VMware vSphere Reviews

Truthfully, I'm not using many of the available features. My needs have been small in that we just needed to virtualize our environment and manage it effectively. VMware vSphere has served that purpose greatly. I’m sure what I get out of vSphere, though, could potentially be gained just as easily via other virtualization platforms available today, but at the time I felt those were too immature to risk. VMware just worked with little to no issue, so I trust them going forward.

The largest benefit for my companies that have used this is the consolidation of our physical server footprint. Never would I thought I could run as many VMs on a single host as we do today.

Overall I’m very happy with what the product brings so I can’t suggest any major improvements. However, I’m very disappointed in VMware’s decision to push management to a web-based vCenter client and away from the standalone thick client. The web client is just terrible in so many ways, mainly on a performance basis. It is very slow. I also find the thick client much easier to navigate and work with my VMs. A large user population shares my sentiment as there are a number of posts in VMware’s forums regarding the issues with the web client. I hope VMware realizes this and either greatly enhances the web client or moves back to the thick client for management.

I have been using it since vSphere 4, so approximately five to six years.

I’m sure there were issues to contend with originally, but as the product matures it gets easier and easier.

I’m sure there were issues to contend with originally, but as the product matures it gets easier and easier.

I’m sure there were issues to contend with originally, but as the product matures it gets easier and easier.

It was pretty straightforward, from what I recall, but I did not do most of the initial setup. I assisted a colleague who took the reigns.

I've rarely had to enlist support, but when I have it’s been what I would expect.

It was pretty straightforward, from what I recall but I did not do most of the initial set-up. I assisted a colleague who took the reigns.

My first environment was set up by a single colleague with my assistance. The only advice I can really give is to really know your requirements for the systems and software you intend to virtualize and build a proper sized VM environment to host them. Oversubscribing resources is, in my opinion, the biggest concern and something that happens easily. Also factor in proper storage built to handle the I/O load of a virtual environment. Lastly, build your VM environment to factor in an N+1 design to ensure if a host fails, the remaining host(s) can handle the load of all VMs that were running on the failed host and always allow for a 15% overhead of free resources under full load.

I really did not handle the financial aspects of my VM environments, but I do know VMware is pricey. These days, from a price point, I would take a hard look at MS Hyper-V as they are catching up with VMware fairly quickly.

When I first looked into virtualization it was back when VMware released vSphere 4. At that time I was interested in Citrix Xen and MS Hyper-V. I felt at the time VMware was the industry leader and was more mature so I trusted them above all others. I’ve been happy with the choice since, though for cost purposes I am really interested in Microsoft’s Hyper-V solution.

Cost considerations aside, be sure to properly scale your VM environment above all else. This is true regardless of product.

Cross vCenter vMotion is a valuable feature.

It allows you to perform vMotion from one vCenter to another vCenter without the need for shared storage, like a cut and paste.

This was not possible until version 6 and is built upon Enhanced vMotion.

It requires L2 network connectivity.

Cross vCenter vMotion can be particularly useful if you have migration projects, or you simply want to shift workloads to different location.

It can be particularly useful if you have plans to move from a VCSA to a Windows Platform vCenter and vice-versa.

If you have shared resources with public/private cloud, you can move them by establishing several vCenters.

One improvement could be to have the vMotion independent of the SSO Domain.

With Cross vCenter vMotion, it is a requirement to have both the source and the destination vCenter on the same SSO domain. It also requires version 6 and above. You cannot have this between a version 6 and 5.5.

I still experience lag with the web interface

We've found that the most valuable features for us are:

• vMotion
• Replication
• Portability

It's improved our functioning in three areas:

• Deployment
• Backup
• Disaster Recovery

One way VMware could improve on this solutions is to re-incorporate the FAT client along with the web client.

I've used it for nine years.

Deployment is done with future needs in mind. But with day-to-day deployment, we haven't had any issues.

There have been no issues with the stability.

We've been able to scale out at deployment time to match our predicted future needs.

Customer service is very good.

Technical support is very good.

No previous solution was in place.

The set-up is very straightforward.

We used in-house staff to deploy. Depending on the implementation, you would decide then on a vendor, if necessary.

I don’t have a specific number on the ROI, but it has been very good.

I would recommend discussing an ELA with the vendor.

Think of the entire environment when making this decision - deployment, storage, backups, etc.

• vMotion
• HA
• Snapshots

In the past without virtualization, it normally took several hours to get a new server built, including cabling, racking and OS imaging. Now we can use templates with many OS flavours and we can get a new server running in few minutes.

Currently we are struggling to keep the storage capacity under control and as we do not use thin provisioning our capacity is always a challenge, but the actual used space by the guests is pretty low. We need to find a way to go to thin provisioning and keep that under control and implement automation on the capacity management and have threshold alerting.

I've been using VMware for seven years.

We have no problems deploying vSphere.

So far, I only had problems with stability when we implemented a third-party backup tool that uses VMware snapshots to take backups. It brought some instability to some guests at the beginning and it took us some weeks to get to the root cause and things back to an acceptable level of stability.

This is a very good solution and I work for a company with a global ELA with VMware. But as our contract and all our commercial team is in the US, we have a limited number of vouchers for training and events in Brazil.

The technical support is good and they always provide good suggestions and technical recommendations and the response time for critical problems has always fair been fair.

I have never tried a different server or datacenter virtualization solution before.

I was not a part of the initial set-up or project team. I work on the operations team and I have only been a part of migration team when moving from old versions to newer ones, but I have never had problems.

You should have good capacity management and you might have at least two clusters or more to separate your guests by tiers or have a good notion of resource pools to keep the resource utilization in good shape.

You should understand what is your demand and plan your capacity and resource allocation carefully to avoid double work in the near future.

• vMotion
• Encapsulation
• Higher usage ratio of hardware
• Storage virtualization

As a consultant and service company, we can manage our own infrastructure with minimal effort, deploy new applications very quickly, and do tests very easily.

In general, the management features need to be improved. vCenter has just gotten really big and overly complicated.

I've used it for over 10 years.

We've encountered no issues with deployment.

We haven't had issues with instability.

We hardly ever have issues with scalability.

We've found customer service to be average.

Technical support used to be better. The response times are OK, but the solution has too many needs too often.

We've been using VMware since the beginning.

I don't have any issues with initial setup.

I do implementations myself.

Carefully think about what features you need now and in the future, because licensing costs depend on that.

Do a PoC and compare it to other solutions.

There are several features we've found valuable, including:

• DRS
• SDRS
• vDS
• Resource pool sharing

By engaging virtualization and vSphere's advanced features, we've started to effectively manage workload and resources, resulting in better performance with fine grained tuning.

One of the features I would like to see is less constraints on the fault tolerance feature. Version 6 may have this, but we don't have it yet.

I've used it for four years.

We haven't had issues with deployment.

It's been stable for us.

It's scaled sufficiently for us.

We haven’t have many interactions with customer support. For the ones we had, it was satisfactory.

We haven’t have many interactions with technical support. For the ones we had, it was satisfactory.

We already had knowledge of the product on the team, so it was easy for us.

We're working with a Hardware-as-a-Service model where we're responsible for the software and VMware is responsible for the hardware. We implemented vSphere together with the vendor.

We considered using Xen/KVM, but we didn’t want to spend much time on the configuration and wanted to start working on the product out of the box.

I would recommend analysis of different options and pricing, including public/private-cloud models. Depending on your application and needs, you may not need such an advanced product as vSphere Enterprise.

The two features we've found most valuable are vSphere's reliability and stability.

Primarily, we've been able to save on energy costs. It also gives us easier migrations when upgrading infrastructure.

We had some stability issues, though they were due to bad hardware and not software.

I've used it for four years.

We've encountered no issues with deployment.

The problems with stability were due to hardware problems, never software.

We haven't had any issues with scalability.

8/10

9/10

We started with VMware, so we never used a different virtualization solution.

The initial setup was nothing but easy. The system was running in just a few minutes.

We implemented it in-house.

We advise in general that the Essentials Plus pack is the best option for the majority of our customers.

No other options were looked at.

Nothing to be afraid of. Everything about vSphere is advantageous.

vSphere's performance and stability are its more valuable features for us.

It's helped us to include automatization in all processes, thus reducing maintenance hours and increasing energy savings.

The price is too high right now.

I've worked with vSphere for 6years now.

I'm a vExpert so I don't have any issues with deploying it.

With v6, there were some stability problems, but after an update to a later version it's been stable.

That's one of the great things about vSphere -- its scalability.

Customer service is insufficient.

Technical support is outstanding.

I previously used Hyper-V, but it isn't stable and is a complex solution.

The initial configuration is very easy, and the deployment of centralized management is an assisted process.

We implemented it in-house.

You only pay for what you need, so there are a lot of features that we will not use.

If you want to sleep well, get vSphere.