VMware vSphere Reviews

• VMware Server is problem solving and cost saving. • No need to buy hardware for every server required, just purchase one server and run multiple virtual machines on that single hardware. • Offers testing solutions, provisioning solutions, and makes testing and rolling out installation easier. • Easy to use technology and industry leader in virtualization technology.

• The new Graphic User Interface is not of high quality. • Web based User Interface means breaching compatibility with any principle of rich client applications, and means lots of bugs particular to every different browser

A major issue with this server is that there are several free solutions offered. These are very appealing because of the virtualization rollout that cuts costs. If your intention is to decrease costs by using the VMware Server instead of several machines for several servers, the horsepower of the VMware hardware should be very powerful or every virtual machine will experience a mess.

• vMotion
• DRS
• High Availability
• Snapshots

We're now able to provision new servers faster and have the option to perform snapshots prior to implementing changes.

The installation of vCenter SSO for a lot of my customers could be improved, but I think it's a totally useless feature.

I've used it since version 4.0, so around six years.

Sometimes there were issues during the installation, especially with certificates.

Only once in five years have we had stability issues.

Customer Service:

Customer service is not so bad.

Technical Support:

Technical support is also not so bad, but it could be better if it could be localized with non-English languages. Both I and my customers sometimes have difficulty understanding them.

I started with vSphere, so I haven't used any previous solutions.

In the previous version (5.1/5.0) the initial setup was terrible, now it’s much better.

I can do the implementation myself.

I think it’s quite expensive.

I think it’s quite expensive.

My customers also looked at Hyper-V and XenServer.

Make sure you have a lab for testing.

It's a stable product, e.g. if I lose the entire SAN all the VMs still run. They might pause but only after they try to write to disk. After the SAN has been reconnected, VMs resume as if nothing happened.

As I work as a consultant for Advania Sweden, I meet a lot of different customers with different challenges. But all customers can agree that delivery time for a server resource to the organization has been reduced from weeks to minutes.

I would like to see an additional licensing model based on size restraints rather than functionality. Also, a foundation licensing model that includes both NSX (Network virtualization) and VSAN (SAN virtualization) but with size restrictions. Then my SMB customers could benefit from our large customers' features.

I’ve been using VMware’s virtualization solutions since 2001, and I haven’t found a more sturdy solution yet, and I have tried most of them out there. Due to its stability, it’s one of the cheapest, if you look at the total operating cost. You can even replace the underlying hardware without downtime.

None, and I do all my deployments from either USB or PXE.

Only one time due to a bad third-party network driver, but here VMware’s technical support showed it’s colors and the matter was resolved quickly and smoothly.

Not yet, but I haven’t gone full scale yet with VM in the 10K area.

Customer Service:

They respond to emails quickly and resolve my problems (most licensing issues in the past).

Technical Support:

As well as the network issue, when we had to restore a SQL database with the wrong parameters they sorted it out.

I’ve tried a lot of different solutions, as a consultant my specialty is incident and disasters, I've been assisting in trouble shooting and most of then had switch to VMware due to it’s reliability.

If you don’t have a complex infrastructure you can do a next, next, finish installation and it would run fine.

I always install it myself since I like to run the latest software before i go to production. If there are any hiccoughs, I like to deal with them in pre-production, rather than finding them when I upgrade later on.

My customers ROI lies between three and nine months.

When you do a budget make sure to include administration time, what level of SLA they require and based on that choose right level of features.

• OracleVM
• Citrix Xen
• Proxmox
• Hyper-V

• Make sure you have a strategy so you could utilize a hybrid cloud solution as you grow.
• Build your segments as managers and users
• Look beyond licensing cost and calculate administration and support time
• Make sure you have a good naming strategy that can scale - I had a customer that named his hosts after the seven sins in the bible, so when he needed to grow beyond seven hosts he had to invent an eighth.

I'd say vMotion, High Availability, and Distributed Resource Scheduler, which have allowed us to administer hardware resources in a better way.

With High Availability, we have had only one incident where one of the hosts failed, and the VMs were moved immediately. It took about four minutes to complete migration, thus affecting operations minimally.

Reporting, and perhaps more DRS-friendly functions.

We've used it for almost three-and-a-half years, and previously we were using older versions, such as 2.0.

No, but that is relative. Sometimes issues are raised eventually.

No, but it does become difficult to have a standardized infrastructure.

No, but I guess cost is the main obstacle.

Customer Service:

So far, good service, but it's managed by our corporate office.

Technical Support:

It's good, but it is relative. I have been able to resolve many of our issues using the web.

I used to manage an IBM solution - SAN with VMware technology.

It was complex, as the setup and management was not too friendly.

We used a vendor team and the expertise was good, but it could have been better.

All I am able to say is that our SLAs have been achieved over the last two years.

This depends on the particular scenarios. Ours is a big one, and requires full stability (Enterprise license). We manage four geographic areas (Mexico, China, Czech Republic and Brazil).

Review the SLAs with customers and provide several options describing cost/benefits to them.

High Availability, DRS, SDRS, DvSwitch, NIOC

Better management of the virtual infrastructure

Web Client, SSO

1.5 years

No

No

Yes

Brilliant hyper-visor with proven virtualization stack.

You need to learn the internals of the system to really customize and reap all benefits.

• VMware server is a free hosted virtualization server which runs on top of various operating systems such as Linux, Solaris, Windows and Netware • It separates single physical server into various virtual machines which can be deployed many times • The installation of the server no longer requires hardware configuration • It serves as a testing environment for experimental OS, patches and softwares but does not need installation or any configuration • It can automatically starts virtual machine at system boot • It can also take full control of virtual machines from remote computers • It provides a complete GUI VMX editor • It allows virtual machines to use two VSMP processors • VMware server 2.0 has Web Management Interface which is used to easily manage virtual machines

• VMware has lesser functionality than the proprietary VMware ESX • VMware server does not fully control the scheduling of hardware resources because the complete control falls into the underlying operating system • VMware Server Support ended on June 30, 2011

It is one easy to install and manage vitualization technique. Its pretty fast also, compared to some other vitualization techniques. And that is because its has a very small amout of resource overhead. It lacks the server console which decreases its booting time.

We can say its free but it's not. Free versions has limited capabilities and misses some very strong features. So in my opinion its not free. Other then that, it misses the console, which may be good from booting point of view, but from troubleshooting point of view, its bad. As it takes a lot more administrations skills to tackle problem without the proper control panes in the form of the console panel.