VMware vSphere Reviews

My primary use case of VMware vSphere 6.7 is that I manage some 100 clients who are using this product in their day-to-day work. These are businesses that use it. It runs the core of their networks. It runs their business. It is critical for them to be up and running, so vSphere is pretty important for them.

The mission-critical application that we run on vSphere is our main program that we use to actually monitor all of our customers. We have hundreds of customers. Our main application of remote monitoring runs in our vSphere environment. We also run our Exchange, which is critical. That's how we get our alerts about all of our systems that we're managing. We also run our ticketing systems. When a customer will submit a ticket via email we get it. All of that is running on vSphere.

While I don't have percentages to share, I can say that I have received a performance boost (using vSphere).

The solution has improved our organization because it's made our jobs a lot easier. We're able to monitor all these customers and, with vSphere, they're much more stable than they were previously when they were on physical servers. The fact that they're more stable makes our jobs a lot easier.

The most valuable features of vSphere are really the scalability and its reliability. It's really helped us, as a managed service provider, because we have so many customers that we have to be pretty much on call for, so that when it's up and running and it's working well, that makes our jobs a lot easier.

The built-in encryption of vSphere really helps us to secure our customers, especially customers in the medical field who need to be HIPAA compliant. Being able to encrypt the VM itself helps out a ton.

I find vSphere very simple and easy to manage. It has a very good GUI that you're able to use. Anybody can log in and start clicking around and figure out how to power on a VM, how to create a new VM. It's pretty streamlined for the most part.

As far as the ease of use goes, if you ever were in a situation where something was down, I feel like the logging in VMware makes it really easy to report what's going on. The logging is a really helpful feature. Also, some of the features built in, like vMotion - if you do have a server that's down - you can use something like vMotion to get it back up and running.

As far as room for improvement goes, I really feel like each release they're coming out with new features, making it better and better. The new HTML5 client is almost there. It needs just a little bit more and then it will definitely be ready.

Stability has been awesome. Like I said, we have 100 clients who are on vSphere and it has made all of their systems a lot more stable, which is great for us.

Scalability is really great. Being able to have a customer who decides, maybe a year after they've purchased their hardware, that they need to add another server because maybe they've decided to purchase a new product - being able to scale that system out really helps a lot.

Getting vSphere set up for the first time is pretty straightforward. The installation process is not that painful. It really guides you through it so it makes it a lot easier, especially if it's your first time doing it.

As far as our ROI goes, vSphere actually reduces time to set up a server by a ton. By a server, I mean a virtual machine. In the past, you'd have to order in hardware, wait weeks for it to come in, and then install Windows, patch it, and actually go deploy it at the customer location. Now, if the customer's already running vSphere, all we have to do is log in to that, build the VM, and install Windows and we're good to go. We've gone from days to an hour, probably.

When we were looking at vSphere, we did look at some of the competitors. Of course, we looked at Microsoft Hyper-V because we're a Microsoft partner as well. However, it lacked a lot of the things that vSphere had.

The best advice I could give somebody looking to implement the solution is definitely to download the trial because you can try it out for free. Put it on some test equipment and run it and you're going to love it.

We don't have a customer that uses VMware Cloud on AWS, but we've been very involved in hoping the price gets cheaper so we can sell it. 

We use vSphere for our production and DR infrastructure. We have all our critical machines on there: domain controllers, monitoring systems, ticketing systems, financial systems, billing systems, Test and Dev environments. For the most part, as far as vSphere is concerned, it's performed pretty awesomely. Sometimes the hardware doesn't work as well.

Once we got VMware vCenter, once we got all that setup - did a PoC, proved that it worked - we did a big push. I led the project to move our entire internal infrastructure from physical to virtual.

We haven't worked with VM Encryption or support for TPM and VBS.

Between vMotion and all the HA, it has made my life a lot easier, and similarly for a lot of my colleagues, and my boss.

The most valuable features are the seamless HA with vMotion and being able to run vCenters in HA mode. We use a company called SimpliVity, it's a hyperconverged system that sits on top of VMware. They have a product called RapidDR which automates the entire DR process for us. So in a DR event, we just run a script, and that's it. Between vMotion and vCenter, everything moves over to the DR environment.

Also, once you start using it and you get your hands dirty with it, it's very intuitive. I find the menus make sense. Other UIs, specifically Salesforce, for example, can sometimes be weird. Things are in weird places, there are a lot of menus, a lot of dropdowns. Especially, in the new HTML5 Client with vSphere and vCenter, everything is pretty straightforward and easy to find and easy to use.

I'd like to get rid of the Flash Client. There are still some things that require us to go into it and use it, some plugins and other things aren't supported in the HTML5. I love the HTML5 Client. I think it's a lot smoother, a lot faster. Version 6.5 was kind of slow. From our testing, from what I've seen, 6.7 is supposed to be better. That would be my biggest complaint right now: that the 6.5 Flash Client is slow. It takes a while to load.

It's very stable. We had one "pink screen," which is basically equivalent to the "blue screen" in Windows, and that was hardware-related.

The scalability has been good, as far as the vSphere and vCenter go. We've had to add more hardware, but it's scaled pretty well. We haven't really had any issues with it.

The move to vSphere was really just a business-continuity initiative. Vestmark makes a financial platform. It's important that we are able to be up as much as possible.

I work on the internals teams, so none of the stuff that I work with is customer-facing, but for our customer-facing teams to be able to correctly support customers, our internal side has to be up as much as possible. It was really just business-continuity, coming down from the executive level, saying, "We need as much HA as possible. We want our systems to be up as much as possible because we need to support our customers as best we can."

When you're looking at HA and seamless DR and the like, there's really one decision, and that's going virtual, whether it's on-prem or in the Cloud. VMware has been a leader in the virtual industry for years. It was a pretty simple decision to go with VMware.

It took some time to really research vSphere as a whole, as far as what the best setup would be for our company, for both the present and the future growth of the company, and to correctly size it. There was a lot of research beforehand that needed to be done to get to the appropriate solution. Once that work was done, the actual install and implementation of it were very smooth, for the most part.

When I first started at Vestmark, a little over four years ago, everything was physical. We had a row of about seven to ten racks - I forget the exact number - of just physical machines. After going virtual, using VMware, vCenter on Cisco UCS, we dropped that down to two racks.

Take your time to do the appropriate research and planning, so that it's sized appropriately. A lot of issues that I've seen are from either underlying hardware or resource constraints that aren't necessarily related to vSphere or VMware, rather that things weren't implemented appropriately.

We do not you use VMware Cloud on AWS. Right now we just have on-prem for both production and DR. We are starting to move some small Dev environments to AWS. I haven't been a part of that project. From what I hear, there have been some ups and downs but, for the most part, I believe there has been positive feedback.

I would rate vSphere a nine out of ten. Ten means everything is perfect. As much as everyone tries to strive for that goal, it's unattainable because there are just so many moving parts, hardware, software, user input, end-users. It's the best that it can be in a nonperfect world.

VMware vSphere is a very stable solution that can be used to host your virtual services. If you want to host a virtual machine, VMware vSphere is the best tool available on the market.

The most valuable features of the solution are the overall virtualization technology and the new features that allow you to move servers from one system to another. The solution's newer technologies allow you to do network-level isolation.

It would be good if the licensing cost of the solution could be cheaper.

I have been using VMware vSphere for five to ten years.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten for stability.

The solution's scalability is also good because you can scale using your required hardware. At the same time, the VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter combination can allow you to scale up to a decent level. Around 100 users were using the solution in our organization.

The solution's technical support was good and fast enough. The technical support team was able to help us with most of the problems we experienced.

The installation and initial setup of the solution were simple because we had a team of people already familiar with VMware. Learning a newer version was never difficult for them. They could easily streamline into the newer versions and use them effectively. So, the learning curve was not that high for the team.

The biggest benefit we had with VMware vSphere is that we could provide effective service to our end customers. I was able to support multiple operating systems on VMware, which was the biggest value of the product.

VMware vSphere on-premises is still cheaper than the cloud. It's the kind of technology you can always count on.

VMware vSphere has helped us provide better services to our customers because we were able to provide them with stable service. The availability of our systems increased by using VMware products. The solution's security was adequate, but we were not using it extensively.

The solution's High Availability is definitely the factor that comes into the picture because you cannot have downtime in today's IT world. VMware becomes a core strength of the product. It gives you the required availability, scalability, and stability for the environment.

I have always been looking for a seamless cloud migration strategy, which has already been implemented. Now, you can easily migrate systems from on-premises to AWS or Azure cloud. It is easy to integrate VMware vSphere with other products.

Many people using the infrastructure on-premise sometimes want to use the additional capacity in the cloud for additional functionality. The version I used earlier did not have the functionality to move the server from on-premises to the cloud seamlessly. In the newer version, they already have established that part.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I use VMware vSphere primarily to provide a layer of virtualization between our Cisco hardware and existing software. It ensures high availability and redundancy for our applications, minimizing downtime in case of OS or application failures. Additionally, vSphere simplifies migration when updating hardware and makes it faster to reinstall virtual machines along with applications.

I appreciate VMware vSphere for its versatility and usability across various use cases. The solution's flexibility allows us to implement it widely. We use it extensively, and I believe soon all our servers will run through virtualization for better efficiency using vSphere. It performs as advertised and meets our needs effectively.

In terms of improvement, the license fee could be more affordable, but overall, I'm satisfied with VMware vSphere.

I have been using VMware vSphere for almost 20 years.

vSphere is very stable. I would rate the stability as a ten out of ten.

Setting up VMware vSphere is very straightforward; no issues there. Purchasing involves acquiring licenses and the licenses often come bundled with hardware from vendors like HP or Dell. The deployment process is smooth, and support hasn't been necessary as the software is stable. For deployment and maintenance, we currently have about four or five active staff members involved. However, considering buying expertise and engineers, the team can range from nine to ten individuals.

The solution is not cheap.

Overall, I would rate vSphere as a perfect ten out of ten.

We use it exclusively for internal purposes within our company, managing our office infrastructure as a private cloud solution.

It stands out as a comprehensive and advantageous solution, providing a full package that effectively caters to our needs for managing our private cloud.

The most significant aspects for us are the invaluable features of High Availability and vMotion in VMware. Additionally, the seamless sharing of resources and numerous other robust features make it highly commendable. Specifically, the capability to implement a load balancer between hosted environments without any downtime is particularly appreciated, underscoring the platform's reliability and advanced functionality.

The current concern revolves around the pricing as it might be less affordable for certain regions. In countries like Tunisia and many others in Africa, there seems to be a challenge regarding the cost of licensing.

I have been working with it for ten years.

It is robust and stable, rating it a perfect score of ten out of ten.

It offers good scalability. I would rate it eight out of ten. It's a small organization, with one hundred users.

It boasts robust support. I've collaborated with local partners in Tunisia, and their operations, coupled with same-day support, have proven highly responsive. I would rate the support experience a solid ten out of ten.

Positive

I have experience working with Hyper-V, and when comparing stability, VMware surpasses it across various generations. While Hyper-V has shown improvement in newer versions, it hasn't reached the level of stability that VMware consistently delivers.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward. I would rate it eight out of ten.

For deployment, it typically takes around two to three days with minimal configuration. One person is often sufficient for handling such setups. It's worth noting that if we opt for solutions like Analytics or other complex configurations, the need for additional personnel may arise, but for straightforward deployments, a single person can effectively manage the process.

I find it highly expensive. I would rate it ten out of ten. It would be highly beneficial for VMware to collaborate with local hosts and partners in countries like those in Africa to establish specific pricing that would align with the economic conditions of countries in Africa, ensuring suitability and compatibility with our consumption capabilities.

In instances where organizations operate on robust infrastructures and budget constraints are not a significant concern, my usual recommendation is VMware. This is especially true for financial companies that prioritize investing in and managing critical software solutions without financial constraints. Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

It is largely for workload virtualization. 

Instead of having so many servers, we have got just two server nodes that are configured in high availability. We are running all our application servers, databases, and Linux and Windows systems on two servers. We've got about 12 virtual machines. If we didn't use VMware, we would have needed to buy 12 physical servers.

The virtualization, the remote management user interface, and the web console are most valuable.

The biggest room for improvement would be just simplicity. It is very intuitive, but it needs somebody with a lot of IT background. 

The way VMware manages storage is not the best. Nutanix manages storage a little bit differently, but we are not using Nutanix. VMware needs to find a way to manage storage properly. There should be storage aggregation and better management of storage.

We tried to install drivers for 100 Gigabit Ethernet Mellanox, and it was very difficult to put third-party hardware and upgrade the servers. We had to roll back because it just wouldn't boot.

Its price definitely should be improved. Its pricing is on the expensive side.

I have been using this solution since 2017.

It is very reliable.

We tried to plug in more hardware, but the drivers were not seamless. We are using the OEM version for HPE because we are using HPE. It could be because it is yet to work with HPE hardware. HPE hardware works with Mellanox, but it just couldn't take Mellanox. We downloaded the Mellanox drivers from their website, but it just couldn't boot, so we had to roll back.

We have three administrators. The number of users varies over time. We started with 24, and because of COVID, we've reduced the number of people who can work in the office to about five.

They are very responsive.

Its initial setup is very straightforward. It is very easy to install.

They can do better by giving better pricing. Their pricing is on the expensive side. As a matter of fact, we are considering switching to OpenStack.

We only work with perpetual licenses. As a company, we don't do subscriptions.

I would recommend this solution any day. I would rate VMware vSphere a nine out of 10. It is excellent.

My primary use case for the product is testing Home Lab. I was involved in the early vSphere 6.7 beta. I wanted to see what the new features were, how it worked. I'm using it currently in my Home Lab for testing lots of the different products as a vSphere-base for vSAN, NSX, running the latest vCenter, etc.

Some of the critical workloads that I'm running in my vSphere environment are Exchange, SQL, various different application servers, and those have to be up and available at all times, and vSphere does that for us. It gives us High Availability, failover, vMotion capability for load balancing. It works great.

Since migrating over to vSphere, we're seeing a significant performance boost due to the fact that we've migrated over to an all-flash vSAN array. Previously we were running external storage SAN over fiber channel. We saw a significant increase, I would say at least a 50 percent increase, in our speeds due to our vSAN running on all-flash. It's been a huge improvement.

The way that vSphere increases our availability in our organization is that it allows us to run our critical business workloads, keep them highly-available, run them at speed, and easily scale when we need to.

The most valuable features for me are a very easily scalable infrastructure. I can have a couple of hosts to do basic workloads. I can have a lot of hosts to do a lot of workloads. vSAN integrates my storage so I don't need an external storage SAN. I love having everything integrated in the same UI. The new HTML5 interface doesn't require any plugins anymore and it's super-fast. Really liking that change.

In terms of the built-in security features that I'm using, currently I am using vSAN Encryption, using an external KMS server, and it works great. It's pretty easy to set up, very easy, especially in the UI, to integrate that and get that set up.

The way that I find vSphere simple and easy to manage is that the interface is all laid out for you. You've got various different views based on what you want to do in the UI. You have your Hosts and Clusters view, if you're doing something where you need to manage at the cluster level. You can manage at the host level in there. If you're doing something very VM-specific or on a vApp level, you can go into the VM and Templates view. It's very easy to scale and use what you need to use.

An improvement could be allowing a "dark mode" for the interface. I think the HTML5 client is a little bit hard to read. It's all white. It's a little bit bright on the eyes. A lot of us IT guys view in the dark.

The stability in our vSphere environment has gone very well. We have never actually had an outage. Due to the HA failover capabilities of the cluster, the High Availability of vSAN, Distributed Resource Scheduler allowing you to basically vMotion VMs and balance your loads across all your clusters, it's been very highly available. We've never had an outage or an issue; never any kind of a data loss incident, even when we were running external storage as well.

Scalability works pretty well. You can start out at a couple of hosts, based on your business needs, your budget. That's probably the base recommendation I would start out at for having some of the DRS and HA failover capabilities. But if your business grows, you can easily add a host and a cluster and expand your capabilities on storage and compute. If you're running vSAN, you can run on the storage side, too.

I have had several instances where I've had to use Global Support Services. They're always great. They are very knowledgeable. If they don't know the answer, they can easily escalate to another engineer and help you out and get the problem solved, usually pretty quickly.

I was not initially involved in the vSphere setup at my current company; that predated my joining the company. But I've brought up the secondary environment and integrated vSAN at that company, and setup was straightforward. It's pretty easy to get everything set up and get things done. I've done that many times in production, and torn down and rebuilt the Home Lab many times. It's pretty straightforward.

We do not currently use VMware Cloud on AWS.

If I had to rate vSphere from one to ten - version 6.7 - I would say right now it's probably about a ten.

We're virtualizing the whole infrastructure of the company. We are only keeping some of the bigger servers as bare metal, but aside from that, everything is being virtualized.

We use vSphere for mission-critical apps including SAP and part of our internal development in C+, for the solution that collects everything for the buyers.

We have seen a performance boost because we have been able to more dynamically allocate either memory or processors.

It has provided us with cost reductions, a little bit more speed in deploying servers, and, of course, consolidation.

It's a very nice tool to be able to reduce your footprint, consolidate servers, and accumulate several servers in a high-density configuration.

It's pretty simple to manage.

It's simple enough right now, but some more automation tools would definitely make it simpler.

It's pretty well integrated with vROps but the integration could be improved a little bit. 

It's pretty stable. We have a wide variety of versions, starting from 4.5 all the way up to 6.5. They all work together and it's pretty stable.

It's simple to scale and the upgrades are pretty simple as well. The upgrades were straightforward. We just installed a new HPC and GN and we deployed everything in there.

However, I prefer to erase completely and reinstall, from the top.

We have Premium Support and they're excellent.

We see a high return on investment, precisely because of the higher density hardware. We're using fewer hypervisors, which results in some return. We also have more virtual servers and less cost. Everything goes hand-in-hand.

Analyze your infrastructure first, see what you want to do, and then start deploying everything from zero.