TrustRadius Insights for VMware vSphere are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
vSphere is a versatile product that has found widespread use across various industries and organizations. Users rely on vSphere to manage virtual servers and physical servers, eliminating the need for downtime. The ability to perform maintenance on virtual servers on the fly without taking them down has been highly appreciated by users. vSphere also allows for easy provisioning of resources to business-critical applications, ensuring smooth operations. The vMotion feature enables users to move workloads between physical hosts and storage seamlessly, offering flexibility in resource allocation. Additionally, users can easily add more disk space to virtual servers without disrupting their functionality. vSphere has been adopted by banks, governments, telcos, pharmaceuticals, and manufacturing companies in Bangladesh for various applications such as in-house applications, HRMS, card management systems, internet banking services, network monitoring systems, authentication systems, mail servers, and financial applications. This product helps lower the total physical server count and maximize computing resources while delivering a top-tier user experience in a cost-effective manner. Its features like compute resource utilization and easy resource provisioning contribute to its value in managing virtualized environments efficiently.
One of the key benefits of vSphere is its ability to enable cloud behaviors like data center migrations, high availability, resource management, and monitoring. Organizations have successfully utilized vSphere for server consolidation, reducing hardware expenses and increasing overall productivity. The automatic failover feature has proven to be valuable by reducing downtime through seamless switching over to another server in case of a complete loss. Moreover, vSphere's capabilities extend beyond server management - it is also used for deploying systems quickly via pre-developed templates and recreating customer issues with test infrastructures. By leveraging vSphere's functionalities, organizations have reported significant cost savings on server hardware and data center space. In industries such as education, manufacturing, and information services, businesses have relied on vSphere to address the common challenge of maximizing computing resources while ensuring scalability and reliability. The product's ability to keep virtual machines organized and manageable in one window has been commended by users, providing easy connectivity and streamlined management. Overall, vSphere serves as a reliable and efficient virtualization technology that enables IT departments to provide robust services, consolidate servers, and optimize resource utilization for various applications and workloads.
vSphere is our main hypervisor being used at our organization. We run a variety of technologies and workloads on vSphere-backed VMs; including large Oracle databases, Active Directory, SharePoint, SAP, HRMS, and few other mission critical systems. vSphere has saved our organization spending money on bare-metal hardware.
Pros
Easy VM management.
Vmotion.
Editing resources.
Cons
License are expensive, we are considering AHV now.
Datastore management is not friendly.
Upgrading is not easy.
Likelihood to Recommend
With the HCI becoming more popular, you have to look at your priorities. If basic needs are fulfilled, then you're good to go with AHV. There are whitepapers now that AHV supports SAP and S4/Hana. When we purchase them back then, there werent any whitepapers, hence why we deployed VMware on top of our Super Micro Nutanix box.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (Chemicals company, 501-1000 employees)
We use VMware to manage servers in a virtual environment. It is used by the IT department and has helped reduce the amount of hardware needed in the server room. As of now, we only use it at the headquarters but looking to virtualize environments at other locations in the future.
Pros
Monitors all servers in a virtualized environment and makes it easy to see what's going on when there are issues.
It provides a web client that's easily accessible. This makes accessing the network easier when you are outside of it.
It allows you to set up multiple virtual networks with multiple different parameters.
Cons
They could offer up more helpful links and training.
Overall, it does pretty well for its capabilities.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you have multiple servers this would be a good fit. You can get rid of all the old hardware and start putting them in a virtualized environment. If you only have a couple, this may not be worth it. You would need to weigh out your options. It works well for us.
VU
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (Plastics company, 201-500 employees)
VSphere is obviously the tool we use to manage all of our virtual machines in our VMWare environment.
It really gives us a full dashboard of the health of our entire infrastructure.
Pros
Manages the health of our servers.
Gives us the interface to make all necessary changes to our servers.
The console view makes it so easy to quickly see what’s going on with the server.
Cons
Now that we have upgraded to the latest version, things work great!
Our organization originally purchased vSphere to begin consolidating servers. We're a smaller organization with around a dozen virtual servers. Our IT department is small, being able to manage all of our servers from a single interface has been more powerful than we could have imagined. Also, our backup and disaster recovery strategy has been greatly simplified. Servers can be moved on the fly, upgrading the underlying server hardware is also a breeze, as all the virtualized servers are built on a standardized virtualized hardware.
Pros
Snapshots - Upgrading an underlying OS and software is so much easier now with snapshots, if something goes wrong, rolling back to a snapshot is a breeze, and will put you back to a point before the process started.
Remote management is much easier, everything can be found under one interface, reducing the need to use third party tools.
Highly available - workloads can be seamlessly moved without an interruption of service. Server hardware can be upgraded and replaced with little to no downtime.
Templates - Provisioning a new server can be done in minutes with a few clicks.
Cons
Web interface - There is no longer an installable desktop client for management. While the web interface works fine, there is definitely room for improvement, when the interface is entirely moved away from flash and over to HTML5 that will be a huge step forward.
Pricing - The pricing makes it harder to justify for a small business when Microsoft is giving away virtualization.
Likelihood to Recommend
You really can't go wrong with choosing vShere, as long as it fits in your budget I see no reason to choose a competitor. If uptime and ease of management are important to you (hint: it definitely should be), and you haven't virtualized your servers, you definitely should look at vSphere. Once you have vSphere in place you'll wonder why you didn't do it sooner.
It is used company-wide. We run about 95% virtualized. All on vSphere.
Pros
Runs Windows and Linux VMs.
Stable under heavy load.
Handles mixed workload well.
Cons
The Flash web client is horrible.
It can be expensive, especially for features like virtualized networking.
Likelihood to Recommend
As a virtualization solution, it is easy to use, and mostly just works. Competing solutions have come a long way, and are probably as good or almost as good, but we put in vSphere when they were definitely best of breed.
VU
Verified User
C-Level Executive in Information Technology (Biotechnology company, 11-50 employees)
I worked for Cisco systems in Boxborough. And it is currently used by a specific number of users who i provide maintenance of vSphere to. They use it to host their virtual servers on them and use them as test beds for various reasons. I have created almost 100 VMs on their servers using vSphere clients and hence have loved the tool enormously. I hope to keep using it as long as i can. Its a great learning experience for me too.
Pros
It helps you manage your entire network, no matter how big or confusing it is.
Its user friendly and the GUI is pretty understandable
The changes that can be made after the VM has been created and cloning of the systems thats available makes the work quite easier and faster
Cons
Just that a better GUI will always be welcomed.
If there were some hard core tutorials you could have the link to attached with the help community, that would help too
Likelihood to Recommend
Advantages:- 1) vSphere is best in maintaining an entire lab of VMs or creating multiple VMs at once, if they all require the same configuration. 2) You can replicate some or all of the disks and the user selects destination location of disks, they don’t need to all go on the same destination datastore. 3) Replication is managed as a property of a VM and can be carried out on a per VM basis.
Disadvantages: 1) Only replicates powered-on VMs. 2)Fault Tolerant VMs, linked clones, and templates are currently not supported. 3)Automated fallback of VMs currently not supported using vSphere replication.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Quality Assurance (Computer Hardware company, 10,001+ employees)
vSphere allows us to manage multiple clusters across the US and Canada on a single view. Its built-in security layer allows us to assign access based on user credentials. New users will find vSphere relatively easy to learn and use without any training needed. With vSphere having multiple frames you will be able to see what is happening in realtime while you are working, also they have a great search feature that will get a lot of use with the bigger clusters.
Pros
Recent tasks window allows you to see what is going on.
Search bar is a great tool to use when managing large clusters.
Plugins for most applications and storage arrays makes it easy to do your work.
Cons
The interface is a little blocky.
The interface could use some updating.
Likelihood to Recommend
vSphere is a great product, helps us do a lot with very little resources.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (Automotive company, 1001-5000 employees)