vSphere - See what you're missing!
Updated February 26, 2016
vSphere - See what you're missing!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
5.5
Overall Satisfaction with vSphere
We currently use vSphere together with Virtual Center across our entire organization. It has allowed us to consolidate 1000's of physical servers into a much smaller foot print while allowing for quicker provisioning of systems to meet business needs.
- vSphere allows us to consolidate what once would have been 1000's of physical servers into a much smaller footprint by virtualizing those workloads. This allows for a much more manageable environment and is a tremendous costs savings for our company.
- DRS is a feature that allows us to distribute workloads across multiple vSphere hosts making it easier to scale out and manage workloads. This feature allows for automated actions to take place to minimize or eliminate performance bottlenecks.
- VMotion is another feature that gives us the ability to migrate workloads without any downtime to other vSphere hosts. This allows for maintenance on our physical hardware or upgrades to that underlying hardware with zero impact to the virtual guests running on it. This is a huge feature of this product.
- If leveraging virtual center for management of your vSphere hosts another feature is the high availability when utilizing clustering. This allows vm guests to restart on working vSphere hosts should you encounter a hardware failure on one of your physical hosts.
- I would still like to see a move to an HTML5 interface for managing virtual center and the vSphere hosts.
- The complete incorporation of the update manager client into the web client would also be a welcome addition.
- I would like to see DRS take into consideration more than just CPU/MEM resources when calculating vmotion migrations. There are other products that do this and I would like to see VMware take a step in that direction.
- There is a definite cost savings by being able to purchase a hand full of physical servers for virtualization of 1000's of guests versus those hardware costs of not going the virtualization route. The ROI will depend on your sizing and needs.
- Virtualizing with vSphere does lead to faster provisioning times for customers which in turn allows for more efficient use of company time.
- The end result is a better customer experience, that goes for the application owners receiving their vm guests quickly and then the end customers enjoying the applications or products running on those systems.
The only other solution that isn't too far behind would be Microsoft Hyper-V. This is a product we only have limited exposure to but seeing that VMware is the leader in this space and we are very happy with what we have today there is no desire to explorer how far along Hyper-V has come.
VMware vSphere Feature Ratings
vSphere Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled