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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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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Powerful Tool for Managing VMs: Users consistently praise VMware ESXi as a powerful tool for managing a large number of virtual machines, …
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TrustRadius Insights
TrustRadius Insights

VMware ESXI

8 out of 10
April 07, 2022
VMware Esxi is very good product. Which helps people to virtualize the environment or data center. I am using Exsi for last 5 years. …
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A class above the rest

10 out of 10
April 04, 2022
Incentivized
We use ESXi in our organization for our virtualized workloads. ESXi provides a solution for growing organizations that have way too much …
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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

View all 5 features
  • Live virtual machine migration (115)
    9.3
    93%
  • Management console (127)
    8.8
    88%
  • Virtual machine automated provisioning (115)
    8.5
    85%
  • Hypervisor-level security (116)
    8.3
    83%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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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?

268 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

8.7
Avg 8.3
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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 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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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(806)

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!

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

(101-125 of 127)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
March 07, 2018

Free VM's for Everyone!

Benjamin Hale | TrustRadius Reviewer
Benjamin Hale
Information Technology Consultant
Orbis Education (Marketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
VMware ESXi is perfect for small to medium size businesses that have the need for multiple servers or workstations running in their environment. The flexibility of unlimited VMs, except by your hardware, and the ability to turn them on and off at will is extremely powerful. I have found it especially useful in a testing environment for software development. If you need to test compatibility on certain operating systems, or different environments, this gives you the ability to turn on the needed equipment without the need to purchase dedicated hardware.
January 12, 2018

ESXi virtualizes ahead of the pack

Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology
Computer Software Company, 5001-10,000 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
August 17, 2017

VMs and ESXI info from a good user

CHRIS ROGERS | TrustRadius Reviewer
CHRIS ROGERS
CEO (Chief Executive Officer)
All IT Solutions Inc. (Computer Networking, 51-200 employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Having the ability to reset a VM and getting back to work faster. This is a great tool for using in ways that don't need to cost thousands of dollars to purchase another system if one fails, you simply relaunch a new VM.
April 03, 2017

VMware ESXi make the classroom productive at Pittsburgh Technical College

Philip D | TrustRadius Reviewer
Philip D
Professor
Pittsburgh Technical Institute (Higher Education, 201-500 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
For the classroom environment, it is extremely beneficial to students. Time-saving has been a crucial observation as students can spin up a VM in a matter of minutes where it would take at least an hour to do using VMware Workstation. There has also been zero corruption of VMs by using the Virtual Center Stack (VCS) to that of VMware Workstation. Students have become highly productive.
February 23, 2017

My experience using VMware ESXi

Ben Liebowitz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Ben Liebowitz
Senior Systems Engineer
Associated Press (Media Production, 1001-5000 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
VMware ESXi is well suited in a variety of environments. It really shines in an enterprise environment though. The more you virtualize, the less hardware you need, which equates to savings on power, cooling, real estate space, etc. It's also a great product for the small/medium business. They just have to buy a limited footprint and they can build several servers on top of that virtualized hardware.
October 17, 2016

VMware ESXI beneficial for server environments

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Airlines/Aviation Company, 51-200 employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
VMware would be well suited in an environment where you have at least 10 servers (email, database, file servers, web). This would make sense because you can consolidate a larger physical infrastructure into 2 or 3 VMware hosts and increase reliability as well through redundancy.

VMware would be less appropriate if a business only has several servers, because they will spend more on licensing and will not appreciate all the aspects that VMware provides (redundancy, disaster recovery, system upgrades).
May 27, 2016

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

Colby Shores | TrustRadius Reviewer
Colby Shores
DevOps Engineer
Voice Media Group (Marketing and Advertising, 201-500 employees)
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
May 24, 2016

VMware ESXi is top notch as a solution.

Matthew Michaels | TrustRadius Reviewer
Matthew Michaels
Sr. Systems Administrator
Screws Industries (Industrial Automation, 51-200 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
It's a challenging debate with several hypervisors available today. Microsoft has advantages as Hyper-V is part of their operating system. However, VMware started the whole movement and they seem to do it very well. I personally find it the simplest to setup and configure. The reality is at the end of the day you need to understand the tools you work with. It's the type of solution you can't go wrong with when choosing VMware. Everyone else is emulating what they are doing.
May 13, 2016

ESXi in a Nutshell

Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology
Investment Management Company, 201-500 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
ESXi is best suited for large corporate environments where there will be multiple ESXi servers managed via vCenter. This allows all the benefits of virtualization to shine. It is also effective for lab environments, where the free version can be utilized since high availability and performance are not as critical. It is not as suitable for a small deployment, such as a single server at a remote office, due to the single point of failure it would create.
April 27, 2016

The best all around virtual environment is with VMware ESXi

Alan Matson, CCNA:S, MCP | TrustRadius Reviewer
Alan Matson, CCNA:S, MCP
Principal Security Consultant
Insight (Information Technology and Services, 5001-10,000 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
I have used VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Proxmox VE, Xen and KVM and of all of them VMware ESXi was the quickest and easiest to set up right out of the box and get up and running with very little configuration or knowledge. While I do not mind having to get down and dirty in the CLI the majority of ESXi is install, set up the passwords and NICs and start flying.
April 13, 2016

VMware, it just works

Verified User
Professional in Information Technology
Food & Beverages Company, 10,001+ employees
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
I would still shy away from it at the very high end for servers 64+ processors and terabytes of memory, but that might just be because I don't have experience with it at those loads.
March 07, 2016

The standard when it comes to virtualizing servers

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Computer Software Company, 11-50 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
VMware ESXi will dramatically help any business consolidate their existing physical server environments by utilizing better usage of host system resources which will, in turn, save on rack space costs, server costs, and energy / heat by combining those server OSEs into virtualized environments that can allow the usage of multiple OSEs on each host server.
March 04, 2016

VMware my favorite Hypervisor

Verified User
Professional in Information Technology
Information Technology and Services Company, 11-50 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
It comes down to VMWare vs. Hyper-V. It is almost an Apple vs. Android debate as they are both capable tools. I personally have used VMWare my entire professional career so that is my preference. Shockingly, I don't have much negative to say about it and that is really a great feat when you consider the length of time I have been using and administering it.
February 24, 2016

VMware is the ONLY solution within medium and large environments.

Kevin Belonzi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Kevin Belonzi
Service Team Engineer
Bayer (Pharmaceuticals, 10,001+ employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
VMware is just about well suited for all environments that have more than a handful of physical servers. However, it all depends on budget as the licensing can be pricey depending on the needs of the company and the features included with each type of license.
October 14, 2015

VMware ROCKS

Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology
Information Technology and Services Company, 201-500 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
From lab/test environments to full Production systems, just use it, and you'll see why the bulk of the market uses VMware.
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