VMware vSphere Reviews

We are using VMware vSphere on all of our servers in all environments.

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.

The monitoring is not good in vSphere, many times you have latency or you cannot find what you want. The events should be improved.

I have been using VMware vSphere for more than five years.

The stability is very good, but the performance is not good. If you have a large workload, you have to go to a physical service.

The solution is scalable, to add storage is easy.

We have approximately six administrators that use the solution in my organization.

I have needed the support of VMware on one occasion. The first level of support is not good but the second level is better and overall the response times tend to be poor.

The initial setup is easy.

I did the implementation of the solution myself. We do the regular maintenance ourselves.

I'm satisfied with the VMware vSphere price. They have a bundle that is priced well. However, any advantage feature is very costly.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate VMware vSphere an eight out of ten.

The solution acts as the basis for doing virtualization. 

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. 

VMware vSphere has a limited scope and necessitates the adding of additional products. This involves further complexity and expense. NSX is a product of VMware vSphere and it would be nice to see the solution have full integration capabilities with it. 

I have been using VMware vSphere since 2007. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is certainly scalable. 

The customer support is nice. We are talking about a great organization, which offers much staff, support and white paper. 

The initial setup was straightforward, perfect. 

This process for the initial server lasts ten minutes. There is also the console, which involves two parts, one being the server itself. This is where the CD-ROM goes, something which is now on a USB key and does not involve the undertaking of any activity. 

Deployment lasts half a day, at which point everything is up and running. 

The real question is whether the person wishes to have one server or a hundred. The use of 200 machines will take longer. What I am talking about is small, basic installations. 

If a person is trained, then he will be able handle the deployment and maintenance on his own. This is not complex. 

Our customers incur a yearly licensing fee, one of three or five years, in fact. 

We consider the solution to be obligatory. 

The solution's use can range from ten users to thousands. 

I would definitely recommend the solution to others. I am a big fan of it. 

I rate VMware vSphere as a twenty out of ten. I give it a perfect ten rating. 

We use VMware vSphere for our windows server and other virtual machines.

No need to upgrade the hardware for individual machines, easily to assign more resources to virtual machines when desired.

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.

The initial setup could be better. Follow the instruction you can set it up, but it's not very straightforward, and you need some storage and network knowledge to get the better understanding.

I have been using VMware vSphere for over ten years.

It's stable. These have patches regularly, and we apply the critical patch.

Scalability is fine. We don't have too many virtual machines because we're moving to the cloud slowly. That's why we don't have an issue with that.

I think VMware support is excellent. They have the highest one, and I'll rate them nine out of ten. I'm still satisfied with their support.

The initial setup is a little complex because of the infrastructure. It's not related to just the one physical server, you need design the storage and networks. There are three different areas.

For my friend with stock in virtualization, I think maybe they can try the Cloud. That may be easier, and they don't need to stay on-premises.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give VMware vSphere a nine.

We are a solution provider and VMware vSphere is one of the products that I have experience with. This product is used as a virtual IT environment. It hosts applications such as SQL databases.

The GUI is very simple to use.

The user experience is good.

Stability-wise, there are some minor issues.

I have been working with VMware vSphere for between 10 and 15 years.

There are some issues with stability, although I don't think that it is a big problem. In general, it is a good product.

Scalability has not been a problem. Israel is a small country, so the level of service is less.

As a system integrator, I have not had to contact technical support.

I have experience with KVM and it is also easy to use, but it is not as good as VMware.

It is easy to deploy this solution from nothing.

We deploy and maintain this solution with our in-house team.

This is an expensive product and the price needs to be reduced.

In summary, this is a good product and I recommend it.

If you have a mixed environment that includes Windows, Linux, and other operating systems then this product is a good choice. However, if you have a purely Linux environment, such as Red Hat, then you can save money and have better performance by implementing KVM instead.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

It's running mission-critical and business-critical workloads for our customers, and the experience has been positive.

The mission-critical apps include core banking systems, core healthcare systems, artificial intelligence. And highly transactional workloads are also great fits for vSphere 6.7.

We've seen an increase of about five to ten percent for the mission-critical apps. Their code is a lot more optimized now that they're using it in the public cloud with VMware Cloud on AWS.

In our organization, the lifecycle management has improved. What that means is our customers are spending a lot less time on "keeping the lights on." Day 2 Operations are being simplified a lot.

• 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.

vSphere is the Rolls Royce of hypervisors. Moving forward, they just need to continue integrating and simplifying that user interface experience. With VMware Cloud Foundation, that's the Day 2 lifecycle management. You've got the VMC offering that's obviously all public cloud. They need to keep on integrating the APIs and simplifying the user experience. And they're definitely moving towards the one-click experience that you have with other technology vendors.

The stability has been good. Now that the VMC on AWS codestream is 6.7, and they're following a DevOps methodology, the stability of vSphere obviously has increased greatly.

It scales very well. Now, with vSphere 6.7, it's 128 hosts. Talk about scale with vSphere is now a non-issue. Typically what we do with our customers is deploy vSan clusters, typically 20 to 30 hosts, because that's a natural failure domain. Going beyond that, it really makes no sense, because you want to have separate failure domains.

In the early 6.x days, their support went down. Now with 6.7, being with VMware Cloud on AWS, their support level has increased, because they've had to. It's definitely a better experience now.

Regarding knowing that it is time to switch to this solution, our customers tend to be existing vSphere customers. End-of-life, end-of-support tend to be the trigger for, "Okay, we need to upgrade our infrastructure stack."

The other big trigger is end-of-life of the hardware stack that they're going with. That's typically a conversation about moving from legacy, three-tier infrastructure to a hyperconverged infrastructure stack. And then there's a hypervisor conversation about the best-of-breed to use to meet their business requirements.

Nutanix AHV, Hyper-V is commonly on the list, and Red Hat KVM is the other one.

Partner with the right partner because not all partners are the same. And have a strategy in mind. Have a design in place, the logical design. What functions are you trying to achieve? What business problems are you trying to solve? And then go ahead and do your due diligence with testing, etc. Once you involve the partner and you're implementing, make sure you have proper testing, have a soft launch, and then a go-live, so that you've got a risk-free solution.

That's where a lot of customers go wrong. They don't do their due diligence, and they don't properly launch, and they have the wrong partner that they partnered with, who is not quite up to the task of doing this type of thing.

For our customers that are very security conscious, in the financial space and the healthcare space, they typically will have clusters where TPM and virtual machine encryption are enabled to provide a more secure experience for those services.

We sell a lot of VMware Cloud on AWS. It integrates natively through hybrid cloud extensibility into VMC on AWS. That's actually been a big selling point with 6.7.

I rate the solution at nine out of ten. What would bring it up to a ten is feature-parity with the HTML5 interface.

The primary use case for the product is, we use it as our core infrastructure to power all of our servers as well as any kind of application that runs tolling for the region.

For mission-critical applications that we use this for, it's mostly for proprietary applications that were specifically built to run tolling. So all of our tolling applications run on vSphere 6.7.

In terms of a performance boost, we have seen about a 10 percent boost; not by much. Our workloads aren't CPU or memory-intensive, they're more idle-intensive with storage.

The solution has improved our organization in terms of compliance. In the past, we struggled with VM encryption. We couldn't encrypt the virtual machines with older versions of vSphere without some kind of third-party tool. Now, with 6.7, it's all in the application itself, in vSphere. We no longer have to procure additional products to meet that requirement. We can just do it on the fly, and pass our audit with no issues.

In terms of managing it, it's a lot simpler now with the vSphere HTML5 client. With the phase-out of the Flash client, which everyone doesn't like, it allows us as administrators to do our jobs far more efficiently than it did with the Flash client.

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.

There is definitely room for improvement and that improvement should be in the licensing and the simplicity of procuring additional licenses or additional VMware products. Right now, it's very complex.

Stability for vSphere 6.7 has been a little rocky at times compared to 6.5, but I believe that's because it's a very new product. With updates later, I think it will stabilize out.

We have especially had an issue with our backup software communicating with vSphere 6.7, but that's been remediated so that has kind of gone away. Initially, it was a little rough, but now it's smoothing out.

Scalability for vSphere 6.7 has been a major enhancement compared to 6.5. That is because of the technical features they've added that allow you to scale further away from your primary data center, such as vMotion over long distance, etc. It's made things better for us.

Only for vSphere 6.5 did we use tech support. We have yet to need tech support for 6.7, but I can't imagine it would be any different than 6.5. Any tech support, period, with vSphere, I have never had an issue. Even when it was a really strange issue, we've always resolved the problem.

I was involved with this design, the procurement, the deployment, and the management.
In terms of complexity, it was very complex for the licensing aspect. That's because in 6.7 it's changed, compared to what I procured years ago with 6.5 and 5.5. It has gotten a little bit more complex, but it's easier once you do it.

Nobody else was on our short-list. Hyper-V had come up because another IT office in our agency does use Hyper-V, but for mission-critical applications that are powering an operation, my opinion was "vSphere-only" and my manager's opinion matched mine. So there really was no other option, it was just vSphere.

We do use AWS, but not for VMware Cloud on AWS. We only use it for storage.

I'd give vSphere a nine out of ten. The only reason I give it a nine is because VMware has amped up how frequently they release new versions and that adds instability to a stable environment. But other than that, I would've given it a ten.

The main use case of this product and its performance is server virtualization, and the performance is pretty good compared to what we were used to with the previous version. The previous version for us was version 6.0.

There are built-in security features, TPM and encryption, which are something we're going to use at a later stage. Right now, we are waiting for a hardware refresh to be able to support a TPM version too. But it's something I'm really looking forward to.

The mission-critical apps and workloads running on vSphere are just about everything. Our municipality covers everything from cradle to grave. We are running a retirement home, nursing home, schools. The most important are the healthcare applications.

Since we started using vSphere, there hasn't been as much of a performance boost, but more flexibility and stability. We've actually been running vSphere or ESX since 2003.

How vSphere has improved our organization is that we have a lot of fewer admins today than there were 15 years ago, and we have a lot more servers than at that time. But because of the flexibility and stability we encounter with vSphere, it's manageable.

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.

Where I think there is room for improvement is in the HTML5 interface in vCenter. What it lacks, for me, is integrating into VMware's other products, especially NSX.

The stability of vSphere is, in my opinion, just fantastic. I can't remember the last time we had a breakdown in the hypervisor. 

The scalability of vSphere, for my company, is perfect. It easily fits in, but we are way ahead of what is the theoretical limit.

I have used VMware technical support and the experience has been variable. But I have seen an improvement in the last year.

I was involved in the setup of vSphere. The setup was, in my opinion, very simple. It was very easy to get started.

When we initially chose vSphere, there weren't any other products, so it was simple to select the direction we were going in.

My advice would be just get started as soon as possible.

At the moment, we are not using VMware Cloud on AWS, but that's because we're still trying to get ahold of legislation because of GDPR.

If I had to rate the product from one to ten, I would rate it at a nine. What could they do to bring it to a ten? In my opinion, it would be alignment with other products, and a more automated upgrade, where you take the other products into account, so you can upgrade the entire VMware stack from a single interface.

We run, easily, 98 percent of our servers out of vSphere. We pretty much have nothing physical anymore.

In terms of mission-critical apps, our entire ERP environment is all virtualized, outside of the rack. Everything in our organization, our student database records, employee records, all of our management stuff, is in VMware.

It's difficult to say if we had a performance boost when we moved to vSphere because we have been using VMware for a long time. Our ERP was actually the driving force behind our acquisition of VMware. We used that as the driver to get VMware in the door and going. Then, as we started to see what it was capable of doing - essentially running this entire heavy product - we started consuming more and more of our servers and eliminating physical machines, based on the success that we had with the ERP system.

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.

Management of the solution depends on the interface you are in. The Flash interface can be a little cumbersome sometimes, but thankfully they are moving all of that into the HTML 5. I did see that with the 6.7 Update 1, every function now is pretty much capable of being run from HTML 5. I'm really happy about that and looking forward to moving to that.

Unfortunately, because I'm the infrastructure guy, some of the features, day-to-day things, require me to go back into the Flash version, but I long to go with the HTML 5. It's really fast, performance is great on that, it looks really good, and using it is not a pain.

It would be nice if they could make the upgrades a little bit smoother but sometimes that's a little tricky because, unfortunately, everyone can throw plugins into the environment and VMware can't necessarily control all of those. So I understand the headache for the engineering team there.

The EXSi hosts are rock solid. We've had a couple problems once or twice with a driver update or bad firmware on one of the devices, but I haven't actually had a problem with those in years now. They pretty much run rock solid, 24 hours a day.

vSphere itself is great when you don't need to make updates, but any time you have to touch it, unfortunately there is always a little bit of a fight to get it to do what you want. But then, once you get it there, it's great.

We have grown our environment, introduced new hosts, taken old hosts out. We have some 1,500 VMs running inside of all of our environments now and that has been a slow growth. I don't know how long it took us to get there, but we've grown to that level and it's never once given us a problem. From the interface, you see how much CPU utilization and RAM utilization that each one of those hosts is giving you. You can tell ahead of time when you need to start expanding the environment. And with VMotion, you expand the environment and then let DRS have at it and walk away.

Often, by the time I'm going for support, there's a major issue with the environment. It sometimes takes a little bit of time for them to either see what's going on or to get me to whatever support I need. The few times I have had to call them on something very basic though, they have been pretty quick.

We use the appliances, so the setups are pretty straightforward. Anytime I have to install new test stuff, I never really have much of a problem with it anymore. Obviously, in the past, there were the issues with SSL certificates, but a lot of that has been worked out and the systems are pretty straightforward now.

Upgrades, sometimes, are hit and miss. It depends upon the complexity of the environment. The more side products you are throwing into vSphere, the stickier it can get. I've had upgrades that have failed, but what's really great about using the appliances is that, when the upgrade failed, I just shrugged my shoulders, turned that new box off, turned the old box back on, and kept moving along for a while, until we figured out the issue.

In term of advice, obviously some of the SSL stuff would be good to know upfront because the requesting of the certificates, while it's gotten easier, can still be a little bit tricky. There are so many of them that you need. Knowing the right steps for selecting what you need can be challenging.

We're not using VM encryption, support for TPM or VBS right now, but we're looking at implementing some of that stuff to improve our security stance.

We're slowly attempting to push our database administrators into moving into VMware. They're reluctant, of course, but we have not given them much of a choice. They will come along and we just need to make sure that they're comfortable and we get them fully supported and happy.

I would easily rate the solution a nine out of 10. The little problems I have with it here and there notwithstanding, it's the easiest product I have ever had to use for something as complex as your entire infrastructure being in one area. I have dabbled around with other products and they never seem to quite be at the same level of stability and feature sets.