VMware vSphere Reviews

We're able to centrally manage our infrastructure.

Its ability to tie into Veeam is really slick – that makes using Veeam really easy.

I'd like to see a different client. I know they are doing the HTML5 stuff with the web client, which has potential, but it could be better.

I think it’s great – we've never had any issues and we've been using it for a long time, about five years.

I think it's really good, it's good for our size and for our future growth. Our company has around 12,000 users.

I haven’t had a lot of interaction because I haven’t really needed to, but when I have they’ve been responsive and support has been good.

No. Our parent company has Hyper-V and it’s no good.

It’s pretty straightforward, not complex at all.

I would highlight compatibility with hosts, ease of use, consistency, reliability – all things that are better than Hyper-V.

Peer reviews are significant, but you can tell the most from firsthand experience.

It only breaks predictively.

• It's saved us costs for power and cooling.
• It's given us automation capabilities for server provisioning and management of configurations.

I'd like to see more trickle down features from vCloud/vRealize to the main feature suite.

Tentatively favorable – we haven’t had a lot of outages just wary about future upgrade ability.

I would go with unknown at this point – we're kind of small, at best were medium sized, so we're not sure what our scaling needs will be. It is not close to the maximum.

Good technical support – response time was good/ average.

Can be straightforward, but it can be complex, depending on the size and what you're trying to do.

It's easier to deploy if you have someone very knowledgeable. Use peer reviews; they're very important.

DRS and vMotion are the most valuable features.

Recovery from hardware failures is easier than before, growth is much easier, and it's very easy to scale out.

I don’t know that I'm looking for any improvements. I'm looking to use additional features that are already out there, and different additional products that they have out there.

Good – rarely have any problems.

Very easy to grow out and scale.

It depends on the issue, sometimes we call the support and talk to them but many times it's just an issue of going on to forums and see how other people are dealing with the issue.

Very straightforward – no problems setting up.

Potential vendors have got to provide a benefit which is hopefully not an additional cost. Or, at least be able to make up for that cost somewhere else.

Peer reviews, are very important. I prefer to start with those before I contact the vendors.

The clustering and High Availability features are very useful and valuable.

After implementing VMware alongside some HP solutions, the total ownership cost was reduced significantly, and operational time was also reduced, which resulted in increased productivity and efficiency.

Management features for multi-vendor products for complex environment need work.

I have six years of core experience in design and configuring VMware solutions.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

9/10.

9/10.

We started virtualization with Microsoft Hyper-V v2, but VMware products are more stable and scalable.

It's straightforward.

The first implementation was done by a vendor team, and after that we completed three upgrade project cycles in house.

The cost of licensing is bit on the high side.

We also looked at Microsoft Hyper-V v2.

As a manager, it’s easier for management, as I don’t have a lot of physical servers with them possibly failing. I’ve been slowly getting all the servers virtualized by adding more hosts.

The disaster recovery solution is so much better to use, to bring systems back up. I’m one person, so I’m managing 22 servers on one set of hosts, and it’s so much easier when I can do it on just one.

I don’t think we're large enough to use it like some other firms do, so v5 is perfectly fine for me. We’re running v6 now, but we really don’t even need that.

I’ve been running it for more than a year now.

We have to get another host because of growth, and I had some issues with my backup software in the beginning, and since then, it’s been running great.

We’re growing only because we’re realizing that we need to switch from physical to virtuals, plus we are launching a few new products causing for new products. Now we’re going from two to three hosts. They’ve been great so far.

I would’ve said it was excellent until the last case. vSphere was running a bit slow, and the last case it took the guys weeks to get back to me. It was a minor issue. and perhaps that was why. The diagnostic logs were sent, and it took weeks before they got back to me.

I had help, but I would say it was fairly straightforward. At that time, I hadn’t even been to a class, so it was very new to me.

We had two vendors come in, and one was quoting a SAN that was ridiculously expensive (I don’t remember who), but the other vendor, which was BPI information systems, came in with a cheaper SAN solution, because that’s where your cost is. We ran it and we’ve had no problems. My environment’s probably smaller than an enterprise, however.

The cost of hardware and maintenance is something we always look at. I was am one person, and it was getting too complicated to keep the physical servers running for, so we needed to switch to virtualization.

I reviewed Hyper-V, but everybody uses VMware. We really only looked at VMware though as consultants recommended it. I knew I wanted to go there.

The support could be a bit better. I would do the same thing that I do.

I don’t have a very big network because I’m so busy, but I count on my consultants and information system networks a lot. After, I’ll research a lot on the internet to back up what we’re doing.

VM snapshot consolidation. It does that extremely well.

Reliability, it just runs without you worrying about it all the time. I don’t have to tweak it, don’t have to really do anything. It’s easy to use as well.

I really don’t have much to complain about as we don’t need very much, so we really are happy where we are right now. However, they could do with bringing back the regular GUI.

Fairly stable, doesn't crash, and does what it needs to do. It’s great.

We’ve only scaled a little bit. We’re not super large, but it definitenly is somewhat easy to scale up. The hardest part is the physical connectivity to disparate networks, which VMware can’t really control.

Excellent, it’s very smooth. You call with your problem, you get to the right person quickly, and they dive in and resolve the issue quickly. If it’s not a VMware issue, they’re very good at letting you know where the issue resides at.

It’s fairly easy to set up. There’s always a little bit of a question of what comes first, the host of the virtualization of the vCenter server, but it’s not too hard to figure out.

I’d highly likely to recommend VSphere, but the only thing that’s prohibiting the switching is cost, as it definitely is expensive.

We always look at responsiveness, availability, and willingness to work on a partnership when choosing a provider. I believe we continuously still look at updates, and sadly we still have some Hyper-V. It’s hard to cost justify switching over for vSphere, as Windows Data Center is just so cheap. But vSphere is definitely better if you ignore costs.

If I’ve never worked with a product, and I’m comparing apples to apples across the board, I definitely have to look at what peers are saying in helping me reach my decision.

The command line power CLI module is a great feature, but the PowerShell module is my preferred management tool.

The automation that it provides is the best. Also cost savings, because you don’t have to go with third-party solutions as long as you have people with the ability to script within your enterprise. Then, you can create your own tools and access APIs very easily.

That’s a difficult question because there’s so many features that have been developed but not released yet. I would like to see more workshops with training opportunities at no cost to the customer. That would be very helpful.

Very stable.

We kind of just started off large, and kept getting larger.

It’s decent. Fairly responsive, not super great but adequate.

We were on Hyper-V, and it sucked. The manageability of vSphere far outperforms Windows Hyper-V, at least the 2008 version. VMWare is more stable, it clusters better, and is just better in general.

For me, it’s manageability. VMware offers so many different ways to manage their solution. You can use UNIX-like command-line interface to access the host, can use Pearl, you have a lot of different options at your disposal.

I don’t know.

We hired a consulting firm to come in and actually develop the environment when we moved from Hyper-V.

There’s no better alternative. I would absolutely recommend vSphere. I do think that they’re the most expensive, but well worth the money.

I also think peer reviews would be an interesting way to research, as I haven’t ever encountered a site like IT Central Station before, but I can definitely see the value of moving forward with it.

• vMotion
• DRS
• HA

It uses less data-room space, and has lower cost and power consumption, giving us much bigger cost savings.

I wish they would maintain thick clients and web clients, so you can choose which to go with.

It's great, just natural hiccups during the upgrade process, but we straightened out those issues.

It's fantastic, able to go as big as you want to go, so long as the backend and databases to support are big enough.

Used tech support for upgrades over the years, and they were good. They were better before partnering with EMC, and not a little more drawn out (ticket, open case, priorities, etc.). Don’t work with TAM.

I was not involved when they did the initial setup. In a prior job, in a big environment, the setup was smooth in moving to 5.5 from 4.1

Budget appropriately, so look at yhr infrastructure, and have no fear on the VMware side because it's a great product.

Nothing is perfect, and something will always have an issue.