An excellent product with proven track record. Plan properly the deployment and use as this products is expensive.
Valuable Features:
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.
Room for Improvement:
With all the desirable features of vSphere and its proven track record, its no wonder that it's also the most expensive virtualization platform out there. This is the first major disadvantage when using VMware. Other vendors have competing products with similar capabilities. However, these products are not proven and tested.Another thing to watch out for when using vSphere is that you really need to plan your deployment and use thoroughly. With the high cost associated with this product, proper diligence must be taken in the planning on how to use this product to achieve the desired results.Lastly, make sure the hardware that you run vSphere on is fully supported. Hardware compatibility issues can limit the functionality of vSphere or worse render the hardware useless.Despite the inherent high cost associated with using this product, I will still highly recommend this for use in production environments. The benefits that will be enjoyed far outweighs the consequences as long as proper planning is done.
Other Advice:
It is also recommend to get a reliable partner for integrating the software with the hardware system. As vSphere has numerous features, an inexperienced integrator or un-trained in-house administrator might not be able to configure fully all features necessary to maximize the product.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Having vMotion independent of SSO would be a great thing but more than like would take some code rewrite. Love that idea though. I see a bit of lag in the Web Interface but not nearly as much as previous versions. Not sure what web browser you are using but I find Opera works very well with the Web UI.