VMware vSphere Overview

VMware vSphere is the #1 ranked solution in our list of best Server Virtualization Software. It is most often compared to KVM: VMware vSphere vs KVM

What is VMware vSphere?

VMware vSphere is the leading server virtualization platform with consistent management for virtual data centers.

Deliver business value from day one with powerful server virtualization, breakthrough availability, safe automated management and intelligent operational insight that adapts to your environment. Automate workload placement and resource optimization based on preset customizable templates.

VMware vSphere Buyer's Guide

Download the VMware vSphere Buyer's Guide including reviews and more. Updated: February 2021

VMware vSphere Customers

Abu Dhabi Ports Company, ACS, AIA New Zealand, Consona, Corporate Express, CS Energy, and Digiweb.

VMware vSphere Video

Pricing Advice

What users are saying about VMware vSphere pricing:

"VMware does provide organizations with discounts. The customer service license fee we got discounts on from the supplier in order for us to get the best out of the license fees. That's our experience. We possibly paid less than our partner company. The partner is only local and not global like our firm."
"I think it's a fair price. We are using it on the production side, and everything is good from our experience. That's why I would say that the cost isn't too high. However, it would always be nice if it was cheaper."
"Container support is the last great addition for VMware and it is worth the money you spend on it."
"The licensing cost is strictly based on the number of CPUs that your hosts have."

VMware vSphere Reviews

Bunmi-Sadiq

IT Supervisor at WACT

Apr 10, 2019

Download

Makes Resources Available & Services More Reliable

What is our primary use case?

The company I work for is a global company and has many data inflection issues. Quality control decisions are not actually made at the local level. It is made at the headquarter level in Europe. We have our cloud site solution, our production environment, and our data recovery environment. We use VMware solutions integrated with HP solutions for hardware replication and storage-to-replication facilities. We use vSphere with ESXi 6.0, primarily for VM migration. We have an HP storage replication system in place for our first storage requirements with the VMs. Every other one is managed by… more »

Pros and Cons

"The features in VMware vSphere data recovery are excellent. Sometimes I've deleted an entire server before and was able to recover the deleted VM. I just used some command line tools and I was able to restore the deleted VM."

"We want to see improvement from VMware with security. We want minimal downtime. We want automation. We want to deploy more efficiently."

What other advice do I have?

The advice I would give is that there should be proper planning for implementing VMware solutions. With us, the content management suppliers and the various vendors provided this. If VMware vSphere is the particular product you are choosing, consider where the sellers were located and if they have a knowledge of the product. * Do the suppliers have the right models for your business? * Do the suppliers have different VMware licenses available? * Will you be able to enjoy the VMware license discount with the manufacturer? * Does the integrator company have good partners in the supply chain? If…

See Entire VMware vSphere Review (1959 Words) »

reviewer1441107

Owner at a transportation company with 1-10 employees

Nov 11, 2020

Download

An easy way of providing near-zero downtime services

What is our primary use case?

Firstly, we use it to provide an infrastructure for a development environment. Secondly, we use it to provide services to end-users. A kind of clustered services, where underneath, there are plenty of virtual machines. Thirdly, these solutions were chosen because of the easy way of providing backups and zero downtime between accidents and issues.

Pros and Cons

"An easy way of providing near-zero downtime services, the operation of the instances between clustered services, and providing the projected SLA for our customers."

"Monitoring information could always be improved."

What other advice do I have?

I think the decision needs to be made by the architects of the solution. They need to be aware of the cost of such solutions, their requirements, and the constraints of such technologies. From a technological point, it's always a good solution. However, it might not be the best solution in terms of the total cost of ownership, and maybe there are better solutions like Proxmox. I would give VMware vSphere a solid eight out of ten.

See Entire VMware vSphere Review (1273 Words) »

Free Report: VMware vSphere Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about VMware vSphere. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: February 2021.

Download now

464,655 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Johan Odendaal

Server Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Nov 27, 2020

Download

Good high availability, easy to scale, and pretty stable overall

What is our primary use case?

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

Pros and Cons

"The solution has high availability."

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

What other advice do I have?

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.

See Entire VMware vSphere Review (1188 Words) »

Tony Reeves

Network Administrator

Video Review

Mar 4, 2019

Download

Allows us to run our critical business workloads at speed and keep them highly available

What is our primary use case?

My primary use case for the product is testing Home Lab. I was involved in the early vSphere 6.7 beta. I wanted to see what the new features were, how it worked. I'm using it currently in my Home Lab for testing lots of the different products as a vSphere-base for vSAN, NSX, running the latest vCenter, etc. Some of the critical workloads that I'm running in my vSphere environment are Exchange, SQL, various different application servers, and those have to be up and available at all times, and vSphere does that for us. It gives us High Availability, failover, vMotion capability for load… more »

Pros and Cons

"The most valuable features for me are a very easily scalable infrastructure. I can have a couple of hosts to do basic workloads. I can have a lot of hosts to do a lot of workloads. vSAN integrates my storage so I don't need an external storage SAN. I love having everything integrated in the same UI. The new HTML5 interface doesn't require any plugins anymore and it's super-fast."

"An improvement could be allowing a "dark mode" for the interface. I think the HTML5 client is a little bit hard to read. It's all white. It's a little bit bright on the eyes. A lot of us IT guys view in the dark."

What other advice do I have?

We do not currently use VMware Cloud on AWS. If I had to rate vSphere from one to ten - version 6.7 - I would say right now it's probably about a ten.

See Entire VMware vSphere Review (877 Words) »

Ganesh Sekarbabu

Windows Virtualization Engineer at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees

Video Review

Mar 4, 2019

Download

The content library option will help us meet our requirements going forward

What is our primary use case?

We have three different types of environments: internal cloud, managed hosting, and VDA. We use VMware vSphere as the main product to accomplish this. VMware is now the main backbone in our company. We are not using VMware cloud on AWS. We are in PoC mode. We may use it in another six months to a year.

Pros and Cons

"Since we have an internal cloud, suddenly people may require 1000 or 2000 VMS in something. We have options to analyze and make sure we have enough scalability."

"We previously had a hard time using tech support."

What other advice do I have?

I would rate vSphere as a nine out of 10. I will recommend the solution, but there are some steps to take first. There are some VMware videos to view and some KB articles to read, which are available, regarding compatibility. I would recommend them to go through everything. Go through the KB articles, then I will recommend them to implement that one. An important criteria for choosing a vendor is evaluating how a company behaves. We will review their past history, the current market, and the value of that product. Then, we will see whether that product can used for our requirement. Based on…

See Entire VMware vSphere Review (875 Words) »

reviewer1447761

Assitant Director - IT at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

Nov 10, 2020

Download

Makes it easy to create virtual machines and very stable but could be more user-friendly

What is our primary use case?

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… more »

Pros and Cons

"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."

"The solution could be a bit more user-friendly."

What other advice do I have?

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.

See Entire VMware vSphere Review (865 Words) »

AllanTrambouze

Consultant senior en technologie de l'information at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Nov 23, 2020

Download

Integrates well with containers, easy to scale, and certificate management has improved

What is our primary use case?

I use vSphere 7.0.1 for a few reasons. My primary use case is for my lab, as vSphere offers a great versatility to use VDI, containers, distributed Storage, and SDN on the same hardware. I also use vSphere for non-production tasks on Rasberry Pie 4, and it offers a great deal for working with Docker on cheap hardware with a single management interface, vSphere. My lab is composed of three white-box servers with vSAN, a 10 gig network, a local SAN, and all storage with SSD to deliver fast VM. I also have vRealize operating to monitor all the VMware components.

Pros and Cons

"VMware Tanzu (container) is the most valuable addition because you get an efficient solution to manage the VM and container in a single pane of glass."

"The HR proxy is actually a little bit tricky to install and setup."

See Entire VMware vSphere Review (834 Words) »

reviewer1081776

Systems Engineer/Systems Administrator at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jan 27, 2021

Download

The most feature rich and reliable hypervisor on the market today

What is our primary use case?

I use vSphere for general server virtualization. I am not doing anything spectacular with it.

Pros and Cons

"Their command-line tools integrate well with other Microsoft products like PowerShell, so I can manipulate VMs using it."

"The web user interface can be a bit clunky from time to time, so there may be some room for improvement in that regard."

What other advice do I have?

VMware vSphere is my preferred hypervisor. It always has been, and always will be. I suggest using it, and not hesitating. I'm sure that they're working on great stuff to enhance this product that I can't even think of, but from my perspective, everything that they do today is great. I don't know what they could possibly do to make my life easier, but I'm sure they'll come up with something. I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

See Entire VMware vSphere Review (809 Words) »

See 42 more VMware vSphere Reviews

Read archived reviews (2+ years old)

Product Categories

Server Virtualization Software