VMware vSphere Review

We use vMotion a lot and use vCenter to manage the entire set-up.

Our entire banking operation is virtualized-- the application and data centers are all virtualized. It’s become easy for us to switch between servers if there's latency or slow responsive. We can switch to servers with more resources.

We’ve been using it for last six years.

We bought NetApp FAS storage and vSphere together, and it’s worked well. All our critical applications run on vSphere and FAS.

It goes hand in hand with growth of our business. We've used the enterprise edition and moved from 5.5 to 6.0 with no issues.

It’s a more stabilized product. Once configured properly, you don’t need support. In the last six years, we haven’t had to call them at all except for the initial setup.

It was complex because we experimented by keeping data and system volumes separate. We don’t replicate the system volumes frequently. We were able to do it though, and we used only 1/10 of the bandwidth with the combination of FAS and vSphere.

Microsoft Hyper-V is giving them a run for the money as vSphere is more expensive. I’m already on enterprise version of Hyper-V, running both it and vSphere.

VMware is not as proactive. They’re not willing to correct some problems I've faced. So VMware should be a bit more flexible in their engineering. I always tell them that with the architecture I've put in place, I can’t use SRM at all, but whatever SRM does, I can do manually, yet I can’t automate it.