VMware vSphere Review

The ease of administration and flexibility are the most valuable features for us. Performance, stability, and functionality just keep getting better.

It enables us to move faster when we're going through the legacy systems. Before vSphere, someone had to wait between one and three months to get service which we can now implement in ten minutes.

There are a couple areas for improvement that I can see. First, I'd like to see better performance for vCenter. And, I'd also like to see NSF 4.1 fully supported. There are some NSF features lacking from version 3 to 4.1.

We've been using it for more than ten years.

We've had no issues deploying it.

The stability has been great. I have only experienced one point down and that was caused by our system.

There was also an issue with expiring licenses in 2008, but that was fixed pretty quickly and a new implementation was put in place to prevent that from happening again.

The product has been so stable that we keep using it. We also didn't want to change it too much because it would require management team training.

It has scaled for us and the workload that we have that runs on it.

We started using it because there weren't any competitors at the time. There was only VMware.

Complexity depends on how you're implementing it because vSphere has a lot of products. If you're looking looking to install vCenter, it quite easy.

If you're using a lot of the other products, you have to be careful. Today, we use almost every product from VMware and we still have to be careful with the updates.

Start small in a development environment. For $200 per year, you can get access to files VMUGs. 

You can get a 60-day free trial with a download from the VMware website, but I recommend using VMUGs and attending local VMUG meetings. They have a lot of really capable technicians who really love to share.

Of course we continue to look at the competitors to see what features are coming. In my opinion, it doesn't matter because VMware is still ahead of the competition.