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.
VMWare ESXi is not longer the king of the mountain due to poor service and support
Great tool for productivity.
Simply the best in business IT asset virtualization.
VMware continues to work well
ESXi helped us out a bunch!
Vmware Stability
VMware ESXi still the best
VMware ESXI
VMware ESXi is a Great, Solid Choice for Virtualization!
VMware ESXi - The Best for Virtualization
A class above the rest
VMware ESXi Best for Virtualization
We …
ESXi is the go to for virtualization
faster, scalable, overall perform better
A Second to None Virtual Hosting Platform for Businesses of All Sizes
Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
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
Pricing
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
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Alternatives Pricing
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.
Product Demos
VMware ESXi 5.1 Install & Configure In Oracle Virtual Box
Features
Server Virtualization
Server virtualization allows multiple operating systems to be run completely independently on a single server
- 8.5Virtual machine automated provisioning(115) Ratings
Automation of virtual machine provisioning through use of vm templates
- 8.8Management console(127) Ratings
Management console for central administration of vm environment
- 8.4Live virtual machine backup(111) Ratings
Ability to backup vms without interrupting service
- 9.3Live virtual machine migration(115) Ratings
Downtime minimization by migrating live vms between hosts and across clusters
- 8.3Hypervisor-level security(116) Ratings
Hypervisor-level security including antivirus and anti-malware
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is VMware ESXi?
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
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(806)Community Insights
- 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
- 10Likelihood to Renew6 ratings
- 10Availability2 ratings
- 9.1Performance2 ratings
- 9.1Usability5 ratings
- 9.8Support Rating55 ratings
- 10Implementation Rating3 ratings
- 9.9Configurability2 ratings
- 10Product Scalability2 ratings
- 9.9Ease of integration2 ratings
- 10Vendor pre-sale2 ratings
- 10Vendor post-sale2 ratings
- 5.7Contract Terms and Pricing Model2 ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 43)Great tool for productivity.
- 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.
- 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.
VMware continues to work well
- Reliability
- Ease of use
- Management
- Support & updates
- They are deprecating old hardware soon
- Networking is difficult
VMware ESXi still the best
- Consolidation
- Redundancy
- Stability
- Improve simplicity.
- Improve documentation.
- Improve updates.
VMware ESXi Best for Virtualization
We address the our problems like resource scaling and physical server load balancing. VMware ESXi provide the easy way to create the VMs and easily migrate the from one physical server to another physical online.
- Cluster Failover
- VMs Migration online
- Resource allocation like Disk, CPU & Memory
- Does not support for all Unix system like AIX
- Better and more descriptive error logging in Vcenter
- High-speed performance.
- Memory occupation is less than 150 MB.
- Itself allows for the basic creation and management of virtual machine.
- Remove API limitations in the free version.
- Allows more than 8 vCPUs per VM.
- Support from VMware and documentation.
VMWare ESXi - King of the Hypervisors
- Scalability
- Fault tolerance resilience.
- Centralized management.
- Host network hardware configuration.
- Physical-to-Virtual conversion can be tricky.
- Some of the back-end configurations are exceptionally tricky to learn.
On the professional end, racks of individual servers reduced to a few physical hosts save space, power consumption, and financial resources. The hosts may need to be a bit more powerful than the individual servers, so one host will cost more, but a single host will cost less than replacing 5 single servers. Even if you plan a cluster, which will cost physical raw hard drive storage space like a RAID will, the cost over replacing 5 individual physical servers still comes out cheaper. If you can justify the lower cost for the physical hardware and plan to use the money unspent there to help pay for the upper level license costs, you are good to go.
VMware ESXi to the rescue!
- HA Failover
- SAN Management
- Cluster Resource Management
- iSCSI Storage connectivity
- Update Management
- Host Management
Backups are also made easy and straightforward using systems such as Veeam which plugs in directly to vCenter.
Server Virtualization Swiss Army Knife
- 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.
VMware delivers critical business features
- 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
Highly recommended
- 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.
We recommend VMware ESXi
- Allows a single set of hardware to service many virtual servers.
- Great management interface.
- I haven't used it in a while, but the web client is not that great.
- I don't really have any complaints, the product just works.
VMware ESXi for K12 Schools
- Hugely reduces our need for physical hardware. Our four hosts handle over 130 virtual servers without any problems.
- It is stable. I have not had an ESXi server crash in years, nor do I really ever have to reboot them for problems. They just run smoothly.
- The HTML5 web interface has taken a while to be brought to parity with the old thick client, and a few features are sometimes tricky to find.
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.
ESXi is the gold standard for business virtualization
- Easy to install.
- Very powerful.
- Very picky about what hardware it will install on.
- Many features locked behind advanced licenses and/or additional products (like vCenter).
ESXi is even for small business
- Resource scheduling
- Storage efficiency
- Cost
- Configuration complexity
- Very efficient on bare hardware
- Installs a very small hypervisor footprint
- The web management interface utilizing HTML 5 is still not fully mature.
- Could use the ability to clone a host configuration in case the bootable media fails.
- Quick and accessible to provision servers as needed. Templates can be configured in VMware ESXi.
- VMware ESXi host software efficiently manages hardware resources so that a single-host server can support multiple virtual servers without causing resource contention.
- Understanding Resource groups and resource reservations can be difficult and cause issues if not fully understood.
- I would like to see better performance monitoring capabilities from the web GUI. The current options can be cumbersome, and many still need to be monitored from the command line.
VMware ESXi for everyone!
- It has more virtual operating system support in real life applications, not just in paper.
- Migration from previous versions is a breeze. With vCenter, it can even be automated.
- During the upgrade procedures, problem VIB's are sometimes a pain to find - This was remedied with the release of full HTML though, so this particular problem is only applicable to management via flash.
- Automatic cleaning of Zombie VDK files would be an incredibly nice feature to have.
VMware gives you flexibility and stability
- High availability. Clustered VMware ESXi hosts make it easy to take a host out of production.
- Storage DRS helps balance virtual disks across the cluster.
- The Flash and HTML5 web interfaces are missing simple sorting features for some lists.
- Errors messages can be vague at times, which requires searching the community for answers.
Ready to serve your enterprise needs
- The ability to use a single server and run multiple virtual machines on it has allowed our enterprise to grow it's technology footprint while keeping cost low and administration functionality more simplified.
- With features like High Availability in ESXi, we have been able to build out a resilient environment that, when issues occur at a hardware level, we can respond and be up and running more quickly than if a single application server failed.
- ESXi seems to be written very well, and with years of experience behind them, they tend to be leaders and innovators also. With that, there are still areas that they fall short or could improve upon. One of those is the user interface. Having recently moved to a full HTML5 GUI, some of the interactions are not intuitive or lack in the way that the Flash GUI client would handle the request.
- The Task area needs work. Being able to filter and configure what Task is running or completed should be more user-configurable. The lack of user control does make it hard when you are troubleshooting.
ESXi is still the best virtual host platform among hypervisors
ESXi's purpose is to act as a host platform for creating, running and managing virtual machines of various types, i.e. servers, user endpoints, appliances, web servers, SQL servers, etc. It's similar to Hyper-V (the Microsoft-branded competition for ESXi) but in my opinion, it has more and better features, overall, although the learning curve for ESXi is both steeper and longer for system admins than most other hypervisors.
Why do we use it? ESXi enables us to host many virtual servers and other endpoints on one physical host machine. This saves on electricity, space, heating, and cooling and improves ease of management of the hosted devices for everything from rebooting them to backing them up to restoring them.
Short answer? For small, medium or large enterprises, ESXi is (still) the best choice for hosting virtual machines. It really doesn't have much legitimate, serious competition in the world of hypervisors.
- ESXi makes management of hosted machines easy. Everything is in one place. If you have a vCenter (which costs extra) to manage all your ESXi hosts, then everything is truly in one place and there is no need to hop around from management tool to management tool. Al the virtual machines' hardware settings, OS information, storage volume information, backup information, even a remote console just like a KVM ... all of it is in one place.
- ESXi balances workloads well when using vCenter. Behind the scenes, the vCenter allows an ESXi host to "talk to" other ESXi hosts and when one VM has resources usage that gets past a certain threshold, it can move virtual machines around to balance workloads, even while the machines are running and service users. It's completely invisible to the users, who don't experience latency or any kind of interruptions when their VM is being moved.
- The vSphere / vCenter GUI is complex. This is because there is just a crap-top of stuff that ESXi manages, so there is frankly a crap-top of necessary stuff that you have been able to manage in the user interfaces. The learning curve is a little steep. Just because it does a lot of things.
- Live (powered on) ESXi snapshots of VMs still don't act as SQL backups very well. Snapshots can't backup SQL reliably because of the architecture of SQL and how it interacts with the live resources running on the VM. This is one of the many reasons why taking a snapshot works better when the VM is powered off. This is also why we don't rely only on snapshots to backup our VMs. We also use Veeam and for critical SQL databases we use native SQL backups and in one case, another backup solution (Veritas) that can do SQL better.
If you want a free hypervisor? Then you need to try Hyper-V first to see if it can do everything you think it should be able to do. Hyper-V comes with Windows (both the server and PC flavors) as a role. It can do some basic functions of a host. But it doesn't have all the full capabilities and management features that ESXi hosts do when managed with vSphere / vCenter.
VMware ESXi is a Solid Product for the Enterprise Infrastructure
- Allows quick and easy cloning and customization of new systems.
- Provides the ability to move or transfer virtual machines between environments.
- Upgrades could be made easier or more automated.
- Prefer a thick client back. The web one still seems buggy at times.
The only server virtualization platform that you need
- 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.
Upgrading to the virtual realm for a mid-sized business
- 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
Fantastic Virtualization Platform!
- 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.
After using VMWare for all these years it still feels like magic
- 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.