VMware vSphere Reviews

Virtually anything, it doesn't matter if you're trying to cross the balance and diversifying the application, that can't be done, won't be done or challenging the vendor in that regard or you're looking to scale. Virtualization is almost the only way to scale both vertically and linearly because applications are often bound by linear growth where you need to throw more at it in order to increase capacity. Some of that is where you need to ask for how much resources I can get on the fly. A lot of hot plug, a lot of hot add of memory, being able to be very flexible within an environment where traditional architecture from the past can't do that. Can't take a hard drive, can't take a motherboard out of a computer and put it in another one.

vCenter and VMware's products allow us to look at things and focus on things that we usually didn't have time for because you were architecting solutions based on hardware. This is VMware mix and hardware agnostics, so it's how fast you want to go.

Being able to itemize by using vApps, vApplications, to do starter priorities so that way if you had dependent NFS and database mounts, applications won't come up prior to that. If you're a one man shop it allows you to turn things on in a way that most people would have to sit there and wait for the next one to go up and the next one and watch the console. Peace of mind, that's what we really use VMware for.

I would like to see much more of a, maybe, application intelligence. Unfortunately you have storage vendors who are doing that for us right now with your XtremIO and storage IO and cards inside of something that has some application intelligence. To make MySQL work, SQL work with storage that you can just buy, but VMware being able to characterize database platforms based on use cases of MySQL or SQL, they're very different. Being able to tell the difference between the two and say, "Hey look, this will work here, but it won't work here." That would be nice.

It's challenging using MySQL with vCenter because Linux as a whole is a latency sensitive OS, so you're only as good as your slowest moving part. Doesn't matter if it's disc, memory or processor and sometimes it's shortest path to storage. In order to make MySQL work you need micron second processing and in some cases when you have monolithic sized databases you need to be able to scale that at the same time.

So, unfortunately with the way MySQL plays with storage and the way VMware is right now, it's where I went with the application intelligence, there's a lot of, not taboo if you will, but doesn't really work. You're not going to find a lot of use cases because, unfortunately, our business falls into a different sector if you will, by running Linux as a primary OS.

So, better support for newer Linux kernels would be always great. The fact that they've released open tools and made it the supported platform for just about every Linux distribution out there now sees that they're solving the problem like the VMXNET3 adapter. The driver's not there, the machine's not online. There has been some pitfalls but VMware's been able to, from a company that supplies an application and an OS, solve a lot of those.

They are listening to the customer. It's very difficult to say what's still left because after today you never really know, that could change.

Currently we use vCenter Operations Manager which is VCOPS, if you will, and that drives our storage analytics based on what's performing, where our bottlenecks are, how to quickly identify why is it slow? Is it memory? Is it computer? Is it solid state disk? What is the balance of which your application is not performing. We also use vSphere Replication Appliance, along and with vCenter Orchestrator to use the set it up once mentality. The machine is created at primary site A and then with Orchestrator it actually goes through the series of doing the replication, setting it up and then getting that VM set up on the other side. A cheap and easy way of doing it for free.

Incredibly stable, so much the point of there's times where we may not know that we're running at half-capacity or full-capacity based on a failover that happens on the back end. That says enough for not only architecting and choosing the right harbor vendors but it also shows that you can actually be failed over on your appliance and business still runs as normal. Things keep working. That constant non-disruptive change if you will.

In terms of evaluation for technical support from VMware, you get what you pay for. You have 24/7 support which allows you to leverage call centers in Ireland and other locations where they surprise me every time. There's always something I learn from every support case I've ever had to open. Even if it's just to kick the tires and make sure we're doing things sort of right.

I was luckily enough to come into a virtualization shop. They pretty much didn't want to do the physical server aspect anymore because again it doesn't scale. Walking into a virtualized shop is very easily, winning that battle can be very difficult. I've been on the other side a handful of times. It's really just showing the value, in which case, VMware can fix the problem. You got to be very specific about what problem you're fixing. Is it latency? Is it processing power? Is it being able to provide DR? Is it being able to move your workload to the cloud or move them to a different data center?

It's amazing how only a couple months out of the year you need DR. You don't need it 12 months out of the year. Moving from a standard virtualization shop, having everything on prem, leveraging the cloud, that's the next step. When you ask me about how would I introduce VMware, I think about introducing it now as a cloud based service provider. Not as an on prem, hey, let's scale this very easily.

They've been able to push out little things as the management agent which allow you to work through vCenter and allow you to connect through vCenter to see all your hosts and make automation very, very easy. On top of that they give you the vCenter Applicance so you're no longer tied to a SQL license. You don't have to worry about using SQL Express and running out of space or running out of license space and then re-licensing it. Then they've also solved the upgrade path. Every time a new B, C, D, whatever version of vCenter comes out I don't know how many times the Windows version blows up. Seeing a company being able to say okay you know what? Let's take a step back. Let's use a very similar OS and let's allow you to utilize vCenter just like ESXi, it's the same platform.

Anything that solves a problem. Find out what your biggest problem is and see how VMware can help you solve that problem. There's more principle architects out there that, especially with everything that's being added to the platform, that would be people specialized specifically in things. VMware has that capacity and the capability to help you solve that problem. Getting the vendor involved, maybe not necessarily a service provider but having VMware actually evaluated. They're going to tell you what you're doing wrong.

We operate within a 10% market of people who don't use Windows. You got to find somebody out there and one of the biggest problems you'll find is you won't find MySQL documentation in terms of what people are using and how they're using it. It's this big, there's not a lot of information that people, in a private sector, are even willing to share or in the public sector. They're still trying to figure it out themselves. Finding out who's successful is pretty much who's willing to write your review. That's something I'd like to contribute in terms of what we're doing to put it out there, let other people know who come to you guys and say, "Who else is doing this?" We can't be the first people.

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.