VMware vSphere Reviews

The solution is primarily used to house VMs, virtual machines.

Virtualization changes radically the IT landscape. Rare are our customers who have not implemented it. vSphere is #1 in hypervisors and offers the flexibility and the fastness our customers need.

VM models is a great feature. It allows to create VMs very fast and already patched with the different configurations that the are needed.

The ease to move a VM from a host to another or even to another storage/DC is very convenient. That all this can be done while users work on the VMs is awsome.

The graphical vSphere vCenter interface is now in HTML. I'm not very found of it. Sometimes you can't find items and you need to log in to the different hosts.

Some work has to be done with this admin console.

I have many years (lost the count...) of experience with this solution, beginning with version 4.0, then 5.0, 5.5, 6.7 and finally 7.0 and use it daily.

The stability has been very, very good. I didn't have any crashes. There aren't bugs or glitches. I find it to be a very, very strong architecture.

In terms of scalability, I haven't really had the opportunity to address this as my customers are not very big companies and we have relatively small data centers.

I've never had to call VMware. You basically can find everything on the web. VMware's  website is very good and there is a lot of information everywhere about vSphere on the web with real experts of the product.

No

The setup is straightforward, only a few questions to answer, and you have your hypervisor ready !

Always in house.

The cost of the solution is relatively low. VMware proposes the Essentials kits which are very affordable for SMB companies.

I didn't really evaluate any other solutions. I haven't even really looked at Hyper-V, although my clients sometimes ask about it.

We are implementors and our customers don't sometime have any dedicated IT guy.  But, as vSphere works well once implemented, there's relativally less to do.

Virtualization of servers: Use of the solution to reduce the space usage in the data center. Also, for hyper-convergence, you can virtualize the storage.

Less space is need. It reduces the space of the infrastructure in the data center. The easy of use with reduced space provides a better use of infrastructure.

• vMotion
• vCenter

All the features in the vSphere essentials are great in helping the administrators manage the virtual platform.

The only issue with vSphere might be with the cost of its tools and the software.

I think that the solution with vSphere is complete.

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

There are several valuable features, including virtualization, of course, as well as DRS, High Availability, SRM, and vMotion.

It's really helped us out with our testing and development.

It's not perfect, and could use improvements with better stability and better support.

We attempted to upgrade from vSphere 5.0 to 5.5, but we weren't successful. We contacted technical support and, after a few tries, they closed our case and asked us to perform a fresh vCenter install and to create the inventory from there.

It hasn't been as stable as we expected.

Scaling it is not an issue.

Customer service needs a lot of improvement. They need to improve on keeping customers informed of their ongoing issues. They need more support for resolving issues rather than offering workaround and hitting the same issue again.

5/10 - I have opened tickets on a P1 support issue and it hasn't been resolved and I logged it over a month ago.

The initial setup is simple.

We implemented it in-house.

We didn't evaluate other options.

It's a good product, but you have to be patient with it when an issue arises.

The ability to aggregate resources.

We have saved money, reducing the number of physical machines. I probably would have had a couple hundred machines and I now have about thirty.

I can't even think of anything – it does everything I need it to.

I love it – over the years its been one of the most stable platforms I've ever dealt with. The platform is more stable than the OS running on it.

I think it’s great. It’s been able to grow even as we care for more and more patients.

I love it. I’ve had great experience with VMware support – they have never failed to resolve an issue or understand how we got there so I don’t get to that issue again.

I wasn’t there for the initial setup, but it's very straightforward.

When choosing a vendor we look at

• Support
• Usability
• Cost

You should also talk to someone knowledgeable not just online research – someone who can help cover questions that wouldn’t normally get covered.

Peer reviews are important but not the highest. There are a few groups I look to specifically, one of which is Spiceworks, but I respect the people I’ve dealt with.

• The ability to virtualize hundreds of servers
• Hardware cost

We are a small company so having a solution that bring the costs as low as possible is the most valuable thing.

Right now, I’m looking to implement v6 with Operation Management so that would be the next step, and maybe VSAN as well.

It's pretty stable, coupled with good performance.

Really high.

Luckily we have never had to use them – that says a lot.

We have always been using vSphere.

Setup was very straightforward.

We implemented on our own.

To be honest, I didn’t try Microsoft, or Citrix, so it's difficult to compare, but I'm used to it and it works – works great.

Compatibilities with software, with OS, we have some applications that are only running on XP and 32 bits. You need to do some research to make it work.

You get virtualized servers, which means you can run a bunch of servers on a couple of machines, so you save money and you save the environmental costs like power and heat. You also get the redundancy when you are using features like vMotion.

We have around 200 virtualized servers, so while if we had to buy 200 physical servers, it would cost a lot more compared to what we spend.

I would say that the internal notifications could be much clearer and the performance monitoring could be a lot better. They have an add-on but that costs money.

It's very stable – the only thing I have found is that it’s a learning curve. You need to understand all aspects of your environment. Some people are just network or storage or server related, but you need to be aware of all areas. In general, if you need to troubleshoot a server, and VMware is not around, and we have a situation, it’s going to be harder for someone to understand the solution.

It’s fairly scalable, as we have over 2000 people, 120 branches across different provinces, and it can support our environment.

Technical support has been fine when they figure out if its hardware or software – we have HP hardware, and so the challenge is dealing with whose job it is, HP or VMWare. Once we understand what the problem is, the support is very good.

I would say not complex but it’s not click click click, it goes through a wizard but once you need to architect the network environment it’s a bit complex.

I would tell say that if you have the money you should buy the solution and go with blades. Also, make sure you do a lot of number crunching to show that the solution is valuable.

The stability in general, and the manageability of features like high availability, storage vMotion, and vMotion configuration via distributed switches.

vSphere is a core product in our services. Building our services on top of this product provides us the ability to create stable, enterprise level services.

Currently none, as the development of new features is already going at high speed.

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

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

8/10.

7/10.

We previously used XenEnterprise and RedHat Enterprise Virtualization based on KVM. Due to the stability and lack of features, we switched.

It was straightforward.

We did it in-house by our infrastructure team who are VMware Certified Professionals.

Using the vCloud Air Network program, we are in a usage based program. So no upfront investments are made for licenses.