VMware vSphere Reviews

vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) is the server that controls and manages your VMware environment. I would suggest using this over the vCenter Server Windows install. It has the advantage of easier install and manageability and seems to be the method most preferred by VMware, as well.

Much of the management of the VMware environment can now be done from the web interface, but you can still use the vSphere fat client, which is still my preferred method of interacting with the VMware environment. The web interface is better than in past iterations, but still just lacks that little something that would make me voluntarily to move to it on a permanent basis.

VMware will assist your organization in managing computer and storage resources, and you will be able to shrink your physical environment significantly making it easier to manage in the long run. So don't expect immediate returns. There is a high price to be paid for licensing, hardware, configuration, and knowledge acquisition.

VMware interacts with a lot of various hardware and has a vast array of capabilities and it seems that new capabilities are being added all the time. I would like to see more documentation and assistance provided by re-sellers to assist in the initial design of customer environments.

There are 3 levels of licensing: Standard, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus. VMware is very pricey and really the most useful in very large virtualization environments. It takes a lot of hardware and configuration knowledge. If you don't already have this in house, obtaining it can be pricey as well. 

If you aren't already familiar with virtualization environments, I would suggest taking a course and/or doing a lot of reading before deciding on a license and configuration.

The best advice I could give is spend a lot of time designing your environment to receive VMware. Read everything you can get your hands on, and take a good online course or attend one in a city near you. Be aware that you will need to know a lot about computers, storage, networking, and security environments to determine the best design for you. 

Download the latest ESXi version and build a test lab. You get 60 days to play with the full gambit of features. Then get a lot of advice from vendor specific engineers, HP, EMC, Netapp, Cisco, etc. because the hardware you choose will run into configuration issues specific to the vendors you choose to use in your environment. Don't go into this thinking you will see immediate returns on your investment. This is a long term design decision.

Ability to automate deployments. We’re very new to this, but the potential from an automation standpoint will save our company money and IT time. Our ROI will see an impact with the potential that vRealize brings.

They understand end-user needs and provision tools that let us do day-to-day deployments and enhancements. It’s a product that continues to grow based on customer needs.

The web tool could be improved, if that’s the direction they’re going, then they need to put more resources towards it to make it good. If we’re forced to use it based on hardware, it should be improved.

Good experiences. With any tool, there’s room for growth that could enhance it.

It's extremely scalable. Our limitations are our own creativity. The key is understanding the business need. If you understand that, scalability is only limited by forecasting. You must know your own products.

Great tech support. I love those guys. Every time I had a ticket, I could escalate, and they’d work in tandem with other vendors (i.e. NetApp) to find solution.

I wasn't part of initial set-up, but I believe it’s complex based on the senior engineer’s experience. For example, right now the metrics to upgrade is complex, requiring certain elements.

Access the enormous amount of virtual apps they have to get practical performance instead of just the KB to deploy.

From the admin perspective, the centralized management/administration of the environment. Additionally, a much smaller data center footprint, streamlined machine deployments and flexible resource sharing rank right up there.

It is hugely more efficient for daily monitoring, patching and upgrades and deploying new machines. With more than 100 servers we would have a couple of full time folks just for patching! Server reboots during business hours are far less disruptive to the end users. We are also in the midst of a large e-commerce project and vSphere has allowed us a ton of flexibility with development and test environments that we wouldn’t have in a physical environment. A lab environment that very closely mirrors production was far easier to design and build than the physical lab we had been struggling with for years.

We are a small shop but still pay the big bucks for licensing vSphere products in order to gain the features that fit our goals.

I'm looking forward to a review of VMTools updates in vSphere 6, which have hopefully been revamped. We currently have a somewhat dated change process so tools updates are hampered by a process that doesn't quite fit and requires more after hours work that is necessary.

We implemented vSphere 4.1 in October 2010 and upgraded to 5.1 in June 2013, then to 5.5 in June 2014. We are beginning to review vSphere 6. Alongside vSphere, we also use ESXi 5.5.0.2718055, and vCenter 5.5.0.2646482.

No – the original deployment went very smoothly with vendor assistance. Upgrades since have been smooth as well. We did a lot of homework before embarking on any upgrades.

No. The virtual environment has remained incredibly stable over the five years since the original deployment.

No. The original deployment consisted of virtualizing 32 machines. We now have over 100 VM’s.

We periodically have regional reps reach out but they don’t seem to know much about our environment. When we call in, for whatever reason, the folks answering phones are very polite, respectful and efficient at directing our calls.

Periodically we have an issue where we have to call in to tech support, but many times are able to Google the issue and find an answer on VMware’s site. When we do have to call though, tech support has been great to us. They definitely stick with an issue until we say it’s resolved.

No, we moved from a completely physical environment.

A little of both. It was complex because we didn’t know a lot about it but being involved in the setup with a vendor proved itself to be pretty straightforward.

We implemented with a CDW team since we hadn’t done any virtualization. They were extremely knowledgeable regarding not only VMware but Cisco, Microsoft and Linux which helped us design an infrastructure that suited our needs well at the time.

We had one Citrix server at the time and I believe we did a very high level evaluation of Xenserver, but VMware was more in line with our virtualization goals.

Do your homework so you learn as much as you can about virtualization concepts as there are many nuances that are quite different from the physical counterparts. It’s easy to get an ESXi host stood up and install a vCenter management server – then you decide to stand up a “few” VM’s and when you figure out how easy that is, you are off and running. But what about your network configuration and HA or DRS to name a few. It’s way easier to learn the concepts ahead of time than to have to research a bunch of little issues after the fact. Google VMware and/or vSphere and have at it!

I like vCenter Server since you can monitor and control your whole environment from there. Also, the Web Client is nice to have, but I have heard from my colleagues that there are a lot of issues with it and it doesn’t work as good as it should do to make the C# client invane.

I think in our own way, it has it made the administration a lot easier, reduced maintenance time and made us more flexible in terms of large and quick deployments.

From what I have encountered, the Web Client should be improved so it loads faster locally, and certainly over a VPN connection, as I have experienced a very slow loading when using it over VPN.

The company has been using it for over three years, starting with v5.5, but I've only used v6.0.

Very good, I have opened a few calls with VMware already and I am very satisfied. I like the flexibility to open calls from the portal.

No previous solution was in place prior to v5.5.

We implemented everything through our in-house administrator team, but I wasn't involved.

• The deployment of Distributed Virtual Switch
• Hyper visors for 5.1, 5.5, 6.0
• We use these to deploy our product (Cisco switches)

• Very flexible and scalable SDN solution
• We can add hypervisors with VNX and switches for a CSA fabric solution; it's very flexible for that
• We can scale up Nexus switches for ACI (application centric infrastructure)

• Right now, the NIC teaming feature has only four roles, only supporting it for one role (IP route hash), but it should include all roles
• MAC pinning feature should be there in NIC-teaming
• It needs a more friendly UI, as right now it's difficult to see what we’re maintaining

It’s a hyper visor residential product, and the AVS status is shared between hosts immediately through vCenter, making it more stable.

Using vCenter and AVS, we can create easily, and transparently, a VMM (virtual machine manager) domains. In general, we can scale easily.

No direct experience.

It was a very easy initial setup, including the ESXi host.

We must meet a real-switch behavior and functionalities. Go ahead and definitely purchase it.

• Virtualization
• Clustering
• High Availability
• All the core functionalities

Allows for substantial increase in server density, reduced spin up times, allows for more remote site management. Recoverability in a server crash situation is substantially improved as well.

User interface and management. The ability to manage the underlying infrastructure is very poorly thought out and implemented. They moved from a C client to a web interface, but still require critical functions to use the client.

I've been using it for seven years, since it was ESX v3.5.

WAN management of sites has some intermittent stability issues.

I would rate it fairly high, as much as I complain about the changes their back end team make, their front end support, and sales guys are very communicative.

We used Microsoft Virtual Server before ESX3.5 was released. We switched because it was not an enterprise grade option.

The setup for the current datacenter was complex, not because of VMware but because of the hosting limitations provided.

We had it initially set up by a vendor team, and I spent four months afterwards fixing their work. I would advise that you verify in advance the skills and knowledge of the implementors.

No attempt to calculate ROI has been made on the current environment.

I am attempting to build an environment around ROBO licensing, which I would advise anyone who has remote offices to investigate. It should cut our costs bytwo-thirds when I am finished.

No evaluation was done.

• vMotion
• High Availability
• Storage vMotion
• DRS

We have v5.5 in production, and v6 in test.

As we are resellers of VMware, we will be migrating customers to v6 in the future. This is to keep in line with new features and better performance in new versions

I would like to have the old vSphere client back as it is a great client to use. Sometimes the web GUI can be a bit clunky along with the newer client.

I used it for two months in a test scenario.

It was fine.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Technical support with VMware is very good. Once they have the logs from your system they will come back with a solution fast.

We used a previous version of VMware.

We've only deployed v6 in a lab environment, but it was easy to deploy, and there was no major differences to v5.5

We did it in-house.

None as of yet but hopefully we will see one.

No other products were evaluated.

I would advise you to implement it as I believe it's still the best in virtualization for expandability and usability.

• Bare metal Hypervisor
• Management
• Mobility of VMs
• Distributed resource services - HA, DRS; Network and Storage

Hypervisor & Management in the new vCenter Server 6 with Platform Services Controller gives us a huge opportunity for scalability. It's also helped improve our SSO functionality with one click.

It would be nice if they could have offer a straight/forward deployment of vCenter from an OVA, not from an ISO.

I've used vSphere for about 15 years, and vCOPS for two years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

I have not needed to contact them yet.

I have not needed to contact them yet.

I hadn't used a previous solution.

It was straightforward.

An in-house implementation was done. All the pre-production implementation tests were made on VMware Workstation 11. Regarding vCenter 6, it is a must to install the VMware OVF tool in order to find, and make, the needed settings in the appliance *.vmx , before starting it. Having in mind the vCenter appliance is intended for ESXi deployment, in the production environment it was straightforward.

The ROI is much better with the VSOM.

From the position of an enterprise partner of VMware, it is not really easy to convince the end-customers of the VSOM benefits, having in mind the price tag.

No other options were evaluated.