A bare-metal hypervisor that installs directly onto a physical server. With direct access to and control of underlying resources, VMware ESXi partitions hardware to consolidate applications and cut costs.
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VMware vCenter
Score 9.0 out of 10
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VMware vCenter is an advanced server management software that provides a centralized platform for controlling vSphere environments for visibility across hybrid clouds. VMware vCenter is no longer sold as a standalone product and is now available as a part of VMware Cloud Foundation.
At the time we did our comparison we found that VMware scaled much better than Hyper-V, lighter weight, and much more reliable. My recommendation if Hyper-V is needed for anything such as Windows containers, is to use nested virtualization and installing Windows Hyper-V within …
While Hyper-V also can work very well and can have licensing benefits, it does rely on Windows in order to run. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can add another layer of potential failure and might not be running on as low of a level as ESXi does. The footprint for H…
When we bought VMware ESXi ten or so years ago, there weren't a lot of other competitors in the market. Nutanix didn't exist yet, and Hyper-V was in its infancy. Since then, Hyper-V has matured, and other products like Nutanix have come on the market as more fully developed …
I have used many hypervisors and VM platforms (KVM, OracleVM, HyperV, etc.) and ESXi is by far the most effective, full-featured, hypervisor and VM platform available. They have always been the leader and first to deliver their most important features (vMotion, svMotion, DRS, …
While Hyper-V has it's place, it is still in it's infancy in comparison to ESXi at this time. There are far too many "basic" features/functions that should be available that are not quite there yet. ESXi was selected due to it's now long time experience in the field of …
ESXi is the easiest to implement, almost every vendor supports a virtual appliance now. ESXi is also extremely reliable with an easy to follow licensing structure. This makes new deployments and consulting much more fluid and in turn easier to make recommendations as business …
VMware ESXi has been here since I joined the company. Before, I was working with Microsoft Hyper V 2012. But VMware ESXi is much more stable, more comfortable to administrate, and much faster.
VMware has been in the business a long time, and makes a very reliable virtualization platform. Hyper-V had matured exponentially, since it's been released and is a viable alternative to ESXi. However, it is not as reliable as ESXi at least at this time. ESXi also accommodates …
It's more expensive than Hyper-V but our vendors seem to know how to support EXSi better than Hyper-V. It's easy to add hosts and build out tons of VMs, provided you have the funding to do so. The support is good and seems consistently better than Microsoft's.
When I was evaluating it, Hyper-V was still relatively new and feature limited. However, now it makes sense for deployment in small all Windows environments and you get a lot for the price (free*). Still, for large deployments ESXi is more feature-rich and flexible.
After trying Hyper-V, Xen, Proxmox VE and more we ended up choosing to go with VMware ESXi due to the ease of use and administration for our consultants. This in turn keeps our clients happy by reducing costs and support times when needed. While Hyper-V came in close the extra …
I strongly prefer VMware over the others. The robust solution that VMware offers is far better, and easier to use. The smaller hypervisor footprint, and resource requirements far outdo the competition. The performance of the VMs in turn is also better compared to the …
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!
The VMware vCenter server is very useful in maintaining the CPU/RAM/datastore resources are balanced when there are multiple ESX/ESXi host servers. It is clear what resources are being used, and it is easy to migrate VMs to different ESX/ESXi hosts. Being able to remotely connect to the VM servers in vCenter when you cannot have other remote connections helps in maintenance and troubleshooting.
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.
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.
Currently, the HTML 5-based vSphere Client lets you manage the essential functions of vSphere from any browser, however, it would be nice if they would port all management functions over to the HTML 5-based Client.
Performing updates and upgrades to the infrastructure is a bit challenging for someone that may not be as intimate with vSphere. I think the updates/upgrades should be more integrated into the UI and provide the ability to push to the hosts, etc...
It would also be nice to have a more robust snapshot management tool to prevent snapshot overgrowth. It would be nice to be able to set a lifespan for the snapshot(s)
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.
We are very dependent on this software, it has become a much needed tool to perform the daily tasks that are required to maintain the virtual server environment. VMware has become very pricey over the years, so we are looking for alternatives for cost savings strategy, but nothing has been found to be on par to what we are currently using
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.
VMware vCenter Server does a great job with maintaining your virtual environment. It has great role based features to delegate various administrative tasks to multiple users. It is an excellent 'all in one' dashboard for viewing all aspects of your vSphere infrastructure. All alerts to software and hardware issues are easy to trace from this interface
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.
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.
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.
VMware support has always been fantastic and they have been invaluable in solving tougher issues that have been run into. Most of the time, any oddities encountered are fixed by available updates. This can be deduced by support quickly with logs within vCenter. We have not run into something yet that support was unable to help with. They either have a solution already, or they are able to find one quickly.
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.
Since moving away from the Windows Server hosting the vCenter application and instead using a virtual appliance, it has become much easier to implement and deploy the new versions. We can easily create a snapshot or clone of the vCenter vApp to ensure any problems encountered during the upgrade can be mitigated with a fall back to the old version to prevent unscheduled downtime.
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).
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.
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
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.
