a native client. Please VMware, listen to your customers!
2. A fully **automatic** and lightweight Virtual Center. Another time this has a huge improvement in last releases. However, a more automatic and simple deployment is required.
3. Automatic on-demand Hypervisor setup for running some workloads on PC workstations at night. This function doesn't exist at time. We really like to see it!

We have used it for seven years.

We did have some issues, so I would suggest a full automatic host server setup using DHCP and PXE without configuration scripts.

No issues encountered. In fact, the system has been very stable.

No, not with dedicated servers. Yes with ephemeral servers- hundreds of PCs that we like to use as ESXi hosts at night for executing virtual machines focused on computing simulations.

No, we haven't used a previous solution.

The multi-path is very complex with iSCSI and non-existent with NFS.

We did it in-house.

Purchase only the cheaper solution with support. I don’t recommend high-end licenses.

• Hyper-V
• Oracle VM

Contract only experts or use an external consultant.

The features we most value are:

• High availability (in ESXi)
• Disaster recovery (via SRM)
• Self-service portal via vRealize automation

The solution has helped us to achieve the following:

• Faster time to market our services
• Lower overall TCO

Commercially, the stock keeping units have changed with the latest iteration of the product.

We have been using the solution for five years.

We had some stability issues but VMware support has made the experience manageable.

We did not have any scalability issues.

I would rate the technical support as 8/10 mainly due to the speed in delivering resolutions to concerns encountered.

We did have a previous solution but it lacked the functionalities.

The setup was straightforward and vendor support is available from planning, to setup, to maintenance.

The cost might be higher than other products offered by the competition but, if implemented correctly, it is worth the investment.

We evaluated the Oracle VM solution.

This software is just another tool to get things done. Ensure that you have laid out your requirements and have carefully evaluated your priorities before acquiring a cloud solution.