VMware vSphere Reviews

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.

• 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.