VMware vSphere Review

We were able to use ESXi to centralize the server farm. I recommend documenting everything.

What is most valuable?

  • High Availability
  • Fault Tolerance
  • Live migration
  • Reduced the overall cost of the infrastructure
  • Centralizing the management.

How has it helped my organization?

We were able to centralize the server farm, thus able to focus administrators on their immediate tasks, reduce response time to incidents, concentrate the informational flows, facilitate the task of data protection.

For how long have I used the solution?

2 years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

The deployment was really easy, migration to the virtualization infrastructure was transparent to the main business.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

None encountered for now.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No. If you would plan an infrastructure from the beginning, you would not encounter any issues.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

We have never asked for any kind of customer service.

Technical Support:

We have never needed any kind of technical support from the vendor.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No, but, in future, we plan to use a Microsoft Hyper-V.

How was the initial setup?

Initial setup was quite straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

The implementation was made by our own team.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Before choosing we didn't evaluate any other options. It was planned to use the VMware as the first queue and the MS Hyper-V as the second one. The reason is in the migration plan of the servers - in the second phase it would be the MS SQL server's, so the MS Hyper-V is more suitable.

What other advice do I have?

Always have a plan for the work document everything.

**Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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2 Comments
author avatarMichael Perry
Real User

We have used MS-SQL server VM's for 4 years without incident. I HIGHLY recommend full flash SAN with 10 GbE ISCSI connectivity if speed is an issue.
Curious why you say the Hyper-V is more suitable?

Reply Like (0)
author avatarit_user6699 (Technical Operations Engineer at a cloud provider with 51-200 employees)
Vendor

I am curious about this too?
What makes yo say Hyper-V is more suitable for SQL servers? In my experience it is the exact opposite,
Do you have any research that points to this?

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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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