VMware vSphere Reviews and Pricing

PatrickCiPaaS

Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager at SnapLogic

Feb 22, 2014

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VMware vSphere Rocks

What is most valuable?

vSphere is very easy to navigate and manage.

How has it helped my organization?

As a Tech Mktg Engineer, this product helps us develop test environments quickly.

What needs improvement?

The scroll window of processes at the bottom of the UI for the vSphere client is sometimes is hard to adjust.

For how long have I used the solution?

About 4 months

Buyer's Guide

VMware vSphere

May 2025

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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No.

How are customer service and support?

Customer Service: I did not have to contact them.Technical Support: n/a

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No.

How was the initial setup?

n/a. It was already set up for me.

What about the implementation team?

In house.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Not sure

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

No.

What other advice do I have?

It works very well.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user3405Partner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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May 2, 2014

One thing I noticed, there are scalability issues, this is based on the database and the distance from the primary datacenter. No matter what you use, there are limitations as it relates.

I am submitting the min/max guides for your review - www.vmware.com

Todd

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it_user88791

Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Feb 13, 2014

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Great product with great feature set (edition license). Manageability, scalabilty, transportation and low footprint.

What is most valuable?

This really depends on the customers requirements. Manageability, transportation and low footprint (and thus higher consolidation ratio) are ones that are often referred to by customers.

How has it helped my organization?

Central management, easy deployment, easy management. This simplifies IT management processes and cuts on project costs and power/data center costs.

What needs improvement?

Licensing cost together with SA.

For how long have I used the solution?

Since ESXi version 3.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

None.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Depending on guest OS, there are some issues with controller type/driver versions.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

None, if you have the resources you can easily scale out (or up)/down depending on your scalability requirements. Autodeploy, host profiles and customizations are a great help here. Further vCOPS will give you valuable capacity management options.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service: Great.Technical Support: Excellent.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No.

How was the initial setup?

Straightforward, must have some knowledge though how to implement in the organizations required solution.

What about the implementation team?

I do projects for customers.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Not at liberty to share.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Yes, XenServer and Hyper-V are often evaluated by customers.

What other advice do I have?

Don't be intimidated by all the possible functions and comparison reports out there. Look what is needed for your requirements and match to available editions. Also when looking into costs, take the whole into account (not just initial costs, but also consolidation ratios, managebilty and the returns you get from those.)

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user10590IT Administrator at a local government with 1,001-5,000 employees

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Apr 11, 2014

I have installed both Solaris 10 and 11 without any issues..

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it_user86190

Infrastructure Expert at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Feb 2, 2014

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Pros are that it is easy to use but it is hard to have certified resources for it

Valuable Features:

HA, DRS, VMotion, Storage VMotion

Use of Solution:

2 years

Initial Setup:

Every thing was straight forward and can easily/readily be found on Internet

Implementation Team:

In-house small deployment

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user82776Chief Executive Officer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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Feb 2, 2014

Certified resources, as in web apps or computer resources online, several challenges in that area were foremost related to recent upgrades and modifications to the certified makers. In economical terms if resources were certified to it, you would rather see a drop in revenue for those manufactures putting resources into one single component.

it_user77823

Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Jan 9, 2014

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Rock solid, great support, large vision, overall stands alone.

What is most valuable?

Of course there are several valuable features that have grown in time since the product came out, but the most basic and critical features of this product that I find valuable is the High Availability (HA) and the vmotion technology. vMotion has expanded to the Storage vMotion as well. This is very beneficial for uptime of servers and still maintaining updates on the hardware.

How has it helped my organization?

With the ability to create multiple server guests on one physical host platform, we were able to create servers in a faster response time, at a cheaper cost, less operational time and the ability to automate tasks to name a few. Also, this infrastructure gave us the capability to expand into a separate self provisioning development environment by utilizing the vCloud technology.

What needs improvement?

VMware has a good sight for what businesses are looking for. They have been ahead of the curve since the beginning. They have good support and quick response. I don't see too many improvements with vSphere itself.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used this product for 9 years. I have tested the old GSX and ESX version 2 years prior to this.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

When I first tested vSphere against other competitors 9 years ago, there was no question on which product our company would use. It was easy to deploy and is easier today than it was back then. With a small OS footprint, the install was quick and configuration was straight to the point.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I have only ran into 2 issues where stability was an issue. One is more of a performance that affected the NUMA nodes and how ESXi handled guests in each NUMA node. (this was isolated to the CPU make/model). The other stability issue was due to a patch that affected some physical hosts causing them to "purple screen" or to not respond.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Again, VMware has been very good with staying ahead of the curve. As the demand grew for virtualization from businesses , VMware increased functionality to cope with growth at the hardware level. The ability to "scale out" or "scale up" physically on the host with zero downtime is very easy or scaling up on the guest is very easy with minimal downtime.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service: When I first used VMware, I had to use customer service often. They were very quick to resolve the issues. They have a team that knew the "Ins and Outs" of the product. I would give them 4 out of 5 stars. I didn't give 5 due to the fact that VMware grew faster than they were able to keep the support engineers trained to handle the large growth over the years. So the times for resolution went down just a little. But still very good compared to other customer support.Technical Support: I would give them a 4 out of 5 here as well. They have teams for each operational architect and at times a problem may need to have the collaboration of multiple teams to resolve an issue.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I did not use any other product prior to VMware.

How was the initial setup?

The install was quick and the configuration was straight to the point. I was up and running with a working platform in 25 minutes from start to finish once I rack mounted and cabled the server. It would be even faster with a converged infrastructure or blade system.

What about the implementation team?

This was done all in-house.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

As an engineer, I don't have those numbers and wasn't part of sharing those numbers to other management and higher.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

When I decided to test the virtualization architectures, I ran tests with several architectures to determine important factors that would affect our business and operations in a positive aspect for growth while still maintaining low ROI. Microsoft and Citrix were the other competitors.

What other advice do I have?

Definitely have a plan before implementing. Don't rush. It is crucial to think years out so you don't have to redo any architecture because you didn't plan for growth, DR/BC or working out of the cloud. If resources are tight to gather, it would be beneficial to reach out to your favorite consulting team to gather advice.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user3396Team Lead at Tata Consultancy Services

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Jan 10, 2014

Cool Tim,

Would you please also share your take on the pros/cons VvSpere vs XenServer or Hyper-V?

Thanks + Happy 2014

Henry

it_user9315

Systems Analyst at a government with 51-200 employees

Sep 9, 2013

Excellent Customer Service & Technical Support but make sure your hardware is compatible

For how long have you used this product?
- 4 Years

Which features of this product are most valuable to you?
- Fault Tolerance (FT)
- vSphere Distributed Resources Scheduler (DRS)

Can you give an example of how this product has improved the way your organization functions?
- Making your infrastructure simpler and more efficient. Applications get deployed faster, performance and availability increase and operations become automated,

What areas of this product have room for improvement?
- Networking

Did you encounter any issues with deployment, stability or scalability?
- We haven't had any issues during deployment.

Did you previously use a different solution and if so, why did you switch?
- Yes. Citrix Xenserver. We switched it to VMware ESXI because its easier to convert P2V through ESXI than XenServer without any issues and Live migration is more thru ESXI than doing it in Xenserver.

Before choosing this product, did you evaluate other options? If so, which ones?
- Yes. Hyper V and Citrix Xenserver

How would you rate the level of customer service and technical support?
- Excellent.

Was the initial setup straightforward or complex? In what ways?
- Was a straightforward setup.

Did you implement through a vendor team or an in-house one? If through a vendor team, how would you rate their level of expertise?
- It was through a vendor team and they were extremely excellent.

What is your ROI on this product?
- Save energy
- Reduce hardware
- Improve disaster recovery
- Isolate applications
- Help move things to the cloud

What was your original setup cost for this product and what is your day-to-day cost of using this product?
- The cost was around $2500 - 3000 \ N/A

What advice would you give to others looking into implementing this product?
- Make sure your hardware the storage and servers are compatible with ESXI. I would recommend EMC storage.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user1068Tech Support Staff at a tech company with 51-200 employees

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Oct 13, 2013

Hello
What are some of the hardware systems that are compatible with VMware ESXi?

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it_user8223

IT Administrator at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Jul 30, 2013

Best virtualization product available

I have worked with VMware products for just over 5 years at this point, and during that time frame have compared with competing virtualization products. I believe that VMware Esxi is the BEST hypervisor available. If you have a virtualization project then this is the route to go, although I will concede that MS Hyper-V may be appropriate for some small businesses with just a couple of servers to virtualize.
Deploying Esxi is very simple, install the package on the host, open the vSphere client, and you are ready to go. The setup can be very simple if you are using local storage, or in-depth if using network storage and wanting to customize the virtual network configuration. regardless, the tasks are simple and easy to understand. If you run into an issue, VMware documentation is very helpful and their support team glad to assist.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user1068Tech Support Staff at a tech company with 51-200 employees

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Aug 25, 2013

The user friendly nature of server virtualization software makes it easy to install, configure and use it.

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it_user5496

Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

Jul 25, 2013

Microsoft Hyper-V vs VMware vSphere

One topic that gets discussed quite often is Microsoft Hyper-V vs VMware vSphere, and a quick Google search for comparisons will return at least several hundred thousand hits. There seems to be a large number of posts and articles trying to make a case that one is better than the other by listing and comparing features of the hypervisors themselves one by one. The purpose of this post is not to claim that one platform is better than the other. Is that the best way to really compare the different virtualization technologies as a whole, or should we take a step back and really look at differences in approach for the virtual infrastructure and/or virtual ecosystems'

Microsoft:

In my opinion, Microsoft is defining and building their virtualization infrastructure as an extension or expansion of their current ecosystem, with System Center at the center of their universe. If you look at the System Center 2012 product page on Microsoft’s website, System Center product details are broken down into two different areas:

Cloud and Datacenter Management
Client Management & Security

Is this really a big surprise' Absolutely not, since it clearly makes more sense to build on what you already have in place than to reinvent the wheel. The majority of virtual machines that are running on the Hyper-V platform are running Windows, and System Center already has a solid foundation of features and capabilities for managing Windows environments. These features include:

Application Delivery
Mobile Device Management
Virtual Desktop Management
Endpoint Protection
Compliance and Setting Management
Software Update Management
Power Management
Operating System Deployment
Client Health and Monitoring
Asset Intelligence
Inventory

VMware:

In my opinion, VMware is looking to create a completely isolated and separated ecosystem that consists of a collection of appliances with different capabilities working independently and making up the features within the infrastructure, including:

vSphere
vCloud Director
vCloud Connector
vCloud Network and Security
vCenter Site Recovery Manager
vCenter Operations Manager Suite
vFabric Application Director
vCloud Automation Center

Conclusions:

One of the main differences that I see in the two approaches is that Microsoft wants virtualization, cloud, and datacenter management to be an extension of the infrastructure, whereas VMware would like the vCloud Suite to be the complete infrastructure. This starts with VMware developing vCloud as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service to fulfill their promise of the software-defined datacenter.

Click here to read my complete review on TheVirtualizationPractice.com

Disclosure: My company The Virtualization Practice is sponsored by some vendors in this market

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.