VMware vSphere Reviews

• DRS
• vMotion

However, without entire feature set we couldn’t manage.

It reduces the time needed to roll out new solutions. Also, it provides a single platform for our API integrations.

It needs color coding (e.g. production/non-=production, tier levels), as it treats everything the same.

It's pretty solid, most issues are resource and Java related, because Java is a resource hog, but it runs pretty smoothly.

There's no concern of scalability, and it gets better with each version. The only issue was with the FT portion, but with 6.0 no concern because it’s capable.

Zero issues with tech support. Our TAM answers after some time, but it's not a negative because they're dedicated just to our company.

The setup itself is simple, and the only thing is finding the minimums; it won’t tell you minimums prior to upgrades, and you won’t find out until machine dies.

It lose points because it lacks color coding, the web client is clunky, and the interface itself makes it harder to find stuff.

You should run the SQL scripts outside the intial install, cluster SQL, cluster vCenters and run as VMs, and set DR rules to match.

vMotion, because you can move off failed hardware, and if you have a maintenance window, you can put everything onto a physical server, and then put everything back

Less downtime for all end users, so if it fails you can get it up on the other machine quickly.

I don’t like the web client, as it's real clunky, and not so instantaneous.

It's very stable.

You can go as big as you want

It's very easy.

If you don’t have it, you need it because everything should be virtualized.

• HA
• DRS
• Storage IO control
• vMotion
• Storage vMotion

On the server virtualization side, we’re able to provide more services with less resources because we can take one server, virtualize it, and put 12 virtualized machines on it, and have them play different roles. It’s allowed us to do more with less.

The web client could use some tweaks, and the should move from flash-based to HTML5.

It's very stable, no hiccups that weren’t addressed by support and updates, no show stoppers.

It's highly scalable. We needed to add HP hardware, and an HR cluster to accommodate recent growth, and it was just as simple as adding to the cluster, so highly scalable.

It's responsive, but a few times we had issues with their tech knowledge and troubleshooting steps. We had to escalate the issue and then it was resolved.

It was straightforward.

It's a good solid product. If I had to virtualize anything, it would be my choice and and would use anything like MS Hyper-V.

Make sure hardware on compatability matrix that VMware uses, because if use something not on list, will run into driver issues unnecessarily. And if planning a brand new data center, those are things you want to look at.

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.

• Stability
• Ease of deployment

We have been able to consolidate 70-80 physical servers into much smaller ESXi virtual servers. We’ve reduced our footprint to a much smaller virtual environment.

I can't say as I'm still trying to figure out the product fully.

I have been extremely impressed by the stability of the solution.

It's extremely scalable. The ease of being able to add a new server or host in, and get it compatible with what's going on gives us a lot more functionality to get that host up and running.

Fortunately, I haven’t had to use it much, but I’ve gotten good response, usually we get someone on the phone and they are able to help us with our issues.

No previous solution was used.

I inherited our production environment, but I set up the dev environment and that was up and running in a day. The time from installation to functional environment was about a day.

I think as a company VMware is committed to innovation and stability and from a setting up the environment standpoint, you want consistency, but from what we’ve seen VMWare has that.

The entire virtualization element has allowed us to utilize the hardware more efficiently.

Instead of having one application for every physical host, we can run 30-40 on the same physical host.

I think the updates allowing me to run through the VCSA appliance could be better.

Fantastic – I love vMotion.

Its been working out great for us.

Our technical support is through HP, but we've had very few issues, and it's been great for us.

It was way too easy.

We look at the price point per performance, performance first and then how much it costs.

We looked at Red Hat but the VMware solution worked out better for us.

• vMotion
• DRS
• DB switch

We’re able to leverage it for our main corporate IT infrastructure and deploying across nine smaller remote offices. We can cluster storage and make it HA-aware, and don’t need local IT staff at remote office.

For most part, pretty good, but UI could be improved. Has GUI geared towards Linux, would like to see GUI for Windows so that Windows admin can install.

Rock solid. Small issues where ESXi host re-booted, but probably related to internal configuration.

Can add multiple ESXi hosts and expand from there. We started with a minimum three node cluster with HP as backbone for storage for blueprint. We were able to move from a 1GBPS network 10 GBPS. We have now gotten up to 30-40 total nodes between all sites, but the main datacenter has 15-20 nodes.

We contact them once in a while, and have always had a good impression. Some colleagues though, have had issues however.

We were a Hyper-V shop but switched, because more robust. VMware is a gamechagner in virtualization.

It's a little bit complicated at the beginning because we did some of it on our own, and we could have engaged professional services to ease that pain. Some of the complications from a networking piece, which were a little confusing. Also confusing, was the difference between thick and thin provisioning. Logic says you should thin provision, but after taking the classes, we probably should have gone with thick provisioning.

The product is good, but the licensing gets confusing. As a technician, I don’t want to have to worry about the licensing side. If I purchase something, just tell me how many licenses I have left whenever I add a server, just something simple like that.

The HA and DRS capabilities are great. Right now, we’re able to basically use the ESXi and move all the blades without the users ever knowing anything was different.

Having all the VMs and everything work without the user experience being affected.

That’s a hard question since I don’t know what new features there are in v6 other than single-user sign-on. I’m curious to see the release of v6 here, as I want to see how the client version works. I also want to get an overall view of how it works, as well as how well the mobile management works.

Of course it has room for improvement, but it’s the best in the field as there’s not many better options.

It’s been very stable for us. I’m still on version 5.5, so one of the things I wanted to do is check out if 6 is worth upgrading to.

We don’t have many users, and right now, it’s just me who's running this solution. For the VMs, we’ve been able to get requests from my internal customers to just improve on the sizes, and it works very, very well.

I’ve had mixed results primarily because I’ve had issues that have dragged on for a while, but for the most part in terms of responsiveness and explanation they’ve been very good. Once I articulate my problem to them, they explain the steps to take next very well.

We had lots of servers, and the costs were also huge. The cost was not only in buying hardware, but also looking at, in the data center, the footprint that we were taking up, and having to pay for all of that. Thus, we knew we needed to become more cost effective, and we were able to move from many locations into one server location in a chassis.

The environment that I manage now was set up about six years ago. We had an outsourcer (third-party) set it up since we wanted a professional to setup a new technology. He royally screwed it up, and we had to come back, completely rip it up, and restart. VMware had to help us get it back up to speed since that point.

Capabilities, as we do a bake-off to essentially evaluate options. We look at multiple vendors, and see if they meet X and Y demands, and see who does it best.

I have a list of things that I think I need, but it helps to see what others need and want as well. After seeing their pros and cons, we can reevaluate on what we need in our environment accordingly.

VMWare was the vendor that won last time, nobody wanted Hyper-V. We looked at Hyper-V and VMWare only, and nobody wanted Hyper-V. VMWare delivered far better test results.

Without explicitly saying look at VMWare, understand what functions you need in your products, look at different vendors and what they claim to provide, and then bring them in house to see if they deliver on their claims. They have to pass all of the tests that your company needs.