What is most valuable?
Scalability and Efficiency of your environment.
How has it helped my organization?
- On a basic level you can have one server perform the functions for a whole small business
- On a scalability level, you can simply setup with the right hardware effective failover functionality
What needs improvement?
- Honestly it’s the leader of the pack so it just needs to keep innovating while the competition catches up
- Maybe the only thing to improve is the compatibility with non-standard devices. In particular we have issues with SAS Tape drives
For how long have I used the solution?
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
vSphere has no issue with software stability, if there is issues it’s because of faulty hardware.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
Excellent, we have a good relationship and they are happy to demo other products with us.
Technical Support:
Excellent
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
How was the initial setup?
Straightforward, the key to this working is to ensure you use compatible hardware.
What about the implementation team?
What was our ROI?
For clients, they can purchase less hardware than what they would require if they did not take advantage of vSphere. Even a small company would have 4 or 5 required servers for applications (Authentication, Email, SQL/Application, and File & Print). Purchasing a single copy of vSphere Essentials or Essentials Plus is less than a server.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
There is licensing cost and there is maintenance cost. Both compared to buying more servers are negligible.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
No but we have compared it to Hyper-V and XenServer as they have come out with new versions. Hyper-V we play close attention to but XenServer we no longer follow.
What other advice do I have?
- For companies comparing this to Hyper-V, this is still the gold VM solution. While Hyper-V is catching up, it’s still has a way to go.
- For small companies, I really advise to go for Essentials Plus. This gives you proper small scale HA capabilities and it gives you tech support. Essentials provides no technical support.