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VMware ESXi is being used across the board throughout the whole organization. We are using it for Servers, Virtual Desktops (End Users) and for numerous headless applications. By leveraging shared hardware resources ESXi eliminates the need of bare metal machines for different servers/applications and provides a stable infrastructure that you can count on.
- Network segmenting.
- Quick and easy management of resources.
- Backup and restore capabilities.
- Moving resources from one cluster to another seamlessly.
- Pricing and Licensing.
- DSwitches.
- Vmotions & SAN.
January 12, 2021

VMware ESXi is the virtualization platform we use for all of our virtual machines on site. It allows us to have two data centers, separated by microwave backhaul, that share systems between themselves.
- Quick rollout of new VMs through templates
- Advanced networking capabilities
- Easy migration of virtual machines to new compute and storage
- Easier upgrade process
- Less expensive options for mid-tier organizations (Essentials is too small)
March 20, 2020
We use VMWare ESXi as the virtualization platform for our entire production environment across the University. This includes all on-premises production, test, and development servers, as well as our remote application delivery and VDI environments. It allows us to design and rapidly deploy environments that are flexible, redundant, and efficient. We have used VMware ESXi for over ten years and are quite happy with the product. It is essential to everything that we do.
- Virtualization - it allows you to take full advantage of your hardware investments
- Flexibility - it allows you to run services across disparate hardware types
- Scalability - it allows you to expand and deploy new services rapidly
- Complexity - if you're not familiar with the product there is a learning curve.
- It does require other licensed VMWare products (vCenter Server, etc.) for full functionality.
A couple years before I came to the company, the decision was made to convert all the physical servers into virtual machines using ESXi. The process itself is easy as VMware or third parties provide you with the tools to do so. All the changes we've made since I've been here wouldn't have been nearly as easy if we were working physical servers rather than using a virtual environment. Spinning up a new virtual machine or cloning an existing to test changes before going to production makes things easy.
- Monitoring and reporting of virtual machines in environment.
- In-depth configuration and management of hypervisor and virtual machines.
- Uptime 900+ days.
- Some of the events could be more informative.
VMware ESXi is installed on 4 HP blade servers configured as a cluster that host all of our Windows servers for the entire organization. It has proven to be reliable, robust and provides excellent redundancy. With this system server deployments upgrades take a fraction of the time compared to physical infrastructure.
- Small footprint
- Reliable
- Linux based
- Management
- Licensing costs
January 30, 2020
We use VMware ESXi to host all of our virtual servers around the district and also in our data center. It's also being used by other departments to access virtual servers in our environment. Each location has 1 ESXi host that runs multiple virtual servers. Those virtual servers are used for caching images and updates for workstations at each location.
- ESXi is able to minimize the physical server footprint.
- ESXi is also very easy to get up and running.
- I would like to see better performance analytics built in to ESXi.
- ESXi could find a way to boot faster.
January 18, 2020
VMware ESXi is being used to host applications and VMs that support the entire university. ESXi is the primary hypervisor in use in our organization, and has been primary for over 10 years now. It allows us to provide computer and storage resources to our users and departments in an extremely efficient way with many functions that facilitate availability and uptime.
- vMotion: the ability to move a VM from one place to another, even on disparate storage, works flawlessly and allows us to be agile and maintain performance.
- PowerCli includes a robust set of PowerShell commands to be able to automate just about anything.
- Integration with other products and vendors is sometimes complex.
- Getting the right permissions configurations to allow certain actions is difficult.
January 17, 2020
We use VMware for almost all of our entire server infrastructure. The only servers we don't have virtualized are backup and video servers. It would be difficult to manage the number of physical servers it would take to server the school district at this point. It saves us a lot of time and money by keeping our physical server infrastructure small and easily manageable.
- Hugely reduces our need for physical hardware. Our four hosts handle over 130 virtual servers without any problems.
- It is stable. I have not had an ESXi server crash in years, nor do I really ever have to reboot them for problems. They just run smoothly.
- The HTML5 web interface has taken a while to be brought to parity with the old thick client, and a few features are sometimes tricky to find.
January 17, 2020
vSphere ESXi is a hypervisor similar to HyperV or Xen, essentially a platform for running many virtual servers on one hardware server or cluster. Primarily it allows you to build out one hardware server on which you virtualize your application and/or role servers. It provides a layer of abstraction between the hardware itself and the application layer that gives you the ability to allocate and reallocate hardware resources and perform actions like cold reboots without having access to a power button or cable.
- Easy to install.
- Very powerful.
- Very picky about what hardware it will install on.
- Many features locked behind advanced licenses and/or additional products (like vCenter).
VMware ESXi is used to host most servers at my site. It is the company standard for virtualization across my company, at least in North America. It allows us to save costs on hardware and licensing for hosting servers and workstations. We can test development, upgrades, and changes on copies of servers before having to do it on a production/live server. Since we can copy an actual server, we know exactly how it will respond to changes. This helps us save on trouble-shooting, save on server recovery, and so many other things.
- VMware is not buggy. In IT we have to work around so many things for products to work the way we expect, or the way we want. I have not had to work around things with ESXi. It works as advertised.
- Sever uptime. Even with hardware failures, and system bugs, VMware keeps our systems up. ESXi has been reliable. I never even think about the OS failing or having issues. That is one less thing to worry about.
- Server deployment. We can deploy a new server in minutes. Some servers come preconfigured with OVF files where we just tell VMWare to set up a new server and point to the config file and tada there is a new server. We can create templates, where the OS and updates are already installed and we just create a new server from the template in minutes. I actually prefer creating one from scratch, and it only takes a few minutes to choose the hardware and start the OS installation. The longest part is installing the OS. It takes forever at my company to approve spending any money. With VMWare, I can set up new servers without any cost so there is no delay. When I want a server, I set it up. I don't have to wait over a month to design, get approval to order, wait for delivery, then set up the hardware, etc. It is fantastic, and such a time saver.
- VMWare's Compatibility Guide on-line is excellent. It is very detailed and easy to discover if there will be any hardware issues. When adding or replacing hosts, this is a must-visit site. It has answered every question I've had without having to call support or talk to anyone to analyze if this hardware will match that one. It is a user-friendly site that gives you all the information you need. It has given me a starting point for buying new servers when my company changed its standard on server hardware. I would not have known where to start in configuring a new host, but this site told me what was compatible with what I had and it became an easy task.
- The new interface for accessing the hosts directly doesn't work well with all browsers. We have restrictions at my company. We use Edge or IE. I had a lot of trouble uploading a file to the datastore because Edge and IE wouldn't play nice. The problem is probably mostly on MS's side, but it would be nice if it could work better with all browsers.
January 17, 2020
We use it to consolidate our servers and infrastructure. It is being used across the company to better use assets. Ultimately, it is used to take anywhere from four or five systems and consolidate them to 1 host, or on the other extreme 60 plus systems combined down to one host.
- It manages physical systems and resources.
- It has a minimal footprint on hosts -- hundreds of megabytes, and very efficient code.
- I have been using ESX since version 3.5 -- they have regular improvements, so while there has been "missing functionality," I have used it when it was very basic, and they keep adding features that have improved it.
January 15, 2020
VMware ESXi is being used by our IT department to deploy servers and services across our entire organization. The software such a game-changer, it's difficult to state how life-changing the software is. On the simple side of things, our IT Department is able to quickly spin up virtual machines at a moments notice. Additionally, ESXi allows us to add additional server resources at a moment's notice, rather than having to go through the cost and process of purchasing new hardware. ESXi allows us to take backup snapshots of servers in the blink of an eye, providing a safety net, unlike anything a physical server can typically do.
- When combining Citrix with ESXi, we are able to create multiple Citrix servers from one master image.
- Combined with Veeam, backing up and restoration of virtual machines running on ESXi is painless.
- I would love to see the licensing cost come down.
January 14, 2020
Our organization makes extensive use of a datacenter and has virtualized hundreds of Windows servers on bare metal hardware. These servers work to process logins, provide access to our student information and registration data, hold and manage email, provide shared drives for file exchanges, websites for access by our schools and parents, etc.
- Very efficient on bare hardware
- Installs a very small hypervisor footprint
- The web management interface utilizing HTML 5 is still not fully mature.
- Could use the ability to clone a host configuration in case the bootable media fails.
January 14, 2020
ESXi is utilized to host our entire server infrastructure, as well as our virtual desktop environment. It allows us to perform hardware maintenance and upgrades with zero downtime. We are also able to replicate our infrastructure to our secondary DR location without the need to have identical hardware available and maintain a very low RTO.
- Server availability.
- Hardware support.
- Phone/technical support.
- Licensing cost.
January 14, 2020
At present we are utilizing VMware ESXi across the entire organization. We are utilizing this for our entire Production & Development Windows environment, as well as some Linux implementation. There are also various VM appliances in place via VMware ESXi service various functions within the organization. ESXi allows us a dynamic & "easy" way to manage our infrastructure environment.
- Implementation of ESXi is extremely straightforward given the correct experience
- The HA capabilities of ESXi are extremely hard to beat when compared to other Hypervisor options
- As much as the upgrade path for newer versions of ESXi has improved, there is still room for improvement in the process
- A better/easier way of handling some network features would be ideal
January 13, 2020
We have implemented VMware ESXi at our primary data center and all of our remote office locations. It is being used across our whole organization and provides a quick and easy way to provision servers as needed. VMware ESXi has consolidated our server footprint from racks of physical servers to only a few VMware ESXi hosts that can support hundreds of virtual servers. Servers can now be provisioned in a matter of minutes rather than days.
- Quick and accessible to provision servers as needed. Templates can be configured in VMware ESXi.
- VMware ESXi host software efficiently manages hardware resources so that a single-host server can support multiple virtual servers without causing resource contention.
- Understanding Resource groups and resource reservations can be difficult and cause issues if not fully understood.
- I would like to see better performance monitoring capabilities from the web GUI. The current options can be cumbersome, and many still need to be monitored from the command line.
January 10, 2020
We use VMware ESXi across our global organization. It's managed by our System Administrators and leveraged by our DevOps teams to help automate business processes. It gives us flexibility and stability for testing. We have multi-ESXi host clusters for high availability. VMware ESXi has allowed us to virtualize most of our physical server infrastructure which has allowed us to work remotely from our data centers. It removes the need to lifecycle 100's of physical servers in favor of a simple lifecycle of a few VMware ESXi hosts.
- High availability. Clustered VMware ESXi hosts make it easy to take a host out of production.
- Storage DRS helps balance virtual disks across the cluster.
- The Flash and HTML5 web interfaces are missing simple sorting features for some lists.
- Errors messages can be vague at times, which requires searching the community for answers.
January 10, 2020
Vmware ESXi is being used company-wide at our business. We decided to use it because we had limited space in our server room but need multiple servers for different purposes. So we virtualized the various servers on one piece of server hardware and were able to keep our hardware use low while getting the number of servers we needed.
- Lets you run multiple virtual servers on one piece of server hardware.
- Saves you money but minimizing the amount of server hardware you need to buy.
- VMware ESXi can be hard to update to the newest versions.
- Hardware compatibility with VMware ESXi can be confusing.
January 10, 2020
We have been a VMware ESXi shop for well over a decade. We use it across the whole enterprise to run 99% of our environment. There are exceptions where we do run physical servers and/or appliances outside of our virtual environment. By using ESXi, we have been able to stretch the resource requirements for applications across fewer physical hardware points. We have also been able to leverage features and functions like High-Availability and Replication due to using ESXi. It has also made the administration of our environment much easier and centralized.
- The ability to use a single server and run multiple virtual machines on it has allowed our enterprise to grow it's technology footprint while keeping cost low and administration functionality more simplified.
- With features like High Availability in ESXi, we have been able to build out a resilient environment that, when issues occur at a hardware level, we can respond and be up and running more quickly than if a single application server failed.
- ESXi seems to be written very well, and with years of experience behind them, they tend to be leaders and innovators also. With that, there are still areas that they fall short or could improve upon. One of those is the user interface. Having recently moved to a full HTML5 GUI, some of the interactions are not intuitive or lack in the way that the Flash GUI client would handle the request.
- The Task area needs work. Being able to filter and configure what Task is running or completed should be more user-configurable. The lack of user control does make it hard when you are troubleshooting.
January 09, 2020
We currently use ESXi to run administrative virtual appliances that are not currently supported by our primary hyper-converged hypervisor. This setup includes three virtual appliances, vCenter to manage two host machines located in two physical locations. The second host is a replication target for the primary host to assure business continuity in a disaster recovery event.
- ESXi is probably more diverse in the operating systems it supports than other offerings.
- ESXi has a wide range of third party integrations to focus in on your businesses needs.
- ESXi is very rigid in its manageability.
- The management interface is not as simplistic as it could be.
January 09, 2020
VMware ESXi is the product that hosts the majority of our virtual server environment. There are several environments set up at several different locations. Managing the environments is easy through the use of vCenter. Having the ability to quickly adjust the needed resources of each virtual machine, provides us the ability to address performance problems as they arise. It does not matter if the system needs an increase in memory, CPU, or disk space, the changes or new resources can be added in a matter of minutes.
- Allows quick and easy cloning and customization of new systems.
- Provides the ability to move or transfer virtual machines between environments.
- Upgrades could be made easier or more automated.
- Prefer a thick client back. The web one still seems buggy at times.
December 30, 2019
I have been administering VMware ESXi since version 2.0. It has evolved over the years to be a very robust hypervisor that in my opinion is the best on the market. Our company is running VMware both in production and in the test. We have 150-200 virtual machines. ESXi helps our IT department to easily spin up servers and meet the demands of the company as well as its executives. Without VMware, we would not be as efficient and quite honestly may even fail on the delivery of projects.
- Boot Times are quick.
- Adjusting compute resources is easy.
- Hot Add of compute (RAM and CPU).
- Easier setup of distributed switches.
December 03, 2019
VMware ESXi is the hypervisor OS of choice for our organization. We use it to host virtualized servers and appliances and improve the efficiency of the consumption of our hardware. By virtualizing your environment you are able to get the most out of your investment in physical compute resources. VMWare can be run from as small as a single host all they way up to a multi-site cloud configuration. It is a fit for any size environment and various IT budgets.
- Stability and maturity are key. VMware has been around for a long long time and continue to be a market leader by far.
- The biggest differentiation versus competitors products are the performance and scalability of the VMFS file system as well as the vast library of integrated offerings in the marketplace.
- They continue to improve on moving from Flash to HTML 5 based management.
- I'd like to see more flexibility in how multi-site VCSA redundancy can be deployed.
- I'd like to see some of the automation and orchestration tools become more affordable for the small to mid-sized business market. vRA/vRO/vCloud..
November 08, 2019
As a Cloud Service Provider for us it's fundamental to have a reliable tool to provide our services, in this case, ESXi is the most significant tool cause it allows us to handle the very large and complex multi-tenant environment.
A hypervisor has a very small footprint and runs perfectly from hard drives, SAN, SSD or BOSS cards.
The VMware support for this is great.
The VMware support for this is great.
- Security
- Relaiable
- Small footprint
- Cost
- Need to buy other VMware software to get the full power.
November 05, 2019
Our entire environment is running on ESXi, including a DR site. Having all the servers be virtual allows for flexibility in resource allocation and overall ease of management. This also reduces maintenance downtime, as VMs can be migrated using vMotion without any downtime. Because everything is virtual, DR scenarios are also very easy to perform.
- Resource management.
- It's simple, yet offers loads of advanced features and settings if there is a need.
- vCenter is great to manage multiple ESXi hosts.
- GPU accelerated graphics are not the easiest to set up.
- The UI is a bit on the slow side even with the new HTML5 client.
- Licencing can get very expensive if you're using multi-processor servers and vCenter.
VMware ESXi Scorecard Summary
Feature Scorecard Summary
What is VMware ESXi?
VMware ESXi is a popular hypervisor, from VMware.
Categories: Server Virtualization
VMware ESXi Integrations
VMware ESXi Pricing
- Does not have featureFree Trial Available?No
- Has featureFree or Freemium Version Available?Yes
- Does not have featurePremium Consulting/Integration Services Available?No
- Entry-level set up fee?No
VMware ESXi Technical Details
Deployment Types: | SaaS |
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Operating Systems: | Unspecified |
Mobile Application: | No |