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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%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
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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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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- 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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Product Details
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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!
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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.
- 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!
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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!
- 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
- 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
- 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!
- 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
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- GPU Passthrough.
- Remote Desktop Server.
- Web interface.
- File transfering.
- Resource utilization.
July 18, 2019
Small Government Use of VMware ESXi
- 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
- 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!
- 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
- 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
- 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.