VMware vSphere Reviews

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.

In general, VMware improves the way almost every business using it operates. Server virtualization cuts down on operating costs by a lot, makes servers easier to manage, and offers increased redundancy.

I think the product licensing is very confusing still and should be simplified on a sliding scale. i.e. one to three servers are essential for four to 10 standard, etc. Instead of licensing per core.

I was using this product at home during the early testing phases and once released we rolled this out to a few of our customers.

No issues encountered.

In the early builds there were some stability issues, but that was resolved early on and is not an issue.

No issues encountered.

9/10.

10/10.

I have used Hyper-V, but it does not even come close to comparing to vSphere. There are plenty of features you cannot do easily in Hyper-V that vSphere makes a breeze.

Very straightforward. Just like moving to any other vSphere release.

We did it in-house. We are a VMware partner so we set this up for our customers.

The licensing can be a little strange, since the per CPU licensing will hopefully be gone in the future. Just make sure to know exactly what you need to make sure you purchase exactly what you need. Also, it is pretty easy to use a licensing calculator.

No other options were looked at.

You should work with an existing VMware partner to deploy, but seek proper training or coursework for day to day management.

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

Less downtime for all end users, so if it fails you can get it up on the other machine quickly.

I don’t like the web client, as it's real clunky, and not so instantaneous.

It's very stable.

You can go as big as you want

It's very easy.

If you don’t have it, you need it because everything should be virtualized.

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.

We have around 200 virtualized servers, so while if we had to buy 200 physical servers, it would cost a lot more compared to what we spend.

I would say that the internal notifications could be much clearer and the performance monitoring could be a lot better. They have an add-on but that costs money.

It's very stable – the only thing I have found is that it’s a learning curve. You need to understand all aspects of your environment. Some people are just network or storage or server related, but you need to be aware of all areas. In general, if you need to troubleshoot a server, and VMware is not around, and we have a situation, it’s going to be harder for someone to understand the solution.

It’s fairly scalable, as we have over 2000 people, 120 branches across different provinces, and it can support our environment.

Technical support has been fine when they figure out if its hardware or software – we have HP hardware, and so the challenge is dealing with whose job it is, HP or VMWare. Once we understand what the problem is, the support is very good.

I would say not complex but it’s not click click click, it goes through a wizard but once you need to architect the network environment it’s a bit complex.

I would tell say that if you have the money you should buy the solution and go with blades. Also, make sure you do a lot of number crunching to show that the solution is valuable.

It enables vMotion, DRS, and HA.

The ability to consolidate and portability, flexibility, and DR. The management thereof is a single pane of glass.

The web client is botched.

There's not many problems with it.

It's very scalable and increasingly so because of what they’re doing with applicances. There's no trade-off between maximums of Windows and appliances.

Since they outsourced it, response times are not what they used to be.

It’s now very easy. It was harder, but now there are more deployment options, scripts, auto-deploy, and you can have full automation or manual, with a smaller footprint.

• High Availability
• Fault Tolerance
• Live migration
• Reduced the overall cost of the infrastructure
• Centralizing the management.

We were able to centralize the server farm, thus able to focus administrators on their immediate tasks, reduce response time to incidents, concentrate the informational flows, facilitate the task of data protection.

2 years.

The deployment was really easy, migration to the virtualization infrastructure was transparent to the main business.

None encountered for now.

No. If you would plan an infrastructure from the beginning, you would not encounter any issues.

We have never asked for any kind of customer service.

We have never needed any kind of technical support from the vendor.

No, but, in future, we plan to use a Microsoft Hyper-V.

Initial setup was quite straightforward.

The implementation was made by our own team.

Before choosing we didn't evaluate any other options. It was planned to use the VMware as the first queue and the MS Hyper-V as the second one. The reason is in the migration plan of the servers - in the second phase it would be the MS SQL server's, so the MS Hyper-V is more suitable.

Always have a plan for the work document everything.

We use the solution mainly for testing our internal systems. We are providing support and solution for clients and we have to test the solutions.

The most valuable feature of the solution would be the basic feature of server virtualization, we use it everywhere.

I have been using the solution for 10 years.

The solution is stable. It has some small bugs which are not influencing the main functions but every software has some bugs.

This solution can scale to extremely large environments, it is very scalable. 

We are a company of 35 people and we are using this solution. We have a lot of customers that we are providing consulting and support for VMware.

Customer support is one of the best in the market.

The installation is straightforward and simple because we learned how to do it a long time ago. Even a new user could find it easy.

The licensing price is fair compared to other similar solutions.

When comparing this solution with the others, it is very similar or a bit better.

I rate VMware vSphere a nine out of ten.

We have Hyper-V on a physical machine and another virtual machine. We are using this because of iSCSI, and we are using VMware for performance and production.

The performance is efficient. You can log the performance and report on the bottlenecks or any other problems you encounter.

One of the areas creating a crash is when you are cloning.

If you are cloning a virtual machine and you have any license on another system it will crash and we have to contact third-party support for assistance.

It's not cloning 100%.

I have been using VMware vSphere for eight years.

We are using version 5 and 6.7.

It's a stable solution, we have not had any issues with stability.

It's a scalable solution. We have three people in our organization who are using this solution.

We did not contact technical support. It wasn't necessary.

We are working with Hyper-V. It was so poor that we started using VMware.

The initial setup was straightforward, it was easy.

The price could be lower.

We are looking for other solutions, specifically for Hyper-V and domain controllers.

I would recommend this solution. It's robust, it's working and it's easy to use.

I would rate VMware vSphere a ten out of ten.

We primarily use this solution for replication purposes we have, and to back up information in HR (High Resolution) mode.

I think they should consider lowering the pricing of entry-level products.

In addition, I think they should come up with a backup feature that is more product enrichment-based. It should be a full-fledged backup solution. It just is not there right now.

The stability of the solution is quite stable.

The scalability of the solution is good. You can scale up to maximum levels. We currently have 2000 users. This requires four engineers to run the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

It was complex, and not straightforward. The deployment took six hours initially to setup. Then, we migrated our virtual-physical servers to virtual machines and now coming projects were also built on virtual machines.

The pricing is justified. It may be a bit high, but the features are worth it.

I would advise others to go with this product if they want to scale their enterprise, definitely if there is no budget constraint.