VMware vSphere Reviews

While we work with the latest version, we also support customers when it comes to backing up their older versions, meaning we work with a variety of different ones. 

Many of our customers have their core infrastructure on vSphere platforms. They make use of the solution for their virtual environments when it comes to their educational and healthcare institutions.

We consider the virtualization of CPU and storage resources to be a valuable feature.

The integration with containers should be addressed. While they have started to integrate with Tanzu, the integration is not that good at the moment. 

I have been using VMware vSphere for 15 years.

As the solution has been around for a while, it's quite stable.

The solution is easy to scale. 

We have take advantage of technical support. It is very good.

The initial setup is very simple.

Its duration depends on how big the environment is. Huge ones may take several weeks for implementation, while smaller ones would take several days. 

Once the solution is deployed, there is a need for specific maintenance, as there are security vulnerabilities which must be considered, or new features or versions that may be put out. 

We provide all the maintenance for the customers. As we also have services organizations, we manage some of these environments on the customers behalf.

As the vSphere platform allows for a variety of additions, it is quite good. There is enterprise plus, enterprise and standard, so the pricing is not too bad.

The solution is mostly deployed on-premises, although we also have cloud deployments.

This product is suitable for a company of any size. 

The solution rates competitively against Nutanix and Microsoft. Overall, I feel it to be a pretty proven platform, although the underlying platform, or the management and features that surround it, are of secondary importance. BDI is the main focus. 

I rate VMware vSphere as an eight out of ten. 

I use VMware vSphere as a regular VM for different workloads and different configurations.

I like the capability of vMotion, DRS, high availability, and resource distribution.

The price could be better. The licensing is definitely expensive and tech support is sometimes frustrating.

I have been using VMware vSphere for 15 or 16 years.

VMware vSphere is a robust and stable product. It doesn't break that often.

Technical support is sometimes frustrating. Lately, we have been dealing with some tech support on SRM and they are not able to solve it.

The initial setup is straightforward. Once you have some understanding, it's straightforward.

The price could be better. The license is definitely expensive.

I don't find anything that I think it would be a bottleneck or any challenge. I've been using it for so many years. It's a robust product, and I don't see anything lacking. I would advise potential users to go for it. It's something you can rely on. It's very robust and doesn't break if you implement it correctly. It actually gives you peace of mind.

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

We have a variety of customers with different use cases. Many can't go to a public cloud, and so we give the option of a private cloud. If they can go to a public cloud, may use a hyperscaler such as AWS or Azure on their applications. 

vSphere is easy to integrate with multiple third-party tools. We're using Carbonite, for example, for migration. We are also using vSphere and vCenter for integrating with a CA product. 

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.

Commercially, you see other products, like Nutanix, which offers a free hypervisor. It would be ideal if this solution was the same in that regard.

There are certain tools the can't run in parallel and occasionally, in those instances, we have trouble migrating customers from one source to our data center.

If I'm replicating workload from the data center and, I have to migrate some of the workload to my location, I have to stop that application. Only then I can run vSphere. That is the biggest challenge. If both the tools cannot run in parallel, it becomes a problem. There should be some sort of way to run these two products in parallel.

We've been using the solution for a number of years. It may be about eight at this point.

The stability has been very good. We haven't had any issues thus far with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The scalability is quite good. You can scale it horizontally and vertically if you need to. It's quite flexible in that sense. A company that needs to expand it shouldn't run into any issues.

The solution can have ten to 15 nodes. 

Currently, we use the solution quite extensively in our organization. We do plan to continue to increase the usage of the product in the future.

Technical support is okay. We're pretty satisfied with the level of service we are provided. They seem to be pretty knowledgeable and responsive. 

We also use Nutanix, however, we don't use that solution quite as extensively.

VMware has much better functionalities. They have integrated IDs and some functionalities. as well as load-balancing which Nutanix doesn't have right now. 

The initial setup is not complex. It's rather straightforward.

We can deploy the solution in three to four days, typically. We deploy multiple clusters and we take three to four days in terms of grid installing. 

In terms of pricing, a little bit of improvement is required. There is a lot of competition in the market. If you talk about Nutanix, Nutanix is much cheaper than this product. Very recently, we lost out on a contract due to the pricing.

We're a partner with VMware.

We are a data center service provider. We sell these services to customers. We are not using it for ourselves only. We are also selling the solution to our customers. In that sense, there's always a plan to increase vSphere.

Overall, we're pretty satisfied with the solution. I'd rate it a seven out of ten.

I'm always sort of working with the servers, therefore, whenever there is a requirement for a different kind of server, I deal with it. For example, one of my departments asked me to provide one server where they can store some files. Instead of getting a full physical server, we created some virtual machines on vSphere and gave it to the department so they could store their data there. That is one where we are using the server. Sometimes we buy software from outside, and there are specific requirements on hardware - for example, X amount much of RAM is required, Y amount of CPU is required, etc., so we try to use the vSphere to create the virtual machines for that.

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. 

I can't think of any features that are missing. I'm not really using any advanced options and don't have complex requirements.

The solution could be a bit more user-friendly.

I've been using the solution for eight years now. It's been quite a while.

The solution is very stable. We've never had any issues. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution can scale. If a company needs to expand it out, they can do so with relative ease.

There are four or five users that work directly with the solution, however, we have it deployed to many departments, so it's used quite a bit in the company. We have about 10-20 servers that are running on the machines.

Right now, we're happy with it, however, we may move to a different product that is even more scalable in the future, That's yet to be decided.

I've dealt with technical support in the past. Whenever we've logged a ticket, it's resolved very well. Everyone is quite knowledgeable, and whenever there is a requirement to follow a query, their tech team resolves those queries very efficiently and our problems were always resolved. We're pretty satisfied with their level of service.

We didn't previously use a different product.

We're considering moving to a different product in the future that could potentially scale even better than this. The reason we haven't moved yet is the fact that it's not easy for us to deploy and migrate all the machines from VMware to any other product.

We didn't actually handle the installation, and therefore I can't really talk about the process, as I wasn't involved directly.

The company that we bought had installed the vSphere for us and that server is still running from last year. We haven't touched it.

The solution was actually installed by the company that we ended up buying, and therefore we didn't directly handle any aspect of the implementation.

We have the licensing for the solution and the perpetual license which we have allows us to choose whether we want a support license separate or not. It's not an overly expensive solution. The pricing is average.

We're currently in the process of evaluating other options on the market to see if there are open-source options that could work for us or products that scale even better than vSphere.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with vSphere.

We aren't using the latest version of the solution. The near version is sufficient for us and it's solving our requirements.

Overall, I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

While I would recommend it due to the fact that it's solving my problems, I am evaluating other products that may be better. There may be an open-source option that could also work for us.  That said, this product is great in that we are using it hassle-free.

• Implemented private cloud.
• Created different OS VMs
• Implemented backup policies.  
• Implemented network solutions.

Due to clustering, if any VM or server goes down, then within a moment it can be back. Even if a node goes down, then automatically all the VMs shift to another node. That is thr beauty of the product. It supports different platforms: Windows, Linux, Unix, Ubuntu, and many more. 

It is very beneficial with low space and easy manageability. Due to this product, we have saved space, energy, and durability. We have a lot of VLANs for different floors and services. This requires different VMs all implemented in one place. 

Users get tremendous speed. As an admin, I found it's usable to manage all services from a single location or point. We have already implemented private cloud, so in an emergency users can work from home. It's suitable for all users. 

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.

OS templates should be readily available, so there is no need to get an OS separately. Only the activation part should be different, which is not presently available due to the need to get the OS from a different location, then create VMs. If it connect with Internet, it should ask this during VM creation with the help of selection. It should auto download the OS so it will be beneficial only at time of activation by entering a valid key. If a key is not valid, then it should start with a trial version. 

More than three years.

It requires proper maintenance and attention to work smoothly.

The product is expandable, as per requirements.

My experience is really good.

No, we only selected this solution at the start.

The concept is new. We found it a little complex at the start but the operational part was normal.

Our vendor supported the implementation. After that, we did it in-house.

As per our requirements and usability, the product is good.

After getting a headache, you will find the cost is reasonably cheaper.

We compared with Nutanix, IBM, and HPE. We got all the technical details, benefits, and functionality.   

Before selection of any product, first determine your own requirements, study them, and then present solutions.

My primary use case for this solution is the DRS feature of the solution.

When checking the utilization reports, the operational reporting and matrixes are a little weak.  In terms of what has been the starting growth or trend analysis is something which, currently they have an add-on which we have not used  because it's an add-on product, which we have not bought. As of now, they have this capability but I've not seen these features to be more integrated on the base product itself rather than having as a special add-on.

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.

When checking the utilization reports, the operational reporting and matrixes are a little weak.  In terms of what has been the starting growth or trend analysis is something which, currently they have an add-on which we have not used  because it's an add-on product, which we have not bought. As of now, they have this capability but I've not seen these features to be more integrated on the base product itself rather than having as a special add-on.

As I mentioned, the necessary improvement would be to add additional features that would integrate reporting and management in terms of automation. Those are the two things I would say it's a lot of, or the third item could be of some service important to integration. Right now everybody is talking about private clubs, but these are the base foundation so, the effect it has had on embedded software attack, running on the hypervisor for self-provisioning, it definitely has an edge.

Its highly scalable, we have never had to make radical changes to the design to make it more, or to put in more capacity. So, as we are growing we have been adding the servers into the existing pool without even worrying about a need for redesign. As we grow, we find that our company is more dependent upon this product. 

Technical support usually we have online support, where we can log a call if there is any trouble. But so far in the last three years that I have been here, we rarely, or I cannot collect any one instance where we had necessity to log a case with the support team, the forums and the community are, have enough knowledge based articles to make us pass through any technical challenges that we have faced.

We have prior use knowledge of Hyper-V. First, it did not have this automatic scalable capability which are scored to move across from one specific hardware to another without impacting any downtime. And secondly, it did not have a lot of automatic configuration capabilities, based on the utilization of the specific hardware it could re-balance what goes around on top of it. So these two are they key features that I feel were lacking at that point in time and it's hard to use another feature that I feared was lacking. In addition, it relied a lot upon the physical machine.

It was very straightforward setup. 

The way we had done it is it came pre-installed with as part of the hardware stack that we purchased so the new servers that we purchased we bundled that ESXi software on top of it from the hardware vendor itself. So from that perspective, the implementation strategy was to have it as an OEM100 by the hardware vendor itself and then the way we designed it from our side is we designed it into two different data centers. One for production, one for test and development. So just have a logical separation there in terms of the hardware that was used for production and what was used for distribution.

Overall timelines are approximately two to three weeks time-frame. After the hardware was developed, they came in and installed the base software and considered it based on our requirements.

Deployment was done by the hardware vendor itself. The hardware came from HP and there was a HP reseller who shipped us the hardware. The resellers team only came and did all the installation and confirmation after the design was agreed with us.

Pricing is competitive I would say, because usually we buy the software, along with the hardware stock so it's usually a bundle thing that we try to squeeze the hardware windows in to get us proper discounts. So, it is regularly higher than what a Microsoft overall solution turns out to be. But, the capabilities are worth it. The price is justified.

Licensing is pretty standard.

In my previous organization, we used Hyper-V for over eight years.

From my side, the advice would be to design it properly the first time. Have proper capacity planned out, and don't just create over-provision in the production environment. Best you can do with provisioning with production, you definitely need to have some capacity sizing done properly. And, that goes in not for just this product but any virtualization product that a company implements. You do not want to overload the hardware. You have to think about the capabilities of the end-user.

Our main use case for the product is we want to do virtualization. We want to save costs on the physical hardware because we were running some big workloads on the physical hardware that we migrated over to VMware. In terms of the retail applications which we are running on the physical hardware, we have now virtualized them.

The product has improved the organization in terms of the infrastructure stability and security, balancing the resources, and providing cost saving. The cost savings and the TCO with vSphere are very good.

We are using our vSphere for our new workloads in terms of Federation Services as well as for our VDI workloads. These are mission critical for us because they are the customer-facing.

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. 

I can see the room for improvement still in the user interface (UI). 

There is still room for improvement with the HTML5 Web Client. They are working on it, as I can see on their blog. However, there is still room for improvement in the newer features that they can push into it.

Stability is perfectly fine. In the past eight months, we have been able to achieve 100 percent uptime. Therefore, the stability is quite impressive.

We are using it on a big scale. vSphere is one of the biggest product of VMware, and we have around five vCenters with around 80 hosts.

Scalability is one of the best things about vSphere. You don't need to change your design if you have a new demand for workloads or if a new product is coming in. Thus, the scalability feature is awesome.

Tech support is sometimes good and sometimes bad. We work in the Southeast Asia region where sometimes we have a language barrier. Therefore, their tech support is 50/50 for us.

With the initial setup, server workloads were running on an open source. When we had planned to go with VMware, we faced a bit of complexity. It was just a one time thing. After that, everything went smoothly. So, there were some complexities that we did face.

In the past six months, we have saved around 110TBs of storage, which is almost equivalent to $200,000 USD. That is a huge savings.

We have seen a tremendous performance boost. From when we started this VMware engagement in 2016 until now, we have seen around a 70 percent performance boost. This is a good number.

When we started with VMware, we also tried Citrix XenServer. We considered them as well as Red Hat's platform.

I will rate vSphere a ten out of ten, as I'm a huge fan of vSphere. 

Please look into this solution. You can have it, test it, and download it for 60 days, then you can test it yourself decide what is best for you.

We don't have VMware cloud on AWS, but we have plan to go on it in six months.

The most important thing when choosing a vendor: We look for performance, return on investment, and tech support. Tech support is very important for us in day-to-day tasks. These are the things that we look for in a vendor.

We had almost 100 servers and we wanted to consolidate them and also make them movable, especially when we have to upgrade hardware. It also allowed us to create more testing environments, because we tended to buy new iron every time. We also want users to be able to “own” servers themselves, so that we would build them for them, hand them over and say, "Have fun".

• Flexibility
• Ease of management

Maybe it's there and I don't know about it, but I would love to be able to build a standard server set and be able to give users, who want to build another server, the ability to click in and have a pool of 20 options for the five groups that are using them. I could just say, “Hey if you want a server click here," and then the server is built for them, tells them how to connect, how to login to it. Done. That would be so cool.

It's stable. It has only crashed once.

We're not a very big shop, so it's not really appropriate for me to answer this question.

I would give technical support about 7.5 out of 10.

I waited until version 5 because, prior to that, I thought it was too difficult to set up. With that version, the setup was fairly easy. And it has gotten a lot easier since.

On the server side, we have definitely seen ROI. If servers fail we just restart them, if a piece of hardware fails we just move it. We haven't saved any money but we have been able to double our load without adding any more staff. That's our ROI.

In real terms, because of the cost of the product, I don't know that we really save anything. We're a public institution and we tend to have very long time frames for holding onto hardware, not like a corporation. I would say it's a wash on a pure ROI, unless we can look into the future and say, “I'm going to be able to do increased stuff without adding any money.”

Pricing is the one "ding" I have against it. Except for VMware vSphere Essentials, it would be pretty challenging for anything but a medium or large size company to use.

If you're managing more than five servers run over and get some vSpere Essentials. I think virtualization is the only way to go, whether you do it on-premise or in the cloud, nowadays. It doesn't make any sense once you get beyond a couple.

I rate the solution an eight. Price would be the main thing, as well as the relative inaccessibility for end-users to be able to touch the product.