VMware vSphere Reviews

It's flexibility is most valuable, as we're able to move things around without downtime.

We now have 200 virtual machines because building a machine is so easy that anyone can do it. Now, our answer is "yes" for any requests for new VMs.

More automation would be good. You can leverage CLI or vSphere with the API’s so that allows you to do anything, but if you don’t have programming experience you are limited.

Pretty solid, like any technology there are gonna be some pitfalls, nothing is perfect, but there is no clear disadvantage for making it virtual.

Very scalable, I don’t think we’ve hit a limit. Were running 2000 virtual machines on 50 hosts and that’s one data center, and we haven’t nearly hit our ceiling.

I haven’t used it that often – they are responsive. It's pretty standard, not above average.

Pretty straightforward, I've installed vCenter dozens of times, and I've run into a few issues, but other than that its pretty easy.

We've looked at Hyper-V, Citrix, Openstack, but we continue to use vSphere, because it’s a market leader – it’s a stable company, not going anywhere.

25% of the server costs are now going to VMware; it's expensive. The stability of the company is always important to look at though.

• HA - for restarting failed VMs on good hosts
• vMotion - ability to migrate between different hosts
• DRS balances data storage and workload of datacenters

Reporting. If I lose a host, I have to report what was on that host, what was affected, and for how long. We create our own power state report providing info on hosts, and I would like reporting for what VMs were affected and what was the fault, what hosts were affected and restarted by HA. You can get third-party reporting, but it would be great to have it built-in.

Extremely stable, only issue is the type of hardware that we run it on. When we get a vendor image (HP, Dell, Cisco), they inject their own drivers into hypervisors, and it is only time we see issues. It’s so resilient, that these problems aren’t even evident and they can go unnoticted.

Very, very good scalability. Four years ago, we had 300 VMs across 32 hosts, now we have 2000 VMs across 132 hosts.

From time to time, we have relied on them, mostly for troublshooeting specific VMs when a vendor wants to blame resources. Whenever we have bad memories or drivers injected by vendors, they’ve helped us remediate those issues.

I was involved in a redesign, which was very straightforward and easy. We just changed the hardware from rack style to blade, expanding all hosts and underlying virtualization layers. It was seemless and customers didn’t notice anything different.

Even with no reporting, it's near perfect, because reporting would just make things easier, and not having it doesn’t impede performance.

It’s changed my life – I’ve been in IT since 1989 and very few technologies have been life changing and VMware is one of them. It has given me my nights and weekends back. It separates the software from the hardware, and having a hardware failure is not catastrophic, so I don’t have to get up and leave church, whenever I have time. Very few applications can fully utilize the computer hardware but VMware can.

I think room for improvement would be in the site recovery manager. I believe that VMware’s moving more towards using VMware appliances, as opposed to having to load components on Windows servers. I have had some issues with this – I need more tools to allow me to access database features on their appliances. They are sealed at this point.

Very stable.

Very scalable.

Technical support, when I’ve used them, have been very good. Typically, the first person who answers the phone is not very knowledgeable, but afterwards, and once they escalate the case, they are very helpful.

No – I have been using VMware since v3. I choose what I like and I stick with it.

It is somewhat complex – for building an enterprise system, however, you can get the free version, and it's actually the same version you run on your enterprise, it’s the same software.

A quality product is number one, and a strong company is number two, good support. If a company is not going to be around, then I won’t choose to spend millions of dollars on my equipment.

Flexibility and inter-operability with other technologies are valuable features.

• Our ability to attain our 100% virtualization goal
• Being able to consolidate and distribute our infrastructure across multiple data centers

One of the biggest thing is support for non-Windows platforms, especially virtualized desktops which is big across Department of Education. It's only just been released so it's one of their most immature offerings and has room to improve and grow. A lot of the recent improvements have been leaning towards small businesses but in government we don’t have those challenges.

I’ve been a VMWare customer for over a decade and we’ve experience more uptime when we were dependent on physical infrastructure.

Scalability is great – it allows us to be more resilient and more disaster resay organization. We can move workloads across the organization and keep uptime high.

Technical support has always been good – extremely responsive especially in the DC area. They are used across government and we are able to even get onsite support when we need it.

Initial setup was easy and any change we make to the environment has been easy. We have made changes to VMWare based on our discoveries. Government usage can be very different than private sector so were able to communicate different feedback from private sector clients.

VMware has been the hypervisor of choice for a while, now we are seeing off-premise cloud technology like AWS, Azure and others. VMware is trying to allow you to move workloads on premise and off premise to those kind of technologies.

Everything is going in the right track so I would ultimately recommend the product. Peer reviews are 10/10 – extremely important.

We have the ability to run within our block environment with a private cloud capability, enabling us to realize our automation roadmap.

We’ve consolidated over $10 million for licenses, $12.2 million in maintenance, and $10.3 million in labor costs – it's a tremendous cost-saving.

I would like to see non-cloud native apps to be able to run on infrastructure and not be dependent on the underlying VMs for stability.

It improves our stability.

We can dynamically scale within hours to meet our business demand, which use to take months.

We include a mission-critical support model, which gives us a very rapid response. So the response time is very good.

Very complex, as there are a lot of moving parts to get into service. We simplify it for the end users but it is complex.

I would say that the total cost of benefits are not just across virtualization but across general business categories. Don’t cut yourself short from using the solution to drive cost-benefits in multiple financial categories.

• 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.

Cost, for one thing, it greatly reduces from physical servers.

Time, it saves me time. It’s also much easier to manage.

More storage capabilities would be great. Also, more hot-adding of devices would be helpful.

Fairly stable – we have issues, but overall it’s a very stable product that doesn’t require much legwork to run.

Not much experience, so I wouldn’t know.

They’ve been extremely helpful. Basically, we create a ticket and they assign a technician that usually calls us back within an hour. They usually do a great job of diagnosing and fixing the problem.

We were using hardware before, we started that in that development phase and realized the benefits of virtual environments and started migrating over.

It’s fairly straightforward.

I always look at the technical support, product availability, and product stability when selecting a new product. We just looked into vSphere though as there’s nothing else like it.

Nobody’s perfect, but it’s great for our needs, and I would absolutely recommend the product.

• The cost, as we can run lots of servers on minimal hardware.
• Easy to recover from failures. For example, to replace a memory card, just pull out blade and replace it.

• Smaller footprint
• Ease of keeping uptime
• Reliability

I like web interface less and less, and miss the client interface.

Licensing that makes it easier to justify getting the features I like, such as the enterprise feature where VMs auto balanced among hosts. This needs to be done by hand because that feature is too expensive.

Rock solid, just had one VM file decayed, but no other issues.

Use it very little, but can scale much more. Only have five or six blades, with 10-12 hosts, and 140 VMs.

They're good, friendly, and professional.

It was straightforward.

I had used it before at a former company two years ago, so decided to use it at my current employer, so I didn’t take the company through an evaluation process.

Make sure you have good SysAdmins who have experience with VMware, as this will save money.