Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs VMware ESXi

What users are saying about

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring#question3' target='_blank' rel='nofollow'>Customer Verified: Read more.</a>

Score 8.9 out of 10

Based on 137 reviews and ratings

VMware ESXi

Score 8.9 out of 10

Based on 326 reviews and ratings

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Feature Rating Comparison

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

8.2

VMware ESXi

8.3

Virtual machine automated provisioning

8.7

8.5

Management console

8.2

8.9

Live virtual machine backup

7.9

8.9

Live virtual machine migration

7.9

8.0

Hypervisor-level security

8.4

7.1

Pros

It's a very easy task to fire up an EC2, even for first-timer education. Launch a free account, pop into EC2, and follow the prompts.
Snapshots and Images are particularly nice, fast and easy to work with. I've had my entire catalog erased by mistake, and been able to restore content within minutes.
Access to data is right there - you have root access to your virtual machine, no clunky interfaces, no negotiation with hosts for resources.

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Brendon Brown

Ecommerce Director & Digital Marketing

My Saint My HeroRetail, 11-50 employees

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Allows system administrators to manage multiple hosts via one interface.
Perform multiple management tasks
Provides excellent memory management

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Higher Education Company, 10,001+ employees

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Cons

Docker style templates for EC2 instances, where the installation, backup and rest of the scripts come out of the box.
Ran into a couple of issues while trying to reboot the EC2 instances, doing reboot on the instance through CLI caused data issues on the system. That needs to be ironed out.
Costs need to be competitive with rest of the market. Found that EC2's are a lot more expensive than its competitors. So if you are tied into the Amazon ecosystem, then EC2 makes sense, but if you are looking for silo EC2 instances, look elsewhere for cost saving.

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Anudeep Palanki

Application Developer

Monsanto CompanyFarming, 10,001+ employees

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A bit overpriced
Performance issues
Application and hardware compatibility

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Maheswar Reddy Nagireddy

Assistant System Engineer

Tata Consultancy ServicesComputer Software, 10,001+ employees

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Likelihood to Renew

No score

No answers yet

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VMware ESXi3.8

Based on 2 answers

Me, not likely as my current company doesn't use it nor do I use it at home. However, I don't see my previous company ever switching away from it.

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Food & Beverages Company, 10,001+ employees

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Usability

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)10.0

Based on 1 answer

Best in its class.Easy to implement.Big community for support.

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Verified User

Consultant in Information Technology

E-Learning Company, 501-1000 employees

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No score

No answers yet

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Support

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)3.0

Based on 1 answer

I have faced that level of support.Our many query were unanswered for few days and costed us a lot.

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Felix Rufus Nadar

Manager Technology

Happ CoachConsumer Services, 11-50 employees

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VMware ESXi9.0

Based on 1 answer

The few times I have had to call, support group was fantastic, and fast to resolve issues.

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Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 201-500 employees

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Alternatives Considered

DigitalOcean and Heroku are two other leading competitors to the EC2 in terms of the type of instances they offer.Digital Ocean:Their Droplet service is equivalent to EC2 instance.Their droplet's offer a low cost, no non-sense alternative to EC2. They are geared more towards hobby/student developers with limited options at considerably lower cost compared to EC2. The reason we choose EC2 is because rest of the ecosystem is tied in with AWS.Heroku:Its geared towards the same crowd as DigitalOcean but they offer a wider suite of applications similar to the AWS offerings. The Heroic shines in offering build packs that recognize the type of application automatically and take care of deployments. The reason we picked EC2 apart from the AWS tie in is because last time I checked, I didn't find Heroku suitable for setting up Databases.

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Anudeep Palanki

Application Developer

Monsanto CompanyFarming, 10,001+ employees

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I have worked with several other virtual machine platforms such as Microsoft Hyper-V and Oracle VM VirtualBox and find not only the ESXi is a better platform for us, ESXi also seems to be easier once you have learned the basics.

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CHRIS ROGERS

CEO (Chief Executive Officer)

All IT Solutions Inc.Computer Networking, 51-200 employees

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Return on Investment

Positive impact, because we could setup the instances and automate the backups using the Snapshot service. With about 1 min of downtime every morning, we were able to backup the instance using automated script.
With great flexibility comes steep learning curve, we had to spend considerable time getting up to speed with the way EC2's are setup and how to tweak the instance for optimal performance. Wish Amazon offers prebuilt templates for things like this instead of using Docker over EC2.
Overall I would consider this a very good investment.

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Anudeep Palanki

Application Developer

Monsanto CompanyFarming, 10,001+ employees

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Great return in savings on physical systems
Great savings not having to buy so many physical machines, when you can just build new VM systems at no cost and a few minutes
Turning P2V had really helped out again saving money not having to replace old or failed systems

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CHRIS ROGERS

CEO (Chief Executive Officer)

All IT Solutions Inc.Computer Networking, 51-200 employees

View all 27 answers on this topic