VMware vSphere Valuable Features
The web console is the most valuable feature for me. Because no matter what happens with the server, I can still get to it with the web console.
View full review »Software Define Data Center (SDDC), easily manage couple hundred servers within one console, deploy multiple servers within an hour, capable of monitoring server’s CPU, RAM, Disk, Network activities, High availability (HA) and Cluster (DRS), vMotion and DataStore vMotion, and more.
View full review »I like stability and the organization of the different functions into the I#M feature which is also quite useful, quite stable. I would prefer the old solution because before, you had to install software on your client's desktop to administrate the environment. Since five or seven years, it's not needed. You can do everything through your web interface. And I prefer when it was more reactive, so when you have a client instead of using your desktop. But it's a good solution, quite stable and quite efficient.
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.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
BK
Brian Kirsch
Instructor at Milwaukee Area Technical College
- A big feature for us was Quick Boot. You don't have to wait for the host to do a recheck on memory. You do an upgrade, and it's not a 10-minute reboot cycle. You can bring your host online and offline.
- Database optimization. They did a lot in enhancing the performance. They took down the memory utilization and increased what it brought in. You see more responsiveness, especially now with having the HTML5 client. It feels like a much snappier product.
The biggest feature that everybody wanted was the HTML5 client. This has made everything native where you're able to surf through it. Going into our web page, you're no longer refreshing it. It feels more like an enterprise product now. With Adobe Flash, it didn't feel that way.
View full review »BS
Bunmi-Sadiq
IT Supervisor at APM Terminals, Inc.
The features in vSphere data recovery are excellent. Sometimes I've deleted an entire server before and was able to recover the deleted VM. I didn't have to use the backup to restore the VM. I just used some command line tools and I was able to restore the deleted VM. I find that fascinating.
For VM migration, I can migrate my virtual machines from one place to the other. vSphere has easy integration. I have some older server models. They are HP products. I have both old and new server models. I was able to integrate all these servers despite that fact that the date of manufacture is a five-year gap between the units.
I was using the same version of vSphere and I was able to integrate all the servers together. They are working well through it.
View full review »JO
Johan Odendaal
Server Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
The solution has high availability.
The on the fly changing of the resources on a VM is very helpful.
You've got the underlying capacity, that's greater than what the actual server has, and therefore you have the ability to do on the fly add capacity. I would say that's by far the thing we use the most.
The VRS, to a lesser degree, is also quite useful to us. It does work in the environment.
The solution is very good from a recoverability point of view. Everything can be stored much easier on a virtual server than on a physical box.
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Kim Dijkstra
Technical manager at Koninklijke Bam Groep N.v.
I appreciate VMware vSphere for its versatility and usability across various use cases. The solution's flexibility allows us to implement it widely. We use it extensively, and I believe soon all our servers will run through virtualization for better efficiency using vSphere. It performs as advertised and meets our needs effectively.
All of the features are great. It affords us different views of the VMs created by vSphere so we can control them better. It provides us with a single view into VMs as an asset. We create thousands and thousands of VMs using vSphere.
We have created more than 6,000 VMs. With this solution, through a single pane, we can see inside the vCenter. We can see our VMs that are running on-premises, the data center, and the ones that are in the Cloud.
View full review »The most valuable feature is its stability. There are a lot of product enhancements that come out regularly but, generally, the stability the solution provides is the most important to me, as I like to go home and sleep at night.
It is absolutely simple and efficient to manage. We can bring in people who have never been exposed to vSphere or virtualized environments and they're still able to support it from a server standpoint. The training time as well as the adoption rate, for a junior technician or somebody coming right out of college, is very good.
Sometimes, the talent pool is hard to fill so having that stability and ease of use is very important to us.
View full review »The most significant aspects for us are the invaluable features of High Availability and vMotion in VMware. Additionally, the seamless sharing of resources and numerous other robust features make it highly commendable. Specifically, the capability to implement a load balancer between hosted environments without any downtime is particularly appreciated, underscoring the platform's reliability and advanced functionality.
VMware vSphere has a user-friendly GUI. It is easy to deploy and find troubleshooting articles as well.
View full review »One of the most valuable features of this solution is the ease of deployment. It's also user-friendly and has been on the market for more than a decade, so it's a leading technology in hypervisor solutions.
View full review »RK
Rangga Kusuma
Head Tim Infrastructure, and IT Security at Lembaga Penjamin SImpanan
The most important feature is the ability to balance the servers with Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). It is a very useful feature and should be mandatory for vSphere to have but it is only available in the enterprise edition. It should be available in all versions.
View full review »SK
reviewer1451847
Sr. Systems Engineer at a non-profit with 501-1,000 employees
The solution is highly reliable and suits our needs - it's highly popular. Support and the overall community are great. You can find a solution to any issues you have.
View full review »AT
AllanTrambouze
Consultant senior en technologie de l'information at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
VMware Tanzu (container) is the most valuable addition because you get an efficient solution to manage the VM and container in a single pane of glass.
The integration of Tanzu inside the base version of vSphere, without the need to install NSX-T, is a great addition. Many IT people don't know NSX-T and NSX can cost a lot, so it could save a lot of money. However, you will not get the enhanced network function due to the lack of NSX-T.
The improvements to vSAN with a file server service is also a very valuable feature for many companies because they will be saving with the management of an NFS storage or a file server.
View full review »RS
Ricky Santos
System Administrator at ON Semiconductor Phils. Inc.
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. This his feature comes hand-in-hand with other features of VMware like the DRS, which automatically load-balances the whole VMware farm based on the usage and recommendation.
View full review »The emphasis isn't specifically on a particular feature, but rather on the ease of use. For instance, when building a test lab or setting up an entire environment from scratch, VMware products are notably more user-friendly compared to alternatives like Nutanix. I've had prior experience with Nutanix.
From my personal perspective, I found it easier to adapt to using VMware than when I started using Dynamics. This ease of use is a strong point. It's largely about how straightforward it is to navigate through VMware's user interface. In contrast, with Nutanix, there's a need to delve into smaller configurations and navigate vendor-specific settings. VMware, on the other hand, offers a more accessible management page. This difference primarily centres around usability and the overall user-friendliness of the interface.
View full review »
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Francis KACOU
Head of Service and Storage Infrastructure at GS2E
The product is extremely powerful.
We have had a module called vRealize for three years. We primarily use vRealize to troubleshoot any issues that may arise with our virtual machines, which is the main reason why we believe this solution is excellent. When a user has a problem, it does not have to be that his application is very slow or that it can't work. Using vRealize, we can determine which part of the solution is causing the problem and resolve it.
View full review »The fact that you can use all the CPU and memory power that the server can provide is most valuable. In a physical server, you might end up not using all the physical resources. There are a lot of benefits, such as flexibility and mobility, in virtualizing computes.
View full review »MA
Mohamed_Ashraf
Senior Product Specialist at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees
The features that I have found most valuable are its vMotion and the other features that are basic in any product. Snapshot, Virtual switch, and VDS are very useful. Its features are so good and fit our needs.
View full review »JH
Jason Hong-Turney
Lead IT Systems Engineer at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees
Most valuable features of vSphere 6.7, for us, at the management level would be:
- VCHA is a nice redundancy feature that they added in 6.7.
- I like the quality of life improvements with the VMFS-6 for using auto UNMAP on the data stores.
- We really appreciate the improvements to the Clarity UI where we can manage Update Manager (VUM) and our vSAN stack within the modern interface.
The solution is also very simple and efficient to manage. Features that have made it simple and easy to manage include the newer VAMI for the V-center appliance, it's very easy to see what version we are at, and very easy to upgrade to the next version. The fact that we can now use VCHA at the appliance level just decreases our chance of having an outage, because so many of our customers rely on the API interface for V-center.
View full review »SP
Stephen Parker
Systems Engineer at BYU Idaho
The HTML5 interface is much better, it's faster, faster than the old C# Client, which was very nice to have. But with the HTML5 interface, it's smooth, fast, responsive. I can do it from any device, from my Mac, my PC, even from my phone.
The solution is very simple to use and to manage. Updates are simple. The biggest feature that enables the ease of use is the fact that you can update via the web interface. With a couple of clicks, the update is done; no manual intervention, you just click Update and it automatically reboots the server for you and you're back up and going again.
View full review »KW
Kevin Williams
IT Analyst I at Los Rios Community College District
Ease of support is one of the main features that we have with it. We're able to take Snapshots before doing updates to make it easy to roll back if something does happen to go wrong.
The visibility that we have of our VMs is also important. What's being applied? Who has management of them? Laying it out in a virtual environment allows us to customize for our students. We're able to respond to the students' needs much more quickly than we could in a physical environment.
I found it a little bit daunting at first when I was coming into it raw, but now the management of it is very simple.
View full review »MH
Michael Huset
Senior Systems Administrator at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
- VHA
- DRS
- VMotion
- Redundancy, failover, any DR situation
- Reducing the overall physical footprint for electrical needs, heating, cooling
- Money-saving, in general
The most valuable feature for us is Virtual Volumes because it gives us better control of VM stores.
View full review »The most valuable features of the solution are the overall virtualization technology and the new features that allow you to move servers from one system to another. The solution's newer technologies allow you to do network-level isolation.
View full review »PY
reviewer1158117
Assistant Consultant with 10,001+ employees
There are many features that are valuable and that excites me. However, it totally depends upon the customer. I'm working on the behalf of a service provider, who supports a customer. How useful it depends on what kind of licensing the customer carries.
The initial setup is straightforward and not overly complex.
Its scalability potential is good.
The solution is quite stable.
Technical support has been good.
View full review »It's the de facto leader in the virtualization market as of now and it's been the pioneer and it's got the maximum breadth of the features available across the virtualization sphere.
It has got almost all the features that one can expect to find in a solid platform. It has good features performance-wise and offers a very small footprint. They're top-class security-wise.
The latest innovation always comes from VMware.
The stability is very good.
The scalability is excellent.
View full review »SK
SenthilKumarGM
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
The most useful features are ESXi, DRS, Auto Deploy, and the Lifecycle Manager.
View full review »MC
Martin Coloumbe
IT Solution Architect at KnowledgeOne
It is a very stable solution. It performs well for our requirements. It has been running for a long time, so we are very knowledgeable about this solution.
It is a very well-supported solution, and it is very flexible. The expansion of its functionality is dynamic.
View full review »CB
reviewer939042
Chief Technology Officer at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
The most valuable features of vSphere are really the scalability and its reliability. It's really helped us, as a managed service provider, because we have so many customers that we have to be pretty much on call for, so that when it's up and running and it's working well, that makes our jobs a lot easier.
The built-in encryption of vSphere really helps us to secure our customers, especially customers in the medical field who need to be HIPAA compliant. Being able to encrypt the VM itself helps out a ton.
I find vSphere very simple and easy to manage. It has a very good GUI that you're able to use. Anybody can log in and start clicking around and figure out how to power on a VM, how to create a new VM. It's pretty streamlined for the most part.
As far as the ease of use goes, if you ever were in a situation where something was down, I feel like the logging in VMware makes it really easy to report what's going on. The logging is a really helpful feature. Also, some of the features built in, like vMotion - if you do have a server that's down - you can use something like vMotion to get it back up and running.
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Brandon Morris
System Administrator at City of Sioux Falls
One of the most valuable features that vSphere has is its HA and DRS protection, where it can simply make sure that all the machines are always where they need to be and how they need to be taken care of. We have a lot of servers and services for emergency services, for police, fire, and the like. We have the ability to use DRS as Anti-Affinity Rules to make sure that those redundant server pairs always stay away from each other. But then, if anything would happen to one of them, we have HA to be able to come up and bring it right up and going again. A lot of companies will say, "Oh no, we lose so much money per hour when something goes," but in our particular use case, if our emergency services would go down, people could actually die. That's a little bit more important.
vSphere does offer quite a bit of security stuff built-in. It is nice to know that we can have the virtual machines encrypted, so that if somebody were to get a hold of any of those files, we don't have to worry about them actually being used. Since we do have so many different departments and areas with a lot of people that need access into the solution, we can use the role-based access controls to really restrict and control who can do what, so everybody can do what they need to do, but they can't do anything else past that.
I do find vSphere simple and easy to manage. Most of the common tasks that you would do are very quickly available. One particular case that we go in all the time for is provisioning new servers. If you take that to the analogy of the physical world, that was something that, by the time you got it and you plugged it in and you stacked it, you did everything, you got the firmware up and going, you got the OS loaded and patched, you were easily in it for a day to two days, trying to prep up something that way. Just yesterday, I was sitting in a session (here at VMworld 2018) and I got a request for a brand new SQL Server for somebody and it was literally: right-click from template, new machine, here's its name, here's its IP address. Oh, by the way, tag it out as an SQL machine, and in 10 minutes the machine is up and running and is already installing SQL on its own, automatically. So it's pretty cool stuff.
View full review »MO
Michael Ogunlade
Head of enterprise systems at Fidelity Bank Plc
Its dynamic resource scheduling and its fault tolerance capabilities are two features that I've found to be valuable. I also like that VMware vSphere is stable, scalable, and easy to install.
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Nitin Pande
Associate Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Server Virtualization is the most important feature because that helps me to utilize 100% capacity of my physical server or box. Its redundancy, uptime, or high-availability is also valuable.
Storage-sharing is also valuable. In vSAN, I can utilize the maximum storage. In the physical boxes, if you don't require storage, it lies idle, but with VMware or any kind of virtualization, you can utilize the full storage.
View full review »LA
Luis Arencibia
IT Operations Services Manager at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
It is a single pane of glass that lets you access your hosts and VMs. This makes the solution impactful, as you have one place to go to manage everything from one console.
The encryption security is great. It is a topic we take into consideration daily. It is important that we enable all the features and make sure our data center is secure. Nobody can hack us, get in, steal information, and use it from our systems.
We run an electric grid. Our apps that run on the electric grid are going on VMs, so these are very secure apps.
View full review »Stability of the Hypervisor, DRS, and HA are some of the more valuable features.
View full review »The solution saves cost. We can run seven to eight different applications on it. SDDC is the best feature. The data center replication features and high availability are valuable to us. We use the product because of its HA. The HA solution is more comprehensive.
View full review »MK
Michael-Kierum
Principal Consultant at Absolute Precision
The ability to redistribute loads, to re-spin failed processes, monitor resource utilization, and such are all valuable features in VMware. In industrial IoT, most elements end up being terrestrial. With VMware, especially when you're working with niche products, you can manage the integrated solution and multiple systems from a single pane of glass.
View full review »BH
Benjamin Hlophe
Director Of Technology Operations at Kutleng Engineering Technologies
The virtualization, the remote management user interface, and the web console are most valuable.
View full review »EF
Emmanuel FOMUDE
Senior Oracle Database Administrator at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
In terms of the usability, it's user-friendly; VMware vSphere is much simpler as compared to Oracle. Even a French-speaking citizen or foreigner can easily implement it.
It's much more stable than other products. It is scalable and easy to implement as well.
View full review »TM
reviewer1505493
Systems Engineer at a educational organization with 11-50 employees
If you're looking at virtualization, it's probably the most stable virtualization platform that I have worked on.
VMware offers one of the most stable if not the most stable virtualization hypervisor.
The solution makes navigation very easy.
It makes migration very simple.
There is a lot of very impressive innovation happening within the product right now.
The integration capabilities are excellent.
We've found the product to be quite scalable.
The installation is quite straightforward.
You can do so much out of the box with their product, with their built-in technology. In vSphere, you can manage the hardware itself using the same platform.
View full review »ID
Irad Dukad
IT Manager at ducart
The interface that the product offers is very easy to navigate. I learned it quite easily. I check the hypervisor interface on it. It's much easier for one who is familiar with the technology.
The details that I get from the solution are great. It gives a lot of detail.
The product has been pretty easy to use overall.
The stability is okay.
Technical support was helpful and knowledgeable.
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Leonardo Shewchenko
Information Technology Support Coordinator at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees
The HA and DRS are very valuable.
It is a very stable solution.
Integration with other environments was simple to achieve.
The initial setup is simple even for complex environments. The documentation for implementation is very good.
VMware vSphere has great technical support.
View full review »The solution has been quite stable.
The solution can scale well.
We found the initial setup to be pretty straightforward.
View full review »JH
SeniorSyb3f0
Senior Systems Administrator at a consultancy with 5,001-10,000 employees
The most valuable features for us are DRS, VMotion, and, of course, some of the analytics that we were able to define to quantify our workloads and tell us how we are able to make our data center more efficient.
It's absolutely efficient and simple to manage in general. Set it up, configure it, then monitor, manage, and maintain. That's it. What makes it simple to manage is that we use a flavor of Auto Deploy, storage policies, among other features around policies, where they come online and their policies are in them. Everything conforms to a policy. It's pretty much set up for good.
View full review »The HA and DRS capabilities are great. Right now, we’re able to basically use the ESXi and move all the blades without the users ever knowing anything was different.
View full review »Essentially, we have the flexibility for a hybrid cloud. We could easily move workloads from on-premises to the cloud and vice versa if we were running on-premises and cloud, which is one of the most important points in the new releases, in particular.
View full review »It is easy to deploy and manage backups for me. That said, I've used it a long time and therefore am quite comfortable with it. Upgrades and restores are simple.
The product is stable as well.
The scalability has been good.
View full review »MS
reviewer1261665
VMware Software Engineer at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
The solution offers a very stable performance.
It's a scalable product.
The solution is extremely reliable. It's an excellent product.
The initial setup is pretty straightforward.
Technical support has always been great.
The pricing of the product is reasonable.
View full review »SS
Sid Sharma
Lead QA Analyst at Loomis Express
Overall, it is a pretty good solution. We do not have to worry about upgrading the versions that people use for our in-house software. We just create ThinApps, and as soon as they log in, they always get the upgraded version. This part really works well for us.
View full review »I have found the solution to be flexible, and the vCenter and vMotion useful. When we have a server that is down we can use the vMotion to use another host. Additionally, the backup feature and graphics are very good. The documentations are clear and easy to understand.
View full review »VMware vSphere gives us a complete landscape to manage the infrastructure in one view. With the REDOPS automation in place, it is easy for us to manage our VMs on top of it.
Also, the automated builds are being done through it, and we don't have to manually do it anymore. All of my AIS platforms are completely automated now with the VM suite.
View full review »RB
RavindraBhojwani
Logistics and product Manager at a security firm with 11-50 employees
VMware vSphere is a stable platform. We never had any issues with VMware vSphere. Once you deploy it with a stable version of the server or the hardware, there's no issue at all.
AT
Allan Trambouze
Senior Consultant at Cofomo
The most valuable features are:
- ESXi Quick Boot
- VM encryption
- New security features.
The new feature announced today with vSphere Update 1 inside vSan is impressive. I did not have a chance to test Update 1 yet. We shall see how it performs in the next few days.
Because my server is too old, I am using my own lab for TPM. I did not have a good chance to test everything. VM encryption is quite simple to implement: Just check two boxes and it is done. It is very easy to do. If you want to move from on-premise to cloud, it is quite easy.
View full review »DP
Daniel Pietrasanta
IT Systems Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
It's a very nice tool to be able to reduce your footprint, consolidate servers, and accumulate several servers in a high-density configuration.
It's pretty simple to manage.
View full review »PG
reviewer924948
Senior Manager Systems/Network, Global Information Systems at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The ability to segregate roles and responsibilities, as well as regions. For example, I can give access to my Chinese team to manage the China servers and hosts. On the other hand, I could give access to my Canadian team to manage global VMware installations. Therefore, I like the flexibility of this tool.
We have just migrated most of our SQL and enterprise databases to vSphere. We don't use it for Oracle, but we do for most other things. We also use it for our communications exchange link, etc. Therefore, it is pretty business critical when it comes to the back office support and server implementations.
View full review »CW
reviewer924351
Director, Windows Server Infrastructure at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
The most valuable features are its flexibility and the ability to move workload.
The built-in security features, such as VM Encryption and support for TPM and VBS, are all important for us, but I can't go into specifics about them.
It's also simple and efficient to manage. It's a complex environment but it is one that we can get our staff trained on, it's not like a one-off environment.
View full review »
The ability to maximize the use of existing hardware resources and run multiple servers at the same time.
View full review »
The most valuable features of the solution are in areas like VMware vSphere vMotion and vSphere HA.
View full review »The tool offers virtualization and monitoring.
View full review »MM
MinaMagdy
Senior Infrastructure Solutions Specialist at Fiber Misr
This is a straightforward solution, there's not much troubleshooting required and the work around it is quite simple. I particularly like the virtualization and the ability of the solution to optimize and deliver an automated and orchestrated cloud platform on-prem. They regularly surprise us with great features developed by a very, very sharp R&D team that delivers up-to-date technology with more features and more valuable ideas to enhance and automate the platform with data center.
PB
PatrickBenson
Sr. Architect, Business Continuity at Sayers
- Storage vMotion to safely migrate VMs to other hypervisors, storage solutions and sites while the VM is still running.
- Distributed vSwitches to better manage networking across large infrastructures.
- vRealize for operations management and automation to remove human error from complex tasks and enable more efficient processes and business activities.
- The VCSA appliance provides a great interface for most management tasks.
In general, the combination of VMware products that compose or plug into vSphere enable most organizations to better prepare for disruptive events.
View full review »TR
Tony Reeves
Network Administrator
The most valuable features for me are a very easily scalable infrastructure. I can have a couple of hosts to do basic workloads. I can have a lot of hosts to do a lot of workloads. vSAN integrates my storage so I don't need an external storage SAN. I love having everything integrated in the same UI. The new HTML5 interface doesn't require any plugins anymore and it's super-fast. Really liking that change.
In terms of the built-in security features that I'm using, currently I am using vSAN Encryption, using an external KMS server, and it works great. It's pretty easy to set up, very easy, especially in the UI, to integrate that and get that set up.
The way that I find vSphere simple and easy to manage is that the interface is all laid out for you. You've got various different views based on what you want to do in the UI. You have your Hosts and Clusters view, if you're doing something where you need to manage at the cluster level. You can manage at the host level in there. If you're doing something very VM-specific or on a vApp level, you can go into the VM and Templates view. It's very easy to scale and use what you need to use.
View full review »We truly value the security of the solution. We also value the consolidation, which can be done in terms of releasing the hardware footprint, and the service call. Furthermore, the automation and ease, as well as source utilization are key features of this product.
View full review »JK
DesktopS0c59
Desktop Support Supervisor at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
The most valuable feature is being able to VMotion and migrate easily, moving machines around on the host. I know DRS will take care of a lot about that, but there's still some manual intervention here and there, so the flexibility of it has been really good.
It's pretty simple. It's easy to upgrade.
View full review »The solution is easy to use, user-friendly interface and has high availability features. When comparing it to other solutions it is more robust.
View full review »MK
MUKUNDKULKARNI
IT Manager at KIRLOSKAR PNEUMATIC CO. LTD.
The most valuable features of VMware vSphere are backup and recovery.
View full review »MF
Mohamed Fathi
IT Manager at pioneers
The solution has many valuable features. Virtualization is flexible and it has simple clustering. However, the most important feature is the ability to move between VMs. The vMotion features are very good.
View full review »YS
Yves-Schatzmann
Senior Information Technology Consultant at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees
I definitely like the stability, performance and ease-of-use.
I have no issues with the solution's scalability or user-friendliness. I consider these to be perfect. We have had a fantastic, problem-free solution for the past 14 years when it comes to fault tolerance and disaster recovery. It has everything one needs.
View full review »FW
ForrestWu
Sr. Manager IT at a non-profit with 51-200 employees
I like that it's like a distributed resource scheduler, the workload can be balanced automatically. Also you can use vMotion as well to manually move the virtual machines around different physical hosts. This makes it easier when it comes to redundancy.
View full review »IS
Igor Schwarz
Presales Engineer at Emet Computing
RV
Rene Van Den Beden
Chief Architect at RoundTower Technologies
- The move towards feature-parity with HTML5 for the user interface.
- Also, increasing the release of features, which is partly through the use of that technology stack with VMware Cloud on AWS, so it's a much more robust product right now.
- It is a lot more simple and efficient to manage. It has improved a lot from the early days of vSphere 5.x. Lifecycle management and reducing the number of clicks that an administrator has to do to actually do a task have been greatly optimized, particularly with the HTML5 interface.
- In terms of more easily managing networks and improving visibility, the two go hand in hand. Compared to the vCloud Air days, it's come a long way. It's a solution that actually works now, and you can use your vSphere staff - who have been trained on and understand vSphere - to actually consume that hybrid cloud with very little or no training.
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Sean Crawford
Information Systems Analyst at San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG)
The most valuable feature would be enhanced, what we call, Linked Mode to link our disaster recovery site to our primary site across different vCenters, without being required to be broken apart. Meaning, we have identity management and the actual vCenter servers split. We can actually do embedded now, thanks to vSphere 6.7.
For the security features for vSphere 6.7, VM encryption was really critical because we're required to protect virtual machines. We have to adhere to PCI DSS for credit card protection. So the VM encryption was very critical to passing our audit.
View full review »MJ
Mikael Korsgaard Jensen
Sr. Operations Engineer at Kamstrup
For me, the most valuable feature would be the EVC, but EVC has been changed to be per-VM which makes it possible for us to migrate the VMs to cloud and not take into account what hardware they're running on.
Also, a big improvement from the previous version is that I'm now able to schedule backup for the VCSA. That is, in my opinion, a huge improvement.
The last thing that I think is really great is, I'm now able to boot the OS and not the entire server. That's going to save me a lot of time.
I find vSphere easy to manage, especially because of both the vCenter and probably because I've been doing it for 15 years.
View full review »CH
Infrastr7d14
Infrastructure with 5,001-10,000 employees
What I like about it is being able to see my entire organization, especially with some of the newer enhanced links. All of my data centers show up in one view and I can see every server that's running. I also get performance statistics so if there are issues, major problems going on, I can see them.
The UI is very intuitive, you don't have to spend hours before you figure it out. All in all, compared to other environments, like Hyper-V, we find vSphere a lot more user-friendly and intuitive to use.
View full review »- Core virtualizaton
- Basic hypervisor functions with HA
- DRS (compute and storage) is one of the best features for practical purposes.
- HA is a great feature, but if you keep hosts patched, HA doesn’t come into play. It’s not a day-to-day feature you use.
- Ability to vMotion across clusters. We took smaller clusters and consolidated them into one mega cluster because of the ability to vMotion from other clusters live into newly-created clusters.
- The HA functions
- vSphere Distributed Switch
NT
reviewer1119762
Information Technology Security Specialist at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
It works well with other VMware solutions.
The user interface is great.
There are no issues with the level of scalability you can achieve.
The stability is good.
The initial setup is straightforward.
View full review »PM
PrasadMane
System Advisor IT at CRIF India
There is the simplicity of management, accessibility, and availability.
The interface is really user-friendly.
View full review »GP
Gabriele-Pizzigati
Senior Software and Systems Engineer at SAMU.IT
This solution's most valuable feature is its High Availability.
View full review »EN
reviewer1602309
IT Manager at a legal firm with 51-200 employees
The product works very well for us. Over the last decade, it's been extremely dependable.
The initial setup is very straightforward.
The stability has been very good.
Technical support is quite good and very responsive.
The solution can scale well.
View full review »KR
กฤษฎา รวยเรืองรุ่ง
System Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Virtualised automation is a useful feature.
View full review »A lot of the features of this product are valuable to us such as vMotion, HA, online modify VM specs, etc.
View full review »We use vMotion a lot and use vCenter to manage the entire set-up.
View full review »Flexibility and inter-operability with other technologies are valuable features.
View full review »JS
JeanSpiteri
Infrastructure Engineer at a hospitality company with 51-200 employees
The most valuable feature of VMware vSphere is the ability to work in big system infrastructure. For example, you can move one bridge, one machine to another, or one virtual machine from one server to another. This is beneficial when you want to put a server under maintenance.
Also, the security features and implementation are very easy.
View full review »WM
Walid Mouamar
Network and Security Engineer at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees
In terms of overall features, vSphere's stability stands out on top. Not only is it highly stable, but we're also able to have a quick backup server on standby.
View full review »JD
Jeroen De Jonge
Autodidact Quantum Physics- Quantum mechanics. at IC Consultancy
The virtualization is set by itself. vSphere is the best way to have a non-host based fixed solution. We always try to find an agnostic environment where we can restore agnostics or just say, "I need resources capacity." That's why VMware vSphere in particular, has been the best in the past but now also with the evolution of their product. Nowadays, you don't have to use any STEM infrastructure anymore because the bandwidth and the LAN speeds are getting steeper.
If you look at the interconnection if you have a dark fiber connection, you can have data sent between locations. It's getting much cheaper.
If you use Zerto on top of that, then you are protected against any cyber threats or attacks. If you do it right, if you configure it from the hypervisor layer to external storage and then you have always a way back. It's blocked by the application of the journal. You can always go back to a point in time if you want to restore. If the point in time is as short as possible then you have the best solution. You can leave any additional solutions like CrowdStrike.
GS
Ganesh Sekarbabu
Windows Virtualization Engineer at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees
The most valuable feature is performance, especially the 6.7 version.
We were looking for content library options for templates and were happy that VMware introduced it in 6.7 version.
I like the speed and the quickness of the boot in the newest version of vSphere.
The mission-critical applications in our company, like SAP, Siebel, and a lot of financially related applications are running. Our developer uses most of animation, etc., and we are using the vSphere for that.
We have seen a performance boost compared to the previous versions, like a 5.1, five years ago. It has gradually increased. Previously, we hadn't migrated any database, like SQL or Oracle, into VMware. However, we are planning to now. We are moving forward because a lot of new features are now available on 6.7.
We are doing a PoC, which we are happy about now. We may move over the database into our VMware environment.
It is simple to manage. However, some of our operation teams, they are used to the desktop line, but VMware removed it in the previous version. Initially, we had an issue on the flash, but now we are happy. With VMware moving to HTML, it's really fast. We did a bit of version testing, and it's really fast and easy to use now.
View full review »DG
David Grimes
VP of Product Engineering at Navisite
- The most valuable feature of vSphere is vMotion, because it rocks. It radically changes the way we think about how we can operate a large infrastructure, and notably, in terms of proactive maintenance.
- The second biggest feature is HA, because complexity around IT resilience is a difficult problem to solve, especially at the application level. Therefore, being able to rely on the infrastructure to provide a 90:10 or 99:1 rule is more than enough resilience for most applications, and getting that directly from the infrastructure is fantastic.
These features are useful day-to-day, because we operate a very large number of single-tenant private ESX deployments, managed by vCenter, as well as VCD-based public cloud. Frankly, with hundreds and thousands of hosts under management, there's no way we could operate that infrastructure without the use of vMotion. The ability to migrate those workloads to free up the physical infrastructure for maintenance activities, patching, BIOS updates, etc., is a critical requirement to operate.
An important vSphere feature from a security perspective is VM encryption. As is the right thing to do in this day and age, security needs to be the number one concern for any IT operator. While there are security solutions which can be delivered at the physical, hardware layer, they don't necessarily address all of the requirements from an encryption perspective. Being able to have VM-centric, VM-level encryption is a great feature of vSphere.
View full review »vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) is the server that controls and manages your VMware environment. I would suggest using this over the vCenter Server Windows install. It has the advantage of easier install and manageability and seems to be the method most preferred by VMware, as well.
Much of the management of the VMware environment can now be done from the web interface, but you can still use the vSphere fat client, which is still my preferred method of interacting with the VMware environment. The web interface is better than in past iterations, but still just lacks that little something that would make me voluntarily to move to it on a permanent basis.
View full review »- HA - for restarting failed VMs on good hosts
- vMotion - ability to migrate between different hosts
- DRS balances data storage and workload of datacenters
- High Availability
- Distributed resource scheduling & vMotion
- Robust management toolset for automating routine tasks
WK
reviewer1390341
IT Infrastructure Engineer at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees
It is a very dependable solution. Its performance is very good, and it is also easy to manage and implement.
View full review »BA
Bilal Aslam
Founder & Technology Advisor at EUC Solutions
vSphere is a robust and feature-rich virtualization platform. It is the number one virtualization-layer platform available, and a lot of people trust it.
Many other platforms now provide similar features but VMware was the first to provide enhanced recorders, DRS, fault tolerance, vMotion, and others. They pioneered these features and they are very stable.
VMware also provides software-defined storage, vSAN, which is built into the kernel. This is a plus point.
Other good features include DRS, HA, fault tolerance, vSAN, and vCenter is a very good management interface.
This platform is easy to maintain.
View full review »GF
reviewer1681332
IT Operations Support at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees
The most valuable feature is the tech manager from the utilization.
The virtualization this solution offers is very complete for the infrastructure. It meets our requirements and our needs.
It is very easy to operate.
View full review »DF
Domingos Francisco
IT Administrator at a healthcare company with 201-500 employees
The solution is user-friendly. It is easy to convert, create, and manage systems.
View full review »MD
Madhura Direckze
Technical Account Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
The solution is user-friendly and easy to manage.
View full review »MA
Maan Othman
Senior System Engineer at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees
KC
Karthikeyan Chinnadurai
Solutions Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
We are utilizing all of the features and they are good.
I don't see any challenges in using this product.
View full review »OK
OmidKoushki
Solution Architect at KIAN company
Valuable features really depend on different projects. We are using the traditional infrastructure based on VMware vSphere. We are also using the high availability (HA) and Distributed Switch features to extend our network and switch between different hosts.
The VMotion and SVMotion features are very essential for us to relocate the storage of virtual machines to different storage or vSANs. We are using VMotion and SVMotion features several times of the day. We are also using another VMware product to replicate a lot of solutions to a second replication site.
View full review »AP
reviewer1266792
IT Infrastructure Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
The most valuable features are the vCenter, and SRM.
Technically speaking, there is nothing that I don't like. I think that the solution is perfect. It's the best on the market.
I have not used all of the features but the features that are provided are perfect. There is nothing that this solution doesn't have.
View full review »TN
Trevor Napier
System Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The most valuable feature is the single pane of glass management. There are a number of things which vSphere offers in terms of consolidating infrastructure onto single pieces of hardware. This is instead of having multiple systems running on the OSs that we need. I like the capability of logging into one system, then being able to shift over to another system within that single pane of glass.
vSphere is simple to manage. Some of the best parts of managing it is vCenter. I use that to provide entry points for different administrators to login from different environments to manage either physical or virtual servers and resources on the network in our storage site.
RC
Robert Cox
Systems Engineer at Vestmark inc
The most valuable features are the seamless HA with vMotion and being able to run vCenters in HA mode. We use a company called SimpliVity, it's a hyperconverged system that sits on top of VMware. They have a product called RapidDR which automates the entire DR process for us. So in a DR event, we just run a script, and that's it. Between vMotion and vCenter, everything moves over to the DR environment.
Also, once you start using it and you get your hands dirty with it, it's very intuitive. I find the menus make sense. Other UIs, specifically Salesforce, for example, can sometimes be weird. Things are in weird places, there are a lot of menus, a lot of dropdowns. Especially, in the new HTML5 Client with vSphere and vCenter, everything is pretty straightforward and easy to find and easy to use.
View full review »AA
Ayodeji Ariyo
Senior Network Engineer with 1,001-5,000 employees
The most valuable features are the scalability and the ease of use. The latter makes it most efficient to use. It is very simple, very easy. We've been doing it for a while now. Most of that comes from having the expertise in-house to run it, and that's why we're here at VMworld 2018.
View full review »RE
Raden Evangelista
Systems Engineerineering Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 51-200 employees
- The hypervisor
- I use the ESXi a lot for my users to create their own templates and control their own VMs without my interaction.
- The stability of the networking site
- I can automate deployments.
- I use customization to prevent any network and DNS collisions to the router.
Our mission critical apps are mostly database servers. We are pretty much a Windows platform company.
View full review »- Isolation/partitioning of the server hardware
- Support for Latest windows and linux operating systems
PR
Patrick Ringelberg
Owner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Distributed Virtual Switch – you only have to configure it once, and then you can promote it to all the servers, so you have a single switch for all the systems.
Also, the HA system works very well right out of the box.
View full review »VL
Thang Le Toan (Victory Lee)
CIO at Robusta Technology & Training
The most valuable feature of the solution is its performance. Nowadays, people are trying to move on Kubernetes. People prefer deploying services over the Kubernetes.
Virtualization, VDI and application publishing are the most valuable features of VMware vSphere.
View full review »vCenter Appliance, DRS, HA, Update Manager and SRM help us keep our business running smoothly. Having the vCenter Appliance has allowed us to save costs on Windows licenses and have a more stable platform for managing hosts. Also having Update Manager now as well it makes the move to VCSA that much better. SRM has allowed us to failover our Tier1 services in under 30 minutes for each whereas it would take over an hour the old fashioned way. DRS and HA have kept our cluster stable and VMs running optimally. With the built in Update Manager now in the vCenter Appliance it is easy to scan and remediate our Hosts even during Production hours as we can use HA/DRS with Maintenance Mode.
View full review »I consider all the features to be of interest.
View full review »SM
reviewer1496229
Manager at a non-profit with 201-500 employees
The product is stable.
The flexibility of the solution is very good.
The product is very easy to use.
The product offers a very nice single dashboard for complete management.
The solution is very straightforward to implement.
We found the scalability to be very good.
View full review »GC
reviewer1346730
IT Director at a manufacturing company with 201-500 employees
The VMotion feature is the solution's most valuable aspect. The fact that you can move the load without service interruption to the users is great.
The initial setup is easy.
View full review »SK
Stephen Krujelskis
Senior System Administrator at a university with 501-1,000 employees
Most valuable features are
- quick provisioning
- High Availability
- DRS for balancing workload.
I definitely find vSphere to be simple and efficient to manage. A key feature that enables this is vCenter. It is super simple to stand up, and once you're in there, especially with the new HTML5 client, everything is easy to manage.
View full review »PL
Preston Lasebikan
Lead Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
The most valuable feature would be the slight changes they've made to VMFork instant cloning, in which they have abstracted out the parent-child relationship in cloning, in which certain features, like HA and DRS, are now usable on that parent virtual machine. That is wildly amazing and something that wasn't available until 6.7.
We are actually making a lot of use of the VM Encryption feature. We're using that mainly because it's a customer requirement, especially after all the changes in the European Union for security. And that's a major issue. We've been adding in NSX and that, combined with the ability to have encrypted VMotion as well, has been huge.
In addition, the simplicity and efficiency in managing it has always been one big thing with the entire vSphere suite. It has been very straightforward if you're just using it from the user interface. Hitting the API has always been great, and they're continuing to grow that, which has been really good for us.
View full review »RP
Rob Pease
IT Director at Jewish Family Service
VMotion is the biggest feature. It gives us the ability to move things on the fly. That's it.
View full review »- Reliability
- HA
- DR
- Ease of deployment
- We had a lot of disparate hardware and now able to consolidate into one platform
- Easy to keep hardware up to date
Key business drivers and benefits for us:
• Co-location data centers environmental costs are greatly reduced (rack space, power, cooling).
• Allows better utilization and flexibility to segment physical resources (vCPU & vMemory)
• Consolidate / centralize management of all Windows and Linux infrastructure
- Administer entire virtual environment via a single pane of glass (vCenter)
- Provisioning of VMs is really simple and quick. Allows easy use of templates.
- Utilize Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) & VMotion
- Optimizes performance of VMs
- Allows flexibility for patching cycles to minimize downtime.
• VMware product has been very stable
• Allows for easier compliance and consistency for meeting IT audit controls
• Initial ROI analysis a few years ago did show significant savings over physical model. We are looking at updated ROI and show-back / charge-back models currently.
View full review »
JS
reviewer1344021
Deputy director at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
We only use it for a few of its features, such as DRS, vMotion, and fault tolerance. We aren't using the NSX, cloud-based, or any other features.
The solution is 100% stable.
The scalability is very good.
We find the user interface to be very nice.
The initial implementation process is simple.
It's easy to use and very user-friendly.
Technical support has been very good. They are helpful and responsive.
View full review »AS
reviewer357684
Technical Architect at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
VMware vSphere is replete with about a gazillion different features. In the context of vCenter, everything has been amalgamated into a single appliance. It's much more simplified at deployment. Because of that, immediately I would say the most useful feature is the Lifecycle Manager, VLCM, that is now available. So, what used to be the VMware of Data Manager has now changed to the Lifecycle Manager. Those changes are really, really useful.
View full review »The most valuable features are the virtualization and the performance on the virtualization platform.
View full review »RS
reviewer1502625
Delivery Manager at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The features that I have found most valuable are the overall good ease of use and the good interface which makes it very easy to migrate from one bare metal to another. These are the two things which I like about it. There are certain things as well which I don't like.
View full review »CB
reviewer1081776
Systems Engineer/Systems Administrator at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
The vSphere is very good at advanced things like memory sharing between VMs, and CPU scheduling between VMs.
I use the automation tools that they have today.
Their command-line tools integrate well with other Microsoft products like PowerShell, so I can manipulate VMs using it.
The capability to add on new features like site recovery and monitoring is helpful.
View full review »CK
Charlie Karam
Chief Technology Officer at Motor City Stamping Inc
The most valuable feature is the VDP Backup solution. It just works.
The Disaster Recovery solution is easy to implement.
View full review »MH
Marcus Hall
Senior Automation Specialist at Federal Reserve Bank Of San Francisco
The most valuable features are cloning, snapshots, vMotion, and replication. All of these have increased our ability to recover from failure and balance workloads.
View full review »MA
Muhammad Tanvir Ashraf
Systems and Network Administrator at Gulf Precast Concrete Co. LLC at Gulf Precast Concrete Co. LLC
I love all of the features in this solution, but moving VMs between host machines is one that stands out.
View full review »LG
Luis Gomez
Server Engineer at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
Server consolidation.
It's extremely simple. Installing the ESXi is a piece of cake and then putting servers on there is really simple, as is having HA and building a cluster for our VM servers. It's very easy.
The UI is great with the new HTML.
View full review »The most valuable feature is that it's not a Windows license. It's also good that it finally has the patch manager included in it. And it's simple and efficient to use.
View full review »CT
ITAnalysac7f
IT Analyst at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
- The high availability (HA)
- VMotion
- The seamless 24-hour uptime
We have a lot of databases running on mission critical apps which control our end production line: Exchange, virtualize, and the main controller. We are at about a 85 percent virtualization rate. We also have mission critical apps which conform our factory.
View full review »JJ
John_Jones
Systems Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 51-200 employees
- Stability: Since it is riding inside of a multi-hardware environment, downtime is virtually nothing. That is a plus.
- It is simple to manage.
- We use two-factor authentication.
Obviously the data center virtualization is of importance for multiple reasons, but Horizon View as well.
I would consider our deployment, at least from the college’s deployment, vanilla, meaning we do not leverage a lot of the technologies VMware offers. We do deploy HA + DRS clustering, but that is about the extent of it.
Our vITA environment does have its uniqueness, and we continually attempt to develop labs that can address most of the products/features available from VMware.
Truthfully, I'm not using many of the available features. My needs have been small in that we just needed to virtualize our environment and manage it effectively. VMware vSphere has served that purpose greatly. I’m sure what I get out of vSphere, though, could potentially be gained just as easily via other virtualization platforms available today, but at the time I felt those were too immature to risk. VMware just worked with little to no issue, so I trust them going forward.
- vMotion
- HA
- Snapshots
- The most valuable feature is High Availability. Even if there's a complete hardware or software failure of the host, which doesn't happen very often, we have peace of mind knowing the production servers can be restarted on a different VM if necessary.
- vMotion allows us to move VMs from host to host, which helps a lot while performing scheduled maintenance on production environments and for workload consolidation.
- vShield endpoint offloads the CPU and memory for virus protection and prevents update and scan storms.
- vGPU gives us almost bare-metal performance on virtual desktops from zero clients and it allows our users to move from device to device while keeping consistent experience and performance.
Virtually anything, it doesn't matter if you're trying to cross the balance and diversifying the application, that can't be done, won't be done or challenging the vendor in that regard or you're looking to scale. Virtualization is almost the only way to scale both vertically and linearly because applications are often bound by linear growth where you need to throw more at it in order to increase capacity. Some of that is where you need to ask for how much resources I can get on the fly. A lot of hot plug, a lot of hot add of memory, being able to be very flexible within an environment where traditional architecture from the past can't do that. Can't take a hard drive, can't take a motherboard out of a computer and put it in another one.
vCenter and VMware's products allow us to look at things and focus on things that we usually didn't have time for because you were architecting solutions based on hardware. This is VMware mix and hardware agnostics, so it's how fast you want to go.
- Virtualization
- Ability to vMotion and create servers on LAN
- HA
- DRS
SS
Sukanya Satapanachai
Infrastructure Professional Service Team Lead at G-Able
VMware has many good features, is stable and reliable.
View full review »HV
Hans-Peter Volk
Head of Professional Services at Axians ICT Austria GmbH
We like a lot of the features, but none really stand out. It's very transparent and independent.
View full review »SL
Stanley Lee
Principal Engineer at ST Engineering Limited
A valuable feature is the provisioning setup of VMs. It's the most common feature used by our clients.
View full review »SG
reviewer1441107
Owner at a transportation company with 1-10 employees
VMware vSphere provides an easy way of providing near-zero downtime services, the operation of the instances between clustered services, and providing the projected SLA for our customers.
Mostly, we use a gap solution for PaaS and IaaS levels of solutions. We also use Kubernetes on the application layer and downtime to move to a different layer of workloads.
However, we still use plain virtual machine platform environments because we are leveraging just on-premise servers. We can't, or we don't want to fully move into clouds. That's why it's important for us to use a solution like VMware vSphere.
View full review »BG
Blake Grover
System Admin at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
This version has added a lot more features to the HTML5 interface and that helps us monitor and manage the system better and faster than with the old interface.
I also think it is very easy to manage. When it moved over to HTML5, bringing all those new features into the HTML5 interface, that improved it a lot. I don't know specific performance data points, but I would say it has helped tremendously in being able to stay in one interface and not having to manage multiple, different interfaces in connecting to it.
View full review »GW
NetworkAa4a7
Network Administrator at a educational organization with 5,001-10,000 employees
There are various clients, for the environment that we have, that can be used. There's the thick client, there's the web client, there are obviously new clients when we upgrade to vSphere 6.7. One of the things I like with the web client, versus the thick client, is that we're able to access all the vCenters that we manage. With the thick client, you have to log in to one vCenter at a time.
View full review »SAAS, SAAS, IAAS using Virtualisation of infrastructure
View full review »The most valuable features are high availability and DRS.
- High availability: High availability is particularly valuable to my company because I know that if one of my hosts should fail, we will experience minimal interruption. The VMs affected will be booted back up in minutes on another host. This is critical to our business continuity.
- DRS: Prevents us from having to micromanage the placement of our VMs. They stay running in optimal spaces on our hosts. If we were to license Fault Tolerance (FT), we could potentially lose a host and have all the VMs continue to run without interruption. However, this is unnecessary in our line of business.
Inventory, vMotion, and cloning are the most valuable for me. Customization of VM's which include joining machines to multiple domains, changing names, IP address information, and post operation using Powershell scripts. I like the single pane of glass view for management
View full review »The ease of administration and flexibility are the most valuable features for us. Performance, stability, and functionality just keep getting better.
View full review »VMware has polished their offerings for High Availability, fault tolerance, and live migration beyond any of their competitors.
View full review »Accessibility and the ease of use is unparalleled. The clustering and ability to move virtual machines around on the fly has been amazing.
View full review »DL
Donald Lesotlho
IT Support Officer at a non-profit with 501-1,000 employees
What I want to see, I can get easily from VMware vSphere, because I know how to navigate it, as I've been using it for years. I also don't have issues with its operation, stability, and security. I also find the VMware support team diligent when they assisted me with the issues I raised.
View full review »RK
reviewer1173861
Global IT Infrastructure Architect at a wholesaler/distributor with 5,001-10,000 employees
The core components are the most valuable aspect of this solution. The fact that we have the ability to easily scale out, and the ability to do maintenance on the underlying hardware without impacting our business applications, are important aspects. In general, we have better control over what kind of systems are impacted when we make changes.
View full review »UF
reviewer929742
System support engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
The solution is stable.
I don't have a problem with scalability.
The product is very easy to install.
View full review »KA
Kobus Almon
Chief Technology Officer at perfekt
We consider the virtualization of CPU and storage resources to be a valuable feature.
View full review »AS
reviewer1642854
Sr. Virtualization Engineer at a government with 51-200 employees
I like the capability of vMotion, DRS, high availability, and resource distribution.
View full review »RM
Rajesh Mehta
Enterprise Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The solution allows for very good virtualization.
It makes migration processes easy.
The product offers a lot of functionality. It helps use manage everything for the client.
The solution can be integrated with multiple other technologies. If you have Cisco CSA solution, for example, it integrates well.
If you want to use third-party tools, you are able to do so.
With respect to the Windows environment, it's very, very easy to use.
View full review »VA
reviewer1447761
Assitant Director - IT at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
It's not a particular feature, really, however, I can say that the solution is just easy to maintain, and makes it easy to backup all those VMs. We can easily save our data and we can deploy VM machines very fast and create the delivery of the server in a pretty simple, dynamic way.
Our company has very limited requirements. We just create VMs and deploy VMs on the machine and give the users access. It's solving our problems perfectly. I'm not using any advanced features right now, however, it is sufficient.
It's very simple and I really like it overall.
View full review »WW
Walmik Wankhede
Manager IT at a healthcare company with 201-500 employees
SimpliVity backup and restoration is more suitable and its best feature. If any file or folder is missing and needs to be restored, then within a moment you can recover it. Simplivity has its own backup system, so there is no need to purchase separate backup software.
All data has security.
Multiple OSs can be created on a single platform.
Its DR facility is good. Within a moment, data can be retrieve from another physical location over the Internet. The speed to recover data is good.
HPE uses flash drive, so its working speed is also better. Its node has 2U rack space, so it saves space.
View full review »TC
Tim Crabtree
Internship Student at NA
Distributed vSwitch, and vSphere.
View full review »AB
Reviewer3064
Head - Server and Storage at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
I really value the DRS feature of the solution. Apart from that, there is a high availability in the feature called VMotion. In addition, the centralized management throughout the V-Center software is useful.
View full review »SC
Sajag Chaturvedi
IT Infrastructure Architect at a retailer
Day-to-day, the most valuable feature on vSphere is its DRS feature: Distributed Resource Scheduler. We don't need to manage or balance resources. As soon as you come to the office in the morning, it's automatically balanced.
We work in a retail company, so you don't know what time the customer will be coming in or what time the work load is high. We are not uniform in terms of our workload. Therefore, it is important for us that when the workload is high, it is automatically optimized.
In terms of the vSphere security, the most important feature is the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), which was launched in 6.7, as well as the encrypted vMotion. These help us to bridge the gap if there is a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack or suspicious activity, so at least our VMware workloads are secure.
The best feature that we like is the Web Client. We just login and there is the data center. We don't have to walk to the data center everyday. We just open our laptops, log into our vCenter, and we have our full data store and data center ready.
View full review »MW
CIO9dd5
CIO at a library with 201-500 employees
- Flexibility
- Ease of management
vSphere is very stable, reliable.
View full review »Its compatibility with LUNs and its vMotion, HA, FT and VDS. It works very smooth with LUNs. When we talk about its Cluster feature, then the HA, FT, and DRS features are just great in how they support large scale servers and VMs without any trouble in the production environment.
VMware offers VDS switches which are very efficient and useful regarding network configuration in your virtual environment. The configuration should be the same on your cluster-joined ESXis to improve performance and when running a production environment or VMs on any ESXi.
These features are very good for us.
View full review »One of the best solutions has got to be the HA and DRS portion of the vCenter where it's kind of an auto-load balancing and auto-recovering of your cluster if one of your hosts happens to die. Luckily it's pretty solid and you don't really have to deal with a lot of the HA stuff, but DRS is definitely very handy.
View full review »Old school stuff - power savings, ability to consolidate, licensing savings, and ease of management. All the new features are great, but they’re just iterations of an already awesome product.
View full review »- vCenter
- ESXi Host
- Configuring
- Management
- Patch
- Maintenance
- Distributed Resource Scheduler
- High Availability
- Storage I/O Control
- vMotion
- Storage vMotion
- Fault tolerance
- vSphere distributed switch
BB
SrEngineer672
Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Scalability and Efficiency of your environment.
View full review »
Of course there are several valuable features that have grown in time since the product came out, but the most basic and critical features of this product that I find valuable is the High Availability (HA) and the vmotion technology. vMotion has expanded to the Storage vMotion as well. This is very beneficial for uptime of servers and still maintaining updates on the hardware.
View full review »
VMware vSphere has a lot of features that are valuable, such as multiple clusters, VM mobility, VDI, and virtual desktop.
View full review »FD
FelixDiaz
Freelance, Automation Project Administration, DCS, I&E at Centennial Cayman Corp Chile S.A
The connectivity is fantastic, and many functions can run together in one server. If you need to scale, we can continue to add components or modules. It's a beautiful virtual solution that has many advantages over physical hardware, where you have to use devices and wiring to connect all your projects.
View full review »LH
Huy Le Quang
Cloud Professional Architect at FPT Software
The fact that vSphere is an on-premise solution is beneficial for the user. It's easier to manage the infrastructure. It's more straightforward to scale and configure virtual machines.
JM
reviewer1126809
Founder at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
The higher availability and the vMotion, I would say, are what makes it very interesting as you avoid systems being down. It provides, if you cluster, high availability, and your services can move from system to system to avoid downtime.
The solution is stable.
The scalability is great.
Technical support is helpful and always available.
View full review »SP
reviewer1515015
General manager at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees
The solution is scalable.
We haven't had any issues with stability.
The installation process is very straightforward.
View full review »AV
reviewer1406361
IT Infrastructure Specialist at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It's a very useful solution. It's easy to set up, and it's pretty stable.
View full review »SK
SathishKumar
Project Specialist at integra software
It's easy to use, and it is flexible.
View full review »ST
Sergei Terekhin
Head of System Architecture Department at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The solution has a high availability of features.
They are very distributed and easy to use.
The virtual card features are very good.
The REST is excellent.
Technical support is very good. They are very helpful.
The solution has been very intuitive.
The product offers a very high level of performance.
You can scale the solution well.
View full review »KS
Kshitij Singhai
Owner at Computech Associates
This product is useful for running multiple virtual machines from a single server so that people can utilize the hardware resources in their organization. Its ability for backups is also valuable. In case of a disaster, you can recover the entire server from the images. It is easy to use.
In terms of features, whatever they are providing is more than sufficient for us. We are not exploiting this product up to a hundred percent.
View full review »JL
reviewer1362096
Pré-vendas at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees
As we are a service partner, I think the most valuable feature vSphere has is the ability to visualize infrastructure. Other similar software does not have this capability.
View full review »JP
Jason Place
Systems Security Administrator at Twin River Casino
- vMotion
- NSX
- Dynamic deployment of new servers is critical.
It has high clustering and availability features. These features are not found with other hypervisors.
View full review »It is user-friendly and easy to use.
View full review »Having the ability to deploy fault tolerant VM’s with up to 4 CPUs is fantastic as it goes one level up from a business continuity perspective. Previously, VMware was covering, with just vSphere, backups and DR, and now it also covers a properly functional fault tolerant offering.
Single Sign On is another feature that is enhanced and solves much of the older problems, either in deploying or managing it. Cross vendor integration is in my opinion one of the best features. Although all these features are welcome and a must, they come at a price in terms of licensing.
View full review »Every organization that I know of that has wanted to implement virtualization in their environments wants HA with every virtual server. That's why for us, we've found the most valuable feature is the ability to move VMs between vCenters and fault tolerance within our four vCPUs.
I would also add that the vSAN feature was not useful beforehand but now with Hyper-Converged infrastructure it will simplify vSphere management as well as storage. We may be acquiring xRAIL from EMC which will definitely eliminate needs for storage as well as Fibre Channel switches.
The most valuable feature for us is the portability of the VM itself. I've dealt with enough physical servers to see the benefit of having a layer of abstraction between Windows or Linux or whatever software is running on top of the hypervisor. It provides flexibility and manageability by abstracting the physical dependencies from the physical hardware.
View full review »From the admin perspective, the centralized management/administration of the environment. Additionally, a much smaller data center footprint, streamlined machine deployments and flexible resource sharing rank right up there.
View full review »The command line power CLI module is a great feature, but the PowerShell module is my preferred management tool.
View full review »FG
reviewer1672974
Systems analyst at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
MO
reviewer1522935
Operation Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The VM features are all very good.
We've been very happy with the reporting aspects of the solution.
The documentation of the product is excellent. It's very helpful.
The product has been very stable. It's quite reliable.
The solution is very scalable.
We've found the technical support to be very helpful and responsive.
View full review »TS
Themba Sibiya
Senior Distributed Platform Administrator at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
The feature I find the most valuable is that vSphere doesn't break unless integrated with Veeam or vCenter.
View full review »RK
Rommie Kaputin
IT TECHNICAL/ SERVER ADMINISTRATOR at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I have found the Storage vMotion feature to be the most valuable.
It is a very user-friendly solution.
View full review »SW
reviewer1016370
System Administrator at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
The primary use is the most valuable feature. Being able to virtualize virtual machines on one set of hardware is essentially what it does.
View full review »DC
David Chief
Works
The most valuable feature is its ability to revert to previous snapshots during testing of various guest and application deployments.
View full review »From a feature set point of view, I am quite comfortable with it.
View full review »The most valuable feature of vSphere 6.7, is the HTML 5. I find it really awesome because it speeded up all our daily operations.
It's reliable, stable, and much easier than the previous version.
vSphere now is even simpler. It was simple even before, but going through the HTML 5 interface - and 90 percent of the features are on HTML 5 - it's even easier than the previous ones. Version 6.05 still was, it had HTML 5, but not one 100 percent.
View full review »- vMotion is one of the most useful features, which helps to provide both flexibility and High Availability. With new versions of vSphere and vCenter, it is still improving (e.g., vMotion across vCenter Servers and virtual switches).
- High Availability - it's a useful feature that helps to minimize downtime of VM's and ensure RTO of our business continuity.
- Simplicity of installation and usability. For our activity, it is very important to quickly deploy a new instance of ESXi and put it in production. I was surprised to discover a large compatibility of HW equipment from different vendors (Dell, IBM, HP, Fujitsu) and different generations of hardware.
Pretty much everything about VMware is a strong point. From my point of view, it's one of the most stable and scalable technologies on the market, and when it comes to virtualization it's probably the very best there is.
As a backup and storage admin, I haven't had the chance to explore in-depth all of its features, but what I did get to work with thoroughly seemed very reliable, just to name a few: vMotion and Storage vMotion, Storage APIs (such as VAAI), Storage Thin Provisioning, good integration with LUN mapping to VMFS, etc.
The best part of ESXi for us is the flexibility it gives us, we can spin up a new server in minutes, we can increase VM drive space live, we can perform maintenance on our infrastructure with minimal down time – we have a blade solution, and have the capacity to move VM’s to allow us to perform updates/upgrades to individual hosts during work hours with zero disruption to the business.
View full review »We have the ability to run within our block environment with a private cloud capability, enabling us to realize our automation roadmap.
View full review »As a manager, it’s easier for management, as I don’t have a lot of physical servers with them possibly failing. I’ve been slowly getting all the servers virtualized by adding more hosts.
View full review »vSphere has many great features. It is very hard choose just one because most of them work together. But, based on the way how vSphere manages all resources provided by the physical system, I believe that the high availability system is the greatest feature of the solution. It works with a series of sub-features that ensure customer resources are online during critical changes.
View full review »SK
Shams K
Vmware Administrator at Intertech
The most valuable features are High Availability (HA), which reduces downtime, and Fault Tolerance (FT), a mirror solution that ensures no data loss. Its vMotion feature is also valuable, as it allows me to move all my virtual emissions to an available host before performing maintenance. I also value a feature called Distributed Virtual Switch, which allows me to create a private VLAN and do L2 management and switch management.
View full review »HI
Hani Ismail
Scrum Master - Digital Marketing at Vodafone
The most valuable feature of vSphere is its modularity. I also like the maturity updates. It's available everywhere and almost all the data centers are using it.
View full review »AS
Amgad Soliman
Senior System & Security Administrator at a legal firm with 51-200 employees
VMware vSphere has very good applications and services.
View full review »AO
reviewer1260267
Senior System Administrator at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
VMware vSphere is user friendly. It is scalable and stable, which are very important attributes for us.
View full review »DV
reviewer1407546
Senior IT Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The solution has offered very good stability so far. It doesn't give us any issues.
You don't need too many people to manage the solution once it's up and running.
View full review »FT
Fernando Tamariz
Information Technology Specialist at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
The most valuable features are the resilience of the solution and vMotion.
View full review »AH
Arshad-Hussain
Director at OPEOPL LISTEN TECHNOLOGIES PVT. LTD.
We only have one virtual machine and we're still exploring it. Overall, it's a super product.
The initial setup is easy.
The product offers good stability.
View full review »BS
Bobby Shirley
Desktop Support Specialist at Bank Independent
- Usability
- Convenience
TM
ITInfras287c
IT Infrastructure Architect at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Some of the most valuable features are
- the ability to Snapshot so that when we do updates we have a layer of protection for simplified rollback
- the replication that we can leverage for data center failures and data center downtime
- the ease of migrating workloads from physical device to physical device for maintenance that we have to do on physical servers.
VMware's high availability which supports our SLA, VMware on the fly features like LUN expansion, P2V and API integrations are the most valuable features.
View full review »VMware is the market leader in virtualization. I like the following vMotion improvements in the current version:
- vMotion across virtual switches: There are no restrictions now to migrate VMs across switches (standard/distributed). It is valuable to me for an upgrade or when moving my datacenter.
- vMotion across vCenter Servers: This leverages the migration with unshared storage. In simple terms, VM1 is running on a certain host/cluster, which runs on a certain datastore and is managed by vCenter 1. It can be vMotioned to different ESXi hosts, which have different datastores managed by another vCenter server, called vCenter 2.
- Long Distance vMotion: I can now perform reliable migrations between hosts and sites that are separated by high network round-trip latency times. This is an official definition. For me, it helps me to manage main and DR sites simultaneously and in an effective way.
There are several features we've found valuable, including:
- DRS
- SDRS
- vDS
- Resource pool sharing
- DRS
- High Availability
- Overall reliability
- vMotion
- High Availability
- Storage vMotion
- DRS
- Training is really great
- Ease of use
- Ease of implementation
The entire virtualization element has allowed us to utilize the hardware more efficiently.
View full review »Storage vMotion and vMotion are the greatest of use in my current role; however, the most prevalent features would have to be Fault Tolerance, SRM and DRS.
View full review »MP
Michael Perry
Vice President at a aerospace/defense firm with 51-200 employees
Robust, functional, reliable, ease of use, good value.
View full review »
You can get it downloaded and installed for free. It allows you to do more with less. It's easy to use and simple to configure. There are hardware vendor specific builds of the software, increasing visibility and manageability of the product.
View full review »
- Enterprise class solution
- Live Migration (both server and storage)
- High Availability and Load Balancing
- Disaster Recovery
- Lots of 3rd party vendor support
- Excellent technical support
View full review »
FP
reviewer1752153
Solutions Architect at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees
The feature that I find very valuable is the ability to move images of virtual machines from different workspaces to other workspaces between different installations.
View full review »MC
reviewer968889
Administrator at a construction company with 1,001-5,000 employees
VMware vSphere is user-friendly and simple.
View full review »DB
reviewer1596237
IT & Security Team Leader at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
It is very versatile. All features are beneficial and very good, especially DRS and resource pooling.
View full review »SM
reviewer1553184
Cyber Security Technical Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
The scalability of the solution is excellent. It expands very nicely.
The speed of the solution is excellent.
The splitting of the machines is quite useful.
The installation of the product is quite straightforward.
Technical support is quite helpful and very responsive.
View full review »The feature that I have found most valuable is the auto recovery during failure.
View full review »OY
Orhangazi Yıldırım
System Architect at KT Bank
vSphere offers the High Availability feature which serves automatic recovery of failed host's virtual machines on another host or hosts in the cluster. Also, DRS makes the cluster balanced.
View full review »MC
C7843E
Technical Support at a energy/utilities company with 5,001-10,000 employees
It provides a new environment in an expedient manner. It is a better use of resources between the servers. As we can use these resources better, it helps our TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) analysis.
View full review »The vCenter management is huge: ease of use, the simplicity of it.
It gives us, with the Enterprise Plus version, pretty much all the tools that we need right on hand that work great with our products. We can help our customers make their data centers run a lot smoother.
View full review »JL
SystemsAe086
Systems Administrator at a pharma/biotech company with 51-200 employees
The most valuable features are the simplicity and ease of use for, a small IT department like ours. It's simple and efficient to manage.
View full review »The most valuable feature is definitely the High Availability and the abstraction of MAC addresses from the hardware. Also, shared storage is definitely beneficial. Back in the old days when we had single storage, it was usually slow disks that were local to the machines, and once we moved everything over to the virtualization platform, we have the benefit of newer and faster disk arrays directly attached to the VMware system. It's made thing a whole lot easier to manager, particularly from a space point-of-view.
Obviously, SANs have been around for a while, but they used to be direct-attached and not shared among a number of hosts. We jumped from direct-attached SANs into VMware with shared SANs, skipping that extra part of the SAN world.
View full review »- Virtualization
- Clustering
- High Availability
- All the core functionalities
- Bare metal Hypervisor
- Management
- Mobility of VMs
- Distributed resource services - HA, DRS; Network and Storage
DRS and vMotion are the most valuable features.
View full review »- vMotion
- DRS
- DB switch
- High Availability options
- High server consolidation ratio
- Space, noise and power consumption reduction
- Easy to administer
- High Availability
- Distributed Resource Scheduler
- Site Recovery
I think that the Fault Tolerance and High Availability features are the most valuable ones. Storage vMotion, Server vMotion, and all the flexibility that vSphere can provide to a storage environment without interruption is also very good.
View full review »
- Increase the flexibility and agility of the infrastructure to move at the speed of business by decoupling the server from the hardware
- Server consolidation has driven the virtualization industry shift, and vSphere leads the charge.
- Virtualization overhead is the smallest of any hypervisor on the planet.
- Supports over 90 operating systems, whereas other vendors cannot even come close
- Centralized management and built-in performance statistics collection make management easy
- Complementing tools, such as Site Recovery Manager, vCenter Operations Manager, vShield, and vCloud Director just increase the power of the stack.
- Add in the licensing for the operating systems and the applications running virtualized, plus the cost of management tools. The competition costs the same.
View full review »
Its stability and manageability are valuable.
View full review »UB
reviewer1702059
self-employed
VMware vSphere has useful tools for management and support.
View full review »BY
reviewer1437084
Manager at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It is user-friendly, easy to deploy, and easy to maintain.
The roadmap for the product itself covers all of the features that we are looking for.
It has what we need.
View full review »FW
reviewer1611207
Information Technology Manager & Chief Information Officer at a financial services firm with 1-10 employees
The ability to create or clone a virtual environment in a short period of time for testing is most valuable.
View full review »FK
reviewer1390431
Head Of Network & Technical Support at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
The solution is easy to use, has high performance, and good virtualization.
View full review »DA
Daniel Aramayo
Implementation and Support Engineer at PRACSO S.R.L.
vVols, vMotion, and vSphere have availability. It is very stable and scalable, and implementation is straightforward as well.
View full review »MC
reviewer1377360
Line Technical Agent at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
vSphere brings the features required for an enterprise class system with a lot of supporting components: An intuitive user experience that simplifies and helps operational management, e.g. provisioning and monitoring the status of the VMs and the underlying resources capacity.
View full review »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.
View full review »The most valuable features for us are HA, DRS, and SDRS.
View full review »It’s changed my life – I’ve been in IT since 1989 and very few technologies have been life changing and VMware is one of them. It has given me my nights and weekends back. It separates the software from the hardware, and having a hardware failure is not catastrophic, so I don’t have to get up and leave church, whenever I have time. Very few applications can fully utilize the computer hardware but VMware can.
View full review »- Storage VMotion
- High Availability
- Distributed Resource Scheduler
VH
reviewer1363245
CIO at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
vRealize Operations Manager is the most valuable feature, but it is not embedded in vSphere; it is a part of vSphere. It is used for forecasting and checking the consumption of CPU, memory, and other resources. It has the capability to do the forecast based on the history and give advice on consumption.
VMware vSphere is easy to use and easy to implement. Its learning curve is not sharp. Any engineer with little or medium knowledge of hypervisors and virtualizations can implement vSphere with a few clicks.
View full review »JS
NetworkA3fbb
Network Administrator at a mining and metals company with 201-500 employees
It provides us cost savings. We are able to virtualize instead of buying many physical servers. Therefore, we can buy one server and add VMs on top of it.
The SQL Servers are our mission critical apps.
View full review »The most important feature is high availability (HA) which monitors the system and restarts virtual machines to a healthy host whenever the system senses an imminent hardware failure.
Another great feature is DRS which is VMWare’s load balancing software which keeps our virtual machines running on the server cluster in a balanced manner. This automated system keeps all our systems running with a high uptime.
View full review »FB
Firoze Bhorat
Senior Environments Engineer - Virtualised Environments at Derivco with 501-1,000 employees
VMware leads the pack with their hypervisor. It's a tiny install, but it's packed with features.
View full review »The most valuable features for us are its agility and that it provides us with the ability to make changes within the environment seamlessly. I also really like its stability; it's got a perfect track record. I can also provide support myself because the product is designed to allow for that sort of support.
View full review »The self-service portal, number one, the ease of deployments, the ability track and monitor how quickly you can provision a virtual machine guest, and the Chargeback model affiliated with that.
View full review »The ability to aggregate resources.
View full review »- HA
- DRS
- Storage IO control
- vMotion
- Storage vMotion
It's consolidated in that multiple VMs can run on a single host and have a single point of management.
View full review »Virtualization is the most valuable feature. Without it, working in the cloud and IT life as we know it is not possible.
View full review »The ability to handle an entire virtual data center, keep costs under control, and move the workload without having a business impact.
View full review »Cheap and fast to deploy new servers.
View full review »
This server class product is very stable, I have been using it for more than 7 years, previous versions were named different with less bugs. No downtime.
View full review »
vSphere is an excellent product to virtualize computing workloads. It helps with consolidation of servers and datacenters, and increases utilization of computing resources. The product is very stable, and contributes to high uptime for critical workloads. Additional benefits from a virtualized datacenter include reduced power and cooling costs.
View full review »
ESXi has one major benefit that outweighs the others; IT'S FREE!Yes, it has plenty of other benefits, like running a wide variety of different virtual operating systems in virtual machines (it supports every platform but OS X, and that can technically still be "hacked" onto it).It's incredibly robust, has excellent resource management, and is easy to set up. It allows for importing of virtual appliances, or pre-made VM's, or a creation of your own VM's.
View full review »
VMWare server is an excellent virtualzation tool for the workstation. It could be used as a limited functionality version of VMWare Workstation or as a host for your virtual machines, with all of the bells and whistles that came with Workstation, such as:- Centralized Management of Virtual Machines.
- Remote management of VM's and configurations.
- Integration with VMware Player and Workstation, to view the machines hosted by Server.
View full review »
PM
reviewer1739175
VMware PSO Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
There are plenty of features we have found valuable. It has multiple features that we are using every day during our jobs.
View full review »LO
Luca Olivotto
Senior System Engineer at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
The most valuable features are the vMotion, the storage vMotion, the DRS, and the high availability function.
View full review »SE
sedson52
Lead System Engineer at MITRE Corporation
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.
View full review »SK
Sree Kumar
Infrastructure Manager at Petrolink
The most valuable feature is vSAN, as it reduces the cost of SAN storage and maintenance.
View full review »I find that the Virtual Center Management, iSCSI support, and VMotion hot migration are very beneficial.
With these features, we have faster server deployments, additional security for development projects, and easier backups.
One of the most valuable features of this product is the integration of VMware vSphere. If you have experience with this product, it is very simple to configure and use. With minimal studying, you can configure and manage it.
View full review »- High performance for data access
- Scalability
- Simplicity
The level of consolidation that you can implement from a hardware reduction element – it is so valuable to us in our industry. Ease of use and simplicity.
View full review »VM snapshot consolidation. It does that extremely well.
View full review »- vMotion
- DRS
- HA
vSphere provides a lots of great features. In my opinion, VMotion is a feature that helps save time, cost, and effort.
You can arrange for system maintenance at any time you want without required downtime.
View full review »AM
ADM
Senior Techical Support Engineer at A Cloud Compute Company
* User friendly and not complex.
* Easy to deploy, manage and troubleshoot.
* Scalability and stability.
* Highly recommended for mission critical applications and databases.
* Aggressive in educating their clients.* User friendly and not complex.
* Easy to deploy, manage and troubleshoot.
* Scalability and stability.
* Highly recommended for mission critical applications and databases.
* Aggressive in educating their clients.
View full review »
VMware Server is a free, easy-to-use Windows and Linux application that provides a superior introductory experience to server virtualization for businesses to optimize utilization of their technology assets.
Below mentioned standout features explains why VMware is so popular among all virtualization software's:
•You don’t need to configure your hardware: VMware installs on top of existing OS, you don't really have to worry about configuring hardware to work with it.
• Simple and basic Installation: VMware has done a great job making it easy to install.
• Web-based management interface: Manage your VMWare installation via Web browser.
• Large support for guest operating systems: Every version of Windows and many Linux distributions are supported.
View full review »
Pros on the VMware Server are-
1) Centralized management and configuration
2) Remote management and headless operation available
3) VMotion feature helps in real time movement of virtual machines from one server to the other
4) Automated scanning and patching of hosts
5) VSphere DRS for continuous monitoring resource pool utilization
6) Can be integrated with Windows Server Active Directory
7) Easy to use high availability and fail over clustering
View full review »
MS
Mohab Samy
VMware Technician Manager at VAS
Stability and scalability are the most valuable features of this solution.
The connectivity to the pools from the large amount of memory to the CPU is also very good.
Also, the stability that it provides from the large system to the virtual machine is good.
View full review »TC
reviewer1109874
Solutions Specialist at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
It is a very mature solution that is easy to use and flexible.
View full review »VC
reviewer1381863
CEO at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
It is very easy to use and very stable.
View full review »LH
Huy Le Quang
Cloud Professional Architect at FPT Software
- vCloud Director, because we may use it as the dashboard for providing cloud services.
- vCenter
- vSphere, because it helps us in the management of thousands of VMs in the coverage UI.
HM
Hazem Mohamed
Deputy Manager IT at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
It has a very high speed, which is a nice feature.
View full review »JM
Justin Melton
Engineering Manager at Turnkey Cyber Solutions
Virtualization of our environment has made our carbon footprint, the real estate necessary and the ease of deployment in time savings significant.
View full review »SM
ITProfes763a
IT Professional with 5,001-10,000 employees
Its most valuable features are reliability, for sure, and quickness in getting the job done. I can spin off 100 or 200 machines in the matter of half an hour.
View full review »- vMotion
- vCenter
All the features in the vSphere essentials are great in helping the administrators manage the virtual platform.
View full review »I value the support for this application.
View full review »The most valuable features for us are vCenter, vSphere, vROPS, vRO, NSX, SRM and vSphere replication. They're not only the most valuable features for us, but they're the features that we use the most right now.
View full review »- Hardware consolidation
- Easy provisioning
- Speed to get environments out to business units
It gives us flexibility in deploying infrastructure. With vMotion, we're able to move critical VMs around our cluster infrastructure, which we manage with DRS.
View full review »vMotion, which lets us migrate from one server to another, is a really beneficial feature.
View full review »- Ease of upgrading
- Ease of backups
- Ease of deployment
It's flexibility is most valuable, as we're able to move things around without downtime.
View full review »- The ability to virtualize hundreds of servers
- Hardware cost
The ability to spin up machines when we need a test and dev environment for client work.
View full review »- Redundancy
- Speed
- Security
vSphere is very easy to navigate and manage.
View full review »
This really depends on the customers requirements. Manageability, transportation and low footprint (and thus higher consolidation ratio) are ones that are often referred to by customers.
View full review »
Great product for users stepping into virtualization and consolidation
View full review »
MP
sumodirjo
Senior Site Infrastructure Engineer at Kurungsiku
Unlike VMware workstation where we have to log in to desktop to run VM(s), with VMware Server we can run VM on the background. It also have a web based management interface so you don't have to install a software on your desktop to manage VMware server. It’s still quite useful virtualization software that you can use for free if you want to spend extra mile patching some files before you can compile support for your kernel.
View full review »
MU
reviewer2263155
Lead Security Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
The tool makes virtualization easy. It was free, and we could profit from its GUI. It helps to manage VMs easily.
View full review »YB
Yan BENOIST
Entrepreneur at WindiS
VM models is a great feature. It allows to create VMs very fast and already patched with the different configurations that the are needed.
The ease to move a VM from a host to another or even to another storage/DC is very convenient. That all this can be done while users work on the VMs is awsome.
SM
Stephen Murcott
System Administrator at j5 Software South Africa
Snapshot and clone: make VM backups for fast recovery options, build systems and reduced setup times.
View full review »- DRS
- Distributed virtual switches
- vMotion
- HA
- Extensibility - you can ring in many ecosystems
The features we most value are:
- High availability (in ESXi)
- Disaster recovery (via SRM)
- Self-service portal via vRealize automation
RR
Engineer353
VMware Engineer at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees
- HA
- DRS
- Snapshot
- FT
- vMotion
- SvMotion
- It provides the option to view performance with advanced real-time monitoring.
- With it, it's very easy to create new virtual machines.
- It also helps you upgrade your machines by making hot templates of them.
The 3D Graphics isn’t something I have used yet, but will be very nice for VDI environments. Also, the improvements in vMotion will bring on some major changes.
View full review »vMotion, because you can move off failed hardware, and if you have a maintenance window, you can put everything onto a physical server, and then put everything back
View full review »You get virtualized servers, which means you can run a bunch of servers on a couple of machines, so you save money and you save the environmental costs like power and heat. You also get the redundancy when you are using features like vMotion.
View full review »It enables vMotion, DRS, and HA.
View full review »- High Availability
- Fault Tolerance
- Live migration
- Reduced the overall cost of the infrastructure
- Centralizing the management.
BK
Barna Kosa
IT Services Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The most valuable feature of the solution would be the basic feature of server virtualization, we use it everywhere.
View full review »CT
Costinel Tunsoiu
Database Administrator at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The performance is efficient. You can log the performance and report on the bottlenecks or any other problems you encounter.
View full review »- The cost, as we can run lots of servers on minimal hardware.
- Easy to recover from failures. For example, to replace a memory card, just pull out blade and replace it.
- Virtualizing everything
- HA
- DRS
The stability in general, and the manageability of features like high availability, storage vMotion, and vMotion configuration via distributed switches.
View full review »JL
Jose Vladimir Leon Higueras
Virtualization Solutions Specialist at datec
The features I've found most valuable are that the enterprise direction is very complete and the data center provides almost everything you need.
View full review »NW
reviewer1487706
Head of Technical at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
I like the standard features.
View full review »MW
ITManageb049
IT Manager at a construction company with 51-200 employees
- Ease of access
- Manageability
We use it for our VDI infrastructure and managing virtual machines.
View full review »- vMotion
- Encapsulation
- Higher usage ratio of hardware
- Storage virtualization
I like vCenter Server since you can monitor and control your whole environment from there. Also, the Web Client is nice to have, but I have heard from my colleagues that there are a lot of issues with it and it doesn’t work as good as it should do to make the C# client invane.
View full review »Obviously, the virtualization allows us to save money because we can run many servers on one physical hardware.
View full review »The management piece of it, being able to see what all my servers are doing from one central place.
View full review »It only breaks predictively.
View full review »The virtualization is the valuable feature.
View full review »- The out-of-box application works well even without customization.
- vCenter web UI is great.
vSphere Replication, Storage APIs, vSphere HA, vSphere vMotion.
View full review »Memory overcommittment and deduplication, allowing higher consolidation ratios.
View full review »
Great product for critical production server virtual infrastructure. No any "gamers" in this area. Latest product can help more than previous. VMware Replication, vSphere Data Protection based on AVAMAR technology, new vCPU architecture and more new features says us that it is the one biggest product.
View full review »
Most usable hypervisor in the industry. It's well documented, really simple and quick to setup.
View full review »
ZB
reviewer1468668
Executive Director at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The most valuable features are that it's stable, easy to use, and it's flexible.
View full review »RT
reviewer1351206
Directeur Production, Infrastructure et Architecture IT at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
VMware vSphere is the best private-cloud solution.
View full review »SJ
reviewer887736
Professional ICT at a non-tech company with 11-50 employees
It's easy to use.
View full review »Usability is the most valuable feature.
View full review »Cross vCenter vMotion is a valuable feature.
It allows you to perform vMotion from one vCenter to another vCenter without the need for shared storage, like a cut and paste.
This was not possible until version 6 and is built upon Enhanced vMotion.
It requires L2 network connectivity.
View full review »- Scalability
- Flexibility
- Vmotion across vCenters
It gives us great management capability and it integrates well with NetApp storage.
View full review »- High Availability, so we're able to failover in the case of hardware failure
- vMotion, for live migration from one server to another without interruption
- DRS, on par with or better than other hypervisors
- vMotion
- DRS
- HA
There are no physical limitations in being able to move virtual machines around hosts and storage.
View full review »
VMware vSphere is a proven product with an established track record. We bought it as part of our server system upgrade project to accommodate our new student management system from Oracle. At first, we had a taste of vSphere as part of a demonstration system. We got to play around with it and really liked its features and the capabilities that it can bring to our organization.VMware is also a Cisco partner, and as such Cisco has a validated design for using vSphere together with their blade servers for Oracle PeopleSoft. This was critical in selecting vSphere as our virtualization platform foundation, as the application which we envisioned to run on the servers is fully tested and verified by Cisco and Oracle to work with vSphere.
View full review »
The most valuable feature is the reliability for our own servers, the backup of the information on our servers.
View full review »NB
reviewer1445340
Director Global Security at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
The most valuable features are stability and support. The stability of this product is very good, and I have not seen an issue for many years. It is very stable for all of the features that are available today.
View full review »vMotion between the hosts, deployment of the virtual machines via templates and distributed switches are some valuable features of this product.
View full review »There are several valuable features, including virtualization, of course, as well as DRS, High Availability, SRM, and vMotion.
View full review »It's allowed us to consolidate our hardware.
View full review »- The deployment of Distributed Virtual Switch
- Hyper visors for 5.1, 5.5, 6.0
- We use these to deploy our product (Cisco switches)
- vMotion helps with core banking operations and time-to-market
- We define architecture tiering
- Availabity is important
- Lots of compliance requirements, so being able to maintain application and business continuity
- Ease of use
- UI
- vMotion, migrating VMs from one physical server to another with no downtime
- Unified management
- UI
It's stable and has the ability to execute the features it promises.
View full review »Robust, reliable, ease of use, good value for money and reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
View full review »- Scripted installation.
- Host Profiles.
- Web Client.
- Windows Client
JC
reviewer1738062
Technical manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
The performance of VMware vSphere is good.
View full review »SY
reviewer1314750
Technical Manager at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees
The most valuable feature of this solution is vMotion.
The performance is good; if I had to rate it, I would give it a nine out of ten.
It is easy to use.
View full review »- Its consolidation.
- Its simplicity of usage.
- It is easy to maintain our data machines and take snapshots with the solution.
We've found that the most valuable features for us are:
- vMotion
- Replication
- Portability
One of the most valuable features of vCenter is the high availability feature so we can have basically one of the out warehouse to DIMS and all of our important VMs are still running.
View full review »- High Availability
- Storage vMotion
- Strong support loads
Ability to automate deployments. We’re very new to this, but the potential from an automation standpoint will save our company money and IT time. Our ROI will see an impact with the potential that vRealize brings.
View full review »- High Availability
- computability
- vMotion
- DR
- DRS
- HA
- vMotion
- vConverter
- Distributed switch
Hypervisor, VM deployment, Migration, Dynamic frequency scaling.
View full review »
Its high availability, hot memory and CPU enabled features. Not forgetting the Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS), vMotion, Storage vMotion and Dynamic Power Management (DPM).
View full review »
HA, DRS, VMotion, Storage VMotion
View full review »
Easy to use and manage.
View full review »
Disclosure: My company is a VMware reseller.
Ease of use, functionality, established product, works very will with almost any prime time OS, very thought-out application, works with the developer community to improve, has deep pocket organization like EMC to help propel them into the future
View full review »
Easy to use and provides centralized management. With that, it is free and provides a very simple and easy web and also remote interface to interact with the product.
View full review »
• VMware Server is problem solving and cost saving.
• No need to buy hardware for every server required, just purchase one server and run multiple virtual machines on that single hardware.
• Offers testing solutions, provisioning solutions, and makes testing and rolling out installation easier.
• Easy to use technology and industry leader in virtualization technology.
View full review »
- vMotion
- DRS
- High Availability
- Snapshots
DL
virtuali332868
Virtualization Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
It's a stable product, e.g. if I lose the entire SAN all the VMs still run. They might pause but only after they try to write to disk. After the SAN has been reconnected, VMs resume as if nothing happened.
View full review »I'd say vMotion, High Availability, and Distributed Resource Scheduler, which have allowed us to administer hardware resources in a better way.
View full review »High Availability, DRS, SDRS, DvSwitch, NIOC
View full review »
Brilliant hyper-visor with proven virtualization stack.
View full review »
• VMware server is a free hosted virtualization server which runs on top of various operating systems such as Linux, Solaris, Windows and Netware
• It separates single physical server into various virtual machines which can be deployed many times
• The installation of the server no longer requires hardware configuration
• It serves as a testing environment for experimental OS, patches and softwares but does not need installation or any configuration
• It can automatically starts virtual machine at system boot
• It can also take full control of virtual machines from remote computers
• It provides a complete GUI VMX editor
• It allows virtual machines to use two VSMP processors
• VMware server 2.0 has Web Management Interface which is used to easily manage virtual machines
View full review »
It is one easy to install and manage vitualization technique. Its pretty fast also, compared to some other vitualization techniques. And that is because its has a very small amout of resource overhead. It lacks the server console which decreases its booting time.
View full review »
The vMotion feature.
View full review »- vMotion
- Storage vMotion
- High Availability
- DRS
- Storage DRS
- Enhanced vMotion Capability
Cost, for one thing, it greatly reduces from physical servers.
View full review »- Stability
- Ease of deployment
RR
Engineer353
VMware Engineer at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees
vMotion, Storage vMotion, Distributed Resources Schedule (DRS), NIOC, SIOC, Storage Profiles.
View full review »
It is os-independent having a very thin architecture with which it can offer unparalleled security and reliability. Unlike most other hypervisors in the market, this don't need a general purpose operating system clearing the hazards of processor overhead, Antivirus and other OS processor consumption. Its this feature makes it prominent in the market of hypervisors.
View full review »
DL
virtuali332868
Virtualization Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
VMware vSphere has plenty of features.
View full review »The clustering and High Availability features are very useful and valuable.
View full review »RT
Ruddy TSHILUMBA
Network and Systems Administrator at Ishango-it
VMware is good for virtualization.
View full review »- Storage vMotion helps a lot when migrating from one storage vendor to another
- Storage vMotion migrates a virtual machine and its disk files from one data store to another while the virtual machine is running, with no down time.
- We can move virtual machines off of arrays for maintenance or upgrade
- We have the flexibility to optimize disks for performance or to transform disk types
We're able to centrally manage our infrastructure.
View full review »
Fast
Manageable
Secure
Low overhead
View full review »
1) Easier way of segmenting the resources.
2) Host profiles - Template to build hosts in minutes.
3) Performance and Graphs - Easy to monitor the hosts
4) Vmotion - In essence, this technique helps you to move a live server between hosts without any downtime.
5) Robust Management Tools
6) Cost saving
7) Advanced memory management - The memory unused in the hosts can be reclaimed and used effectively.
8) High availability
View full review »
- Free
- Easy to install and configure
- Very low overhead
- Great management features
- Enterprise Ready
View full review »
The two features we've found most valuable are vSphere's reliability and stability.
View full review »
Greatly consolidated my server infrastructure; DR/BCP friendly
View full review »
- High Availability
- vMotion
- Storage vMotion
ES
reviewer1333554
Senior Presales Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The ease of movement of these machines is the most valuable. It is very easy to move these machines between physical hosts. The fast deployment of services is another valuable feature.
View full review »AU
ReviewerU8183
Principal Consultant at a tech consulting company with 1-10 employees
Gathering all of the hosts together to create one single pool across the enterprise is a terrific feature.
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.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.