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Powerful Tool for Managing VMs: Users consistently praise VMware ESXi as a powerful tool for managing a large number of virtual machines, …
Overview
What is VMware ESXi?
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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Popular Features
- Live virtual machine migration (115)9.393%
- Management console (127)8.888%
- Virtual machine automated provisioning (115)8.585%
- Hypervisor-level security (116)8.383%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
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Southern Farm Bureau Casualty Insurance Company (Insurance, 1001-5000 employees)
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What is VMware ESXi?
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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- No setup fee
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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What is VMware vSphere?
An enterprise workload platform, vSphere is used to improve the performance for a data center. It is used to boost operational efficiency, supercharge workload performance, and accelerate innovation.
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VMware ESXi 5.1 Install & Configure In Oracle Virtual Box
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What is VMware ESXi?
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.
ESXi is used to:
ESXi is used to:
- Consolidate hardware for higher capacity utilization.
- Increase performance for a competitive edge.
- Streamline IT administration through centralized management.
- Reduce CapEx and OpEx.
- Minimize hardware resources needed to run the hypervisor, boosting efficiency.
VMware ESXi Integrations
VMware ESXi Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Reviewers rate Live virtual machine migration highest, with a score of 9.3.
The most common users of VMware ESXi are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Pros
- Cons
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.
Confusing User Interface: Many users have expressed frustration with the confusing and non-intuitive user interface of VMware ESXi. This has made it challenging for them to perform tasks efficiently, causing unnecessary delays and difficulties in managing their virtual environments.
Stability Issues: Several users have encountered stability issues with VMware ESXi's hypervisor. These issues have resulted in instances of corruption, leading to the need for reinstallations. The instability not only disrupts operations but also poses potential risks to data integrity and system reliability.
High Pricing and Complexity: The pricing of VMware products is often considered a barrier, particularly for smaller businesses. Many users find the deployment process complex and excessive for their needs, requiring significant time and resources to set up properly. This can be overwhelming, especially for organizations with limited IT expertise or budget constraints.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(26-50 of 127)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
March 24, 2022
Ease with Esxi..!!
Esxi was used to host and manage numerous virtual machines across the departments and administer the virtual machines and hosts. Esxi is an easy-to-understand and self-explanatory application in VMware, scheduled patching is done on all the virtual machines and hosts to enable seamless management of virtual machines. We managed about 250+ machines for our customers.
- COnfiguration is easy the self explanatory in ESXi.
- ESXi supports various operating systems as well.
- ESXi is reliable and gives great performance.
- ESXi makes functionality seamless.
- Unable to integrate with 3rd party backup applications.
- Integration with 3rd party applications could help simplify tasks and reduce multiple applications.
- Performance tracking should be available in data analytics format.
March 24, 2022
VMware ESXi - The Gold Standard in Hypervisors
VMware ESXi was used to provide virtual machines to support work-from-home for faculty, staff, and students. Virtual machines provided remote access to internal systems which would otherwise require the user to be onsite. Virtual machines were also provided to students and instructors to provide computer configurations that would otherwise not be available.
- An extremely reliable platform with greater than 99% of uptime.
- Very secure platform.
- Number of tools that enable management of the platform.
- Very stable VMware product.
- The upgrade/patch process is in need of a complete overhaul.
March 24, 2022
Best virtualization solution
We use it as our secondary virtualization platform, in collaboration with OpenStack.
- Virtualization
- Orchestration
- Security
- Networking
- Price
- Hybrid between on-premise and cloud services.
- vSAN
March 24, 2022
VMware ESXi the only real choice
We use VMWare ESXi as the virtualization platform for our entire production environment. It allows us to design and rapidly deploy environments that are flexible, redundant, and efficient. We have used VMware ESXi for two years and are quite happy with the product. It is essential to everything that we do.
- Ease of Access to all of my Virtual servers.
- Great performance visibility.
- Easy to Grow at a moment's notice.
- Complexity - if you're not familiar with the product there is a learning curve.
- VMware ESXi could find a way to boot faster.
March 24, 2022
One of the best hypervisors available in market!!
VMware ESXi is being used as an important part of our virtual infrastructure. We are running VMware ESXi as our core hypervisor to host virtual machines and run the entire on-prem infrastructure on it. It provides us with a range of features that are more than enough for keeping the infra stable and available at most. I am a VMware Consultant in the organization and responsible for the implementation and management of VMware products.
- Hardware Virtualization.
- Supports multiple OEMs.
- Can be aligned with other important infrastructure tools.
- Single host management should be improved.
- One-click SSL certificate renewal from custom location cannot be done.
- Host isolation management can be improved.
March 24, 2022
The best hypervisor for private clouds.
We're using VMware ESXi to virtualize our infrastructure, servers, and desktops. Our needs are to maximize our physical servers and increase availability. Our business requires very low downtime, including maintenance, backups and we need to support a lot of OS versions. Servers are across Canada and US, in private DC and colocations, using WAN and Internet links.
- Performance
- Reliability
- Security
- Maintenance
- interoperability
- licensing
- pricing
March 23, 2022
VMWare ESXi Is Great For All Business Sizes!
I utilize VMWare ESXI to manage my virtual environment district-wide. When we jumped into virtualized environments 8 or 9 years ago, VMWare was our go-to choice, and it has been the same ever since. The GUI of it is very easy to traverse, and device drivers are easily found as VMWare is among the highest used virtualization technologies in the industry. VMWare ESXi has also simplified our backup strategies - as it's much easier to capture a virtualized snapshot - and back that up - rather than trying to backup direct from (and to) disk.
- Incredibly quick to deploy. Total installation time of less than five minutes
- Able to easily mount ISCSI storage devices to VMWare ESXi hosts within the GUI
- Allows you to run the product for free - if you stay under the physical core count (and with some reduced features)
- Incredibly stable software - we have not run into any issues that were a direct result of VMWare ESXi being at fault
- Very low hardware resources utilized to run this product
- It would be nice if it was easier to upgrade between versions/releases
- Trying to find some of their software downloads can be difficult, as their website is not the greatest - also requires you to be logged in to view any of their software downloads (which is difficult if you're working with a reseller)
- When you click on "Virtual Network Cards" as a hotlink - it generally breaks your session. So that small bug could also be patched.
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.
March 22, 2022
VMware ESXi to the rescue!
We use VMware ESXi as our primary hypervisor platform for two separate environments with a combined total of approx 300 virtual machines split over two datacentres. For our main production environment, we have an HA cluster spread over both DC's with replicated storage supported the VMs. This works perfectly for us as we have the ability for full failover if needed and VMware takes a lot of the issues away by handling all the failover of virtual machines to other hosts etc.
- HA Failover
- SAN Management
- Cluster Resource Management
- iSCSI Storage connectivity
- Update Management
- Host Management
February 04, 2022
VMware ESXi (Elastic Sky X Integrated)!
We have a mini data center for our office. We have optimized our IT infrastructure by creating VMs instead of HW. Vmware ESXi is a bare-metal Type-1 hypervisor that can be deployed on bare metal and we can create multiple virtual machines. Antivirus servers, SQL servers, etc., all have been hosted on VM. We can modify or allocate CPUs, RAM, etc. according to the need through multiple features like VMotion, HA, etc. Vmware has helped us to decrease the use of multiple hardware, manpower as well as it has also helped us to save time.
- It partitions applications from underlying hardware to cut costs.
- It abstracts the CPU, RAM, Storage, etc from physical hardware into multiple virtual machines.
- You can host multiple applications with different OS, different nature of applications on each virtual machine hosted on the server.
- It provides live migration and automatic load balancing through features like VMotion, HA, etc.
- No official VMware technical support
- Does not support all operating systems like UNIX, AIX
- Permission structure can get confusing sometimes
September 28, 2021
Highly recommended, you know what you're getting with VMware
We make use of VMware ESXi and vCenter with a collection of clustered servers, geographically split between two data centres. These data centres run our critical business applications that require an on premises locale. Connected to our SAN, ESXi allows us to have a robust, secure, and easily manageable interface with a platform that supports integration with other vendors to allow for expansion, recovery or backup.
- Quick deployment of VMs.
- Small footprint.
- Easy install.
- Backup integration.
- Secure.
- Premium Price
June 28, 2021
VMware ESXi for the win, again and again
VMware ESXi is the best there is. As a type-1 hypervisor, it supports from the bare metal up. From there, you can install vCenter or standalone hosts that can then create anything from a Linux to an .ova to a Windows environment. I believe VMware ESXi does this better than anyone else in the game that I have used.
- Deploys virtual server very well
- Deploys .ova very well
- Great details, notes, and alerts
- Very scalable
- It can be cost prohibitive for some small to medium-sized businesses
- With its integration with EMC VxRail, getting the right support for the issue can sometimes prove difficult
- Based in VmKernal cli, so if you ever need to ssh, it can get hair pretty quick if you're not in there regularly
May 14, 2021
Simple to use virtulization
We are using VMware ESXI to leverage hardware resources to host multiple VM's across our organization and we are also hosting server vm's for subtenants. The servers are being used to host terminal servers and also being used by our organisation to host and stream applications to our mac's using parallels remote application server
- Low cost
- High end features included for the cost
- Easy to setup
- Great support
- Support can be complicated to understand at times
- obviously not designed for novices
- Mac osx support for management isnt the best
May 13, 2021
Great Product!
We leverage ESXi and VCenter to host all of the university's virtual machines and appliances. This has allowed us to dramatically increase our effective use of space in the data center as well as increased our flexibility with our end users to meet the business requirements that they have for their application needs.
- HA protection
- Workload Balancing
- Elastic resource allocation
- We are looking for more flexibility with vvol usage
- Better and more descriptive error logging in vcenter
- Permission structure can occasionally get confusing
May 13, 2021
VMware ESXi to the rescue!
We use VMware ESXi on a number of servers in order to deploy various virtual machines that are used in our products. It is used across the entire department and in multiple locations.
- Utilizes the underlying hardware effectively.
- Clean and easy to setup.
- Very stable.
- Upgrades can sometimes be difficult
May 13, 2021
Server Virtualization Swiss Army Knife
We use VMware ESXi on various HPE hosts for our server and client virtualization in combination with GPU cards. ESXi is a powerful piece of software that is capable of hosting a large amount of VM's with a very small management footprint. Is is very stable, consumes few resources, and [is] easy, or let's better say, very easy to install. For most of the big vendors, you can find predefined custom images with all necessary drivers etc. for the appropriate HW usage.
- Very small resource footprint.
- Easy to manage.
- Very easy to install.
- Capable of hosting large environments.
- Manage large amount of networks (VLAN's, etc.).
- There is nothing really to add.
- With some releases there were some minor issues.
May 03, 2021
VMware ESxi for the small business
We are using [VMware] ESXi as a backup to our production server infrastructure. We do have a few production servers on that cluster. [VMware] ESXi allows us to easily scale and build new servers without requiring us to constantly purchase new hardware. We have saved a significant amount of money since setting up the [VMware] cluster[.]
- I like how easily it integrates with windows
- Snapshotting is very easy to setup
- There are also many integrations to extend ESXi functionality
- Pricing is a barrier for most companies
- A deployment can get quite complex and overkill for a small company
- I would like to see more options for setting it up in a hyperconverged manner
May 03, 2021
VMware delivers critical business features
VMware [ESXi] is being used to host critical customer facing applications. It is being used by multiple departments across the enterprise. It is the hypervisor of choice for many business units and provides extensive redundancy and high availability features. ESXi has many 3rd party integrations which allow us to leverage our existing tool sets for monitoring and automation workflows.
- High availability
- Resource pooling
- Alerting
- Live resource monitoring
- HTML5 client can be buggy at times
- Better documentation for hidden features
- Support team response time is slow
February 18, 2021
ESXi Industry Standard
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--the best option for small and mid-size data centers
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
VMWare ESXi is still the king of Hypervisors
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.
March 06, 2020
ESXi is great.
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.
February 21, 2020
Behold The Power Of VMware ESXi
VMware ESXi has been in use in my organization for a number of years. We are a healthcare organization and not for profit. We have 9 ESXi servers across 3 sites. ESXi allows my organization to run the servers and applications needed to be successful in providing top-notch healthcare to our patients.
- High availability.
- Easy migration.
- Some of the more advanced features might take additional training.
- Free version limitations.
February 20, 2020
De facto Virtualization Standard
At ~98% virtualization, VMware ESXi forms the core of our server infrastructure. It's an exceptionally mature product that grows with organizational needs. In our organization it is used in two separate AD domains, each instance managed separately. One of the key features of ESXi is high availability; virtualization prevents a single hardware failure from resulting in service loss. If the hardware running ESXi fails or develops a fault condition, the virtualized server can be automatically or manually migrated to a functioning host while the fault condition is addressed. An additional layer of resilience is provided by snapshot technology; prior to making any system changes a snapshot can be taken to supplement existing backups and provide a point-in-time recovery. Snapshots also make backups less intrusive when a compatible platform is used.
- High availability/vMotion for hosted VMs is a must-have in any business. No one wants their systems to fail, knowing that the hosted systems are protected and always available is a great stress reliever.
- Load and resource balancing (with proper licensing) keeps busy servers from consuming all available resources on a given host. DRS and StorageDRS make short work of balancing workloads, I find this a must-have feature.
- There are some odd issues with VMware's virtualized network drive (VMXNET3). On occasion, after a reboot of a Windows-based VM the NIC will fail to bind properly and network access is unavailable until an admin intervenes by disabling/re-enabling the adapter. While it's possible that our environment is a contributing factor, this never happens on VMs using Intel E1000 emulation, only the paravirtual NICs.
- Logging is extensive but difficult to work with. VMware's solution is a product called Log Insight, which comes at additional cost. Fortunately this is somewhat mitigated by the extensive support documentation and robust user community, but in the heat of the moment obtaining the required detail can be a trying experience.
January 23, 2020
Highly recommended
VMware ESXi is currently used by most of my organization, and I manage two separate sites that have it implemented. It provides a stable and reliable base for our virtual infrastructure. It has been easy to maintain and control, and expansion has also been quite straightforward when we've had the requirement.
- Allows control of VM's on the host, which is helpful if vSphere is unavailable.
- As you would expect, it integrates perfectly with vSphere.
- A better interface to monitor the logs in VMware Esxi would be helpful.