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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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Southern Farm Bureau Casualty Insurance Company (Insurance, 1001-5000 employees)
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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.
Product Demos
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
(1-25 of 127)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
- The ability to seamlessly migrate a virtual machine from one host to another is a vital part of the virtual experience in 2023.
- Metrics and statistics easily allow us to understand where pain points can be in the environment and to change or correct them for a better experience.
- In my experience, service and Support is severely lacking from VMware. Over time this has gotten worse to the point where it is easier not to open a case and just guess at a solution.
- In my opinion, pricing has gotten increasingly worse over time as well. Every year there seems to be a new way of licensing that is only in an effort to suck more money from the consumer.
- They have been pushing more and more to the cloud but their services are not ready for primetime when they do. Horizon licenses are now pushed from the Cloud services and, in my experience, they did not work in the beginning and even now are a pain to use, so I dread going to the same for VMware ESXi.
June 18, 2023
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.
June 17, 2023
Simply the best in business IT asset virtualization.
- Simple deployment on metal using SD or USB.
- Fast spin-up of guest machines.
- Detailed information and management options for Network and Storage
- External USB devices can have occasional issues when passing through to a VM.
- Issues with implementing and passing through GPUs to VMs.
June 14, 2023
VMware continues to work well
- Reliability
- Ease of use
- Management
- Support & updates
- They are deprecating old hardware soon
- Networking is difficult
June 13, 2023
ESXi helped us out a bunch!
- Ease of use
- Extremely intuitive
- Easy to manage
- Upgrade procedures could be outlined a bit better
- Documentation could be improved to show specific images of tasks
- Network integration and interfacing could be easier to navigate
May 02, 2022
Vmware Stability
- Manages and balances loads between hosts
- Provides real time data and monitoring of resource usage
- Allows for easy access and administration of virtualization
- Alerting can be confusing due to jargon
- Support can be complicated and lengthy to troubleshoot with
- Integration with storage can be tricky in some cases
April 26, 2022
VMware ESXi still the best
- Consolidation
- Redundancy
- Stability
- Improve simplicity.
- Improve documentation.
- Improve updates.
April 07, 2022
VMware ESXI
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Network virtualize
- Storage Virtualize
- CPU virtualize
- Memory virualize
- Data Storage handling
- Network handling
- Available with respect to internet
- We can not access Vsphere anytime anywhere
April 05, 2022
VMware ESXi is a Great, Solid Choice for Virtualization!
- VMware ESXi is a very stable and reliable OS. We have had longer uptime on the server by using this OS.
- Using VMware ESXi allows for Windows servers to reboot faster as they don't need to go through BIOS. The VMware ESXi OS itself boots quickly too when we do need to reboot the host.
- By using VMware ESXi, our organization has gained flexibility we have not had with smaller sites that only had a few servers. This allows us to split applications to their own servers and keep them running while maintaining different applications and not taking down everything at once.
- Easier patching of single hosts has become a problem. We are finding it more difficult to schedule maintenance as there are more and more patches needing to be applied, and vCenter cannot update itself. For larger multi-host deployments this is not an issue.
- Some newer updates include more features in the GUI, but at the same time make things feel buried. It is not as intuitive as it was, but with time it is not terrible to adjust.
- Adding more CPUs without adding sockets is not as easy as it used to be. Too many servers have been created by techs that are not correct and lead to slow servers.
April 04, 2022
VMware ESXi - The Best for Virtualization
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Resource scalability
- Operate much faster
- Easy to take VMs backup and restore
- Easily we can migrate the VMs between the physical servers.
- Reliability and flexibility
- Remove the API Limitation in free version
- Hardware monitoring
April 04, 2022
A class above the rest
- Ease of management.
- Installation is very straightforward.
- Support is great as well as online documentation.
April 04, 2022
VMware ESXi Best for Virtualization
- 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
March 31, 2022
ESXi is the go to for virtualization
- Reliability - very well suited for production environments
- Easy to setup, use, and maintain
- ESXi supports a vast majority of operating systems
- Flexible - it can be configured to suit particular needs
- It can get expensive
March 29, 2022
faster, scalable, overall perform better
- Operate faster.
- Scalable.
- Smallest hypervisors.
- Installation process quick.
- Don't know.
- Resource management. The automatic load balancing works very well to ensure no host is taxed disproportionately compared to the others.
- Templates and cloning. It is very easy to set up a template and spin up new servers based on a specific setup. This makes server management very streamlined.
- VM management. The vSphere interface is very easy to use and navigate. Everything is responsive and it works when you need it to. The options are also robust while also being arranged in a straightforward manner.
- We are not on the latest version yet (pre-7.0), so this might be related to our current version. Sometimes when VMs are rebooted, the virtual NIC will be in a bad state and will have no network connectivity. Disconnecting and reconnecting the vNIC will fix this quickly. It's easy to fix, but definitely an annoyance. We'll be upgrading in the near future, so we are optimistic this will be fixed.
- Due to the complexity of the environment, it can be difficult to figure out when some odd issues are related to storage or something else. For instance, there was a time when refreshing the storage connections for all hosts fixed an issue, but there was no direct indication that anything was going on with the storage connections. I don't know if this is clearer to see in newer versions, but having a way to indicate that in some way can make certain troubleshooting easier to do.
- Access to some resources requires a VMware account, while others do not. I can understand this is the case due to licenses being required for certain product support. We have never been in a situation where we couldn't access anything, plus we have all of the accounts and licenses we need. However, it can be confusing for someone new to managing a VMware environment why they can't access something they need to manage the environment.
March 27, 2022
Virtualization with ESXi Just Works as Promised
- High Availability.
- Upgradable inline in production.
- Easy integration with backup software.
- Upgrade function could be more seamless.
- vCenter snapshots could be more responsive.
- Support is good but could always be better.
- VMware ESXi is a dependable platform that provides excellent performance.
- VMware ESXi is compatible with a wide range of operating systems, too.
- Third-party backup programs cannot be integrated.
- Third-party programs may be able to simplify processes and minimize the number of applications that are needed.
- Hosting servers.
- Allowing 3rd party integrations such as Veeam Backup.
- Allowing administrators to adjust system resources on the fly.
- Allowing administrators to power on/off resources or schedule maintenance.
- Just kicking butt in general. VMware does everything really well.
- Every product has bugs or maintenance issues from time to time and VMware is no different. There were some Log4J vulnerabilities identified in VMware recently but patches were quickly released.
- Virtualizes servers and workstations across many different platforms.
- Provides a great way to setup labs to test new services.
- Can easily piece out part of the infrastructure for different staff based on their roles.
- Greater support for newer OS's on previous major version of VMware ESXi.
- Provide easier upgrade method for vCenter appliance deployed in HA mode.
- Fix recurring issues. Often hangs or lose functionality from filled up ramdisk.
- 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.
- Hosting of multiple OS VMs.
- Provides excellent troubleshooting tools.
- It is reliable: very low down-times.
- ESXi tends to require larger network bandwidth allocations than some of our other systems. This is problematic for remote field sites.
March 24, 2022
VMware ESXI share hardware, save money
- Save money.
- Centralized computing.
- Allows easy evaluation of new software.
- Hardware monitoring.
March 24, 2022
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.
March 24, 2022
One of the best VMware Products, ESXi!
- VMware ESXi provides a wizard for the hypervisor to be installed making it very easy to configure on almost any bare metal box.
- It provides an easy interface to see information about the Virtual Machines you have set on the VMware ESXi hypervisor.
- VMware ESXi is also very easily upgradable. The hypervisor takes care of all the necessary tasks prior to a hypervisor upgrade, allowing for peace of mind when upgrading and no effect on the virtual machines you have running.
- VMware ESXi can improve on the UI that is installed on the bare metal machine. The menus can be hard to navigate when looking for simple configuration items.
- VMware ESXi can improve on the stability of their overall hypervisor. There have been a few times we had to reinstall due to corruption of VMware ESXi.
- I would like to see VMware ESXi do better at adding more standard free features in their consumer version of VMware ESXi. For example, having the ability to back up virtual machines is good practice and something that would be very nice if offered in their free version.
March 24, 2022
Easy to manage
- Easy to install.
- Easy to manage.
- Troubleshooting is easy.
- Upgrading is sometimes difficult.
- Cost