VMware vSphere Reviews

Accessibility and the ease of use is unparalleled. The clustering and ability to move virtual machines around on the fly has been amazing.

We’ve been able to consolidate our footprint and decreased the number of hardware hosts we were running.

I think everything we’re looking at should be addressed in 6. I don’t like the web client, I’m sure it’s fine, but I believe 6.0 addresses that.

We just switched, but so far it’s been very stable.

Not yet, we just switched over.

I submitted a ticket about four weeks ago, and the guy called me on a Saturday at midnight. It’s been fairly hard to get hold of somebody, and when they get ahold of you, I understood about three of every five words they said. I wished it was better.

We were just running Hyper-V, and the size of our team required more. The need to consolidate our servers, as VMware is a lot better with resource management, we didn’t want a large server cluster, so VMware was needed in order to maintain it well with a smaller staff.

Peer reviews actually a huge point in us switching over from Hyper-V. It’s such an old product that it was hard to find any support for it online, and the change we’ve seen in vSphere is night and day. There’s so many peer resources available that it’s been easy to transition for us.

It's straightforward, and the documentation is nice. It's also got a good footprint on the web, that makes it easy to look for other users for knowledge and advice.

I always look at the price before purchasing technology.

Nope, it was the best from what we heard.

I would say from a 4 of Hyper-V, I would easily give this a 7 or 8, as the support definitely improved drastically.

When selecting a vendor, do your research and develop relationships. If you know the product and can get in contact with POCs, we want to see the product before we buy it.

• DRS (compute and storage) is one of the best features for practical purposes.
• HA is a great feature, but if you keep hosts patched, HA doesn’t come into play. It’s not a day-to-day feature you use.
• Ability to vMotion across clusters. We took smaller clusters and consolidated them into one mega cluster because of the ability to vMotion from other clusters live into newly-created clusters.

The consolidation. Pre-VM, we had pain transporting applications from one physical machine to another. Now, we can consolidate machines that aren't using computer resources into an environment where they can all exist without performance degradation.

I'm excited to see in 6.0 the enhanced vMotion capabilities to connect our Phoenix, AZ and Culpepper, VA datacenters. It will have the ability to geo-vMotion instead of just metro-vMotion machines.

Now, it's much better than used to be. HA doesn’t even come into play, but you must manage the environment to maintain that.

There’s some bugs (zero uptime bug, and RAM disk issue), but those were resolved. They were hiccups/annoyances.

Phenomenal. Multiple 32-node clusters and 6.0 can support 64 nodes. Don’t know if we will get that large because it gets unwieldy, and will be hard to vMotion all of that off one host onto another and patch within a reasonable amount of time. It’s so condensed in clusters that it makes it hard to maintain.

Periodically used as sounding board for things we want to do. Not high marks, though, because first-level support is not knowledgeable. I would rather rely on peers in blogs, forums, etc. Also, sometimes they're not communicative.

Involved in the beginning with v2.5, not overly difficult (in ESXi had to come up with some scripts, because at the time it didn’t have a GUI).

Consider the scale of environment, especially if you're in a position to have closeted datacenter. It’s self-contained and cost-effective.

vSphere is great, I’ve made a career of it.

The management piece of it, being able to see what all my servers are doing from one central place.

Higher return on investment, reduced cost of hardware, and central management which is key. The most important part is that it's nimble – I can deploy a server in minutes.

The product is perfect the way it is for us, for our needs.

Very stable – extremely so.

Easy to scale – able to scale out as we need.

Depending on what technical level you are on, they are responsive and very knowledgeable. Any time I have to use them a solution is forthcoming within 24 hours.

Somewhere in the middle – you have to know what you’re doing and have some knowledge. One thing with these products, is that the more you use them the easier it is.

We looked at Microsoft, and we looked at the viability of the product, technical support, and ease of use. VMware was chosen because of its ease of use, and the product itself.

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.