VMware vSphere Reviews

We use the solution in servers for digitalization. Our digital products, like mobile and internet banking, run on them.

We are running critical applications like mobile applications on vSphere.

The tool offers virtualization and monitoring.

Virtual machine snapshots and consolidation need to be improved. Also, there are licensing and subscription issues.

I have been using VMware vSphere for 3 years.

I rate the solution’s stability a 9 out of 10.

The solution is scalable. 5 users are using this solution.

I rate the solution’s scalability an 8 out of 10.

Customer support takes a long time to respond.

Neutral

We have used Nutanix. We opted for VMware because the environment is good.

The initial setup is very easy and takes half an hour to complete, but it is costly since it has training costs and tutorials. The 3 tutorials are included in this package. They somewhat automate, but it's not enough.

Earlier, the solution had a perpetual license, but now, it has a subscription. Also, they have increased the price. The certification is costly.

vSphere has the DRS site. We got the recovery site feature, but we haven't used it. It's good to use the high availability to be more than AWS. We have many weekly metrics running on these.

Overall, I rate the solution an 8 out of 10.

We primarily use the solution for everything Microsoft-related for the most part. I would say our visualization platform is about 99.5% of all our workload from a Microsoft point of view

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. 

The biggest pain point is probably the firmware management of the underlying hardware. It could be a lot better.

We use HP hardware. The biggest thing is the firmware upgrades and other items at the backend. You have to take down the system. It's an in-memory database and that can sometimes cause issues. If you have to do firmware upgrades, it's organizing downtime and all sorts of things, which normally in a VMS space isn't an issue. They have embedded some of this in 7.1, however, I haven't tested it or seen it in action as yet. 

That said, one of the problems is that when we're sort of behind big memory servers and the databases in them if you migrate it, it potentially breaks the system off. That's a big pain point that the firmware management of the underlying hardware should handle. VMware doesn't really cater to it, however, Nutanix to some degree does cater for. It gets pretty expensive, however.

We are always sort of one or two versions behind. We never test the latest version. I would say for me personally, the management aspect with large memory and in-memory databases for the motions and stuff like that is what it needs. That's one of the key things that I need really, from a support perspective. That's caused a number of issues already. 

You do get something called host profiles, which they've also improved slightly, however, I still think it's a bit clunky in terms of the way you can manage it. They can produce something to improve that aspect slightly.

I've been using the solution for more than 12 years. It's been over a decade at this point.

The solution is mostly stable.

We've had issues, however, if you think about it, it's quite complex if you look at stuff like a three-tier architecture with different stories, subsystems, and things like that. It's not really VMware if it's unstable perhaps. 

VMware itself isn't necessarily unstable, however, they might present as a VM-ware issue due to the fact of the storage latency or a driver issue. We did a firmware update and VMware itself I think is quite stable. Every now and again, there's an issue that creeps in, however, it's because we use different vendors for storage and a different vendor for computing. Overall, by and large, VMware is very stable.

From the way we set it up, it is relatively easy to scale as long as you've got the planning in place for where you're going to. We use something called blade technology, and that is relatively easy to scale.

There's a total of ten people that are actually on the solution at any given time.

I've used technical support a couple of times. I'm quite happy with it. We've got an agreement with HP. We offer our support via HP or via Data Centrix with HP. Durin the couple of times I've used it has been quite fast and thorough.

I've never used a different solution. I started using VMware or VMware server, about 20 years ago. vSphere ESX is probably the first visualization tool I've used. Subsequently, yes, we've tested one or two other options, for example, Hyper-V and what used to be called Acropolis. We've also used Oracle VM. However, for production and for everything else we've done, we pretty much speak to VMware. It's tried and tested and we're quite happy with the stability. Therefore, we stick with it.

If all your hardware requirements are met, it is a relatively simple implementation. However, you have to have the boxes ticked in terms of connectivity, capacity, and all that sort of stuff. The actual VMware part of it is not the biggest complication of everything now.

We handle maintenance ourselves. My team consists of five people, and of those, only one of them really works on the maintenance of the hardware and the software. It doesn't take a lot of personnel.

Initially, we did use a vendor for the initial setup. That's even before I started at this company. The company uses their local vendors to output the hardware deployment and with the software deployment, however, it's my understanding that it's been done in-house mostly.

It's not a cheap solution. The maintenance specifically is quite expensive. I also find that it's more expensive than the higher tier products. 

We've looked at buying into something like a vROPS or whatever they call it today. However, when you look at the cost and the benefits, although there is great benefit in the product, it's just never been a cost discussion that we've been able to entertain with management. 

Similar to vSAN, we looked at that a couple of times. It's a great product and it has proven itself. It's brilliant. It's stable. However, as soon as you look at any peripheral products, it becomes quite expensive, as it's licensed per socket or per blade or per server or whatever. 

We're just customers.

We are a little behind the latest version, which I believe is 7.1. We're using 6.5 for the most part. We still have a little bit of a legacy in 5.5, however, that is just hardware related. It doesn't support the newer version. We trying to rectify that as soon as possible.

I would recommend the solution to other companies.

Overall, I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

I use VMware vSphere primarily to provide a layer of virtualization between our Cisco hardware and existing software. It ensures high availability and redundancy for our applications, minimizing downtime in case of OS or application failures. Additionally, vSphere simplifies migration when updating hardware and makes it faster to reinstall virtual machines along with applications.

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.

In terms of improvement, the license fee could be more affordable, but overall, I'm satisfied with VMware vSphere.

I have been using VMware vSphere for almost 20 years.

vSphere is very stable. I would rate the stability as a ten out of ten.

Setting up VMware vSphere is very straightforward; no issues there. Purchasing involves acquiring licenses and the licenses often come bundled with hardware from vendors like HP or Dell. The deployment process is smooth, and support hasn't been necessary as the software is stable. For deployment and maintenance, we currently have about four or five active staff members involved. However, considering buying expertise and engineers, the team can range from nine to ten individuals.

The solution is not cheap.

Overall, I would rate vSphere as a perfect ten out of ten.

We mainly use this solution to create hosts and convert them to virtual machines. We convert our physical assets into virtualized assets. We need to convert ESXi hosts into VMs.

Our entire operating team has access to vSphere. They can log into vCenter — vSphere's dashboard. We have multiple IDs and roles created. In total, we have more than 600 users. Out of our 600 users, we have around 50 admin users who can administer the entire map. 

We definitely plan to continue using this solution.

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.

There is some room for improvement but if we're not satisfied converting all of our physical assets into virtualized ones, since we have a scope for other technologies, we can always go for containerization.

There are some challenges around ESXi hosts — converting them into VMs. Also, it could definitely be more secure, overall.

It would be nice if other users could see or accept the VMs that we create — this has to do with the cluster.

The cluster should be able to be viewed by multiple sets of users apart from the operating team. If a developer also wants to have access to the cluster, it's complicated. Role-based access should be available to make this easier.

I have been using VMware vSphere for more than 10 years.

It's quite stable. I haven't experienced any issues as such. We have support available from an extended team of VMware professionals. It's aligned to the GTI, global technology infrastructure. VMware is a big area in our organization.

It's quite scalable. You can keep scaling up the number of VMs you want to create. As I mentioned, we create thousands of VMs, so yes, we can scale easily. That's a capability I would look at from a business goal perspective. Any business leader will want to scale up their hypervisor. vSphere is pretty much the hypervisor. 

I am satisfied with the support. There's a separate team for maintenance and a separate team for support. Whatever upgrades need to be done, it is all taken care of by the maintenance teams.

There are two ways of installing it, depending on your deployment topology. Overall, it's quite fast and easy to install. It only takes a couple of days to install it.

An extended team of VMware professionals helped us with the installation, but we mostly did it ourselves. It was onboarded into our organization in 2009 — the very first version. You could say that we're one of the earliest adopters.

The licensing has become cheaper over time. As there are multiple offerings, it depends on how you are leveraging.

We evaluated Edge containerization a while back, but we didn't notice any tools that would help us grow, so we decided to stick with VMware vSphere.

I would absolutely recommend this solution. It's better than Microsoft Hyper-V. Hyper-V has some problems. VMware vSphere is the industry leader by far when it comes to the hypervisor sector.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine.

The primary use case is for virtualization of the Windows environment for our organization. 

It has performed wonderfully. Over the course of the last 10 years, we have implemented vSphere Hypervisor and moved from five percent virtualization up to a current rate of about 85 percent, for our Windows environment.

The mission-critical apps we use it for are for production facilities, as well as optimizers for the machine equipment that is at those production facilities. There are ancillary systems in our corporate data centers that are used for the internal customer-facing apps, to work with the business intelligence piece, which can monitor metrics as well as capacity planning, ordering, and business warehousing. All of these business-critical functions run on vSphere Hypervisor.

We are able to increase the density of the virtualized servers and, with the increased density we have a lot of page sharing as well as memory sharing. We see performance increases from Server 2012 and forward; 2003 is debatable. There were negligible differences in 2012 but we did see benchmark performance improvement from utilizing Hypervisor and the increased density that comes with it.

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.

VMware has expanded, from a corporate standpoint, to where they have gotten very large. I have noticed, in the last couple of years, the breaking apart of specific added benefits and charging license upcharges for them. That would be the only negative thing that I have to say: As a large consumer of the Hypervisor, we have a hard time justifying the cost of utilizing the extra products, especially when it's a couple of grand here and there, a couple of hundred dollars here and there. It's hard for an IT administrator or an architect to sell to upper management. When they're seeing so much ROI from the Hypervisor, it's hard to show them that there is extra value in the additional products that can be tied on top.

I would really like to see an assessment of which products are actually going to be beneficial to charge for, and that they then continue to keep some of the products bundled in with the initial Hypervisor.

There are some competitive vendors out there who are sticking to the original model that VMware seemed to have, which includes a lot of additional features and functionality in the initial pricing, and I think they are gaining a lot of market share based on the fact that they are keeping their licensing simple. The only argument I have with VMware is that, when I ask our VMware team about a new solution, I hear comments like, "For a nominal fee we can upgrade your license and you can have that." For the large number of Hypervisors and the scale we have, it's frustrating to hear that I have to go ask for additional money for very small, additional features that I think should be included.

I respect that VMware has to grow and there are some features that they should not bundle in and that they should ask more money for. So I would like to see an analysis of sales and what's included and what the consumption rate is. I think they could dial it in a little bit better to where they have more bundled solutions. 

Unfortunately, I think the type of model that VMware is moving toward is having an a la carte type of fee list. There are so many products that start with a "v" that I tend to get drowned with all the capabilities and I have to pick the particular thing I want to go after. Whereas, if there were more bundled services, or a package that included more bundled services, I might be able to swing that more easily than asking for money here and there. 

We're able to scale with density. I think that's the most important part. The clusters are allowed to go to so many nodes. We don't even touch the number of nodes per cluster. We traditionally have multiple fault zones in the data center, really for a comfort level, not because of a technological level. I know we could push the equipment a little bit harder but we generally like to keep things in a comfort zone that is constantly moving northward. So scalability is limitless and we have not really touched the capabilities yet, but we know the capabilities are there when we are ready to use them.

The environment has changed hands several times over the years. Currently, I work to architect any new deployments but I was not involved in the initial bringing in of GSX, when the company first adopted virtualization, roughly 10 years ago. I have turned the environment over two or three times since I've been here. Now we have new staff in my group who are constantly evolving and changing with the adoption of new architecture and business cases for the Hypevisor and other products in the suite that complement it.

It's hard to calculate the ROI but I know that in our main, corporate data center we have gone from 700-plus Hewlett Packard servers down to fewer than 50 physical servers for the Hypervisor. We still have some legacy physicals that have not been virtualized yet but, over the course of this current refresh and into next year, those should go away.

In addition, in our paper mills and pulp mills we have heavily adopted virtualization, and in our box plants, where we make container boxes for shipments, we have seen a ratio of five servers down to one, and that's over a couple of hundred sites.

While an actual ROI number is hard to calculate, if you think about the yearly maintenance on all of those systems, it's very vast and deep. It also allows us the portability to expand rapidly and add virtual machines with virtually no overhead, once the initial architecture has been built.

If you are not already virtualizing, existing-wise, you are doing yourself a severe disservice. Anybody who is continuing down the road of physical servers, any justifications that they think they have, should be challenged. If you have an environment that is all physical servers, a very easy win would be to present virtualization and denser workloads to your management. That would definitely make you look good in your career. I really don't see any negatives to moving to virtualization, even at a 100-percent adoption rate. We have yet to find a workload that is unable to run successfully in a virtualized manner, with the proper configurations and tuning.

We have not quite adopted vSphere 6.5 or 6.7. We do have some locations that have 6.5. On the radar will be utilizing the encryption capabilities, but as of yet, we have not really implemented that. We have a large organization so we move at a little bit of a slower pace. But implementing that is on the very near horizon, at least for our external-facing systems, as well as some internal.

We are also investigating the VMware Cloud on AWS initiative. That will probably be in the 2019 forum for dabbling or moving a percentage. With our being a manufacturing company, we move a little bit slower in adopting newer technologies and we have not really built the framework for a cloud initiative yet, but that will be something we investigate shortly.

I would definitely rate vSphere a 10. If you rate the Hypervisor alone, it's a 10. It has been one of the staples of technology for the last 15 years, and the key player for virtualization, for the whole industry during that time - or since Dell spun VMware off, or created the organization. It has been the premium, platinum product for Hypervisor. There are a few other players in the industry, but they are nipping at the heels, and that's about it. I do think that VMware is going to continue to lead, as far as Hypervisor goes, for the foreseeable future.

Currently, our whole infrastructure stack is residing on the VMware hypervisor. Everything we use is running on VMware. We have multi-site vCenter data centers. We have four sites, but they are two separate pairs of sites that provide redundancy. We will shortly also use VMware Site Recovery Manager for the two to four hours disaster recovery strategy. 

We are on version 6.5 or 6.7, and we are moving to version 7.0 shortly.

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.

Its cost needs to be improved. It is very expensive as compared to other solutions.

I have been around VMware and vSphere for the last ten years.

In terms of stability, it is very well-established and very stable. For any problems or issues that we've encountered in the past, their support was quite dynamic. We've had very good success in resolving any issues or problems. None of these issues or problems had a direct impact to live services. They have built it in a way so that it provides redundancy and flexibility. It ensures that your production environments remain available at all times, even in the case of problems or issues that could be encountered. I would give it an A for stability. 

It is easily scalable, and it can be scaled without any impact on the availability of the production environment.

Their support is very good. I would give them good grades. For any problems or issues that we've encountered in the past, their support was quite dynamic. We've had very good success in resolving any issues or problems. Because there are many different products in the stack, you need to ensure that you reach the right person for the product you're looking at, but it is always fairly simple and easy to reach the right person.

The learning curve to actually get used to the product and know the product properly is fairly steep. I have been working with this solution for the last ten years, so it is not a new solution for me. I couldn't speak to today's onboarding process because I haven't onboarded in the last year. It has been many years.

It is very expensive as compared to other competitive hypervisor solutions in the market today. Its competitors are actually more aggressive. Even though most of them are less established solutions, they have started to catch up in functionality and capacity, and their pricing is extremely aggressive.

If someone is starting new with VMware, it is important that you either onboard someone who has experience with it or you ramp up the knowledge of your IT operations staff. It is far-reaching and complex and requires a good understanding to manage it properly. If you don't have a good understanding at the beginning, you could find yourself in situations where you're not getting the actual return on the solution because you're not managing it properly. The knowledge gap at the beginning has to be covered quite thoroughly.

I would rate VMware vSphere an eight out of ten.

We have been virtualizing our on-premises data center. We relied heavily on VMware vSphere to manage our servers; all our virtual server loads are hosted on it.

The tool comes with scale-out capabilities. Deploying new infrastructure became much quicker, saving significant time previously spent sourcing hardware for each installation. It also has the ability to downscale on rack spaces, reducing the number of rack units needed to accommodate our servers.

Its most valuable feature is remote replication which comes with high availability. 

I would suggest that the tool reconsider its pricing strategy. The recent price hikes could potentially pose a problem for VMware in the future. The recent price increases, especially since Broadcom acquired them, seem excessive. There are reports of businesses experiencing massive price hikes, sometimes as much as 10-30 times higher. This is causing smaller businesses to consider exiting the space altogether.

Overall, it's a functional system that works well. However, I believe that systems like Nutanix offer better integration and functionality. While both are solid hypervisors at level one, VMware vSphere's management, especially through the web-based interface, could use improvement.

I have been working with the product for 15 to 16 years. 

I rate the tool's stability a nine out of ten. 

VMware vSphere is highly scalable, and I rate it a ten out of ten. My company has 400 users. 

I rate the tool's ease of deployment a six out of ten. It was quite complex due to various hardware restrictions and issues. We had to address several technical issues with VMware along the way.

I would rate the deployment process as typical regarding time and considerations. However, the migration from on-premises to the cloud was a bit cumbersome. It required a bit of work. 

The installation phase took about three months initially when we deployed on-premises. This duration was understandable as we had to virtualize numerous physical servers and handle various complexities. Transitioning to the cloud extended the project timeline to approximately six months.

I believe the biggest return on investment stemmed from significantly reduced deployment time frames. Commissioning and deploying systems and accommodating growth became much faster—measured in days rather than months. This efficiency and consolidation efforts resulted in a high long-term ROI.

I rate the solution's pricing a ten out of ten due to the recent price changes. 

My advice to those considering VMware vSphere would be to carefully assess your business's size and the product's value proposition. It may not be well-suited for smaller enterprises due to its prohibitive cost. It's important to consider alternative solutions. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. 

We use it exclusively for internal purposes within our company, managing our office infrastructure as a private cloud solution.

It stands out as a comprehensive and advantageous solution, providing a full package that effectively caters to our needs for managing our private cloud.

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.

The current concern revolves around the pricing as it might be less affordable for certain regions. In countries like Tunisia and many others in Africa, there seems to be a challenge regarding the cost of licensing.

I have been working with it for ten years.

It is robust and stable, rating it a perfect score of ten out of ten.

It offers good scalability. I would rate it eight out of ten. It's a small organization, with one hundred users.

It boasts robust support. I've collaborated with local partners in Tunisia, and their operations, coupled with same-day support, have proven highly responsive. I would rate the support experience a solid ten out of ten.

Positive

I have experience working with Hyper-V, and when comparing stability, VMware surpasses it across various generations. While Hyper-V has shown improvement in newer versions, it hasn't reached the level of stability that VMware consistently delivers.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward. I would rate it eight out of ten.

For deployment, it typically takes around two to three days with minimal configuration. One person is often sufficient for handling such setups. It's worth noting that if we opt for solutions like Analytics or other complex configurations, the need for additional personnel may arise, but for straightforward deployments, a single person can effectively manage the process.

I find it highly expensive. I would rate it ten out of ten. It would be highly beneficial for VMware to collaborate with local hosts and partners in countries like those in Africa to establish specific pricing that would align with the economic conditions of countries in Africa, ensuring suitability and compatibility with our consumption capabilities.

In instances where organizations operate on robust infrastructures and budget constraints are not a significant concern, my usual recommendation is VMware. This is especially true for financial companies that prioritize investing in and managing critical software solutions without financial constraints. Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.