VMware vSphere Reviews

• 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.

The most important feature is high availability (HA) which monitors the system and restarts virtual machines to a healthy host whenever the system senses an imminent hardware failure.

Another great feature is DRS which is VMWare’s load balancing software which keeps our virtual machines running on the server cluster in a balanced manner. This automated system keeps all our systems running with a high uptime.

We can bring up brand new servers with a couple of mouse clicks when it used to take a couple of days.

Cloning large servers will require just as much space on the virtual volume as the original server. It makes it difficult when your system has limited space.

We have been using the solution for one year.

We didn't have any real issues with stability, our system uptime is at 99.99 percent.

We didn't have any real issues with scalability. Anytime we need more storage or computing power it is relatively easy to just add another drive or physical server to the clusters.

Technical support for the product is top notch because the solution has been around for many years and most of the issues/bugs have been experienced by others and we have the benefit of those prior solutions.

Contacting support is relatively painless and there is a deep bench of experts.

We did not use a prior solution.

The initial setup was relatively easy, basically installing the VMWare operating system.

The difficult phase was doing the actual VMWare conversions because we were not sure whether the legacy servers would convert over properly.

Another difficult setup was the networking aspect because each VLAN needed to be specified and the network settings needed to be correct.

For pricing and licensing I would consider getting the Enterprise plus edition and the proper Windows datacenter licensing.

We did evaluate other hardware options such as a hyper-converged solution (Nutanix, Simplivity, HP) and better storage options (Nimble, Tegile, etc).

We also evaluated other software options such as Hyper-V.

Our current solution met the needs of our users and the price was very reasonable.

Do as much up-front planning as possible. Make sure you analyze the IOPs of your servers and plan for computing power, bandwidth and redundancy.

Take into consideration whether the DR and backup solution can support the new environment.

Check into whether the operating systems being used can be virtualized and whether the application will work in that space.

SAAS, SAAS, IAAS using Virtualisation of infrastructure

Work life balance as systems administrators got flexibility, robustness, scalability of current infrastructure.

The licensing part. VMware must simplify the licensing mode to help selling to business and additional products.

Almost 10years

Nope. Smooth all the way.

Never. Vmware was the easiest system i ever deployed. Did it without training.

Not yet. As long as i have the infrastructure, the system works like magic. I can add hardware and servers as i want.

I only have the online website customer service. Otherwise i have no support from anyone. Tho i love the product.

once i had to upgrade and i was adding some new hardware from DELL the company in Kenya sent very good guys to work on them directly. We have been good friends with the guys tho they are no longer in DELL.

I was deploying servers from bare metal. Once i got VMware, i have never looked back.

It was smooth. I had bought symanted brightmail and it could only deploy from VMDX. So i had to learn the hard way. I likes it. Once i learnt about VMware, i have helped no less than 20 administrators to deploy VMware in Kenya.

Dell M1000 full blade power edge, deployed by the manufacturer.

It is superb. Level of hardware investment went down. Scalability and power is superb. Next am deploying BI and warehousing on DELL poweredge using VMware and later a 4 tier (a true 4 tier) datacenter in Kenya.

This is a place VMware have to work on. Bringing in products or upgrading is difficult to sell to the finance guys.

I fell into VMware. I so far like the marriage.

Keep going guys. Best thing under the sun.