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 allows us to run multiple virtual servers on one physical piece of hardware. We have a virtual server for the phone, one for the e-commerce site, one for the inventory application, one as a firewall/router, and one for general file storage. It allows to easily bring up a server to test a new piece of software.
Pros
Save money.
Centralized computing.
Allows easy evaluation of new software.
Cons
Hardware monitoring.
Likelihood to Recommend
Appropriate: Small business environment (when multiple virtual servers are needed. Less appropriate: 24/7 environment (unless you spend lots of money on high availability servers.
VU
Verified User
General Manager in Corporate (Consumer Goods company, 1-10 employees)
A couple years before I came to the company, the decision was made to convert all the physical servers into virtual machines using ESXi. The process itself is easy as VMware or third parties provide you with the tools to do so. All the changes we've made since I've been here wouldn't have been nearly as easy if we were working physical servers rather than using a virtual environment. Spinning up a new virtual machine or cloning an existing to test changes before going to production makes things easy.
Pros
Monitoring and reporting of virtual machines in environment.
In-depth configuration and management of hypervisor and virtual machines.
Uptime 900+ days.
Cons
Some of the events could be more informative.
Likelihood to Recommend
I'm a bit biased here. Having little experience with HyperV or others, I'd say ESXi is my go-to with virtualization.
VU
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (Mechanical Or Industrial Engineering company, 51-200 employees)
VMware ESXi is currently used by most of my organization, and I manage two separate sites that have it implemented. It provides a stable and reliable base for our virtual infrastructure. It has been easy to maintain and control, and expansion has also been quite straightforward when we've had the requirement.
Pros
Allows control of VM's on the host, which is helpful if vSphere is unavailable.
As you would expect, it integrates perfectly with vSphere.
Cons
A better interface to monitor the logs in VMware Esxi would be helpful.
Likelihood to Recommend
I would say VMware ESXi suited to most environments, really, depending on the available budget. It has proven very reliable in my experience, which is very valuable to us, as we are a 24/7 company.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (Aviation & Aerospace company, 501-1000 employees)
VMware ESXi is used to host most servers at my site. It is the company standard for virtualization across my company, at least in North America. It allows us to save costs on hardware and licensing for hosting servers and workstations. We can test development, upgrades, and changes on copies of servers before having to do it on a production/live server. Since we can copy an actual server, we know exactly how it will respond to changes. This helps us save on trouble-shooting, save on server recovery, and so many other things.
Pros
VMware is not buggy. In IT we have to work around so many things for products to work the way we expect, or the way we want. I have not had to work around things with ESXi. It works as advertised.
Sever uptime. Even with hardware failures, and system bugs, VMware keeps our systems up. ESXi has been reliable. I never even think about the OS failing or having issues. That is one less thing to worry about.
Server deployment. We can deploy a new server in minutes. Some servers come preconfigured with OVF files where we just tell VMWare to set up a new server and point to the config file and tada there is a new server. We can create templates, where the OS and updates are already installed and we just create a new server from the template in minutes. I actually prefer creating one from scratch, and it only takes a few minutes to choose the hardware and start the OS installation. The longest part is installing the OS. It takes forever at my company to approve spending any money. With VMWare, I can set up new servers without any cost so there is no delay. When I want a server, I set it up. I don't have to wait over a month to design, get approval to order, wait for delivery, then set up the hardware, etc. It is fantastic, and such a time saver.
VMWare's Compatibility Guide on-line is excellent. It is very detailed and easy to discover if there will be any hardware issues. When adding or replacing hosts, this is a must-visit site. It has answered every question I've had without having to call support or talk to anyone to analyze if this hardware will match that one. It is a user-friendly site that gives you all the information you need. It has given me a starting point for buying new servers when my company changed its standard on server hardware. I would not have known where to start in configuring a new host, but this site told me what was compatible with what I had and it became an easy task.
Cons
The new interface for accessing the hosts directly doesn't work well with all browsers. We have restrictions at my company. We use Edge or IE. I had a lot of trouble uploading a file to the datastore because Edge and IE wouldn't play nice. The problem is probably mostly on MS's side, but it would be nice if it could work better with all browsers.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think VMware ESXi would be well suited for any company that has more than a few servers. If you have two servers, you might as well virtualize them and make your hardware hosts in a VMware environment. It will keep your servers up and running if you have any hardware failures. If you backup your servers, you can quickly and easily restore them after any software crashes. You can test all updates and changes before actually deploying them. I have had to do major reconfiguration of servers, and was unsure of how the server software would respond. You can easily make a copy of a server, launch it and do all the testing you need. If something doesn't work, start over again until you find the solution. It does cost to have the licenses, but you can calculate the cost of downtime if you didn't have it to see if it is worth it for you. If you have a very small environment, it may not be cost-effective, but it will surely improve the time you spend in IT. It would be good to have an idea about how the environment works, but once you learn, support can help with any other issues you have.
At present we are utilizing VMware ESXi across the entire organization. We are utilizing this for our entire Production & Development Windows environment, as well as some Linux implementation. There are also various VM appliances in place via VMware ESXi service various functions within the organization. ESXi allows us a dynamic & "easy" way to manage our infrastructure environment.
Pros
Implementation of ESXi is extremely straightforward given the correct experience
The HA capabilities of ESXi are extremely hard to beat when compared to other Hypervisor options
Cons
As much as the upgrade path for newer versions of ESXi has improved, there is still room for improvement in the process
A better/easier way of handling some network features would be ideal
Likelihood to Recommend
In any scenario, I've yet to find many reasons where ESXi is not best suited for what is being thrown at it. From small organizations with 2-5 virtual machines to the larger organizations of 1000+ virtual machines it scales extremely well and the features, options, etc. remain the same given correct licensing. The options for HA, again given proper licensing, work extremely well once implemented and have saved myself and others I work with many hours of additional work automatically migrating VMs once a host has failed.
Given the options with the licensing, there are times where something else may have to be reviewed to see if it makes more sense unfortunately to say. The licensing is the only place where ESXi does not scale very well
We use VMware ESXi across our global organization. It's managed by our System Administrators and leveraged by our DevOps teams to help automate business processes. It gives us flexibility and stability for testing. We have multi-ESXi host clusters for high availability. VMware ESXi has allowed us to virtualize most of our physical server infrastructure which has allowed us to work remotely from our data centers. It removes the need to lifecycle 100's of physical servers in favor of a simple lifecycle of a few VMware ESXi hosts.
Pros
High availability. Clustered VMware ESXi hosts make it easy to take a host out of production.
Storage DRS helps balance virtual disks across the cluster.
Cons
The Flash and HTML5 web interfaces are missing simple sorting features for some lists.
Errors messages can be vague at times, which requires searching the community for answers.
Likelihood to Recommend
VMware ESXi is well suited where you don't have the physical space needed for the number servers you require. If you have applications that require little to no downtime, VMware ESXi can help provide that when clustered with other hosts. VMware ESXi will allow you to snapshot servers prior to major upgrades and changes. This provides a relatively safe fallback option if the upgrade doesn't go well. You can also leverage this to quickly go back to a clean state when testing new software or code.
My company uses ESXi as the go-to host hypervisor platform of choice when deploying virtual hosts at all of the plants and offices in our network. We use at least one ESXi host at every plant/office and at some sites, we have several.
ESXi's purpose is to act as a host platform for creating, running and managing virtual machines of various types, i.e. servers, user endpoints, appliances, web servers, SQL servers, etc. It's similar to Hyper-V (the Microsoft-branded competition for ESXi) but in my opinion, it has more and better features, overall, although the learning curve for ESXi is both steeper and longer for system admins than most other hypervisors.
Why do we use it? ESXi enables us to host many virtual servers and other endpoints on one physical host machine. This saves on electricity, space, heating, and cooling and improves ease of management of the hosted devices for everything from rebooting them to backing them up to restoring them.
Short answer? For small, medium or large enterprises, ESXi is (still) the best choice for hosting virtual machines. It really doesn't have much legitimate, serious competition in the world of hypervisors.
Pros
ESXi makes management of hosted machines easy. Everything is in one place. If you have a vCenter (which costs extra) to manage all your ESXi hosts, then everything is truly in one place and there is no need to hop around from management tool to management tool. Al the virtual machines' hardware settings, OS information, storage volume information, backup information, even a remote console just like a KVM ... all of it is in one place.
ESXi balances workloads well when using vCenter. Behind the scenes, the vCenter allows an ESXi host to "talk to" other ESXi hosts and when one VM has resources usage that gets past a certain threshold, it can move virtual machines around to balance workloads, even while the machines are running and service users. It's completely invisible to the users, who don't experience latency or any kind of interruptions when their VM is being moved.
Cons
The vSphere / vCenter GUI is complex. This is because there is just a crap-top of stuff that ESXi manages, so there is frankly a crap-top of necessary stuff that you have been able to manage in the user interfaces. The learning curve is a little steep. Just because it does a lot of things.
Live (powered on) ESXi snapshots of VMs still don't act as SQL backups very well. Snapshots can't backup SQL reliably because of the architecture of SQL and how it interacts with the live resources running on the VM. This is one of the many reasons why taking a snapshot works better when the VM is powered off. This is also why we don't rely only on snapshots to backup our VMs. We also use Veeam and for critical SQL databases we use native SQL backups and in one case, another backup solution (Veritas) that can do SQL better.
Likelihood to Recommend
ESXi is the right host OS if you want all the features a host OS would normally need to provide AND if you ware willing to pay for the license. It's not cheap. You will also want to pay for VMWare support unless you have an on-staff VMWare admin who really knows their way around ESXi and vSphere / vCenter functions.
If you want a free hypervisor? Then you need to try Hyper-V first to see if it can do everything you think it should be able to do. Hyper-V comes with Windows (both the server and PC flavors) as a role. It can do some basic functions of a host. But it doesn't have all the full capabilities and management features that ESXi hosts do when managed with vSphere / vCenter.
VU
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (Aviation & Aerospace company, 501-1000 employees)
I have been administering VMware ESXi since version 2.0. It has evolved over the years to be a very robust hypervisor that in my opinion is the best on the market. Our company is running VMware both in production and in the test. We have 150-200 virtual machines. ESXi helps our IT department to easily spin up servers and meet the demands of the company as well as its executives. Without VMware, we would not be as efficient and quite honestly may even fail on the delivery of projects.
Pros
Boot Times are quick.
Adjusting compute resources is easy.
Cons
Hot Add of compute (RAM and CPU).
Easier setup of distributed switches.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think ESXi is an invaluable tool no matter the industry that a company is in. It is a great tool to allow for the easy creation of servers for development purposes. It also has the ability to use snapshots when changes are being made to a server in the event of failure or misstep. The one drawback to ESXi is that it is expensive and may not be suited to smaller sized companies. While it offers a free version, that version cannot be centrally managed.
VMware ESXi is being used as the primary platform to host our applications servers. We are currently using 3 hosts in a cluster with roughly 25 Microsoft/Linux VMs. VMware allows us to reduce physical hardware and electrical costs, as well as giving us ease of access to our environment.
Pros
Ease of Access to your virtual environment
Easy to learn and logical interface
The support staff are always helpful
Cons
I've not run across anything I've not been able to do yet.
Likelihood to Recommend
ESXi is incredibly useful for a range of situations. Outside of business I use it at home for my test lab, this has allowed me to do and learn more without the hassle of doing everything on a physical machine.
Our organization uses VMware ESXi to host all of our virtual guests. We selected the essentials package and it works very nicely for our requirements. When we switched to it, we became 100% virtualized in our environment. Moving completely to ESXi has allowed us to save on energy, and improve our monitoring overall of utilization. We can also handle backups and data protection much easier.
Pros
Stable Platform
Simple to Operate
Advanced Capabilities (Backup, Redundancy, Etc.)
Cons
Licensing could always be less expensive.
More capabilities within GUI management. Much requires CLI to perform.
Notification of security updates. You don't always know you need them.
Likelihood to Recommend
It's a challenging debate with several hypervisors available today. Microsoft has advantages as Hyper-V is part of their operating system. However, VMware started the whole movement and they seem to do it very well. I personally find it the simplest to setup and configure. The reality is at the end of the day you need to understand the tools you work with. It's the type of solution you can't go wrong with when choosing VMware. Everyone else is emulating what they are doing.
