VMware vSphere Review

Free Hypervisor from VMWare

Valuable Features:

ESXi has one major benefit that outweighs the others; IT'S FREE!Yes, it has plenty of other benefits, like running a wide variety of different virtual operating systems in virtual machines (it supports every platform but OS X, and that can technically still be "hacked" onto it).It's incredibly robust, has excellent resource management, and is easy to set up. It allows for importing of virtual appliances, or pre-made VM's, or a creation of your own VM's.

Room for Improvement:

The only issue I have with ESXi is that it is console (CLI) based. While I personally have no operational issue with this, as most of my training began with CLI based systems, some people might not want to configure a high availability virtual machine server via the Command Line.They're now marketing ESXi as VMware vSphere Hypervisor, which makes sense because that's essentially what it is. There used to be another product called ESX, which was a step between ESXi and vSphere, but they did away with that and rolled some of the features into ESXi.

Other Advice:

All in all, it is an excellent solution that I have deployed in multiple locations and organizations.
**Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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4 Comments
author avatarit_user5700 (Engineer with 501-1,000 employees)
Vendor

Great hypervisor with a lot of power. Very scalable from running just a single VM or appliance up to running many hosts and hundreds of VMs. It is CLI based, but when coupled with vSphere it becomes more powerful and easy to use. Best of all, its FREE!

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author avatarit_user2652 (Project Manager at a non-tech company with 10,001+ employees)
Top 20PopularVendor

Nice one, do we need to purchase separate license of vSphere to connect to ESX hosts?

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author avatarit_user4524 (Founder & Principal Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees)
Consultant

You will need a CPU socket-based license (or a related bundle) of vSphere and full ESXi licenses to allow vCenter to talk to ESXi hosts for centralized management. vCenter is reasonably priced and depending on the size and scale of your organization, you can get management bundles for up to 3 hosts + vCenter for a reasonable price.

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author avatarit_user2652 (Project Manager at a non-tech company with 10,001+ employees)
Top 20PopularVendor

@kleegeek........thx!!

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Highlights
We are able to patch our hosts during production hours with the ability to keep services running.
The vMotion in particular I think is the most valuable because this feature provides migrations of virtual machines in case you want to run do maintenance.
The free ESXi hypervisor was a great way to get started, as it allowed us to introduce virtual machines so that users could start to experience the advantages.
It has allowed us to be more resilient to infrastructure and hardware failure, reduced hardware costs, and decreased recovery time from failures.
The most valuable feature is the VDP Backup solution.
The ability of a running VM to be quickly relocated to another hypervisor or launched at another site via replicated storage greatly reduces downtime.
Its DR facility is good. Within a moment, data can be retrieve from another physical location over the Internet. The speed to recover data is good.
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