VMware ESXi Reviews

VMware ESXi is one of the two or three best products I've used in my career. It revolutionized IT infrastructure when it was released, and it continues to be an essential underpinning to our entire environment now. It is the segment leader for on-premises server virtualization. It does carry some significant licensing costs, but we have found that those easily pay for themselves over time for an institution of our size.

I'm a bit biased here. Having little experience with HyperV or others, I'd say ESXi is my go-to with virtualization.

In my opinion, VMware ESXi is the best software for running virtual machines out of other hypervisors that I have tried. It works great for a good amount of servers. If you're hosting only a handful of servers, you may be pressed to find a free or low budget solution. If you're running a medium-sized business, up through a large enterprise, this is the technology you want.

To maintain multiple OS systems on a single box at the same time, there is no better solution than VMware ESXi. It's lightweight, works on 95% of all hardware, and has tremendous support both technical from VMware and community-driven. Virtual networking is done correctly and is very easy to maintain, manage and deploy!

For an HP blade server infrastructure in a Windows VM environment this is an excellent choice. Integrated as a cluster, this an extremely reliable system which at least in our case has had zero downtime, very little maintenance with performance that meets and exceeds our needs now and well into the future.

ESXi is very well suited for companies that don't have the money or can't afford to run a big data center. We were able to reduce our server hardware footprint from 15 to 1. All of our data center ESXi hosts will now fit into one rack, reducing the number of physical servers also reduced our power consumption.
If you only need to run one OS for all applications, ESXi may not be for you.

VMware ESXi works well in large environments where lots of computing and storage resources need to be shared and constantly reallocated for virtual machines. There are full-featured versions that come at a high cost, but there are also versions that lack some features that may not be needed at a lower cost, and even a free version for small lab environments. If you just need one virtual machine to run periodically, you can use one of the more consumer-grade hypervisors like Workstation, Fusion, or just Virtual Box for free.

If you have the proper hardware, and desire stability and support, then ESXi is about at the top of the list. It has a proven reputation, and you can't really be blamed for buying the best.

If your budget is low, and/or you might not have the latest hardware, some of the open source virtualization products might be a better fit.

All in all, vSphere ESXi is almost always the best solution for virtualization. Hobbyists and homelabbers will appreciate the ability to learn core features at no cost. Small businesses will benefit from consolidating hardware into one server where their domain controller, SQL server, file server, etc. can all still run independently. Medium to large businesses will find a lot of security in scalability and clustering.

I think VMware ESXi would be well suited for any company that has more than a few servers. If you have two servers, you might as well virtualize them and make your hardware hosts in a VMware environment. It will keep your servers up and running if you have any hardware failures. If you backup your servers, you can quickly and easily restore them after any software crashes. You can test all updates and changes before actually deploying them. I have had to do major reconfiguration of servers, and was unsure of how the server software would respond. You can easily make a copy of a server, launch it and do all the testing you need. If something doesn't work, start over again until you find the solution. It does cost to have the licenses, but you can calculate the cost of downtime if you didn't have it to see if it is worth it for you. If you have a very small environment, it may not be cost-effective, but it will surely improve the time you spend in IT. It would be good to have an idea about how the environment works, but once you learn, support can help with any other issues you have.

It's suited to Data Centers that are short on space. You are able to consolidate systems anywhere from 5 to 100 to one host. It's also good for Data Centers purchasing new hardware that want to use the space most efficiently. The multi-core systems of today cannot be used effectively without a virtualization product, why waste your peoples time messing with a lower-tier "free" product that requires more management time and is harder on compatibility
It is less appropriate if a company has little money and wants to waste their employees' time -- you are trading VMware $$ to save employee time.

I think every organization that has the need for on-premise servers should consider investing in ESXi. The initial cost for getting a proper ESXi environment set up with the servers, storage, and networking can be steep, so organizations that are on shoestring budgets may want to skip virtualization until they're ready for the necessary investments.

VMware ESXi is an excellent product to get the most out of your bare metal hardware. Lots of server manufacturers provide pre-built install images that are optimized for their servers, so that one can take full advantage of the hardware features and interface with the built-in sensors. However, VMware ESXi is a costly product and for small organizations going the Microsoft Hyper-V route will be a big cost savings even tho it is not as robust and efficient.

VMware ESXi is best suited for mid to large enterprises that require maximum uptime. The ability to migrate virtual workloads on-demand, and across different hardware types allows for this. With the high cost of entry, it wouldn't likely be a good fit for most small businesses or those that don't require a high level of uptime.

In any scenario, I've yet to find many reasons where ESXi is not best suited for what is being thrown at it. From small organizations with 2-5 virtual machines to the larger organizations of 1000+ virtual machines it scales extremely well and the features, options, etc. remain the same given correct licensing. The options for HA, again given proper licensing, work extremely well once implemented and have saved myself and others I work with many hours of additional work automatically migrating VMs once a host has failed.

Given the options with the licensing, there are times where something else may have to be reviewed to see if it makes more sense unfortunately to say. The licensing is the only place where ESXi does not scale very well

I believe VMware ESXi is an excellent solution for all medium to enterprise-level companies. VMware ESXi does provide options for small business, but depending on features needed, this can be costly. VMware ESXi is the industry standard for virtualized data centers and continues to improve and innovate in the virtualized server space.

VMware ESXi is well suited where you don't have the physical space needed for the number servers you require. If you have applications that require little to no downtime, VMware ESXi can help provide that when clustered with other hosts. VMware ESXi will allow you to snapshot servers prior to major upgrades and changes. This provides a relatively safe fallback option if the upgrade doesn't go well. You can also leverage this to quickly go back to a clean state when testing new software or code.

Vmware ESXi is useful when you have limited space in your server room but need multiple servers for different purposes. You can virtualize the various servers on one piece of server hardware and keep your hardware use low while getting the number of servers you need. It's also great when you want to keep your hardware costs low but requires multiple servers in your environment.

I believe that ESXi is well suited for any and all scenarios. Except those where cost is a major factor. ESXi is not cheap, and with most companies that have a Microsoft EA for Windows Server that also grants them Hyper-V, sometimes the cost isn't justifiable. With that said, ESXi has functions and features that most enterprises need to stay resilient and function at a high level. Where critical services are needed, ESXi is tried and true and can handle everything you throw at it. Even for smaller IT shops, ESXi will provide flexibility and performance that will allow the organization to focus on more important areas, like their customers.

ESXi is well suited for small shops requiring three or fewer hosts, that have a capable and knowledgeable IT department with tight budgets, and minimal technology requirements. It is also suited for very large enterprise entities with large budgets and capable IT staff. Medium-sized businesses that require more than an Essentials Plus license (supports up to three hosts) should consider other available options before deciding to go with ESXi as the licensing costs beyond Essentials Plus are quite extensive.

Having used or worked with the major hypervisors, my preference is still VMware ESXi over the other products. One of the key features it has that make the management of virtual machine so easy is the ability to right-click on a system to perform numerous tasks on it. Also, the ability to structure the environment all in one view, not only simplifies moving around between environments, but providing role-based access control as needed is very beneficial from a security standpoint.

I think ESXi is an invaluable tool no matter the industry that a company is in. It is a great tool to allow for the easy creation of servers for development purposes. It also has the ability to use snapshots when changes are being made to a server in the event of failure or misstep. The one drawback to ESXi is that it is expensive and may not be suited to smaller sized companies. While it offers a free version, that version cannot be centrally managed.

VMware is suited for just about any kind of server virtualization nowadays. The only scenario where I am not fully comfortable virtualizing at this point is for HPC environments that have strict NUMA or CPU allocation requirements. And even that scenario is being addressed by VMware and is technically supported today. The product is mature and able to run just about any kind of workload assuming the OS you are running supports being virtualized.

For complex, production and high availability environments ESXi is great, especially with large and heterogeneous loads the behavior is outstanding.