Likelihood to Recommend I'd strongly recommend IBM Power servers to anyone who has the budget for it. A Power Virtual Machine, what is generally called FlexTB VM, can support as many small VM of 256GB, and scale up to 32TB on the fly. If IBM recommended architecture is combined with your organizational reference architecture, then forget about running into unplanned downtimes.
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 I love how it supports a mix of operating systems protection of our sensitive energy data and ensuring compliance with industry regulations. It provides a flexibility that ensures that we can accommodate increased workloads without a complete overhaul of our infrastructure. 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 A solid IDE for editing programs. SEU was simple and solid. Then it became outdated and support for it ended as the language continued to evolve. That's fine. But RDi is expensive and shaky at best, and VS Code, while free, is severely lacking even the modicum of features RDi has. 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 This is one of the best systems on the market. You can have Flash/Copy which created another LPAR to look like the system you are copying. This takes seconds and not minutes. Then you can use BRNS to do full system backups nightly with no downtime. I am ready for us to upgrade to a Power 10.
Read full review 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 They are very easy to set up and use once you re knowledgeable enough to deal with it. They are continuously enhance the user experience on the HMC and operations on the systems. Once setup it's like a beast, going on and on. I have experience with servers that are not being rebooted for more than 1000 days
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 In all of the years I have used various Power System, I have never had any problems at all. Even when hackers were attacking our email servers and many users PCs, the IBM Power System came out completely unscathed. I haven't even had any application errors that were able to take the system down. Nor have I ever experienced an unplanned outage
Read full review 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 The IBM Power System is built for integration. It supports multiple operating systems and you can run multiple OS's on the same box with no problems at all. It also supports a number of open source languages such as PHP, Java, Python, and Perl which helps you continue to grow and integrate with lots of other systems.
Read full review 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 On large-scale systems, the rating would have been 10. However, I have seen some cases in more rural areas where the IBM onsite support is not as available or of the highest quality as in the past. For software support, there are sometimes instances of language barriers.
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 Systems are robust and you need to know exactly what your are going to do with them. There are multiple configurations possible and you need to gather your requirements first, before going on with the implementation. Tuning is a must before migrating production systems
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 Power server do not need a stack of software for viruses, spam and others... Power server do not need to have release often power server are much more strong then other manufacturer Power server do not need to restart offen
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 This system can work in a small factory with a few users and easily scale out to thousands of users. It is truly amazing on how much you can throw at this box and it will just keep humming. It is great for use across multiple departments and even across multiple corporations. I worked at one company where we were hosting multiple corporations on just one large Power System and had ZERO problems.
Read full review 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 In the event of a crash, IBM Power servers offer a variety of simple options to recover the operating system. With the flexibility offered by IBM Power servers, the production business can be improved by making the most of its physical servers. 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