VMware ESXi Information Reviews & Insights

Score7.8 out of 10

810 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for VMware ESXi are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Powerful Tool for Managing VMs: Users consistently praise VMware ESXi as a powerful tool for managing a large number of virtual machines, with easy management of individual VM settings and configurations. Several reviewers have highlighted this aspect, emphasizing how it simplifies their virtualization workflows and enhances overall efficiency.

Cost Reduction Benefits: Many users appreciate the cost reduction benefits offered by VMware ESXi. It minimizes the need for physical servers and reduces storage footprint, resulting in electricity savings. This advantage has been mentioned by a significant number of reviewers, highlighting the financial value that VMware ESXi brings to their organizations.

Support for Various Operating Systems: The support for various operating systems, including Windows and Unix, is considered a significant advantage by users. This feature enables them to host a wide range of applications on VMware ESXi. Multiple reviewers have specifically mentioned this pro, appreciating the flexibility it provides in terms of application deployment and compatibility.

VMware ESXi Reviews

16 Reviews

InformationComputer Software4Computer Networking4Internet1Telecommunications5Information Services1Media Production1

Great tool for productivity.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

June 18, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We were facing multiple issues related to security and privacy due to work from home environment, and VMware helped in this regard with its top-of-the-line flagship product ESXi. Our employees love the way virtual machine work with an added layer of security, along with the great performance provided by Vmware.

Pros

Great secure environment for our employees.
Virtual machines get ready in no time, making it a quick task.
The performance of virtual machines is great which increases productivity.

Cons

The integration with the Windows server can be made smoother.
Cost can be reduced as compared to competitors.
It should be made more user-friendly for Vmware administrators.

Likelihood to Recommend

It has been a great tool that helps us maintain a secure environment to keep our valuable client information from getting into the wrong hands. It has also gained clients' trust, which also had a positive ROI on our investment. Clients believe in VMware, and we try to deliver what our clients demand.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (Computer Software company, 5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

VMware ESXI

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 7, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

VMware Esxi is very good product. Which helps people to virtualize the environment or data center. I am using Exsi for last 5 years. VMware vsphere is giving graphical view to to control the servers. EXSI helps to vertiualize the network, storage, CPU and Memory. We can virualize whole data center and vm spinup time is very less.

Pros

Network virtualize
Storage Virtualize
CPU virtualize
Memory virualize

Cons

Data Storage handling
Network handling
Available with respect to internet
We can not access Vsphere anytime anywhere

Likelihood to Recommend

VMware ESxi is a very stable and reliable OS. We have had longer uptime on the server by using this OS. Adding more CPUs without adding sockets is as easy it used to be. Too many servers have been created by techs that's are not correct leads some serious issue

Satchidananda Rout

Senior Software Engineer in Information Technology at Orange Business Services (Telecommunications, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

View profile

VMware ESXi is a Great, Solid Choice for Virtualization!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 5, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use VMware ESXi at many sites to virtualize the servers they need and reduce the number of servers needed. This also helps when multiple software packages used would contend with each other if on the same server. We have a few different deployment styles and all of them help provide more flexibility for users and better uptime and maintenance for IT staff. This has really helped the workflow for our sites and increased productivity as we roll up new applications in addition to the ever-demanding need to update applications without taking down another application as we reboot VM servers.

Pros

VMware ESXi is a very stable and reliable OS. We have had longer uptime on the server by using this OS.
Using VMware ESXi allows for Windows servers to reboot faster as they don't need to go through BIOS. The VMware ESXi OS itself boots quickly too when we do need to reboot the host.
By using VMware ESXi, our organization has gained flexibility we have not had with smaller sites that only had a few servers. This allows us to split applications to their own servers and keep them running while maintaining different applications and not taking down everything at once.

Cons

Easier patching of single hosts has become a problem. We are finding it more difficult to schedule maintenance as there are more and more patches needing to be applied, and vCenter cannot update itself. For larger multi-host deployments this is not an issue.
Some newer updates include more features in the GUI, but at the same time make things feel buried. It is not as intuitive as it was, but with time it is not terrible to adjust.
Adding more CPUs without adding sockets is not as easy as it used to be. Too many servers have been created by techs that are not correct and lead to slow servers.

Likelihood to Recommend

VMware ESXi is a very stable product that gives a lot of flexibility. The uptime provided by VMware ESXi is much higher, but when you do have a patch a single standalone host is difficult. As with anything now there are more and more patches to be done, so maintaining and staying up to date takes longer. Overall, using VMware ESXi there are so many advantages and features we can't look back to not having it in our organization. It has allowed for more applications to be deployed faster and easier than ever before.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (Computer Networking company, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

15 years of experience

ESXi is the go to for virtualization

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 31, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

VMware ESXi is used as our primary means of deploying virtual machines for any business purpose with approximately 200 virtual machines across our own infrastructure and customer infrastructure. We find it to be very user friendly with good reliable performance. ESXi has earned our trust for on-prem server deployments.

Pros

Reliability - very well suited for production environments
Easy to setup, use, and maintain
ESXi supports a vast majority of operating systems
Flexible - it can be configured to suit particular needs

Cons

It can get expensive

Likelihood to Recommend

VMware ESXi is well suited for both production or lab environments and it is a common virtualization solution so gaining familiarity with it will be beneficial to anyone using it. I think it is an appropriate recommendation for a vast majority of use cases for hypervisor solutions with very few exceptions that I would consider to be very specific or special/unique cases. For general virtualization VMware ESXi is the way to go.

James Jakimowicz

Senior Network Engineer in Information Technology at Synergy Fiber (Computer Networking, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

VMware ESXi still the best

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 24, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We virtualized all servers except for our DB servers. Virtualizing 25 servers saves us on hardware, heating, cooling costs. And allows us to have them be redundant without the extra expense of doubling the hardware and the complexity with that. Virtualizing allows us to add more capacity quickly without increasing our footprint.

Pros

Consolidation
Redundancy
Stability

Cons

Improve simplicity.
Improve documentation.
Improve updates.

Likelihood to Recommend

Pretty much any scenario except maybe with heavy DB requirements. But VMware ESXi fits almost all scenarios and highly recommend using it everywhere possible for all sizes of environments. It is a small footprint and manages any size of the environment. I have used it for 5 servers up to hundreds of VM's.

Terry Schultz

IT Consultant in Information Technology at Makiska Media (Internet, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

12 years of experience

VMware ESXi to the rescue!

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

March 22, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use VMware ESXi as our primary hypervisor platform for two separate environments with a combined total of approx 300 virtual machines split over two datacentres. For our main production environment, we have an HA cluster spread over both DC's with replicated storage supported the VMs. This works perfectly for us as we have the ability for full failover if needed and VMware takes a lot of the issues away by handling all the failover of virtual machines to other hosts etc.

Pros

HA Failover
SAN Management
Cluster Resource Management

Cons

iSCSI Storage connectivity
Update Management
Host Management

Likelihood to Recommend

Using vCenter, the management of multiple hosts is very straightforward. We have an environment with about 30 ESXi hosts so management of these without vCenter would be extremely difficult. However, due to having a web interface for all hosts and vCenter etc, securing everything with web certificates can be frustrating. Using plugins in vCenter, management of third party equipment such as SAN arrays does make life a lot easier being able to manage everything from the one place - single pane of glass etc.
Backups are also made easy and straightforward using systems such as Veeam which plugs in directly to vCenter.

Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology (Telecommunications company, 5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

VMware delivers critical business features

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

May 3, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

VMware [ESXi] is being used to host critical customer facing applications. It is being used by multiple departments across the enterprise. It is the hypervisor of choice for many business units and provides extensive redundancy and high availability features. ESXi has many 3rd party integrations which allow us to leverage our existing tool sets for monitoring and automation workflows.

Pros

High availability
Resource pooling
Alerting
Live resource monitoring

Cons

HTML5 client can be buggy at times
Better documentation for hidden features
Support team response time is slow

Likelihood to Recommend

[VMware ESXi is] well suited to host business critical applications that require 5 9’s uptime. Not so well suited for a business that does not have a large buying power as it’s expensive. Lots of documentation and scripts widely available on the internet. Powershell and python native tools available make this a developers dream.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Computer Networking company, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

We recommend VMware ESXi

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 18, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

VMware ESXi is being used by our organization to host virtual machines, specifically Windows servers. It is just used in our department, however, IT does serve the entire organization. It does exactly what it was designed to do: spread underused physical IT resources across a virtual environment resulting in significant savings.

Pros

Allows a single set of hardware to service many virtual servers.
Great management interface.

Cons

I haven't used it in a while, but the web client is not that great.
I don't really have any complaints, the product just works.

Likelihood to Recommend

VMware ESXi is well suited for pretty much any IT environment that plans on having multiple servers. I suppose if you are small, have zero IT people, and have zero desire to learn the product, it would be best to skip it.

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (Information Services company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

VMware ESXi for everyone!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 12, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We leverage VMware ESXi as our main hypervisor, spread across multiple hosts. It is used to support a large amount of VM's that we use for day to day business operations, as well as a separate network for our lab. It is utilized by our entire organization because each department is tied to at least a handful of VM's. Our Engineering team manages the environment, and it solves a lot of problems for us. We consistently perform P2V conversions of other equipment and then place it on our virtual infrastructure for easier management and backups. We continue to use it because of the outstanding reliability that we see within the environment, and the ease of patch management that is becoming more and more necessary as technology becomes more readily available.

Pros

It has more virtual operating system support in real life applications, not just in paper.
Migration from previous versions is a breeze. With vCenter, it can even be automated.

Cons

During the upgrade procedures, problem VIB's are sometimes a pain to find - This was remedied with the release of full HTML though, so this particular problem is only applicable to management via flash.
Automatic cleaning of Zombie VDK files would be an incredibly nice feature to have.

Likelihood to Recommend

ESXi is well suited for every business model out there, that requires flexible management options of multiple servers. It is reliable, saves resources, time and money by allowing you to have one powerful box wearing many hats, instead of multiple cheaper boxes wearing individual hats. This is perfect for allocating resources appropriately as business needs are constantly changing and scaling and usually unpredictable rates. Conversely, ESXi is not suitable for environments that need to maintain computers without a domain, or need for server infrastructure. This is almost non-existent in the current climate, however.

Verified User

Consultant in Information Technology (Telecommunications company, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Industry leading hypervisor - for good reason!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 8, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using VMWare ESXi as our primary virtualization platform across our server rooms. We are using it on our hyperconverged nodes to allow scalable compute across all our machines. We use it to provision virtual machines for all business tasks and have it running 24x7 throughout our on-premise cloud. It is used daily [frankly always] and allows us to scale our infrastructure virtually instead of physically, saving hardware costs.

Pros

Virtualization is powerful and feature rich
Highly scalable from one node to thousands

Cons

Challenging to learn initially
High cost of implementation

Likelihood to Recommend

Recommending a Type 1 hypervisor for virtualization, you really don't have that many options. If I were forced to recommend one, VMWare ESXi would have to be my primary choice for its rich feature set, wide variety of support and compatibility, and overall industry acceptance. You will be hard pressed to find a software as prevalent as VMWare ESXi in most on-premise servers, and has not only industry but also hobbyist support. VMWare documentation may be a bit lacking in certain areas but community support more than makes up for that.

Verified User

C-Level Executive in Engineering (Computer Software company, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

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VMware ESXi is a Great, Solid Choice for Virtualization!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 5, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

VMware ESXi is a very stable and reliable OS. We have had longer uptime on the server by using this OS.
Using VMware ESXi allows for Windows servers to reboot faster as they don't need to go through BIOS. The VMware ESXi OS itself boots quickly too when we do need to reboot the host.
By using VMware ESXi, our organization has gained flexibility we have not had with smaller sites that only had a few servers. This allows us to split applications to their own servers and keep them running while maintaining different applications and not taking down everything at once.

Cons

Easier patching of single hosts has become a problem. We are finding it more difficult to schedule maintenance as there are more and more patches needing to be applied, and vCenter cannot update itself. For larger multi-host deployments this is not an issue.
Some newer updates include more features in the GUI, but at the same time make things feel buried. It is not as intuitive as it was, but with time it is not terrible to adjust.
Adding more CPUs without adding sockets is not as easy as it used to be. Too many servers have been created by techs that are not correct and lead to slow servers.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (Computer Networking company, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

15 years of experience