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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%
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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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- 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
(76-100 of 127)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
January 08, 2020
Industry leading hypervisor - for good reason!
We are using VMWare ESXi as our primary virtualization platform across our server rooms. We are using it on our hyperconverged nodes to allow scalable compute across all our machines. We use it to provision virtual machines for all business tasks and have it running 24x7 throughout our on-premise cloud. It is used daily [frankly always] and allows us to scale our infrastructure virtually instead of physically, saving hardware costs.
- Virtualization is powerful and feature rich
- Highly scalable from one node to thousands
- Challenging to learn initially
- High cost of implementation
December 31, 2019
VMware ESXi in the Eyes of An Administrator and End-User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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 21, 2019
VMware ESXi is pound-for-pound the best hypervisor in the business
ESXi has enabled us to reduce our infrastructure footprint at our datacenters thus reducing our cost of doing business. ESXi, vCenter clustering, has also added a layer of redundancy when it comes to the threat of physical hardware failure. Running ESXi also saves time by making it quicker and easier to spin up and deploy new servers.
- Has the best memory management in the virtualization business.
- ESXi itself uses very little resources.
- Upgrades can be clunky if host is in a cluster.
- Management can be difficult if vCenter is not used.
December 17, 2019
VMWare ESXi Brings Stability
We use VMWare ESXi standard edition as bare-metal Hypervisor hosts on our physical servers. We have virtualized all our servers on VMWare ESXi and do not have any physical servers, aside from the ESXi hosts. The guests are a mixture of Linux and Windows and with the guest addons agent installed, management and data sharing between ESXi and guest OS is seamless.
- Management console is comprehensive.
- Easy to spot resource intensive machines, resource bottleneck.
- Advanced features are cryptic and require external explanations to decipher.
- Disk management features to reduce virtual drives is not present.
December 03, 2019
VMware ESXi, still the market leader for a reason.
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 26, 2019
Small piece of software with great and strong virtualization skills!
We have 2 vCenters based on 22 VMware ESXi hosts. We are hosting virtual servers, virtual appliances, and also VMWare Horizon View VDI non-persistent desktops on the VMware ESXi hosts. We are providing services like Microsoft AD, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL, and other essential Microsoft Services like file and print, etc. for more than 200 users based on these VMware ESXi hosts.
- VMware ESXi hosts are very stable.
- VMware ESXi hosts don't need a lot of performance.
- VMware ESXi hosts are easy to maintain.
- VMware ESXi hosts can run from a USB stick if necessary (a nice-to-know fact).
- Troubleshooting sometimes need some digging.
November 25, 2019
VMware ESXi helps you to to cloud
We use VMware ESXi to support our servers. We have four vCenters across three data centers. Our primary datacenter holds more than 400 MVs. Within this DC, we support our preproduction and our production VMS. Thanks to this technology, we can save on electricity, rack footprint, and hardware obsolescence. Whenever we need to upgrade a hardware platform, instead of continuing with hardware silos, we virtualize that particular technology, thus saving costs.
- Consolidate hardware.
- One way to move towards clouds.
- Best technology to do replication to other data centers with minimum admin efforts.
- It helps to save on storage footprint.
- VMtools should be easier to install/maintain because it is individual on each VM.
- Integrate marketplace within the vCenter.
- Include Windows and Linux licensing within vCenter.
November 23, 2019
The world-leading Hypervisor Software
ESXi from VMware is used as a hypervisor for all our internal servers. We have Windows and Linux servers/applications deployed. We use ESXi in a cluster in combination with vCenter for better availability and for easy management.
- Very powerful.
- You can manage a lot of VMs.
- Individual Settings for VMs.
- Templates.
- Network configuration.
- Not easy to use.
- Implementation requires a lot of know-how.
- Network architecting is not that easy.
November 20, 2019
The only server virtualization platform that you need
We use VMware ESXi in our local data center to run all the on-premise virtual machines with ease. We can deploy or clone machines in a second, manage them perfectly as well as maintain backups and all our hyper-converged infrastructure through the VMware plugin, hence it has become the heart of our data center.
- Best on-premise data center hypervisor.
- Stability of the platform.
- Security in all the needed aspects.
- Web interface is sometimes laggy.
- Licenses are not very cheap.
- Automation can be improved.
November 18, 2019
Server virtualization done right
VMware ESXi is used to host our server farms, it provides us with high availability and optimizes the use of our hardware, allowing us to better use the available hardware. The high availability part comes into play when hardware failures occur or maintenance is required. Allowing the virtual servers to be moved easily to different hosts.
- High Availability
- Resource management
- Hardware virtualization
- The licenses policy are not very rigid and the best options are stuck behind the most expensive license.
- Configuration management is limited versus some other products currently on the market.
- Better/simpler automation would be great, for example automated ways of doing blue green would be very welcome.
November 15, 2019
ESXi, hypervisor extraordinaire!
We utilize ESXi to help get more bang for our buck for our compute workloads. We run primarily Windows and Linux workloads. We use ESXi across our whole organization. ESXi allows us to perform maintenance without downtime. We can also automate provisioning and maintenance with tools to allow for more efficient use of our time.
- Stable software.
- Supports many guest OS'es.
- Allows for automation.
- Allows for more uptime.
- Quality support can be hard to receive.
- Licensing for features can be expensive.
- The learning curve for new users can be steep.
November 12, 2019
VMware has made life simpler
It's been used in our organization and also we recommend it for other companies as it helps to reduce the number of servers and the power consumption too.
It helps to get 6 to 7 applications on a single server reducing a huge data center space.
- Within PBX the number of servers has reduced drastically by having all applications in one.
- Redundancy within VMware has helped a lot to have a reliable system in place.
- The IP address/Network port requirements are reduced drastically when VMware is used.
- License cost shd be reduced since yearly renewal cost adds up which is avoided by many organizations.
- The VMware license selection needs to be made simpler.
November 12, 2019
Upgrading to the virtual realm for a mid-sized business
VMware ESXi is being utilized to bring virtualization into the current environment. ESXi is the backbone of the virtual infrastructure within the organization. It was brought in originally to assist with some virtual systems for remote users who needed to utilize software that does not behave well through VPN. By bringing in this product we allowed out user base to take advantage of virtual systems that can be accessed from any location that has internet access.
- Manage resources for virtual machines
- Allows ease of access to maintain and upkeep VDI
- Gives a high level overview of current resources that are being used
- The various add-on features can make things a bit complicated
- It is an expensive solution v.s other options
- Web interface is not the easiest to navigate
November 06, 2019
Fantastic Virtualization Platform!
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.
October 25, 2019
Best Hypervisor for on prem workloads
We use VMware ESXi to run on on prem compute workloads. We use VMware across the board on our on prem footprint. VMware helps us keep our servers running dense and enables ease of server deployment, backup, recovery, and migrations. This keeps the business up and running with minimal downtime thanks to all the virtualization features.
- This is the best product for on prem virtualization.
- vMotions both storage and standard help us stay agile and helps us support our applications.
- VMware can get complicated with all the add-on features.
- Sometimes its hard to find a starting point between their other solutions.
October 22, 2019
After using VMWare for all these years it still feels like magic
We host probably 95% of our servers on a 9 host VMWare server cluster containing over 200 virtual machines. We also have a colocation and remote office that we run a couple VMWare hosts at with a handful of machines at each location as well. Running our business on VMWare has been incredibly amazing over the years, it allows so much flexibility and scalability as well as cost and data center footprint reduction.
- Ability to stand up a new virtual server within a few minutes.
- Cost reduction due to fewer hardware purchases throughout the year and saves on electricity due to fewer physical servers running in the data center.
- Ability to make virtual hardware changes on the fly such as adding more CPU or RAM or increasing hard drive space within minutes.
- The new web UI that was forced upon us with version 6 isn't bad now but still preferred the old thick client as it was faster and familiar.
- I wish they maintained support for older hardware for longer, usually, we find after a couple of big revisions the old servers aren't totally compatible and we like to use our hardware for many years more than most people probably do
- Licensing can be a bit confusing.
VMware ESXi is being used to provide a bare-metal VMware hypervisor running on our Dell Servers. The entire organization uses virtual servers running on this platform. It provided a smaller footprint version of ESX that we run on system integrated flash built into the hardware. We originally began using ESXi to allow for disk-less servers that were attached to dedicated iSCSI storage arrays.
- ESXi has been around for quite some time now and is very prevalent in IT so knowledge/experience is easy to come by.
- The application is very quick and easy to install/configure and requires light local resources to get going and begin using.
- The management application is easy to use and easy to teach people to use.
- The list of positives around virtualization aren't unique to ESXi but include greatly reduced hardware churn, much less power consumption, and vastly easier migration and backup operations.
- Licensing cost can be a challenge for starting to use and maintaining ESXi. There are ways to mitigate this using less CPU sockets with more cores but you have to be aware of this or it gets very expensive to purchase and maintain.
- In the early years of use, the product was more rock solid in progressions through new versions. Lately, we have had a few issues crop up with trying to maintain the most current versions. We have subsequently stayed a bit behind to let them work out issues.
- Support for the product has also seemingly suffered as it has grown very large. We don't have many problems in quantity, but when we do occasionally have one crop up, first tier hasn't seemed super effective and the process has been a bit drawn out without any real resolution at times.
We use VMware ESXi at small client sites that have a surplus of legacy hardware and don't have the budget for cloud-based virtual machines, or fully licensed VMware products (vSphere). We generally make use of it to run multiple light-duty VMs on older server hardware to maximize its usefulness before EOL.
- It's free!
- Hardware compatibility is very good. If the version direct from VMware has issues with your server-class hardware, most likely the OEM has a version of ESXi with their drivers.
- Web management client in newer versions is excellent.
- Relatively easy setup.
- While ESXi is "free," if you are running Windows Servers as VMs, there's very little reason to use ESXi instead of using the Hyper-V license that comes with your Windows Server license and has less limitations.
- Arbitrary vCPU, etc limitations.
- While setup is relatively easy, if you run into an issue, the documentation is pretty bad and usually solutions can be found on random blogs.
- CLI isn't well documented.
August 31, 2019
Good, solid product that saves time and budget.
We use ESXi for nearly all servers in our school district, very few things left on physical servers. This makes it easy for me (I am the only one in my department managing servers) to work on everything from one centralized location. I almost never have to be on-site with our hosts, and I can spin up new machines on the fly in a few minutes. This also saves us thousands of dollars in hardware costs, which is incredibly important for public education.
- Snapshots! These are the ultimate way to cover yourself. I create one before installing or updating almost everything because then if something errors out and starts to cause issues you are back to normal working order in seconds rather than hours/days.
- Distributed Switches are quite nice, so long as all of your hosts in a cluster have the same ports, you can set up the virtual switches one time and it propagates out to all of the hosts for that group.
- VMotion/balancing the load in general. Whether you do it manually or use DRS to move your virtual servers around it is incredibly simple to adjust the computing resource for your virtual server to make sure that you are sharing the load evenly across all of your hosts.
- Updates are pretty much a complete reinstall. This has gotten better over the years, but is still a cumbersome process.
- Sometimes features release before they are fully baked. ESXi 6.5 released and HTML 5 GUI for VCenter that only included "partial functionality."
July 19, 2019
Not great for the basics
ESXi is being used primarily as a GPU server and as a remote desktop server with the Horizon system. This allows the entire company to have individual desktops wherever they are in the world. It eliminates our data security concerns with traveling employees as all our company data is in the office with the virtual desktops and the user just logs into the desktop/information. The GPU passthrough is used to add extra power for some employees (engineers) with extra demands. ESXi allows for consumer Nvidia cards to be used, saving cost.
- GPU Passthrough.
- Remote Desktop Server.
- Web interface.
- File transfering.
- Resource utilization.
July 18, 2019
Small Government Use of VMware ESXi
Our VMware ESXi environment runs almost all our virtual servers. What used to be two 48U racks of servers is now consolidated down to less than half a rack. Server management is simplified and requires less downtime.
- Ease of use.
- Fast.
- Well documented.
- Price. There are many free and open source alternatives.
- HTML5 management client still isn't 100% complete.
- Some components such as Site Recovery Manager still require a Windows Server.
June 13, 2019
ESXi fan because it makes my life easier
EXSi is the foundation for all of our virtual machines. Virtualization has allowed us to scale down our physical server count considerably, reducing overhead costs. It allows us flexibility in terms of spinning up new virtual machines and how we manage them with vCenter
- Makes it incredibly easy to deploy new virtual machines.
- Works well with our SAN and our backup software integrates nicely with ESXi.
- Their support has been helpful when I've needed it.
- We are on version 6.0 and it has some Flash problem with browsers. We could not manage vCenter after a Flash update in google and had to use the thick client.
- It would be nice if it was easier to update. They have gotten better with subsequent releases but it's not great with 6.0.
- It's not cheap compared to Hyper-V
May 14, 2019
VMware ESXi The best Virtual Host!
VMware ESXi is being used as the primary platform to host our applications servers. We are currently using 3 hosts in a cluster with roughly 25 Microsoft/Linux VMs. VMware allows us to reduce physical hardware and electrical costs, as well as giving us ease of access to our environment.
- Ease of Access to your virtual environment
- Easy to learn and logical interface
- The support staff are always helpful
- I've not run across anything I've not been able to do yet.
May 01, 2019
ESXi bare metal performance at a reasonable cost
VMware ESXi provides the core backbone to hosted private cloud applications and services. It hooks into a multi-clustered VSphere and SRM environments.
- Hypervisor boot speed
- Ability to run deprecated server operating systems (Centos 3,4, NT, XP, Windows 2000) in a contained environment.
- Excellent documentation available freely online.
- License fees of the tie-in infrastructure products are expensive.
- Free license version makes it difficult to patch.
- Hyper V can support more host physical memory than ESXi.
April 24, 2019
VMware ESXi saves us money and space in the data center
VMware ESXi is used within our university to virtualize the servers in our data center in order to minimize the physical server footprint. It allows us to maximize our resources by fully utilizing all of the available memory and CPU in each host. VMware ESXi also provides us with redundancy and high-availability features to ensure that all of our servers are available at all times.
- Using VMware ESXi together with VCenter is a great platform for maintaining the VMs, virtual networks, building data centers, and tracking what is going on with our VMs.
- I like it because it takes control of all the resources of my computer and presents them as a single pool of resources, also allows me to manage my host, to provide different services in a way centralized and dynamic.
- Super easy to deploy and amazing customer service and support.
- I do not like the web client for VMware ESXi.
- Cost is high.
- Everything else is good.