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VMware ESXi

Score7.9 out of 10

810 Reviews and Ratings

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What is VMware ESXi?

A bare-metal hypervisor that installs directly onto a physical server. With direct access to and control of underlying resources, VMware ESXi partitions hardware to consolidate applications and cut costs.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features VMware ESXi has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 810 ratings of VMware ESXi's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Management console

    Management console for central administration of vm environment

    Category average: 8

  • Virtual machine automated provisioning

    Automation of virtual machine provisioning through use of vm templates

    Category average: 7.8

  • Live virtual machine backup

    Ability to backup vms without interrupting service

    Category average: 8

Areas for Improvement

  • Live virtual machine migration

    Downtime minimization by migrating live vms between hosts and across clusters

    Category average: 7.9

  • Hypervisor-level security

    Hypervisor-level security including antivirus and anti-malware

    Category average: 8.4

Reviews

What users are saying about VMware ESXi.
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VMware ESXi is a great hypervisor for those who can afford it

Incentivized
Carlos Coque
System Administrator in Information Technology at IBEX Payroll Services (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have dozens of virtual servers in the office and use VMware ESXi as a hypervisor to consolidate them in a few physical servers, getting performance and reliability while using less energy and hardware parts in our operation.
VMware ESXi has different versions for various kinds of company profiles and we ended up choosing the one that best fitted our needs.

Pros

  • Virtual Machine creation and management
  • Access to network drives (NAS, SAN, etc)
  • Load balancing

Cons

  • Pricing is stratospheric
  • Support needs improvement
  • Relationship with client needs improvement

Return on Investment

  • It makes Virtual Machines fast
  • I makes Virtual Machine deployment easier
  • It makes Virtual machine management easy

Usability

Simply the best in business IT asset virtualization.

Incentivized
Brendon BrownView profile
eComerce Director in Information Technology at Island City Media (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ESXI allows us to run multiple and separate headless services on different platforms all on the same hardware, while also allowing for quick spin-up of user stations for temporary or remote access. Using VMware ESXi allows us to invest in server infrastructure instead of end-user devices, which allows us to keep maintenance and security closer to the IT department.

Pros

  • Simple deployment on metal using SD or USB.
  • Fast spin-up of guest machines.
  • Detailed information and management options for Network and Storage

Cons

  • External USB devices can have occasional issues when passing through to a VM.
  • Issues with implementing and passing through GPUs to VMs.

Return on Investment

  • IT Managment costs are lower and more responsive when localized.
  • Ease of management and new deployments are great for emergency or day-to-day support tickets.

Alternatives Considered

Hyper-V, Proxmox VE and LogMeIn Pro

VMWare ESXi is not longer the king of the mountain due to poor service and support

Incentivized
David RiberdyView profile
Enterprise Data Management Supervisor in Information Technology at Southern Farm Bureau Casualty Insurance Company (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

VMware ESXi is used for all of our Production and Test/Development environments in our organization.

Pros

  • The ability to seamlessly migrate a virtual machine from one host to another is a vital part of the virtual experience in 2023.
  • Metrics and statistics easily allow us to understand where pain points can be in the environment and to change or correct them for a better experience.

Cons

  • In my experience, service and Support is severely lacking from VMware. Over time this has gotten worse to the point where it is easier not to open a case and just guess at a solution.
  • In my opinion, pricing has gotten increasingly worse over time as well. Every year there seems to be a new way of licensing that is only in an effort to suck more money from the consumer.
  • They have been pushing more and more to the cloud but their services are not ready for primetime when they do. Horizon licenses are now pushed from the Cloud services and, in my experience, they did not work in the beginning and even now are a pain to use, so I dread going to the same for VMware ESXi.

Return on Investment

  • In my experience, some versions of VMware ESXi destroyed hosts and caused us serious downtime, and it took a while for support to admit it was the new version.
  • We have been able to migrate VMs around when there have been hardware issues with 0 downtime and no consumer impact.

VMware continues to work well

Incentivized
Chris Hein
Systems Engineer in Information Technology at CIH (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use VMware ESXi to host all of our VMs. It houses 95% of our on-prem infrastructure. We have a cluster of hosts that do this work with a SAN on the backend.

Pros

  • Reliability
  • Ease of use
  • Management
  • Support & updates

Cons

  • They are deprecating old hardware soon
  • Networking is difficult

Return on Investment

  • It has provided great reliability.

Other Software Used

Avanan

Usability

ESXi helped us out a bunch!

Incentivized
Richard PottsView profile
Network & Systems Administrator in Information Technology at College Foundation, Inc. (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use ESXi within all of our Production, Development, & Testing environments to manage and run critical workloads that the company leverages for revenue generating applications as well as day to day IT infrastructure systems. ESXi is our management center for all of these systems and allows us to modify our virtual environment as needed.

Pros

  • Ease of use
  • Extremely intuitive
  • Easy to manage

Cons

  • Upgrade procedures could be outlined a bit better
  • Documentation could be improved to show specific images of tasks
  • Network integration and interfacing could be easier to navigate

Return on Investment

  • Decreased application deployment times
  • Quicker revenue generation due to ease of use
  • Decreased reliance on multiple admins to get a task complete

Alternatives Considered

Hyper-V

Other Software Used

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud