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VMware ESXi

VMware ESXi

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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Learn from top reviewers

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

Rating: 9 out of 10
December 31, 2024
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 us...
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Carlos Coque
Analyst - Information Technology
System Administrator
IBEX Payroll Services
VMware ESXi9 years of experience

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

Rating: 6 out of 10
August 10, 2023
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
VMware ESXi is used for all of our Production and Test/Development environments in our organization.
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David Riberdy
Supervisor - Information Technology
Enterprise Data Management Supervisor
Southern Farm Bureau Casualty Insurance Company
VMware ESXi20 years of experience

Simply the best in business IT asset virtualization.

Rating: 10 out of 10
June 17, 2023
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 tempo...
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Brendon Brown
Director - Information Technology
eComerce Director
Island City Media
VMware ESXi8 years of experience

VMware continues to work well

Rating: 10 out of 10
June 14, 2023
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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.
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Chris Hein
Administrator - Information Technology
Systems Engineer
CIH
VMware ESXi8 years of experience

ESXi helped us out a bunch!

Rating: 9 out of 10
June 13, 2023
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
We use ESXi within all of our Production, Development, & Testing environments to manage and run critical workloads that the company leverages for revenue generating applic...
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Richard Potts
Administrator - Information Technology
Network & Systems Administrator
College Foundation, Inc.
VMware ESXi10 years of experience
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Pricing

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VMware ESXi

VMware ESXi

N/A
Unavailable

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.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Would you like us to let the vendor know that you want pricing?

359 people also want pricing

Alternatives Pricing

VMware vSphere

VMware vSphere

$995
per year
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.

Hyper-V

Hyper-V

$24.95
per month

Sorry, this product's description is unavailable

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Product Demos

VMware ESXi 5.1 Install & Configure In Oracle Virtual Box

YouTube
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Features

Server Virtualization

Server virtualization allows multiple operating systems to be run completely independently on a single server

8.3
Avg 8.2
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Product Details

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:

  • 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 TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

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 Management console highest, with a score of 8.8.

The most common users of VMware ESXi are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews From Top Reviewers

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(1-5 of 44)

VMWare ESXi, battle tested hypervisor marred by questionable design choices.

Rating: 7 out of 10
Incentivized
May 27, 2016
CS
Colby Shores
DevOps Engineer
Voice Media Group (Marketing and Advertising, 201-500 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
VMware ESXi
4 years of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use VMware ESXi as our primary hypervisor to host our web architecture. Before we implemented VMware, we had previously provisioned machines by installing Linux on bare metal. This task used to to take days and limited the amount of machines we could create due to the size of the physical hardware. Before VMware ESXi we our machines contained multiple tasks which from an administration perspective was a nightmare. It wasn't clear how systems where configured or what their tasks where. In order to become more agile as a company, we adopted VMware to virtualize our infrastructure.
Pros
  • Virtualization allows us to create machines that handle specific tasks rather than a bare metal OS that uses the entire hardware; on bare metal, an admin has to use the machine to handle multiple tasks which is confusing to administrate.
  • VMware is fantastic at migrating systems between hosts. This is important to distribute load and for consideration in case of hardware failure.
  • VMware makes automation a snap, we currently use puppet & kickstart for our automation software. Virtualization allows us to be agile in creating systems and destroying them. Before VMware we had to provision machines by hand which is costly in labor costs.
  • VMware has some exciting verticals that integrate well with its hypervisor, VSan comes to mind which helped us address our need for resiliency in case of a hardware fault.
Cons
  • VMWare ESXi 5.0 introduced a Adobe Flash based web interface as it's primary way of interfacing with the hypervisor and it was near unusable when it first launched; sluggish and buggy. VMWare ESXi 6 is a vast improvement over 5.0, however it is still very sluggish and buggy(especially when logging in to the interface). Another thing that concerns me as a Linux DevOps engineer, since it is using Flash, the version of Flash it requires is not even supported on Linux Chrome anymore with no future upgrade path!
  • VMware really needs to scrap the entire code base for the web interface, its an abomination and rebuild it in HTML5. This is the primary reason why I give VMWare ESXi a 7.
  • VMWare ESXi's verticals are also one of its faults. Since their products are completely interoperable with each other, it makes it difficult to switch to another platform in the future. Furthermore, some of the other compelling open source solutions such as Ceph(as opposed to VSan) are unsupported as a back end for VMWare.
  • We have servers between Intel and AMD, there is an artificial limitation VMWare has imposed that prohibits live migration between VMWare hosts between different CPU types.
  • VMWare ESXi us unable to add additional CPU or memory to live systems while other competing hypervisors are able to.
Likelihood to Recommend
VMWare is well suited for a mid sized company that absolutely has to have technical support however other most other hypervisors based on KVM have caught up and in many cases surpassed VMWare's offerings in performance and affordability. I also can't recommend VMWare ESXi in it's current state with the web client the way it is from a Linux administration perspective.

Server Virtulization: Less is More

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
September 07, 2016
CJ
Curtis Jackson
Network Admin
School City of Hammond (Education Management, 1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
VMware ESXi
7 years of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
VMware ESXi is used for server virtualization across our whole organization. We are approximately 85 percent virtualized. It allows us to utilize less server space, power, and cooling while allowing us to quickly spin up more servers. We have also included some desktop virtualization in our organization. It allows for much more efficient management of our servers.
Pros
  • Allows our organization to spin up needed servers in a short time based upon pre-staged templates.
  • Make for simplified updates on hosts with migration features.
  • Space, Power, and cooling requirements have been dramatically reduced because we have been able to remove older servers and replaced with fewer more efficient server hosts.
Cons
  • Would like all the functions including updating be all in one client instead requiring the fat client for Update Manger.
  • Web client is still a little slow.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is awesome for server virtualization when trying to reduce servers.

VMware ESXi For The Win!

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized
October 06, 2015
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Facilities Services Company, 51-200 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
VMware ESXi
7 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use VMware ESXi as our main virtualization platform. It is managed by our IT department. We have multiple sites tied together using VMware vCenter Server. It helps us manage our entire virtualized environment by providing a streamlined interface through the vSphere client. The amount of time we have spent troubleshooting server issues has declined greatly since we adopted VMware.
Pros
  • The vSphere client interface is very intuitive to use whether accessed via the web or local client.
  • It is easy to perform the initial installation and configuration of ESXi.
  • The integrated monitoring functionality makes it easy to monitor the status of the physical server.
Cons
  • The web interface for vSphere is quite slow.
  • Several new features are no longer supported in the locally installed vSphere client.
  • If you upgrade a VM to machine version 10 or greater, it is hard to downgrade.
Likelihood to Recommend
How large do you plan on scaling your environment? It may be possible to use the free version of ESXi in smaller environments.

ESXi virtualizes ahead of the pack

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized
January 12, 2018
Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology
Computer Software Company, 5001-10,000 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
VMware ESXi
12 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
It is used across the entire organization and solves providing temporary servers, right-sizing the servers (physical servers are more limited in their RAM and CPU configurations. A single physical server can host dozens of virtual server VMs, all with different operating systems installed. It also abstracts the [hardware] from the server which enables a VM to be exported to a different building or location or even a different company. Virtualizing large servers can reduce cooling, power, ups, cables, physical space and racks, noise, support. Many processes like antivirus, backups, boot ups, upgrades can be more centralized.
Pros
  • Support of so many operating systems including various Windows and Unix, including many variations.
  • API PowerCLI scripting can help automated enterprise tasks to scale
  • Virtualizing physical servers provides much higher ROI compared to non-virtualized servers running a single OS
  • ESXi loads in ram on the server & it's small so the hypervisor uses very little of the hosts resources
Cons
  • The client has been the most common complaint about ESXi. It took 4 years to complete the web client and as soon as it was finished, they announced it would be replaced by the HTML client. frustratingly, the html client is incomplete which puts users in the same predicament as the previous 4 years.
  • Converter could be better integrated into ESXi (client) which would make creating VMs (p2v) much easier and would also prompt VMware to continue to update and improve converter (which has not had many improvements or updates since being released.
  • Maintenance mode should be much quicker when ESXi is used with vSAN.
Likelihood to Recommend
The bigger the server, the better the ROI with ESXi since more CPU and RAM mean more or bigger VMs, whereas smaller servers are a poor choice fo ESXixi. For example, ESXi can install on a 2 core 8GB server but there would be no CPU or RAM for VMs. On the other end, a super large server could become an issue since it might have 100s of VMs which would need to migrate or be powered off anytime the host was updated. Those VMs would also need to restart elsewhere during a failure.

Basic VMware ESXi Review

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
April 23, 2019
JV
John Van Lieshout
Network Engineer
Lincoln County, WI (Government Administration, 501-1000 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
VMware ESXi
15 years of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use VMware ESXi across our entire network. It simplifies the backup process and management of our server environment. The cost savings in hardware (space and number of servers) and power consumption is worth the upfront cost.
Pros
  • You can manage all of your servers through one pane of glass.
  • High availability if you are using clusters.
  • Using templates to turn up servers takes about 5 minutes.
Cons
  • I would like it if the old client was still used. The web interface is nice, but the client worked better.
Likelihood to Recommend
In large server farms it is at its best. However, I still use it sometimes on single server deployments.
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