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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.

Last updated: Jul 11 2012

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4 Comments

it_user5700 (Engineer with 501-1,000 employees)

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!

(0)

04 April 13

it_user2652 (Project Manager at a non-tech company with 10,001+ employees)

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

(0)

22 September 13

it_user4524 (Founder & Principal Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees)

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.

(0)

22 September 13

it_user2652 (Project Manager at a non-tech company with 10,001+ employees)

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

(0)

23 September 13

Author

it_user1122

Infrastructure Expert at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Highlights

We are able to patch our hosts during production hours with the ability to keep services running.

Production people can quickly reboot the server with ESXi Quick Boot.

The most valuable feature is its ability to revert to previous snapshots during testing of various guest and application deployments.

We are able to create virtual machines and move them from one host to another, controlling the resources.

The most valuable feature is vSAN, as it reduces the cost of SAN storage and maintenance.

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.

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Server Virtualization Software