VMware vSphere Reviews

The self-service portal, number one, the ease of deployments, the ability track and monitor how quickly you can provision a virtual machine guest, and the Chargeback model affiliated with that.

The simplicity of deployments, the speed to market with our application portfolios, the ability to give our developers the ability to quickly provision or stand up in an environment without having somebody to hold their hand.

Some of the features I would like to see, future enhancements of the vSphere product which starts with Virtual Center. The ability to manage more than a single host because right now, they're a challenge, because we have so many deployments, we can only manage one Virtual Center per one VMware host box. That's a limitation of the product. We would love to be able to see, we have various locations scattered throughout the US and international. We would love to see Virtual Center being able to manage more than one host at a single location because right now, we're challenging with having to login to Virtual Center at each location, instead of a single pane where the Oracle exist under one Virtual Center, our motto.

We currently use the vSphere EXSi along with their vCAC products. We are currently evaluating their vRealize products and we are also evaluating the vCloud Air.

Some of the advantages of the stability of their product is how robust VMware is, in a sense. The ability to scale on a fly. Without having to touch the system, you can literally increase the compute resources on the fly. I mean, we've been running their products since 2002. I have not had any major issues or outages since, and we've deployed this solution globally.

In my impressions of some of the capabilities and scalability of the vSphere products, it allows you to, without having to invest in a large hardware portfolio, it gives you the opportunity to scale on the fly through consolidation efforts.

We were challenged a couple of years, several years back with figuring out ways to cut cost and save money through ingenuity and automation and innovation, and this is one of the tools that was recently released in the early 2006. That's when VMware, I want to really feel like they really ironed out their niche and made this product usable and feasible for our infrastructure. By doing so, we saved a ton of money.

The efforts required to set up vSphere is extremely simplistic. In our market, we have a large turnover from time to time, so it's easy to train and educate those on setting up the vSphere products from the ground up. It's very simplified. The installations are very easy.

Typically, what we do is the installations are done by our own premise resources with little or no experience, so that goes to show you how easy and simplistic the product is to install and or to manage overtime.

There were other competitors out there that we've evaluated that just fell short of this implementation because of their feature set or some of their security vulnerability.

I have not tested Virtual Volumes. That's why I'm here, to learn more about the Virtual Volumes feature along with the NSX platform. I'm excited about it because we have a huge SAN infrastructure where we would like to be able to move workloads from point A to point B and I think that's a good starting point.

I've seen a lot of hypervisors out there, but 10, hands down, in the market.

If I were to recommend this particular product to some of my peers or co-workers or somebody else in another industry, I would clearly state the reliability, the stability, and the ease of use, is which they would fall in love with and they're always innovative. I mean, that's what we love. Every year, we come back to the conference and you learn something new. There's always some good takeaways.

Typically, I would like to hear from the source. I always find myself as an IT technical resource. I tend to like to talk to the people that's actually doing the work and I like to read some of the guys that have the hands-on experience. I don't go out and read a bunch of documents or books per se. I like to engage with the resources that have actually deployed, implement it, because those are your viable resources that have the hands-on experience.

• High Availability
• Storage vMotion
• Strong support loads

• Scalability
• Cost reduction
• Efficient resource utilization

I've used it for two years.

VSAN was not as reliable as I expecting and it crashes when we get to 90% memory.

VMware support escalation tickets are so slow to answer.

It's poor.

We switched because in most cases, support was slow, so we had to find forums and internet articles for solving our issues.

It was straightforward, just following the step by step guide.

We did it in-house.

VMware products are expensive.

• Microsoft
• Citrix

Look at the scalability and pricing, as well as the ease of implementation.

It gives us great management capability and it integrates well with NetApp storage.

There's a lot of expertise within the legal industry for VMware, and we’re early adopters of VMware since 2.0.

Also, we can spin up VMs within hours instead of going through a paper trail of physical servers and install process. This has drastically reduced our procurement timeline.

It's hard to say because now that Dell acquired EMC, which owns VMware, we have to see how that flushes out.

It just works, and is not buggy.

It scales well.

It's pretty good, and because we don’t use them much, this reflects on how well the product works.

We used a third-party installer, which made it straightforward. But it was complex because of planning involved.

Understand your requirements and see how it fits in, especially with Hyper-V as a competitor. Take into account third-party support.

It gives us flexibility in deploying infrastructure. With vMotion, we're able to move critical VMs around our cluster infrastructure, which we manage with DRS.

From a compute and storage perspective, we're able to use our resources much more efficiently.

it’s so simple that it’s idiot proof.

We never have a problem. It’s almost set it and forget it. Once configured, it takes care of itself. Usually any issues are with hardware, which can’t be helped. With vSphere running on UCS, we’re thrilled.

We’ve needed to scale and have had no problems in deploying nodes into clusters and getting their profiles. It’s very simple.

We've not had to engage them in some time. In the past, we never had a bad experience. We had complex tech issues which we worked through the night and they stayed with me on the phone.

I was not involved, but it would be simple to apply consistent set of policies and get them to function as a single entity.

It’s incredibly mature and simple. It’s one of those things where you say “why not?”

We use vMotion a lot and use vCenter to manage the entire set-up.

Our entire banking operation is virtualized-- the application and data centers are all virtualized. It’s become easy for us to switch between servers if there's latency or slow responsive. We can switch to servers with more resources.

We’ve been using it for last six years.

We bought NetApp FAS storage and vSphere together, and it’s worked well. All our critical applications run on vSphere and FAS.

It goes hand in hand with growth of our business. We've used the enterprise edition and moved from 5.5 to 6.0 with no issues.

It’s a more stabilized product. Once configured properly, you don’t need support. In the last six years, we haven’t had to call them at all except for the initial setup.

It was complex because we experimented by keeping data and system volumes separate. We don’t replicate the system volumes frequently. We were able to do it though, and we used only 1/10 of the bandwidth with the combination of FAS and vSphere.

Microsoft Hyper-V is giving them a run for the money as vSphere is more expensive. I’m already on enterprise version of Hyper-V, running both it and vSphere.

VMware is not as proactive. They’re not willing to correct some problems I've faced. So VMware should be a bit more flexible in their engineering. I always tell them that with the architecture I've put in place, I can’t use SRM at all, but whatever SRM does, I can do manually, yet I can’t automate it.

• High Availability, so we're able to failover in the case of hardware failure
• vMotion, for live migration from one server to another without interruption
• DRS, on par with or better than other hypervisors

• Reduces the size and cost of our physical data center.
• It gives us a smaller footprint, and we can do more with less.

vROPS should be part of the product and not something extra. There’s a bunch of third-party applications that can do the same thing for less money. If VMware wants people to get vROPS, it should be included. Price is an issue.

It's rock solid. We're 100% virtualized and we run everything in this architecture (FAS and vSphere), but you have to deploy it correctly.

It's infinitely scalable, if you have the money.

It's great, except for AirWatch.

Upgrading from v5.5 to v6.0, there were a couple of areas in which we had to be careful because the instructions weren't presented clearly, especially with the new vCenter architecture. You have to be careful, but after that, everything else was easy.

Over the last couple of years VMware has included more in your license, but support costs start going up for those products. Hardware costs go down, but licensing starts to cost. CTO’s start looking at open source because of cost, but architects don’t want that.

It just works. Just get it. There are other hypervisors, but the amount of time you put into it to get your job done, you’re going to save money on the back end with vSphere.

The 3D Graphics isn’t something I have used yet, but will be very nice for VDI environments. Also, the improvements in vMotion will bring on some major changes.

In general, VMware improves the way almost every business using it operates. Server virtualization cuts down on operating costs by a lot, makes servers easier to manage, and offers increased redundancy.

I think the product licensing is very confusing still and should be simplified on a sliding scale. i.e. one to three servers are essential for four to 10 standard, etc. Instead of licensing per core.

I was using this product at home during the early testing phases and once released we rolled this out to a few of our customers.

No issues encountered.

In the early builds there were some stability issues, but that was resolved early on and is not an issue.

No issues encountered.

9/10.

10/10.

I have used Hyper-V, but it does not even come close to comparing to vSphere. There are plenty of features you cannot do easily in Hyper-V that vSphere makes a breeze.

Very straightforward. Just like moving to any other vSphere release.

We did it in-house. We are a VMware partner so we set this up for our customers.

The licensing can be a little strange, since the per CPU licensing will hopefully be gone in the future. Just make sure to know exactly what you need to make sure you purchase exactly what you need. Also, it is pretty easy to use a licensing calculator.

No other options were looked at.

You should work with an existing VMware partner to deploy, but seek proper training or coursework for day to day management.

It's a stable product, e.g. if I lose the entire SAN all the VMs still run. They might pause but only after they try to write to disk. After the SAN has been reconnected, VMs resume as if nothing happened.

As I work as a consultant for Advania Sweden, I meet a lot of different customers with different challenges. But all customers can agree that delivery time for a server resource to the organization has been reduced from weeks to minutes.

I would like to see an additional licensing model based on size restraints rather than functionality. Also, a foundation licensing model that includes both NSX (Network virtualization) and VSAN (SAN virtualization) but with size restrictions. Then my SMB customers could benefit from our large customers' features.

I’ve been using VMware’s virtualization solutions since 2001, and I haven’t found a more sturdy solution yet, and I have tried most of them out there. Due to its stability, it’s one of the cheapest, if you look at the total operating cost. You can even replace the underlying hardware without downtime.

None, and I do all my deployments from either USB or PXE.

Only one time due to a bad third-party network driver, but here VMware’s technical support showed it’s colors and the matter was resolved quickly and smoothly.

Not yet, but I haven’t gone full scale yet with VM in the 10K area.

They respond to emails quickly and resolve my problems (most licensing issues in the past).

As well as the network issue, when we had to restore a SQL database with the wrong parameters they sorted it out.

I’ve tried a lot of different solutions, as a consultant my specialty is incident and disasters, I've been assisting in trouble shooting and most of then had switch to VMware due to it’s reliability.

If you don’t have a complex infrastructure you can do a next, next, finish installation and it would run fine.

I always install it myself since I like to run the latest software before i go to production. If there are any hiccoughs, I like to deal with them in pre-production, rather than finding them when I upgrade later on.

My customers ROI lies between three and nine months.

When you do a budget make sure to include administration time, what level of SLA they require and based on that choose right level of features.

• OracleVM
• Citrix Xen
• Proxmox
• Hyper-V

• Make sure you have a strategy so you could utilize a hybrid cloud solution as you grow.
• Build your segments as managers and users
• Look beyond licensing cost and calculate administration and support time
• Make sure you have a good naming strategy that can scale - I had a customer that named his hosts after the seven sins in the bible, so when he needed to grow beyond seven hosts he had to invent an eighth.