VMware ESXi

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.

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!

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

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.

Pretty much any scenario except maybe with heavy DB requirements. But VMware ESXi fits almost all scenarios and highly recommend using it everywhere possible for all sizes of environments. It is a small footprint and manages any size of the environment. I have used it for 5 servers up to hundreds of VM's.

I have seen and managed VMware environments of various sizes from a larger company down to small and medium businesses. I feel it is an excellent solution for all business sizes. For anyone looking for a virtual environment for their infrastructure, it works well and can scale easily as a business grows. The tools provided make management simple, and VMware support is one of the best experiences I have ever had out of all of the companies I have dealt with. They are a benchmark in that regard.

Extended page table support comes in handy if you're trying to attach a GPU to a virtual machine or if you're trying to do some sort of nested virtualization which is a good way to test Hyper-V. If you require a single virtual machine or similar needs for the machine, it is not recommended to use. But when you have fewer hardware facilities, it is highly recommended to use them.

Appropriate: Small business environment (when multiple virtual servers are needed.
Less appropriate: 24/7 environment (unless you spend lots of money on high availability servers.

If you're looking for basic virtual servers that you can buy one larger server to run 5+ smaller servers on, the basic VMware ESXi license is free to use. Also good if you're testing how to create virtual servers or test a new environment. On the negative side, to use features like clustering and fault tolerance, you need a higher level license above their base "free" VMware ESXi license and the need for their vCenter Server to maintain it. That can carry a hefty annual software/support maintenance bill every year.

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 is best suited for organizations looking to create or expand their virtual environment. If an organization is continuing to deploy physical workstations or servers, they can save lots of time, money, and space investing in VMware ESXi to build a virtual environment. This will also prevent further headaches in having the recover corrupt servers or workstations as ESXi makes it very easy to take snapshots and integrate 3rd party backup solutions. Where VMware ESXi is less appropriate would be for small "mom/pop" outfits that aren't requiring too many servers or virtual workstations. There is a standard equipment set and technical environment required for VMware ESXi which small business may not need to invest in if they aren't looking for virtual environment solutions.

Using vCenter, the management of multiple hosts is very straightforward. We have an environment with about 30 ESXi hosts so management of these without vCenter would be extremely difficult. However, due to having a web interface for all hosts and vCenter etc, securing everything with web certificates can be frustrating. Using plugins in vCenter, management of third party equipment such as SAN arrays does make life a lot easier being able to manage everything from the one place - single pane of glass etc.
Backups are also made easy and straightforward using systems such as Veeam which plugs in directly to vCenter.

VMware ESXi are the market leader and make management / administration simple and intuitive. If you've got the budget to get vCenter and particularly the essentials package that supports vMotion, then moving machines for maintenance is hassle free. Integration with the likes of Veeam make backup and recovery very simple. The templates to copy a machine or to quickly deploy several VMs has saved us a lot of time.

I would say VMware ESXi suited to most environments, really, depending on the available budget. It has proven very reliable in my experience, which is very valuable to us, as we are a 24/7 company.

VMware ESXi is well suited for pretty much any IT environment that plans on having multiple servers. I suppose if you are small, have zero IT people, and have zero desire to learn the product, it would be best to skip it.

If you have the proper hardware, and desire stability and support, then ESXi is about at the top of the list. It has a proven reputation, and you can't really be blamed for buying the best.

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.

All in all, vSphere ESXi is almost always the best solution for virtualization. Hobbyists and homelabbers will appreciate the ability to learn core features at no cost. Small businesses will benefit from consolidating hardware into one server where their domain controller, SQL server, file server, etc. can all still run independently. Medium to large businesses will find a lot of security in scalability and clustering.

I think VMware ESXi would be well suited for any company that has more than a few servers. If you have two servers, you might as well virtualize them and make your hardware hosts in a VMware environment. It will keep your servers up and running if you have any hardware failures. If you backup your servers, you can quickly and easily restore them after any software crashes. You can test all updates and changes before actually deploying them. I have had to do major reconfiguration of servers, and was unsure of how the server software would respond. You can easily make a copy of a server, launch it and do all the testing you need. If something doesn't work, start over again until you find the solution. It does cost to have the licenses, but you can calculate the cost of downtime if you didn't have it to see if it is worth it for you. If you have a very small environment, it may not be cost-effective, but it will surely improve the time you spend in IT. It would be good to have an idea about how the environment works, but once you learn, support can help with any other issues you have.

VMware ESXi is an excellent product to get the most out of your bare metal hardware. Lots of server manufacturers provide pre-built install images that are optimized for their servers, so that one can take full advantage of the hardware features and interface with the built-in sensors. However, VMware ESXi is a costly product and for small organizations going the Microsoft Hyper-V route will be a big cost savings even tho it is not as robust and efficient.

I believe VMware ESXi is an excellent solution for all medium to enterprise-level companies. VMware ESXi does provide options for small business, but depending on features needed, this can be costly. VMware ESXi is the industry standard for virtualized data centers and continues to improve and innovate in the virtualized server space.

VMware ESXi is well suited where you don't have the physical space needed for the number servers you require. If you have applications that require little to no downtime, VMware ESXi can help provide that when clustered with other hosts. VMware ESXi will allow you to snapshot servers prior to major upgrades and changes. This provides a relatively safe fallback option if the upgrade doesn't go well. You can also leverage this to quickly go back to a clean state when testing new software or code.

ESXi is well suited for small shops requiring three or fewer hosts, that have a capable and knowledgeable IT department with tight budgets, and minimal technology requirements. It is also suited for very large enterprise entities with large budgets and capable IT staff. Medium-sized businesses that require more than an Essentials Plus license (supports up to three hosts) should consider other available options before deciding to go with ESXi as the licensing costs beyond Essentials Plus are quite extensive.

ESXi is the right host OS if you want all the features a host OS would normally need to provide AND if you ware willing to pay for the license. It's not cheap. You will also want to pay for VMWare support unless you have an on-staff VMWare admin who really knows their way around ESXi and vSphere / vCenter functions.

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.

Having used or worked with the major hypervisors, my preference is still VMware ESXi over the other products. One of the key features it has that make the management of virtual machine so easy is the ability to right-click on a system to perform numerous tasks on it. Also, the ability to structure the environment all in one view, not only simplifies moving around between environments, but providing role-based access control as needed is very beneficial from a security standpoint.

Great for "old fashioned" companies like us that mostly still use on-premise infrastructure. But on the good side once we decide to move to the cloud, it will also be great to manage cloud infra as well with the hybrid cloud and multi cloud focus nowadays. Really cannot think of data center scenario where VMware would not fit in.

This software is fantastic when it comes to providing visibility for multiple virtual systems that have been implemented within the infrastructure. The ability to have eyes on multiple virtual servers and their current workload is fantastic, with VMWare ESXi you can verify which server is experiencing a high amount of use and allocate resources from a system that is not being utilized as much to alleviate pressure.