VMware ESXi 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

6 Reviews

Engineering

VMware ESXi critical to the reliability of our ICS systems

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 24, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is used as the platform to host our ICS systems, both data center, and field. These systems are out HMI and supporting functions. We have 150+ VMware ESXi-based systems deployed, in over 40 states. The VMware ESXi hosts Windows-based OS servers, in addition to Linux-based support structure VMs. We do not utilize vCenter.

Pros

Hosting of multiple OS VMs.
Provides excellent troubleshooting tools.
It is reliable: very low down-times.

Cons

ESXi tends to require larger network bandwidth allocations than some of our other systems. This is problematic for remote field sites.

Likelihood to Recommend

VMware ESXi shines when it comes to hosting VMs of various OSs, and provides troubleshooting mechanisms that are unparalleled.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Oil & Energy company, 5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

VMware ESXi to the rescue!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

May 13, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use VMware ESXi on a number of servers in order to deploy various virtual machines that are used in our products. It is used across the entire department and in multiple locations.

Pros

Utilizes the underlying hardware effectively.
Clean and easy to setup.
Very stable.

Cons

Upgrades can sometimes be difficult

Likelihood to Recommend

I would recommend using it to a colleague. It does exactly what it should do and does it well. If you have a deployment that involves a lot of Virtual Machines, you should look at VMWare ESXi. It gives you all the functionality needed.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Higher Education company, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 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

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

The world-leading Hypervisor Software

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

November 23, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ESXi from VMware is used as a hypervisor for all our internal servers. We have Windows and Linux servers/applications deployed. We use ESXi in a cluster in combination with vCenter for better availability and for easy management.

Pros

Very powerful.
You can manage a lot of VMs.
Individual Settings for VMs.
Templates.
Network configuration.

Cons

Not easy to use.
Implementation requires a lot of know-how.
Network architecting is not that easy.

Likelihood to Recommend

The Hypervisor can be used in every environment. You can install a very fast and easy new server within a few clicks. The settings can be configured individually for every VM.

The licenses are not that cheap, that can be a minus point.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Entertainment company, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

No Money? Managing less than 5 physical nodes? Use Vmware ESXi!

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 23, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used it in conjunction with vcenter to manage our virtual machines. It is partially used by our department. The business problem it addresses is to allow us to create a test environment and maximize hardware infrastructure.

Pros

GUI is very easy to use. Learning curve is low.
This software can be deployed for many nodes through puppet.
The ability to do snapshot restores quickly is great compared with ovirt.

Cons

To utilize vmware esxi fully, you need to couple it with paid software (vcenter).
Not easy to automate the deployment this software on many nodes unless you purchase vcenter or puppet.
No ability for DRS unless you buy vcenter.

Likelihood to Recommend

It becomes a beast to manage if you have more than 10 nodes.

Ethan Tran

Senior Systems Engineer in Engineering at Exeter Government Services, LLC (Information Technology and Services, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

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