VMware vSphere Review

It's made us a lot more agile. We don't have to acquire new hardware just to bring it up or utilize new services for our customers. It makes it a lot easier for my team to allocate resources for the other business teams at the company.

The most important feature for us is clearly the foundation it provides. In addition to that, we've found the High Availability and flexibility to be important as well.

I definitely could see some improvements in Operations Management. That's another product that they have, but it's lacking in a few things. I feel that it's not as aggressive as it should or could be. They have different levels built into it, but I think they should have more aggressive levels.

Another area of improvement would be the further development of graphics virtualization. They've starting dabbling in that, it seems, but it definitely needs a lot more. They need to make it a little quicker and better.

I could count on one hand the number of times I've had issues with it and it's generally been related to hardware faults.

It's been very much scalable. When we started using it, we only virtualized a handful of servers. We've since expanded it to virtualize about 90% of our infrastructure at this point.

Customer Service:

Not really applicable to my situation. I've always had a good relationship with the regional sales rep but I don't need to contact him very often.

Technical Support:

It's been a little bit hit-or-miss at times. I think that's related to who picks up the phone first. They always get my problems resolved, but sometimes it ends up being quicker for me to figure out on my own than it is for them to get back to me. I've probably rate technical support a 6 out of 10.

We evaluated Citrix, but in our testing, vSphere was definitely more stable. Once we got started with vSphere and saw what it could do, we liked it more and more.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, but it can get complex as you want to use more features. When we first started, it was very, very simple, but we've since made it a lot more complex to account for redundancy.

We implemented using in-house talent.

Make sure you find a good reseller you can trust. I don't have any advice with regard to pricing though, because the product is worth what you pay for it. I definitely feel like I"m getting good value.

Because there are multiple tiers, you want to make sure that you size your licensing appropriately. If you're going to have a stack, you're going to want to weigh the features that are available with the Enterprise versions versus the standard versions and really understand what you're going to get out of it.

Yes we looked at Xen server, but we had issues with VM stability. This was over 8 years ago though so obviously that isn't likely the same anymore.