VMware ESXi Reviews & Insights

Score7.2 out of 10

832 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for VMware ESXi are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Powerful Tool for Managing VMs: Users consistently praise VMware ESXi as a powerful tool for managing a large number of virtual machines, with easy management of individual VM settings and configurations. Several reviewers have highlighted this aspect, emphasizing how it simplifies their virtualization workflows and enhances overall efficiency.

Cost Reduction Benefits: Many users appreciate the cost reduction benefits offered by VMware ESXi. It minimizes the need for physical servers and reduces storage footprint, resulting in electricity savings. This advantage has been mentioned by a significant number of reviewers, highlighting the financial value that VMware ESXi brings to their organizations.

Support for Various Operating Systems: The support for various operating systems, including Windows and Unix, is considered a significant advantage by users. This feature enables them to host a wide range of applications on VMware ESXi. Multiple reviewers have specifically mentioned this pro, appreciating the flexibility it provides in terms of application deployment and compatibility.

Reviews

129 Reviews

VMware ESXi is a great hypervisor for those who can afford it

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

December 31, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have dozens of virtual servers in the office and use VMware ESXi as a hypervisor to consolidate them in a few physical servers, getting performance and reliability while using less energy and hardware parts in our operation.
VMware ESXi has different versions for various kinds of company profiles and we ended up choosing the one that best fitted our needs.

Pros

Virtual Machine creation and management
Access to network drives (NAS, SAN, etc)
Load balancing

Cons

Pricing is stratospheric
Support needs improvement
Relationship with client needs improvement

Likelihood to Recommend

VMware ESXi has different 'flavors' for different company profiles. In my opinion, there is a flavor to every client style. The only problem is that it has been disclosed that Broadcom, the new VMware ESXi's owner, said it will focus just on its biggest clients. Then, after that new approach, I believe that VMware ESXi is now not as attractive as before to medium and small business. Technically speaking, though, I still believe it is a great virtualization solution if you can afford it.

Carlos Coque

System Administrator in Information Technology at IBEX Payroll Services (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

VMWare ESXi is not longer the king of the mountain due to poor service and support

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

August 10, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

VMware ESXi is used for all of our Production and Test/Development environments in our organization.

Pros

The ability to seamlessly migrate a virtual machine from one host to another is a vital part of the virtual experience in 2023.
Metrics and statistics easily allow us to understand where pain points can be in the environment and to change or correct them for a better experience.

Cons

In my experience, service and Support is severely lacking from VMware. Over time this has gotten worse to the point where it is easier not to open a case and just guess at a solution.
In my opinion, pricing has gotten increasingly worse over time as well. Every year there seems to be a new way of licensing that is only in an effort to suck more money from the consumer.
They have been pushing more and more to the cloud but their services are not ready for primetime when they do. Horizon licenses are now pushed from the Cloud services and, in my experience, they did not work in the beginning and even now are a pain to use, so I dread going to the same for VMware ESXi.

Likelihood to Recommend

Before, I would have said that VMware ESXi would have been great in all environments, but now I can see a case for other options in everything but the most important of Production. Test and Development environments don't always need all of the advanced features of VMware ESXi and could probably use some other form of virtual server.

David Riberdy

Enterprise Data Management Supervisor in Information Technology at Southern Farm Bureau Casualty Insurance Company (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

20 years of experience

View profile

Great tool for productivity.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

June 18, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We were facing multiple issues related to security and privacy due to work from home environment, and VMware helped in this regard with its top-of-the-line flagship product ESXi. Our employees love the way virtual machine work with an added layer of security, along with the great performance provided by Vmware.

Pros

Great secure environment for our employees.
Virtual machines get ready in no time, making it a quick task.
The performance of virtual machines is great which increases productivity.

Cons

The integration with the Windows server can be made smoother.
Cost can be reduced as compared to competitors.
It should be made more user-friendly for Vmware administrators.

Likelihood to Recommend

It has been a great tool that helps us maintain a secure environment to keep our valuable client information from getting into the wrong hands. It has also gained clients' trust, which also had a positive ROI on our investment. Clients believe in VMware, and we try to deliver what our clients demand.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Simply the best in business IT asset virtualization.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

June 17, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ESXI allows us to run multiple and separate headless services on different platforms all on the same hardware, while also allowing for quick spin-up of user stations for temporary or remote access. Using VMware ESXi allows us to invest in server infrastructure instead of end-user devices, which allows us to keep maintenance and security closer to the IT department.

Pros

Simple deployment on metal using SD or USB.
Fast spin-up of guest machines.
Detailed information and management options for Network and Storage

Cons

External USB devices can have occasional issues when passing through to a VM.
Issues with implementing and passing through GPUs to VMs.

Likelihood to Recommend

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!

Brendon Brown

eComerce Director in Information Technology at Island City Media (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

View profile

VMware continues to work well

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

June 14, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use VMware ESXi to host all of our VMs. It houses 95% of our on-prem infrastructure. We have a cluster of hosts that do this work with a SAN on the backend.

Pros

Reliability
Ease of use
Management
Support & updates

Cons

They are deprecating old hardware soon
Networking is difficult

Likelihood to Recommend

It is great if you host a lot of virtual machines.

Chris Hein

Systems Engineer in Information Technology at CIH (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

ESXi helped us out a bunch!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

June 13, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use ESXi within all of our Production, Development, & Testing environments to manage and run critical workloads that the company leverages for revenue generating applications as well as day to day IT infrastructure systems. ESXi is our management center for all of these systems and allows us to modify our virtual environment as needed.

Pros

Ease of use
Extremely intuitive
Easy to manage

Cons

Upgrade procedures could be outlined a bit better
Documentation could be improved to show specific images of tasks
Network integration and interfacing could be easier to navigate

Likelihood to Recommend

ESXi is very well suited for managing and running small to enterprise sized workloads and allows for detailed visibility and management of your workloads within a single view. ESXi has a very low learning curve and allows administrators to ramp up quickly on how to properly and safely manage and deploy virtual environments.

Richard Potts

Network & Systems Administrator in Information Technology at College Foundation, Inc. (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

View profile

VMware ESXI

Rating: 8 out of 10

April 7, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

VMware Esxi is very good product. Which helps people to virtualize the environment or data center. I am using Exsi for last 5 years. VMware vsphere is giving graphical view to to control the servers. EXSI helps to vertiualize the network, storage, CPU and Memory. We can virualize whole data center and vm spinup time is very less.

Pros

Network virtualize
Storage Virtualize
CPU virtualize
Memory virualize

Cons

Data Storage handling
Network handling
Available with respect to internet
We can not access Vsphere anytime anywhere

Likelihood to Recommend

VMware ESxi is a very stable and reliable OS. We have had longer uptime on the server by using this OS. Adding more CPUs without adding sockets is as easy it used to be. Too many servers have been created by techs that's are not correct leads some serious issue

Satchidananda Rout

Senior Software Engineer in Information Technology at Orange Business Services (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

View profile

VMware ESXi is a Great, Solid Choice for Virtualization!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 5, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use VMware ESXi at many sites to virtualize the servers they need and reduce the number of servers needed. This also helps when multiple software packages used would contend with each other if on the same server. We have a few different deployment styles and all of them help provide more flexibility for users and better uptime and maintenance for IT staff. This has really helped the workflow for our sites and increased productivity as we roll up new applications in addition to the ever-demanding need to update applications without taking down another application as we reboot VM servers.

Pros

VMware ESXi is a very stable and reliable OS. We have had longer uptime on the server by using this OS.
Using VMware ESXi allows for Windows servers to reboot faster as they don't need to go through BIOS. The VMware ESXi OS itself boots quickly too when we do need to reboot the host.
By using VMware ESXi, our organization has gained flexibility we have not had with smaller sites that only had a few servers. This allows us to split applications to their own servers and keep them running while maintaining different applications and not taking down everything at once.

Cons

Easier patching of single hosts has become a problem. We are finding it more difficult to schedule maintenance as there are more and more patches needing to be applied, and vCenter cannot update itself. For larger multi-host deployments this is not an issue.
Some newer updates include more features in the GUI, but at the same time make things feel buried. It is not as intuitive as it was, but with time it is not terrible to adjust.
Adding more CPUs without adding sockets is not as easy as it used to be. Too many servers have been created by techs that are not correct and lead to slow servers.

Likelihood to Recommend

VMware ESXi is a very stable product that gives a lot of flexibility. The uptime provided by VMware ESXi is much higher, but when you do have a patch a single standalone host is difficult. As with anything now there are more and more patches to be done, so maintaining and staying up to date takes longer. Overall, using VMware ESXi there are so many advantages and features we can't look back to not having it in our organization. It has allowed for more applications to be deployed faster and easier than ever before.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

15 years of experience

VMware ESXi - The Best for Virtualization

Rating: 10 out of 10

April 4, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using the VMware ESXi to create the multiple virtual machines over single physical server. Easily we can migrate the VMs to another physical servers without any issue. Easily we can scale up and scale down the resource of VMs as per demands. VMware ESXi provides the lots easy and advanced feature like snapshot, backup & restore, resource allocation which help make project work smoothly.

Pros

Resource scalability
Operate much faster
Easy to take VMs backup and restore
Easily we can migrate the VMs between the physical servers.
Reliability and flexibility

Cons

Remove the API Limitation in free version
Hardware monitoring

Likelihood to Recommend

VMware ESXi is leading name in the world for virtualization and its very user friendly administrator tool. Easily we can migrate the VMs between physical servers online. Management of VMs are much easy like Virtual machines creation, backup & restore, reboot, snapshot, resource scaling etc. We had great experience to work on VMware ESXi. VMware ESXi provide the load balance between physical servers.

Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

A class above the rest

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 4, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use ESXi in our organization for our virtualized workloads. ESXi provides a solution for growing organizations that have way too much of a physical presence. Without ESXi, datacenters would be filled with single-purpose, standalone servers. 99% of our environment currently runs on ESXi. I have used it in my previous jobs and still do in my current one.

Pros

Ease of management.
Installation is very straightforward.
Support is great as well as online documentation.

Likelihood to Recommend

Having used both Hyper-V and ESXi (2 of the most popular options for businesses), I highly favor ESXi. There has been a lot of improvements made over the years to ESXi and it continues to get better. ESXi can even boot off of USB/SD, which makes it really easy to deploy. The only scenario I can think of that may be an issue is possibly licensing costs but that really depends on what your environment is like and what your goals are.

Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

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VMware ESXi is a Great, Solid Choice for Virtualization!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 5, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

VMware ESXi is a very stable and reliable OS. We have had longer uptime on the server by using this OS.
Using VMware ESXi allows for Windows servers to reboot faster as they don't need to go through BIOS. The VMware ESXi OS itself boots quickly too when we do need to reboot the host.
By using VMware ESXi, our organization has gained flexibility we have not had with smaller sites that only had a few servers. This allows us to split applications to their own servers and keep them running while maintaining different applications and not taking down everything at once.

Cons

Easier patching of single hosts has become a problem. We are finding it more difficult to schedule maintenance as there are more and more patches needing to be applied, and vCenter cannot update itself. For larger multi-host deployments this is not an issue.
Some newer updates include more features in the GUI, but at the same time make things feel buried. It is not as intuitive as it was, but with time it is not terrible to adjust.
Adding more CPUs without adding sockets is not as easy as it used to be. Too many servers have been created by techs that are not correct and lead to slow servers.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

15 years of experience