Likelihood to Recommend I think IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions would be a good fit for a medium to a large company looking to outsource their current in-house VMware products. The IBM solution would allow them to outsource their current infrastructure so that the company could then concentrate on their core business, whatever that may be. A smaller company with a smaller VMware footprint would probably not be a good fit here. It's a pretty complex process to get things started, so it might not be worth it for a smaller company.
Read full review If you're looking for the industry standard in server virtualization, I would recommend ESXi. After decades of expertise in the field, VMware continues to provide a strong product, production-ready, with an easy-to-learn interface that allows for quick management along with less costly upfront onboarding and training. Grab the free personal-use license and install in your homelab to start!
Read full review Pros Adaptable valuing relying upon size and scale. The presentation is first rate. Our on-prem climate was continually experiencing slack and general languor. With IBM running everything, it's much smoother. Start another group as little as one ESXi worker or scale a current bunch. Read full review Resource management. The automatic load balancing works very well to ensure no host is taxed disproportionately compared to the others. Templates and cloning. It is very easy to set up a template and spin up new servers based on a specific setup. This makes server management very streamlined. VM management. The vSphere interface is very easy to use and navigate. Everything is responsive and it works when you need it to. The options are also robust while also being arranged in a straightforward manner. Read full review Cons Support is horrible and or non-existent Documentation is out of date and incorrect for the most part IBM employees and salespeople are not aware of features or offerings Does not integrate the Zerto, only Veeam and has limited options for data migration Read full review VMware ESXi can improve on the UI that is installed on the bare metal machine. The menus can be hard to navigate when looking for simple configuration items. VMware ESXi can improve on the stability of their overall hypervisor. There have been a few times we had to reinstall due to corruption of VMware ESXi. I would like to see VMware ESXi do better at adding more standard free features in their consumer version of VMware ESXi. For example, having the ability to back up virtual machines is good practice and something that would be very nice if offered in their free version. Read full review Likelihood to Renew It is critical to our business, what started out as a way to do certain functions, it has now become core to ensuring our product is available to our customers and reducing our costs to operate and reduce our recovery time and provisioning servers. Their support is great and the costs to renew is reasonable.
Read full review Usability It is easy to use and setting it up is simple. The only con is that the pricing is a little bit high as well as documentation is a little low; so we had to do some personal learning to be able to fully utilize the product, or hop on the phone with someone.
Read full review The interface is fairly intuitive for most things, and the areas that are a little less obvious usually have fantastic documentation in the online knowledgebase. In 3-4 years of managing our ESXi hosts, I think that I have only opened 4-5 support cases for things that I could not figure out myself or find answers to on the website.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Without the need to patch the servers with bug fixes and enhancements we whave not experienced any downtime with VMware issues. Even the bug fixes and updates do not cause of downtime as we just migrate the servers to the opposite node and update the one and then move servers back. Very simple and painless.
Read full review Performance We do not notice any difference between a physical and virtual server running the same workload. In fact we can scale quicker with the virtual server than we can with the physical.
Read full review Support Rating Overall, just a great experience here. No one in my opinion gets a perfect 10/10 rating (no one is ever perfect), so 9/10 is probably as good as it gets! From initial planning to post implementation support, the IBM Cloud and professional services has been there for my group as much as we have needed them. Great job!
Read full review I can't say enough good about VMware's support team. To an individual they take ownership of the case, provide thorough answers, and follow up regularly. On one occasion, a problem we experienced with NSX Endpoint was escalated to development for a permanent resolution after a workaround was found. In my experience, most companies would have tried to find a way to close a case like that instead of taking it all the way. Most importantly, when production is down and every second counts, they VMware teams understand that urgency and treat your issue as if it were the only one they had to deal with. You can't ask for better.
Read full review Implementation Rating IBM professional services helped us plan and implement the project with great success. They guided the project from planning, scoping, pre-implementation, testing, roll-out, then production and post-production support. We were very impressed with their knowledge of VMware and really appreciated their desire to make our project a success. I would highly recommend them!
Read full review Jsut read and follow anything your storage provider may require to allow the integration of VMware with storage operations, outside of that VMware jsut works.
Read full review Alternatives Considered IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions stacks up against them, we fully agree there are so many features in IBM cloud for VMware Solutions that make it unique and different. The system provides us hypervisor security level and the system even has live backup and storage capacity of data. This system provides us with accuracy that helps us to reduce errors and vulnerability.
Read full review As long as you're using
Nutanix AOS on Nutanix hardware and are paying their software support fees, AOS is a valid competitor to VMware and can save money due to not needing a license and having their server management system built into the base host management system. If you aren't using Nutanix hardware, however, VMWare is in most cases the best way to go. I cannot comment on HyperV, but most IT people I know either use it because they have to (most) or they like it better (not many).
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model it has been fair and easy to understand. I know VMware is looking at wanting to change from CPU to core pricing so we will see what that looks like when it happens.
Read full review Scalability We started out with a two-server cluster and adding a third or fourth is very straightforward and simple with no issues. You just need to be aware of the size of your Vcenter Server to handle the workload, but still the resources needed is very minimal
Read full review Return on Investment It has a positive impact on the cost required to maintain our vSphere environment by allowing us to get rid of our vsphere hardware and not worry about maintenance either. There have been very few negatives, but one would definitely be the open-ended cost associated with cloud products in general. Read full review VMWare ESXi licensing is affordable for our business - and the licensing model is simplistic. Not like that of Microsoft with having to keep track of server licenses and CAL licenses for users. VMWare ESXi also has hardware-monitoring built-in, so that further saves us money from having to be spent with another vendor. As much as I hate the saying "a single pane of glass" does fit for this product. You can manage your servers, monitor hardware status, create and export backup snapshots, manage virtual NICs, connect to various storage devices. We're very happy with this product. Read full review ScreenShots IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions Screenshots