VMware vSphere Reviews

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.

• DRS
• High Availability
• Overall reliability

The best improvement overall is the ability to rapidly provision servers due to the decoupling of servers from physical hardware. We have saved countless hours of time at the data centers racking and stacking servers.

Recent releases have had significant bugs, which ends up significantly delaying the deployment of new versions. In particular, with vSphere 6, there is an all-paths down related bug that is preventing us from upgrading. The VMware Update Manager component of vCenter desperately needs to be deployed as part of the vCenter Server Appliance, not requiring Windows Server and SQL Server.

I've used it for six years.

No issues with deployment. It is almost too easy. The same with subsequent upgrades.

We have not encountered any issue with stability, however, this is a direct result of watching for reports of others experiencing issues. We take a very cautious approach to upgrades so that we don't experience some of the issues that would impact stability

We have not had any issues with scalability. We have seen significant performance improvements over time allowing us to increase our consolidation ratios.

All aspects of being a VMware customer have been excellent. We have a very engaged sales team who will bring the correct resources to the table when we need to discuss solutions.

The technical support is excellent. The few times we have engaged technical support have resulted in the appropriate engineer being assigned quickly and the person has followed through to resolution of the issue.

We previously used VMware Server. We switched to vSphere ESXi because of the scalability and management enhancements. Additionally, it didn't need a separate operating system to manage.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was almost too easy. Once vCenter is up and running, creating the first cluster was simple. There is very good documentation from VMware and many other resources available online to assist with selecting the correct configuration options.

All aspects of our VMware environment have been implemented using in-house resources.

As a small organization, we don't track specific ROI. What I can say is that we most definitely would have spent a significant amount more money and time if we continued using physical servers instead of virtual servers.

For rapidly growing organizations like ours, virtualization is critical to meeting internal and external customer demands. The licensing might seem to be expensive, but the stability and excellent technical support make up for the costs

We considered Red Hat's KVM offering. The different subscription models (license plus maintenance for VMware vs annual support for Red Hat) would have resulted in more money spent on Red Hat in year six, and every year thereafter.

I would advise anyone who is interesting in implementing virtualization using VMware's products to try it. We started using the free licensing without support and were extremely satisfied with the ability to rapidly provision resources. We then purchased licensing and support to better manage the environment and have grown to 50 licensed hosts.

vMotion, which lets us migrate from one server to another, is a really beneficial feature.

We are using

• less hardware and
• less power

as a result of this solution.

Improvements need to be made in the performance manager.

I have used it for over 10 years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

5/10.

5/10.

I didn't use any other solution.

Setup was very easy.

We used a vendor team who were 5/10.

I advise that you take your time and get the most you can for the money.

This was the only solution we looked at.

Spend time learning the product before going into production. Buy the vCenter software. That is a must.

It's allowed us to consolidate our hardware.

• We spend less money on hardware.
• We're able to get better use of data center space because our hardware is consolidated into a smaller footprint.

The VSAN storage could be improved.

I've used it for over 10 years.

No issues encountered.

There are only slight issues.

It's very good.

It's very good.

No previous solution was used.

It was a straightforward initial setup.

Know what your needs are and then license accordingly.

No other options were evaluated.

It's important that you understand the technology before using it.