We are an IT consulting company who serves and sells IT services.
I am using the last version to understand the new features. Also, we are using it to improve our code for our VMware clients.
We are also using on VMware cloud on AWS inside POC.
We are an IT consulting company who serves and sells IT services.
I am using the last version to understand the new features. Also, we are using it to improve our code for our VMware clients.
We are also using on VMware cloud on AWS inside POC.
It is very simple to manage.
Some of the benefits that we have seen are:
I am testing more products and advising my clients about what they should do and implement with the newest version of VMware.
The most valuable features are:
The new feature announced today with vSphere Update 1 inside vSan is impressive. I did not have a chance to test Update 1 yet. We shall see how it performs in the next few days.
Because my server is too old, I am using my own lab for TPM. I did not have a good chance to test everything. VM encryption is quite simple to implement: Just check two boxes and it is done. It is very easy to do. If you want to move from on-premise to cloud, it is quite easy.
I put information on my blog stating that I would like more Amazon stuff inside of VMware. They have announced many thing that I am looking for today, so I am happy.
The stability is very impressive. VMware develops many stable products. That is why we participate in the beta product testing to make things better.
The scalability is very impressive. As usual, VMware is able to scale out and up all their solutions.
I do use the technical support, and so do my clients who receive good support.
I did use in the past Hyper-V, KVM and XEN. I do prefer VMware for the maturity of their solutions. VMware is also available inside all big cloud provider like Azure, AWS, Alibaba and IBM.
The initial setup is very straightforward. There isn't any complexity unless you have very old servers, then you won't be able to install the latest version of VMware 6.7 because of TPM.
VMWare is one of the most used solution all around the world, it is easy to found some expertise on the market. Ask for a VMware certified person like VCP ou VCAP this will garanty a good knowledge of your tech support.
Our ROI is good.
There is an average performance boost, especially if you use VM encryption inside the VMware with another product, like McAfee. You will see great improvement in these cases.
The price is high, but you get a lot functionnality included with the product. You can also start with the free version of ESXi.
I am using many solutions: IBM PowerVM, Hyper-V, Acropolis, and VMware.
VMware is the most natural product on the market at the moment, especially in virtualization. The other products are quite good too. I am not saying you can use them, because you can. They are stable now. However, with VMware, you receive more feature than with the others.
Think about your business needs, afterwards choose the product. Write down your needs on paper in bullets, then the solution will be clear and you can justify choosing VMware, not Hyper-V.
I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10. There is always space for improvement.
Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It depends on the business's need. That is all. I am a consultant and must know what my client needs. If they want a Rolls Royce, I give them a Rolls Royce. If they want a Honda Civic, I give them a Honda Civic. I must know the products to fit them to the customer's needs. I don't sell too much, just what the customer wants.
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.
We use it to manage multi-site, multi-regional implementations of VMware. We use the security end roles to give different tiers of access from the VM up to the VMware installation. We manage the roles and responsibilities within the security to do this.
We do all the functionality inside vSphere. We use VMotion and DRS to manage some of our licensing issues that we have. With bigger software vendors, like Oracle, we use it to keep licenses and requirements compliant and keep VMs running on specific hardware.
We use it for quite a few daily tasks: cloning and testing out patching. Then, we can perform snapshots through vSphere.
Visibility: We can easily pull reports and give access to other people to look at specs or performance metrics. This came as a bonus to us. Yet, we have been using it for quite a long time (12 to 13 years).
The solution is simple and efficient to manage. It has brought ease of use to employees who are not at a senior level. It has been able to expose minimal tasks which can relieve some of my senior guys to do engineering tasks, as opposed to help desk, reboots, restarts, etc. We have been able to pass some of those tasks along.
The ability to segregate roles and responsibilities, as well as regions. For example, I can give access to my Chinese team to manage the China servers and hosts. On the other hand, I could give access to my Canadian team to manage global VMware installations. Therefore, I like the flexibility of this tool.
We have just migrated most of our SQL and enterprise databases to vSphere. We don't use it for Oracle, but we do for most other things. We also use it for our communications exchange link, etc. Therefore, it is pretty business critical when it comes to the back office support and server implementations.
There has been a lot of improvement with UI: its speed and usability features. Before, it was very slow. When it comes to cross-regional (e.g., someone in the US managing the China vSphere implementations), it can be a somewhat slow. I would recommend increasing the speed. While there has already been improvement there, I would like to see more.
I haven't had any real issues. In the very beginning, there were some issues when upgrading or migrating from versions. However, our last upgrade was 5.5 to 6.5 where went from Windows to the Linux OVF version, and we did not have any issues with it.
It is easy to scale and obtain as much power as we need. It is easy to provision and join it to the cluster. We haven't had any issues or limitations.
Technical support is very good. I haven't used them in quite some time though, because we have on-staff VMware experts. When I did use them a long time ago for compatibility with network cards (we use FCoE, which is not the industry standard), they were pretty quick to link us back to some articles to help us resolve our issues.
When I first came on board, they had a very small implementation of Citrix. The servers at that time would cost 20K per application. They didn't allow us to centrally manage any systems. There would be a hodgepodge of vendors and versions of hardware. Therefore, it was a more difficult to track. When I came on board, we were maybe 20 to 30 percent virtualized. Since then, we're probably 99 percent virtualized. This did reduce staffing costs.
The APIs and plugins are important. We used to use NetApp. We use now InfiniteApp and Compellent. Having these types of plugins and using their APIs in the storage subsystems, allows general admins to provision storage easily, as opposed to being a storage admin. It has alleviated having to have five to 10 storage admins. We consolidated to one or two storage admins, while having the others be able to provision their own storage.
We are spending less on buying bigger machines, which are overprovisioned. Thus, the ROI is found in consolidation and cost savings.
There are a lot of management and soft skills that we end up being able to save on. For example, my engineers in Canada could watch over systems in China, California, and Phoenix. Thus, it gives us the flexibility of administration.
We evaluated Hyper-V four or five years ago. They weren't as fast to develop technologies or even adopting the technology. There were some tools missing. Also, they were less innovative than VMware. Now, I think Microsoft has caught up a bit. However, it seems that VMware is putting a lot more R&D money into the product. So, we've been happy. We haven't had a need to leave.
Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They are a leader and more innovative than the competitors.
We use it for virtualization of approximately 90 percent of all of our computing. In terms of mission-critical apps, quite honestly we use it for the majority of them on the banking side: our financial apps, loan accounting, loan origination, etc.
We have seen performance boosts for our mission-critical apps, with the ability to add compute at any time. We've been using this for so many years, so over that time we have probably seen performance increases of three to four times. As compute has increased we've been able to offer that to the apps. I don't know that I can give you a total percentage increase but it's a lot.
Other benefits include high-availability, uptime, management is a lot easier, and a lower cost of support but with increased availability. That's a win.
The most valuable features are its flexibility and the ability to move workload.
The built-in security features, such as VM Encryption and support for TPM and VBS, are all important for us, but I can't go into specifics about them.
It's also simple and efficient to manage. It's a complex environment but it is one that we can get our staff trained on, it's not like a one-off environment.
In terms of additional features I would like to see, I just heard about them here at VMworld 2018. They're rolling in security to be a core feature. Built-in app defense is something we'll take advantage of. The ability to utilize tools that are in the cloud - we don't really use the cloud - will be available for use on-premise, and that is a pretty big feature.
The stability has been huge for us. We have a very predictable environment, robust, fault-tolerant. It's great.
Scalability is the big advantage of it. The product itself allows us to scale on the fly as we need it, and plan for the future.
We are a Business Critical Support customer, so we have an engineer dedicated to our team. We use them on a day-to-day basis.
We didn't have a previous solution. We just had challenges that everybody was faced with and VMware, back in its core, back in its early days, had the capability to move compute from one data center to another and that was huge. We wanted to be able to do things in a secure, safe manner with low risk.
I was involved in the initial setup, back in 2005. Back then it was fairly complex but that's because we were early adopters of it.
I don't know that I can give you a number, but our ROI has been significant.
At that time, VMware was an innovator in this technology so it was a question of learning more about what they offered and taking advantage of it.
If you're not already looking at vSphere, you're probably behind. I don't really have any colleagues who aren't utilizing this product.
I rate this solution as a nine out of 10 because I think you can always improve. But it's a tremendous product. We consider VMware a partner, we work with them closely.
It is a compute virtualization software. It is mainly used to virtualize physical servers and deploy virtual machines on top of virtual servers. So, instead of having one workload per server, you can have multiple workloads.
The fact that you can use all the CPU and memory power that the server can provide is most valuable. In a physical server, you might end up not using all the physical resources. There are a lot of benefits, such as flexibility and mobility, in virtualizing computes.
The improvement is more from a licensing perspective rather than from a feature functionality perspective. There could be more flexibility and fewer model options to make it easier to sell. Today, there are so many different options available, and sometimes, it is not really clear which one is the right version or the right model to propose.
We have been providing this solution to our customers for 15 years.
It is definitely stable.
It is scalable. In our country, I believe 50% of the customers are running vSphere virtualization.
I don't have experience with their technical support.
I never did an installation, but as per my understanding, it is straightforward.
The number of people required for installation and maintenance really depends on the scale of the project. Usually, one engineer can deploy vSphere very easily.
It depends on the contract they have with VMware.
I can recommend this solution. I would rate it at least an eight out of 10.
We deliver this solution to our customers and we partner with the vendor. I'm a senior infrastructure solution specialist.
This is a straightforward solution, there's not much troubleshooting required and the work around it is quite simple. I particularly like the virtualization and the ability of the solution to optimize and deliver an automated and orchestrated cloud platform on-prem. They regularly surprise us with great features developed by a very, very sharp R&D team that delivers up-to-date technology with more features and more valuable ideas to enhance and automate the platform with data center.
If you're converting from any other virtualization system to VMware, you will note that the price is significantly higher.
I've been using this solution for 10 years.
The solution is scalable to an unlimited number of hosts.
Technical support is very helpful. They don't deliver the troubleshooting directly, but they understand and collect the logs and provide the procedure to follow in order to reach a solution.
The initial setup is straightforward. VMware is a very, very easy system to implement and to administer, as long as you have at least some sort of experience. You don't need to be an expert but those who have a high-level knowledge of VMware can manage and deliver the crucial tasks.
There are different licensing costs depending on whether you're using the standard or enterprise solution. A socket in the standard solution might cost $1,000 whereas it would cost $4,000 for the enterprise socket.
I rate this solution a nine out of 10.
I'm a Solutions Architect. I advise clients on how to leverage VMware products to provide resiliency in the face of disruptive events. VMware's platform is the most robust for running VMs upon, and it also has the most mature technology. Therefore, it is much more reliable and predictable, and those are the key characteristics needed to ensure a successful business continuity solution. Bleeding edge newcomers have yet to prove themselves production worthy compared to VMware's long history of success.
Portability of infrastructure is the greatest asset of any virtualization platform. By using VMware solutions, there is no lock-in with a particular hardware vendor for compute, network, or storage needs. Likewise, the ability to run various guest operating systems further amplifies that flexibility. The overwhelming majority of my clients are able to use VMware's solutions for 100 percent of their software application needs. Finally, the ability of a running VM to be quickly relocated to another hypervisor or launched at another site via replicated storage greatly reduces downtime.
In general, the combination of VMware products that compose or plug into vSphere enable most organizations to better prepare for disruptive events.
The ability to run ARM based VMs on an x86 platform for testing purposes. With the growing use of SBCs running on ARM architectures for IoT devices, it would be very useful if developers could build and deploy VMs running operating systems like Raspbian used on Raspberry Pi devices on their existing x86 ESXi environments. Even if this is not possible through some form of emulation, the ability to add ARM hypervisors to vSphere environments would be very useful. This will enable more rapid development cycles for customers just getting started with IoT but already existing vSphere users.
Since 1999 when they only made Workstation.
I've used Hyper-V, AHV, VirtualBox and KVM solutions. Each of these solutions has merits, but none of them are as flexible and reliable as VMware solutions. They are all rapidly improving, but are not being adopted widely enough to rival vSphere's dominance. I rarely advise clients to switch away from a VMware based solution, because of the long history of success and reliability that comes with it.
Do not buy based on price alone. Many of my customers chose the lowest cost option only to discover that the additional funds needed to access even a few more features would have been money well spent. Likewise, if you are going to spend more money on additional features, then have a plan to actually deploy and integrate those features into your infrastructure. Many customers never take full advantage of the many features that they are paying for and that can be avoided by being proactive in developing your overall vision for the infrastructure.
I am constantly evaluating many solutions. I also regularly re-evaluate other solutions. The competition is improving, and VMware has done a great job improving as well.