VMware vSphere Previous Solutions
it_user171321
Sr. System Engineer VMW Specialist at a government with 501-1,000 employees
No, we did not.
View full review »BS
Bunmi-Sadiq
IT Supervisor at APM Terminals, Inc.
We didn't use anyone before we procured VMware. Before we procured the product, we didn't use any other advisor. We were using HP hardware and servers.
For the implementation period prior to 2015, we first implemented on-premise attached solutions. Prior to that time, all our applications were stand-alone IDS servers.
View full review »
Endalkachew Admasu
Manager of Computing and Storage at CBO
We have used Nutanix. We opted for VMware because the environment is good.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
VMware vSphere
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about VMware vSphere. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.
JO
Johan Odendaal
Server Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
I've never used a different solution. I started using VMware or VMware server, about 20 years ago. vSphere ESX is probably the first visualization tool I've used. Subsequently, yes, we've tested one or two other options, for example, Hyper-V and what used to be called Acropolis. We've also used Oracle VM. However, for production and for everything else we've done, we pretty much speak to VMware. It's tried and tested and we're quite happy with the stability. Therefore, we stick with it.
View full review »
Youssef_Hmani
IT INFRASTRUTURE CONSULTANT at Hyfi Cloud Computing
I have experience working with Hyper-V, and when comparing stability, VMware surpasses it across various generations. While Hyper-V has shown improvement in newer versions, it hasn't reached the level of stability that VMware consistently delivers.
Sameer Gusain
Technical Lead at Sopra Steria
We used Citrix before. It could be more stable. Comparing both the solutions, VMware is better than Citrix.
View full review »
Tommy Myo Min Aung
Senior System Engineer at Vantage Drilling
We have a mixture of VMware and Hyper-V. For the small branches, we use Hyper-V because of the licensing and because Windows has four VMs embedded into the core Hyper-V. For VMware, we need to buy a separate license, but we use it for bigger offices and centers.
View full review »RK
Rangga Kusuma
Head Tim Infrastructure, and IT Security at Lembaga Penjamin SImpanan
I have used Hyper-V previously.
View full review »AT
AllanTrambouze
Consultant senior en technologie de l'information at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I did use the previous version of vSphere and I upgraded for the Tanzu support and VSAN improvement.
View full review »RS
Ricky Santos
System Administrator at ON Semiconductor Phils. Inc.
Prior to this solution, we used Oracle Virtual Machine and Xen Virtualizations.
View full review »FK
Francis KACOU
Head of Service and Storage Infrastructure at GS2E
FL
reviewer1578723
IT Supervisor at a aerospace/defense firm with 10,001+ employees
This department happens to run VMware. Other departments run VMware and also use Citrix for certain things. We're looking at running BDI rather than Citrix.
View full review »JH
Jason Hong-Turney
Lead IT Systems Engineer at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees
I was not using any other solution before vSphere.
I was involved from all the early stages of planning to move to vSphere 6.7.
We were already considering moving to 6.5 and, for us, there were so many added benefits of going to 6.7, and being that it's not a real major bump - it's more like 6.5 "Update 3" with a lot of quality of life improvements - it made it very easy for us to make that decision.
When I'm working with a vendor, some of the most important criteria are
- their release cadence
- how much support they're giving to the product
- what kind of R&D they're investing in
- generally, anecdotally, the response we're getting when we're asking for support.
KW
Kevin Williams
IT Analyst I at Los Rios Community College District
I don't think we were using anything before vSphere. I think we led off with it. My partner was thinking for a time about Microsoft, but he decided that Hyper-V wasn't for us and we went with VMware, and we haven't regretted it a day since.
View full review »MH
Michael Huset
Senior Systems Administrator at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The backup solution we were using at the time was Dell's version of IBM's Tape Library with Symantec Backup Exec. We were doing tape backups at the file level, not really any virtual snaps, so incrementals every day, fulls on the weekends.
As data gets bigger it's harder and harder to back up and that's where virtualization comes in, because you can start doing analysis on data changes and deltas a little bit better. Tracking and things that are tied into VMware assist digital backup solutions to be faster, more resilient, and have less downtime in a restore situation.
View full review »it_user366615
Datacenter Manager at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees
We went with v6 to get the benefits of the better Web Client.
View full review »SK
SenthilKumarGM
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
We have also been working with AWS and Azure. We normally recommend VMware solutions for private cloud, and for public cloud, AWS or Azure. However, VMware is also having capabilities on AWS and Azure which we recommend.
View full review »MO
Michael Ogunlade
Head of enterprise systems at Fidelity Bank Plc
We used Hyper-V, which is a Microsoft product.
View full review »NP
Nitin Pande
Associate Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I didn't work on something similar before vSphere. After vSphere, I tried to work on Microsoft Virtualization, which is also quite good, but I did not get much exposure to that. My organization prefers to work on VMware. In our sister concern, we're working on Microsoft, but we are planning to move them to VMware vSphere because I want to establish my DR on the other side. We had VMware DRS hosted at one of the service providers, and then we moved to Microsoft Azure, but now we're planning to move back to on-premise.
View full review »it_user194427
Chief Technology Officer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
For an enterprise virtualization platform, I have only used VMware. I have also used Amazon Web Services as an IaaS, but that doesn't exactly sit in the same category as an on premises virtualization platform.
View full review »
Pavol Schreiber
Manager at TCX
We tried Hyper-V a few years back, but there was a problem with the 2012 version of Hyper-V, so we prefer VMware because we know it works. However, I'm not sure about the newer versions of Hyper-V. I can only speak to our experiences with the older one. We weren't satisfied with the features, and the Microsoft code had bugs that they didn't repair those errors.
Overall, Hyper-V was a highly unstable solution at the time, so we decided to stick with VMware because it was much more reliable. Maybe Microsoft has improved Hyper-V since then. I can't say.
MK
Michael-Kierum
Principal Consultant at Absolute Precision
I've deployed Docker as a standalone using Linux, multiple servers, etc. I'm currently learning Kubernetes so that I can create a new island in the chain and do a container, but I still have the other systems that continue to run in environments best suited to VMware.
TM
reviewer1505493
Systems Engineer at a educational organization with 11-50 employees
Previously, we were using mainly the normal Windows hypervisor, Hyper-V. At my previous employer, we used to also have Xen hypervisor.
View full review »it_user320091
Monitoring Tools Analyst at a individual & family service with 10,001+ employees
We had lots of servers, and the costs were also huge. The cost was not only in buying hardware, but also looking at, in the data center, the footprint that we were taking up, and having to pay for all of that. Thus, we knew we needed to become more cost effective, and we were able to move from many locations into one server location in a chassis.
View full review »
Ahmad Ali
Infrastructure System Engineer at King Saud University
Previously, we were using Hyper-V, but I don't have a lot of experience using it.
View full review »
Ali Gursoy
IT Manager at Cobantur
We also have used Microsoft's Hyper-V solution.
View full review »SS
Sid Sharma
Lead QA Analyst at Loomis Express
Previously, we were deploying all of the in-house software to client machines, but we didn't find it practical enough. Considering that we have offices all across Canada, we needed a solution that allowed us to create a new version of the in-house software and then deploy it remotely. That's where vSphere came in. We do not need to deploy to individual clients. It is just a link that is shared on their desktop, and they can access it straight away.
View full review »AT
Allan Trambouze
Senior Consultant at Cofomo
I did use in the past Hyper-V, KVM and XEN. I do prefer VMware for the maturity of their solutions. VMware is also available inside all big cloud provider like Azure, AWS, Alibaba and IBM.
View full review »PG
reviewer924948
Senior Manager Systems/Network, Global Information Systems at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
When I first came on board, they had a very small implementation of Citrix. The servers at that time would cost 20K per application. They didn't allow us to centrally manage any systems. There would be a hodgepodge of vendors and versions of hardware. Therefore, it was a more difficult to track. When I came on board, we were maybe 20 to 30 percent virtualized. Since then, we're probably 99 percent virtualized. This did reduce staffing costs.
The APIs and plugins are important. We used to use NetApp. We use now InfiniteApp and Compellent. Having these types of plugins and using their APIs in the storage subsystems, allows general admins to provision storage easily, as opposed to being a storage admin. It has alleviated having to have five to 10 storage admins. We consolidated to one or two storage admins, while having the others be able to provision their own storage.
View full review »CW
reviewer924351
Director, Windows Server Infrastructure at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
We didn't have a previous solution. We just had challenges that everybody was faced with and VMware, back in its core, back in its early days, had the capability to move compute from one data center to another and that was huge. We wanted to be able to do things in a secure, safe manner with low risk.
View full review »it_user127791
IT Representative at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees
Previous to the current environment. I was dabbling with virtualbox. Awesome software but the application for it is different because its small scale and does not optimize its usage of the hardware its running on. It can crash windows.
View full review »
PB
PatrickBenson
Sr. Architect, Business Continuity at Sayers
I've used Hyper-V, AHV, VirtualBox and KVM solutions. Each of these solutions has merits, but none of them are as flexible and reliable as VMware solutions. They are all rapidly improving, but are not being adopted widely enough to rival vSphere's dominance. I rarely advise clients to switch away from a VMware based solution, because of the long history of success and reliability that comes with it.
View full review »
Ali Yazıcı
IT Service Manager at Kuveyt Turk Participation Bank
I have previously use Hyper-V.
View full review »MK
MUKUNDKULKARNI
IT Manager at KIRLOSKAR PNEUMATIC CO. LTD.
We have used Microsoft previously and we have found VMware to be more mature.
View full review »IS
Igor Schwarz
Presales Engineer at Emet Computing
I have experience with KVM and it is also easy to use, but it is not as good as VMware.
View full review »RV
Rene Van Den Beden
Chief Architect at RoundTower Technologies
Regarding knowing that it is time to switch to this solution, our customers tend to be existing vSphere customers. End-of-life, end-of-support tend to be the trigger for, "Okay, we need to upgrade our infrastructure stack."
The other big trigger is end-of-life of the hardware stack that they're going with. That's typically a conversation about moving from legacy, three-tier infrastructure to a hyperconverged infrastructure stack. And then there's a hypervisor conversation about the best-of-breed to use to meet their business requirements.
it_user851001
Senior Architect at Art Van Furniture
We had straight physical before. Of course, it is clear that when you use physical infrastructure, depending upon the type of application you're implementing on that infrastructure, often you do not use the infrastructure's capability to the maximum. You use anywhere between 10 and 25 percent of the potential of the infrastructure, and that has to do with the specifics of what application you're implementing and how well this application plays with other applications. A typical example is SQL Server and SharePoint. They both try to steal resources from each other so it's very hard to have those components sharing the same hardware. There are many other examples. This is just to illustrate, a little bit, the benefit of the virtualization solution.
Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are a reasonably priced solution that the vendor maintains well, one they stand behind, so that when we use their solution, we keep up with the state of the art. Some vendors - and I'm not going to cite names - tend to invest in creating a solution, and then they don't stand behind it, and the customer is left to fend for himself. The solution has never been improved, it's no longer a key part of the vendor's line of business. At this point, for us, the important point is that the vendor keeps pushing the state-of-the-art and keeps improving the solution while maintaining a top level of support for the customer.
View full review »it_user370284
Manager - System Engineering and Storage at a construction company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We had Hyper-V, but the older versions had issues. When the 2016 version releases, we are going to re-evaluate it.
View full review »it_user321249
Virtualization Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
it_user298431
Senior Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Not since I’ve worked here, so at least 10 years. We started with vSphere.
View full review »PM
PrasadMane
System Advisor IT at CRIF India
I'm familiar with all of the virtualization platforms that are now available on the market.
View full review »GP
Gabriele-Pizzigati
Senior Software and Systems Engineer at SAMU.IT
We have customers who use Sangfor, as well as customers with VMware.
vSphere is used by all VMware customers.
View full review »EN
reviewer1602309
IT Manager at a legal firm with 51-200 employees
We didn't previously use a different solution. We've basically used this product since day one.
View full review »KR
กฤษฎา รวยเรืองรุ่ง
System Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
IBM Power. We switched to vSphere from IBM Power because the hardware is cheaper.
View full review »it_user541089
Information System Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I'm also using Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 along with SCVMM 2012 R2. It's really painful for VMware users since Microsoft's hypervisor solution has a lot of bugs/problems and is hard to fix.
View full review »GS
Ganesh Sekarbabu
Windows Virtualization Engineer at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees
Previously, for monitoring, we use other products. Slowly, we are moving to vRealize now. It depends on our requirements and budget.
View full review »it_user281958
System Engineer with 10,001+ employees
No previous solution was used.
View full review »WK
reviewer1390341
IT Infrastructure Engineer at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees
I have used Microsoft Hyper-V.
View full review »BA
Bilal Aslam
Founder & Technology Advisor at EUC Solutions
As a technology consultant working for customers with varying requirements, I work with other virtualization platforms. Two of these are Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer.
View full review »GF
reviewer1681332
IT Operations Support at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees
We use several solutions such as Microsoft Azure, Oracle, and we use VMware for our infrastructure.
We also have another solution for disaster recovery.
We used Microsoft Azure for testing with the model phone credit. It was for testing only.
View full review »DF
Domingos Francisco
IT Administrator at a healthcare company with 201-500 employees
We use Microsoft Hyper-V.
View full review »KC
Karthikeyan Chinnadurai
Solutions Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
We have not used another similar solution.
View full review »AP
reviewer1266792
IT Infrastructure Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Yes, a used Microsoft Hyper-V, I switched because vSphere is more mature and stable.
View full review »TN
Trevor Napier
System Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I wouldn't say that I invested in a new solution to get to where I'm right now. I just really have been upgrading upon what's already there. I'm pretty much in bed with VM. I'm staying with VM, and that's where I want to be. I don't want to go anywhere else. VMware is top of the line.
View full review »RC
Robert Cox
Systems Engineer at Vestmark inc
The move to vSphere was really just a business-continuity initiative. Vestmark makes a financial platform. It's important that we are able to be up as much as possible.
I work on the internals teams, so none of the stuff that I work with is customer-facing, but for our customer-facing teams to be able to correctly support customers, our internal side has to be up as much as possible. It was really just business-continuity, coming down from the executive level, saying, "We need as much HA as possible. We want our systems to be up as much as possible because we need to support our customers as best we can."
When you're looking at HA and seamless DR and the like, there's really one decision, and that's going virtual, whether it's on-prem or in the Cloud. VMware has been a leader in the virtual industry for years. It was a pretty simple decision to go with VMware.
AA
Ayodeji Ariyo
Senior Network Engineer with 1,001-5,000 employees
Prior to having this, we had physical servers. We've virtualized almost everything that we can virtualize. I wish we could virtualize our IBM iSeries, the mainframe, which is impossible to do. But for everything else, I think we are pretty okay.
When selecting a vendor, I first look at
- proven industry standards
- longevity
- security
- good customer experience
- a robust infrastructure that is scalable and tested.
Usually, when we make recommendations, which is one of the things we do as infrastructure specialists, we evaluate several vendors and try to see which ones match up most with these criteria. Whichever one comes out ahead, comes out ahead.
View full review »RE
Raden Evangelista
Systems Engineerineering Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 51-200 employees
The previous development team at my company used Workstation. When I joined the company, I didn't like the product. So as soon as I joined, I transformed our entire infrastructure to vSphere along with vCenter. This made things easier with our directory and for other users in the company to deploy and perform their own VM development. Managing users has become more streamlined.
As soon as we switched over from Workstation to ESXi and vCenter, the downtime was very minimized. Growth and flexibility are now there. If I want to add more hosts, servers, and devices, it is not a big deal. The infrastructure is there. As far as having more job requirements, we wanted to explore our development lifecycle more without making major changes.
View full review »it_user317979
Senior Vice President at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
I have experience with Microsoft Hyper-V, but production has always been VMware
View full review »PR
Patrick Ringelberg
Owner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
No, I've always used VMWare, as I’m not a fan of the other options available.
View full review »VL
Thang Le Toan (Victory Lee)
CIO at Robusta Technology & Training
No we didn't previously use a different solution.
View full review »
Chris Childerhose
Lead Infrastructure Architect at ThinkON
No other solution has been used.
View full review »PL
Preston Lasebikan
Lead Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
We've always been using vSphere from the beginning, starting with 5.5. We actually worked with William Lam from VMware on getting ESXi working on Minis at that point in time. It's been a wonderful relationship since then.
One big thing that I know a lot of people talk about, when looking at why go with vSphere, is the ecosystem. You have other products that were built solidly to work with the vSphere product and the integration is always completely solid. The continuous development on the vSphere product and all the other products in the ecosystem, and the community, also play a part. There's pretty much nothing that I have run into where I say, "Hey, I want to do something outside of what vSphere does," and there hasn't been somebody within the community who has been able to say, "Oh yeah, I got that running, it is really easy, this is how you do it." That's not something I have seen in any of the other ecosystems.
View full review »RP
Rob Pease
IT Director at Jewish Family Service
We were all physical and it wasn't scalable. Every time they came to me and said that they wanted to start a new project with a new piece of software, I had to buy hardware for it. One day we looked at it. Quick, funny story: big presentation to the Board. Spent an hour explaining what virtualization was. I said, "Okay. I can do this by spending less over the next five years and we've already budgeted more." And the Chief Financial Officer looked at me and said, "Why did you just waste our last hour? If it's going to cost us less, then just do it." Why didn't you start with that? Way to bury the lead!"
It was a no-brainer to move.
The most important criteria when selecting a vendor is support, absolutely. US-based support that doesn't pass the buck, that takes ownership of a situation and deals with it.
Neeraj Mehra
Manager of Solutions and Support at Esconet Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
We are system integrators. We use a wide range of hardware and products.
On a daily basis, we work with servers, virtualization, VMware, and EMC storage boxes, as well as pure storage.
Our clients have tried Hyper-V as well and other solutions, but the consistency is better and there are fewer issues with the vSphere interface.
View full review »RS
reviewer1502625
Delivery Manager at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
This was a first implementation of vSphere for us. They have a hybrid environment where there is a Hyper-V running their Oracle with VirtualBox running across. We found this to be much stronger and much easier to deploy and hence we thought to continue with it.
Also it supports a wide range of operating systems.
View full review »CB
reviewer1081776
Systems Engineer/Systems Administrator at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
vSphere was our first hypervisor.
Since then we have added additional hypervisors in our environment. We have AHV from Nutanix and Hyper-V from Microsoft.
AHV doesn't support things like memory sharing, at all, and Hyper-V is just not very good at it.
View full review »LG
Luis Gomez
Server Engineer at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
A big thing for us, and the reason we went with VDI, was for security. We didn't want folks having laptops or taking them out of our environment, out of our building, and not having them secured, where somebody could just pick one up and take it. This way, we keep it all in-house and it's more secure. It's in our hands and not theirs.
We went with VMware because we were all more familiar with VMware and our vendors, our reps. We all have a great relationship with them, so we decided to go that route.
View full review »CT
ITAnalysac7f
IT Analyst at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
We were not previously using anything from a virtualization perspective.
View full review »JJ
John_Jones
Systems Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 51-200 employees
We started out in the Microsoft Hyper-V because it came with everything in their license. After messing with Hyper-V, we always had a small VMware environment. With some of the blade services that came out from Dell and Cisco, we moved over to VMware because they utilize all the back-end interconnects a lot better than Microsoft does. After that, we went full VMware.
View full review »it_user297561
VMware(VCP5), VMware Regional Academy Director at a university with 501-1,000 employees
We didn't use any previous solution for server virtualization. For desktop, the college still uses XenWorks, with minimal Horizon View deployment mainly due to manpower issues and comfort.
View full review »it_user370200
Senior IT Analyst at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
I have never tried a different server or datacenter virtualization solution before.
View full review »it_user353388
Managing Director & Head of Technologies at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
In my previous company, we used oVirt, the free-of-charge version of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, which turned out to be way more expensive than a solution like VMware in terms of both human and hardware resources.
View full review »it_user335898
Senior Systems Engineer at PlanSource
I was luckily enough to come into a virtualization shop. They pretty much didn't want to do the physical server aspect anymore because again it doesn't scale. Walking into a virtualized shop is very easily, winning that battle can be very difficult. I've been on the other side a handful of times. It's really just showing the value, in which case, VMware can fix the problem. You got to be very specific about what problem you're fixing. Is it latency? Is it processing power? Is it being able to provide DR? Is it being able to move your workload to the cloud or move them to a different data center?
It's amazing how only a couple months out of the year you need DR. You don't need it 12 months out of the year. Moving from a standard virtualization shop, having everything on prem, leveraging the cloud, that's the next step. When you ask me about how would I introduce VMware, I think about introducing it now as a cloud based service provider. Not as an on prem, hey, let's scale this very easily.
View full review »SG
reviewer1441107
Owner at a transportation company with 1-10 employees
My experience was with the public sector. That was rather complex from the start. In my previous experiences, if we wanted to use vSphere, that was after we tried some different techniques, and we had reached the limit of it or the complexity of the setup.
That's why we wanted to move to simplify it. The setup was immature, and we needed to provide better service for customers. That's why we choose to use vSphere. The complex one was the other option.
BG
Blake Grover
System Admin at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
When I came on, they were using vSphere.
View full review »it_user515508
Works at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees
I was deploying servers from bare metal. Once i got VMware, i have never looked back.
View full review »it_user320235
Senior System Administrator at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
It has always been vCenter, they were in a Rackspace physical environment beforehand.
View full review »it_user386772
Server Manager at a local government with 1,001-5,000 employees
We started using it because there weren't any competitors at the time. There was only VMware.
View full review »it_user297717
Stevenson University Systems Administrator at a university with 501-1,000 employees
I used to work with Hyper-V, but it is a very Microsoft-centric product. It has a long way to mature in terms of stability and cooperating with fringe cases. If you're an all Windows shop, Hyper-V is worth considering, but if you're a Windows/Linux mixed shop, and manage more than 200 servers, there is no good choice but VMware.
View full review »it_user320199
IS Manager at a pharma/biotech company with 501-1,000 employees
We were just running Hyper-V, and the size of our team required more. The need to consolidate our servers, as VMware is a lot better with resource management, we didn’t want a large server cluster, so VMware was needed in order to maintain it well with a smaller staff.
Peer reviews actually a huge point in us switching over from Hyper-V. It’s such an old product that it was hard to find any support for it online, and the change we’ve seen in vSphere is night and day. There’s so many peer resources available that it’s been easy to transition for us.
View full review »JS
JeanSpiteri
Infrastructure Engineer at a hospitality company with 51-200 employees
Previously, I had used Hyper-v. VMware is a much better solution.
View full review »RK
reviewer1173861
Global IT Infrastructure Architect at a wholesaler/distributor with 5,001-10,000 employees
We did not work with another similar solution prior to this one.
View full review »UF
reviewer929742
System support engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
We were using a third-party utility product. Now, events are being pushed through VMware.
View full review »RM
Rajesh Mehta
Enterprise Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We also use Nutanix, however, we don't use that solution quite as extensively.
VMware has much better functionalities. They have integrated IDs and some functionalities. as well as load-balancing which Nutanix doesn't have right now.
View full review »VA
reviewer1447761
Assitant Director - IT at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
We didn't previously use a different product.
We're considering moving to a different product in the future that could potentially scale even better than this. The reason we haven't moved yet is the fact that it's not easy for us to deploy and migrate all the machines from VMware to any other product.
View full review »WW
Walmik Wankhede
Manager IT at a healthcare company with 201-500 employees
No, we only selected this solution at the start.
View full review »AB
Reviewer3064
Head - Server and Storage at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
We have prior use knowledge of Hyper-V. First, it did not have this automatic scalable capability which are scored to move across from one specific hardware to another without impacting any downtime. And secondly, it did not have a lot of automatic configuration capabilities, based on the utilization of the specific hardware it could re-balance what goes around on top of it. So these two are they key features that I feel were lacking at that point in time and it's hard to use another feature that I feared was lacking. In addition, it relied a lot upon the physical machine.
View full review »it_user547797
System Support Engineer at TMN
We didn’t use anything previously. We chose VMware ESXi 5.5 over Hyper V due to its features.
View full review »it_user335907
Principal Architect at Rackspace
Interoperability is one of the things I really like to look for: How well the VMware solution plays with other either hardware vendors, or other solutions, other service providers, other add-ons to make it even better. That's something we really look for. How well does it work in a service provider environment as well, because most service providers are different.
View full review »it_user300507
Systems Engineering Associate Manager with 1,001-5,000 employees
The previous solution were individual physical servers, which we replaced by utilizing VMware.
View full review »it_user284382
Analista de Suporte Sênior Especializado at TIVIT
I used a different solution, but it was not even close to vSphere. It was a good solution for certain environments, but lacking some features.
View full review »BB
SrEngineer672
Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
No we didn't.
View full review »it_user77823
Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
I did not use any other product prior to VMware.
View full review »
JM
reviewer1126809
Founder at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
We have other tools, such as Oracle VM, which we are using in other areas, however, VMware is used more than the Oracle VM.
SK
SathishKumar
Project Specialist at integra software
We have used other applications previously.
View full review »ST
Sergei Terekhin
Head of System Architecture Department at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I've used Zen servers four or five years ago. I've also used Oracle VM in the past with a client.
View full review »it_user855678
Azure Infrastructure Architect at Wireless Car
I also have experience with Citrix ESXi.
View full review »it_user373449
Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
My customers have used all available solutions. Some move to vSphere, some move away. In the end it will be about costs unless very well justified by a business need for high resiliency and market name.
View full review »it_user231912
Senior System Administrator at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
I used Hyper-V, which worked well on a single server running Windows 2008 R2. But as soon as a cluster is configured, there are lots of issues with SCVMM. I've heard that Microsoft made some improvements and the product is now more stable, but VMware ESXi is based on the Linux OS and is much more stable. I've had to learn command-line code in Linux, but VMware is better than Microsoft.
View full review »it_user11286
IT - Server Administration with 501-1,000 employees
No, we moved from a completely physical environment.
View full review »it_user320115
Senior Systems Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
We were on Hyper-V, and it sucked. The manageability of vSphere far outperforms Windows Hyper-V, at least the 2008 version. VMWare is more stable, it clusters better, and is just better in general.
For me, it’s manageability. VMware offers so many different ways to manage their solution. You can use UNIX-like command-line interface to access the host, can use Pearl, you have a lot of different options at your disposal.
View full review »FG
reviewer1672974
Systems analyst at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I am a customer of Dell Technologies as well as VMware.
Other products we work with are VDI, VMware Horizon Server, and vSphere with Operations Management.
I have been using Horizon for eight years. We are using version 7.
It has 100 user licenses, that are deployed on-premises.
I feel that Horizon is more flexible in increasing the number of desktop and network profiles.
I would rate Horizon a seven out of ten.
There are ways to implement VDI in the organization other than the VMware Horizon.
View full review »SW
reviewer1016370
System Administrator at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
Prior to using vSphere, I was working strictly with individual machines.
View full review »it_user367830
Deputy Director at a government with 501-1,000 employees
At the beginning of the virtualization of our data center, we used open source projects (such as KVM), but we quickly realized that they didn't satisfy our business requirements.
View full review »it_user350622
System Administrator - Backup & Storage Specialist at METRO SYSTEMS Romania
Before VMware, our company used to employ Citrix for the VDI infrastructure. Besides being more easy to use for the common VDI user, VMware also allowed us to step up the game by also taking the majority of your server infrastructure to the virtual environment.
View full review »it_user292629
Systems Support Analyst at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
I work with more than one virtualization technology. The solution implemented varies according to client requests.
View full review »SK
Shams K
Vmware Administrator at Intertech
Previously I also worked with Hyper-V, but some of my Linux machines were having problems with it.
View full review »CM
reviewer807690
Principal Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
I have some experience with Hyper-V and KVM.
View full review »FT
Fernando Tamariz
Information Technology Specialist at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
This is the only solution of this type that we have used.
View full review »AH
Arshad-Hussain
Director at OPEOPL LISTEN TECHNOLOGIES PVT. LTD.
I'm currently also working with another product called KVM. It's much more affordable than vSphere.
View full review »TM
ITInfras287c
IT Infrastructure Architect at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We were just utilizing physical servers with manual deployment of applications. By moving to vSphere, now it's just: Deploy VM from a template, or clone a VM now. Whereas previously, we had to order a physical hardware, wait for the arrival, deploy that into the data center, configure it. Now all of that has gone away.
View full review »it_user694665
IT Infrastructure Team Lead / Project Lead IT at a mining and metals company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We did not use another solution; we started out with VMware and we now have Hyper-V and VMware.
View full review »it_user419235
Infrastructure Senior Specialist at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
I used different solutions from different vendors. VMware products are the most stable/scalable products on the market. VMware can integrate easily with other vendors.
View full review »it_user332808
IS Director at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
We previously used VMware Server. We switched to vSphere ESXi because of the scalability and management enhancements. Additionally, it didn't need a separate operating system to manage.
it_user313893
Operations Director at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
We used a previous version of VMware.
View full review »it_user298443
Network/Systems Administrator at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees
At my current employer, they used to use Hyper-V 2008. We migrated to VMware due to a more robust feature set and the fact that, yes Hyper-V has a lot of the features that VMware does but, once deployment is complete, VMware is a clearly more stable product than Hyper-V in the long run. I’ve seen and been involved with a few Hyper-V migrations that go from VMware to Hyper-V and after six to 12 months, most of those installations wanted to migrate back to VMware.
View full review »MP
Michael Perry
Vice President at a aerospace/defense firm with 51-200 employees
No - prior was physical one up servers.
View full review »it_user71133
Senior Manager of Network at a tech company with 51-200 employees
I have tried other hypervisor technologies including XenServer, Hyper V, KVM, Parallels and virtual box. They all do the same thing, but ESXi has been doing it better for longer.
View full review »
MC
C7843E
Technical Support at a energy/utilities company with 5,001-10,000 employees
We looked at Microsoft Hyper-V, but it does not have all of the systematics of VMware vSphere.
View full review »it_user938985
Customer Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
We were previously using standalone servers. Once I came on board and I started talking to them about the features, we made the decision to virtualize some of our more urgent applications. We did it and everything has been running really great since. As a result, we are bringing more and more in, to the point where those standalone servers are basically sitting idle on a shelf now.
View full review »it_user312804
Senior System Analyst at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We used Microsoft Virtual Server before ESX3.5 was released. We switched because it was not an enterprise grade option.
View full review »it_user315288
Senior Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
I hadn't used a previous solution.
it_user321129
Sr. IT System Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
We were a Hyper-V shop but switched, because more robust. VMware is a gamechagner in virtualization.
View full review »it_user237264
IT Administrator and Sr. VMware Engineer at a retailer with 501-1,000 employees
No. The initial solution was VMware and we loved the product. There exists other solutions, but no one offers the level of trust and features that VMware offers, even open Source solutions like Xen.
View full review »it_user293886
VMware Consultant at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I have used Hyper-V solutions that lack many high availability features, and the idea of being a Windows based hypervisor made them not so stable.
it_user281973
Storage and VMware Expert at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
We have other solutions in the environment such as Oracle Rac and Microsoft Hyper-V, but I believe that vSphere is the most reliable product on the market.
View full review »FK
reviewer1390431
Head Of Network & Technical Support at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
We have used another solution previously.
View full review »DA
Daniel Aramayo
Implementation and Support Engineer at PRACSO S.R.L.
Oracle Virtualizacion. Was not so user friendly and lacking a lot of features
View full review »it_user389040
Senior Network Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
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.
View full review »it_user365892
Project Leader at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
I’ve used different hypervisors and also previous versions of vSphere. I think that vSphere is the most complete and stable solution for enterprise customers.
View full review »it_user320934
Principal Analyst at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
No – I have been using VMware since v3. I choose what I like and I stick with it.
View full review »it_user271026
System Administrator at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
No previous solution was used.
View full review »VH
reviewer1363245
CIO at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We moved from legacy servers to VMware Hyperconverged Infrastructure. We were using the ESXi version from vSphere, and then we moved to the cluster version. We have multiple servers in one cluster.
One of the main reasons for choosing vSphere was that it is one of the most known hypervisors in the market. It is easy to use, easy to implement, and straightforward. It was very good for our proof of concept, and we went for it. Eventually, we moved to a cluster infrastructure. Obviously, we use vSphere as the hypervisor.
View full review »JS
NetworkA3fbb
Network Administrator at a mining and metals company with 201-500 employees
We did not have a previous solution that we were using.
View full review »it_user683454
DPSA III at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees
We did not use a prior solution.
View full review »it_user321048
Sr. IT Technical Engineer & Solutions Architect at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We were challenged a couple of years, several years back with figuring out ways to cut cost and save money through ingenuity and automation and innovation, and this is one of the tools that was recently released in the early 2006. That's when VMware, I want to really feel like they really ironed out their niche and made this product usable and feasible for our infrastructure. By doing so, we saved a ton of money.
View full review »it_user297123
Operations Support Analyst at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The solution in this company started on v4.1, and has moved to v5, and is currently on v5.1. This was to do with keeping with in support and being able to use new features.
View full review »it_user280956
Virtualization and Cloud Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
I was using Citrix. vSphere is far better than Citrix, in my opinion. There was a time that when you wanted to deploy a VDI environment, there would be no reason not to choose XenServers. But now, VMware vSphere is providing not just the VDI platform, but also the complete virtualization infrastructure with very good features.
View full review »it_user209226
System Administrator at a cloud provider with 51-200 employees
We used Xen and KVM, and we switched for the lack of manageability, stability, scalability.
View full review »it_user183474
Senior System Engineer with 1,001-5,000 employees
No previous solution used.
View full review »it_user332952
Researcher and Professor at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
No, we haven't used a previous solution.
it_user420003
CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
We used old-style infrastructure with a SAN data store and blade center. We changed to simplify infrastructure management.
View full review »it_user414402
Technical Director at ADMI France
Previously, I used a traditional ISCSi network with SAN.
View full review »it_user280818
Systems Engineer at a engineering company with 501-1,000 employees
I have used KVM and Microsoft Virtual Server before switching completely to VMware vSphere. With VMware vSphere, we have a good management tool, with easy provisioning, and easy troubleshooting.
View full review »HM
Hazem Mohamed
Deputy Manager IT at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
We previously used Hyper-V, and we found a lot of problems with taking snapshots of our virtual machines. It also was not very stable.
View full review »it_user385836
Virtualization Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
We didn't really evaluate other solutions, but we're aware that Hyper-V is out there. But we went with VMware because they've been in the market a long time and we trust them.
View full review »it_user333873
Director of IT at a engineering company with 501-1,000 employees
I didn't use any other solution.
View full review »it_user320466
Network/Systems Administrator at South Plains Electric Co-Op
We were running physical servers, the industry was headed that way, and we knew that we had to. Furthermore, 80 physical servers is too much to fit into one room.
View full review »it_user321078
IT Manager at a retailer with 501-1,000 employees
We have always been using vSphere.
View full review »it_user320298
Technology Services Manager at Oden
We were limited on space in our data center, with physical servers, and we needed more.
View full review »PatrickCiPaaS
Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager at SnapLogic
it_user88791
Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
YB
Yan BENOIST
Entrepreneur at WindiS
SM
Stephen Murcott
System Administrator at j5 Software South Africa
I also used Citrix Xen which was really great, but ended up mainly using Qemu and Libvirt with KVM because of costs.
View full review »it_user685386
Technical Education Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
We did have a previous solution but it lacked the functionalities.
View full review »it_user334191
System Administrator at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
I have used Hyper-V, but it does not even come close to comparing to vSphere. There are plenty of features you cannot do easily in Hyper-V that vSphere makes a breeze.
View full review »it_user321009
Network Analyst at a construction company with 1,001-5,000 employees
it_user167028
System Administartor at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
No, but, in future, we plan to use a Microsoft Hyper-V.
View full review »CT
Costinel Tunsoiu
Database Administrator at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
We are working with Hyper-V. It was so poor that we started using VMware.
View full review »it_user284274
Technical Director - IT Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
I previously used Hyper-V, but it isn't stable and is a complex solution.
View full review »it_user274569
CEO with 51-200 employees
We previously used XenEnterprise and RedHat Enterprise Virtualization based on KVM. Due to the stability and lack of features, we switched.
View full review »MW
ITManageb049
IT Manager at a construction company with 51-200 employees
I have used the product my entire IT career.
View full review »it_user367836
IT Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
We've been using VMware since the beginning.
View full review »it_user326694
IT Technician at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
No previous solution was in place prior to v5.5.
View full review »it_user320919
Group Leader - Server Technologies & Storage at a government with 501-1,000 employees
We haven't used another solution.We do an
View full review »it_user300504
Executive Vice President at a construction company with 501-1,000 employees
No previous solution used.
View full review »it_user279879
Programmer at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
No previous solution used.
View full review »it_user132501
Manager of Infrastructure at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
We also have in production Citrix Xenserver; Xenserver does not seem to be friendly with third party integration.
View full review »ZB
reviewer1468668
Executive Director at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
We did not use another similar solution prior to vSphere.
View full review »it_user499017
Lead System Architect at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We still continue using our other solution. We did not switch.
View full review »it_user363441
Deployment Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
No, I did evaluate Hyper-V and Xenserver, but stayed with VMware due to features, despite initial cost difference.
View full review »it_user332244
System Engineer at a legal firm with 501-1,000 employees
We used a third-party installer, which made it straightforward. But it was complex because of planning involved.
View full review »
OscarMunoz
Jefatura del Departamento de Tecnologías de la Información at SERGEAR SAC
We previously used SAN products and we've recently decided that we're going to move to Nutanix.
NB
reviewer1445340
Director Global Security at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
Compared to other products, vSphere is number one in terms of flexibility and scalability.
View full review »it_user282900
Infrastructure Engineer at a non-profit with 5,001-10,000 employees
I was not using any other solution previously.
View full review »it_user333861
Sr. Architect - Enterprise Virtualization at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
No previous solution was used.
View full review »it_user862539
Infrastracture Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees
We started using Hyper-V from Microsoft, then we changed to VMware, because VMware is more stable. It is easier to manage this solution.
View full review »it_user375447
IT Infrastructure Engineer at a consumer goods company with 1,001-5,000 employees
No previous solution was in place.
View full review »it_user335937
Technical Lead - IT at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees
We knew that we needed to go for virtualization because there was this big messy server wreck with all those bare metal old servers in there. It was just crazy in terms of service. We switched to virtualization, now we're good to go.
View full review »it_user334206
System Administrator at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
We switched because in most cases, support was slow, so we had to find forums and internet articles for solving our issues.
View full review »it_user285072
Technical lead - Infrastructure Consulting / Transformation at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I have not had to switch.
View full review »it_user131937
Works at a non-tech company with 501-1,000 employees
it_user128259
Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
No, we went straight to VMware.
View full review »
it_user365877
System Engineer with 501-1,000 employees
I started with vSphere, so I haven't used any previous solutions.
View full review »DL
virtuali332868
Virtualization Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
I’ve tried a lot of different solutions, as a consultant my specialty is incident and disasters, I've been assisting in trouble shooting and most of then had switch to VMware due to it’s reliability.
it_user280935
IT Systems Administrator at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
I used to manage an IBM solution - SAN with VMware technology.
View full review »DN
reviewer935562
Senior Buyer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
We used a virtual machine prior to the solution.
it_user313041
IT Systems Administrator II at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
No solution was used previously.
View full review »it_user339246
VMware Architect at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
We have been using VMware in our environment since the company's inception.
View full review »it_user320268
Network Engineer at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
We were using hardware before, we started that in that development phase and realized the benefits of virtual environments and started migrating over.
View full review »it_user321027
Systems Analyst at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
No previous solution was used.
View full review »it_user320502
Asst. manager System Operations with 1,001-5,000 employees
We started virtualization with Microsoft Hyper-V v2, but VMware products are more stable and scalable.
View full review »RT
Ruddy TSHILUMBA
Network and Systems Administrator at Ishango-it
I have experience with using Proxmox on a single host for about two months, with Hyper-V. This setup is only in a lab and not for production.
View full review »it_user320607
System Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
No. Our parent company has Hyper-V and it’s no good.
View full review »it_user367833
ITC Systems Administrator at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
We started with VMware, so we never used a different virtualization solution.
View full review »it_user357519
Consultant at a tech company with 51-200 employees
We didn't use a previous solution to prior to vSphere.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
VMware vSphere
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about VMware vSphere. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Buyer's Guide
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Updated: March 2024
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