VMware vSphere Reviews

There are no physical limitations in being able to move virtual machines around hosts and storage.

It allows us to be flexible-- every time we need a new server we don’t need a new physical box.

I’m sure there is plenty that could be better, but nothing comes to mind immediately because it just rocks.

Very impressed – rock solid.

It's infinitely scalable.

It's readily available as needed.

I inherited our setup. It's very easy to add new versions as well. As long as you know what you're doing, it's very easy.

We did an evaluation of Microsoft Hyper-V, and it's not there compared to VMware. It's where VMware was five years ago.

You can't go wrong with VMware. The stability and the flexibility it allows, they do it best compared to competitors.

Peer reviews are fairly important, but I try to form my opinion from a POC over anything else.

• vMotion
• DRS
• HA

The ability to perform consolidation and it's portability, flexibility, and DR capability.

None that I can think of. It's a nicely-evolved product.

Overall, it’s very stable. I'm very impressed, except when running on Dell, but it works on Cisco blades.

It's very scalable, and you can add more as needs dictate. It depends on the ratio and goals for consolidation, so you can scale as you need.

The quality is not quite what it used to be since it was outsourced.

It’s now very easy, was harder but now more deployment options, scripts, auto-deploy, can have full automation or manual, smaller footprint.

It enables vMotion, DRS, and HA.

The ability to consolidate and portability, flexibility, and DR. The management thereof is a single pane of glass.

The web client is botched.

There's not many problems with it.

It's very scalable and increasingly so because of what they’re doing with applicances. There's no trade-off between maximums of Windows and appliances.

Since they outsourced it, response times are not what they used to be.

It’s now very easy. It was harder, but now there are more deployment options, scripts, auto-deploy, and you can have full automation or manual, with a smaller footprint.

• Unified management
• UI

It simplifies the management of VMs of our 30 VMs. It's helped with disaster recovery, and we use EMC for disaster recovery, but it's managed with vCenter.

We moved the disaster recovery location from one state to another, and VMs helped us so that we didn’t have to move physical servers.

The alerting functions, right now based on performance, is not so clear now either by email or on the console.

No issues, it's rock solid.

We add one or two VMs every six months, and the only issue was with Sharepoint 2013 that required dedicated memory.

It's good, no issues with response time or knowledge.

Make sure you get training on use, and deployment because you won’t know what you’re getting into.

• Ease of use
• UI
• vMotion, migrating VMs from one physical server to another with no downtime

It simplifies the management of VMs of our 30 VMs. It's helped with disaster recovery, and we use EMC for disaster recovery, but it's managed with vCenter.

We moved the disaster recovery location from one state to another, and VMs helped us so that we didn’t have to move physical servers,

I don't use it enough to suggest improvements.

No issues, it's rock solid.

There's no issues with it.

We’ve had no need for tech support yet; my team have so far been able to solve any issues.

Make sure you get training on its use and deployment, because you won’t know what you’re getting into.

• vCenter
• ESXi Host
• Configuring
• Management
• Patch
• Maintenance

It has reduced the space, and power utilization, as well as allowing a much more efficient way to increase/decrease the server inventory.

I think VMware should make it easier to manage different components (ESXi Hosts, vCenter, etc.) through firewalls. Some organizations have to separate the components with firewalls for security purposes, and VMware does not act well when hosts are separated from vCenter by firewalls.

I've used it for two years.

Absolutely, numerous issues in particular HP ESXi VMware images that we utilized created a number of deployment issues. ESXi Hosts would lock up, network configs would malfunction and plenty more. We had issues deploying vCenter on windows 2012, and Windows 2012 r2, such as being unable to successfully integrate vCenter with Active Directory and plenty more.

Technical support was difficult to obtain at time because of the limited number of resources allocated to our program.

The previous solution were individual physical servers, which we replaced by utilizing VMware.

It was straightforward, and physical servers used to host web applications.

We implemented it in-house.

No other options were looked at.

The virtualization is the valuable feature.

It's much easier to manage than a pile of hardware.

We are also able to roll out new ideas to the users quicker.

The web-based access is flaky. It needs to have a built in backup ability, and the update manager needs to be its own appliance.

I've been using it for four or five years.

It does not like working with the older Intel NICs nor the Realtek NICs, but I was able to work around that.

The one customer service issue I have had is almost three months old and still unresolved (that sucks).

I've never used tech support.

No previous solution used.

It's straightforward.

We did it in-house, and I would suggest you set up a couple of machines in a practice lab first though.

We can't quantify the ROI.

The pricing is reliable.

No as we've been using before any other virtualization software was popular.

It's stable and has the ability to execute the features it promises.

We have managed to reduce the number of our physical servers dramatically.

It now has an easier configuration, so new server deployments don't take much time anymore.

Also, we're getting much less out-of-work-hour calls.

The web client has a lot of problems which hasn't been addressed properly.

The tools that VMware provides with vSphere need improvement, such as vSphere data protection.

I've used vSphere for about eight or nine years, and this particular version for four to five months.

No issues encountered.

Not at all, I'm quite happy with the stability.

This products works quite well with scaling.

It has room for improvement, but the staff are usually very friendly and they know what they are doing.

It has room for improvement, but the staff are usually very friendly and they know what they are doing.

As system admins, difficulty isn't an issue as long it works after the deployment.

It was done in-house.

It's saved electricity costs for us as well as costs on unnecessary equipment procurements.

We did a trial run of Hyper-V. We didn't switch, but Microsoft is very aggressive and tried to leverage the licenses that we had already bought. We also looked at Citrix.

Stick with vSphere as long as they don't screw up the product.