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vSphere is a versatile product that has found widespread use across various industries and organizations. Users rely on vSphere to manage …
Starting at $995 per year
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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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Popular Features
- Live virtual machine migration (64)9.696%
- Virtual machine automated provisioning (61)9.191%
- Management console (66)8.888%
- Hypervisor-level security (61)8.080%
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$995.00
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per year
Enterprise
$3,995.00
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per year
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- No setup fee
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- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
vmware vsphere esxi removing snapshots manually from ctobob
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Demo of vSphere 5.5's New Flash Read Cache
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VMware vSphere 5 HA Demo
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vSphere 7 - How to get started with vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM)
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How to delete the vCLS VMs
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Demo of OVF Template Deployment in vSphere 4
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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.
vSphere features encompass:
vSphere features encompass:
- Maximization of Data Center Capacity Utilization - Using a forward-looking analytics engine, vSphere can predict future demand, get recommendations, and automate reclamation and rightsizing.
- Optimize Budget Management - Manage tight IT budgets by increasing ROI from existing resources and leveraging chargeback and showback.
- Maximize SLAs - Maximize SLAs with performance monitoring, predictive analytics and faster troubleshooting.
- Regulations Adherence - Enables governance and compliance to industry standards.
- Enhance Workload Performance - Improve infrastructure performance by offloading security and networking functions from the CPUs to Data Processing Units (DPUs).
- Accelerate Business Innovation with AI - Enhancement of the performance of large AI/ML workloads with support for up to 16 vGPUs per VM, 32 passthrough devices per VM, and the deployment of NVLink and NVSwitch technology.
- Improve Infrastructure Health - Maximizes the visibility to keep workloads performing optimally.
- Self-service for DevOps - Provide self-service access to infrastructure resources to DevOps and Dev teams for faster time to market.
- Run Modern Apps - Build and run modern apps using containers and VMs on a unified platform for simplified management.
VMware vSphere Video
vSphere Overview
VMware vSphere Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Reviewers rate Live virtual machine migration highest, with a score of 9.6.
The most common users of VMware vSphere are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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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!
- Business Problems Solved
vSphere is a versatile product that has found widespread use across various industries and organizations. Users rely on vSphere to manage virtual servers and physical servers, eliminating the need for downtime. The ability to perform maintenance on virtual servers on the fly without taking them down has been highly appreciated by users. vSphere also allows for easy provisioning of resources to business-critical applications, ensuring smooth operations. The vMotion feature enables users to move workloads between physical hosts and storage seamlessly, offering flexibility in resource allocation. Additionally, users can easily add more disk space to virtual servers without disrupting their functionality. vSphere has been adopted by banks, governments, telcos, pharmaceuticals, and manufacturing companies in Bangladesh for various applications such as in-house applications, HRMS, card management systems, internet banking services, network monitoring systems, authentication systems, mail servers, and financial applications. This product helps lower the total physical server count and maximize computing resources while delivering a top-tier user experience in a cost-effective manner. Its features like compute resource utilization and easy resource provisioning contribute to its value in managing virtualized environments efficiently.
One of the key benefits of vSphere is its ability to enable cloud behaviors like data center migrations, high availability, resource management, and monitoring. Organizations have successfully utilized vSphere for server consolidation, reducing hardware expenses and increasing overall productivity. The automatic failover feature has proven to be valuable by reducing downtime through seamless switching over to another server in case of a complete loss. Moreover, vSphere's capabilities extend beyond server management - it is also used for deploying systems quickly via pre-developed templates and recreating customer issues with test infrastructures. By leveraging vSphere's functionalities, organizations have reported significant cost savings on server hardware and data center space. In industries such as education, manufacturing, and information services, businesses have relied on vSphere to address the common challenge of maximizing computing resources while ensuring scalability and reliability. The product's ability to keep virtual machines organized and manageable in one window has been commended by users, providing easy connectivity and streamlined management. Overall, vSphere serves as a reliable and efficient virtualization technology that enables IT departments to provide robust services, consolidate servers, and optimize resource utilization for various applications and workloads.
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December 12, 2019
VMware vSphere Review
To manage and monitor a vast portfolio of virtualized applications. We use the product extensively and pay close attention to the current and future feature set that will be made available.
- Manage virtualized servers.
- Monitor virtualized servers.
- More documentation on seldom used features
- Enhanced support experience.
November 07, 2019
Enterprise-level workload virtualization
We use vSphere as our primary hypervisor. It supports all of our virtual servers, as well as handles our high availability and disaster recovery. It helps us get the most out of our hardware.
- It allows us to get the most density out of our hardware.
- It provides high availability/disaster recovery feature.
- Allows for automation in provisioning new resources.
- Expensive to get all the functionality.
October 28, 2019
vSphere is the best!
We've been using vSphere since 2013. We started small with a few VMs and now we have about 200+ including desktop and servers. We like vSphere because it is a very solid product that just works. We like how they keep updating the user interface to make all options available with just a few clicks.
We started by using the free option but we outgrew it very quickly. There are other companies out there but I don't think any other can do what VMWare is doing!
We started by using the free option but we outgrew it very quickly. There are other companies out there but I don't think any other can do what VMWare is doing!
- Easy to deploy VM
- Fast modification of virtual hardware
- Easy interface
- Console options
- Easy way to deploy virtual switches
- Easy to add storage and browse data
- User interface is great but could use help with the HTML5 client (buggy)
- Would like a mobile app that allowed you to do minor tasks or monitoring
- Cost
October 26, 2019
One of the best virtualisation systems.
We use vSphere for our Client & Server infrastructure in a cluster of 7 Hosts. We host mostly Windows Servers and Clients. The Cluster is working very stable. Creating a server only takes a few minutes. You can manage all settings like CPU or RAM in just a few clicks. Very easy to use.
- Fast VM deployment.
- Support a lot of OS.
- Strong support.
- Very stable hypervisor.
- Many small bugs that can steal a lot of time.
- The HTML 5 console is not fully working. You will miss some features like Ova deployment.
- Migration is not that easy.
October 16, 2019
VMware vSphere is useful for virtualized environments
We use VMware to manage servers in a virtual environment. It is used by the IT department and has helped reduce the amount of hardware needed in the server room. As of now, we only use it at the headquarters but looking to virtualize environments at other locations in the future.
- Monitors all servers in a virtualized environment and makes it easy to see what's going on when there are issues.
- It provides a web client that's easily accessible. This makes accessing the network easier when you are outside of it.
- It allows you to set up multiple virtual networks with multiple different parameters.
- They could offer up more helpful links and training.
- Overall, it does pretty well for its capabilities.
September 24, 2019
Excellent Virtualization Solution
vSphere is the best experience in virtualization so far. The interface is straightforward and informative. The web client is useful when I'm not near my main system for responding to emergencies while not at work. Scheduling tasks and alarms, as well as spinning up new instances and snapshots are straight forward.
- vSphere is dependable.
- It will run a large variety of workloads, and operating systems without issue.
- Administrative tasks are simple to find and configure.
- The recurring costs of licensing.
- The user interface is sometimes slow.
- Initial setup can be difficult
May 13, 2019
vSphere for your Business Atmosphere
Currently vSphere is being used as the main technology in the bank in terms of virtualization. The company is mostly digitizing and making everything virtualized. It is a technology that benefits our current infrastructure with such centralization of the virtual platform. Used primarily as a management tool to organize the current infrastructure of the company.
- Centralization
- Virtualization
- Management Platform
- Ease of use
- Functionality
- UI Design
vSphere is heavily used by my organization, it especially helped to increase the density of the virtualized servers. It also helps to achieve great performance improvements and improve the operation of the whole organization and what we do every day, as it enables us to manage and provision the huge quantity of servers and other resources we have.
- Very cost effective, big savings in terms of equipment maintenance.
- Great stability
- Very easy and simple system management.
- Easy portability and migration of services.
- Brilliant availability
- It can be quite expensive if it comes to extensive usage of the tool, so it can be not a good solution for smaller businesses.
- The configuration can be quite complex and not always too easy to understand the logic behind it.
- The user guide is not very useful for new users, it would require more explanation.
February 17, 2019
vSphere is enterprise class
vSphere is the primary virtualization technology that we use to maximize our server hardware investment. We are almost 100% virtual and only have a handful of physical machines, which greatly reduces our hardware refresh cycle.
- vSphere is a trusted hypervisor and VMware keeps patches coming and introduces new features as well.
- VMware is a leader in hypervisor technology.
- Nothing comes to mind for vSphere to improve.
February 13, 2019
vSphere is the best hypervisor
vSphere is being used for our entire City as a hypervisor. We currently have deployed 3 clusters and over 15 hosts on 6.5 configurations.
- It is the best hypervisor in my opinion.
- V-motion is the best hypervisor migration tool. Better than the Hyper-V live migration tool.
- Very intuitive.
- Its licensing model can be pricey.
- vSphere got rid of its client based administration tool and has gone fully web UI based since 6.0 and that has made many people mad.
- Tool packages for hardware can sometimes be a pain.
December 22, 2018
vSphere gets the job done.
We use it to virtualize our servers and applications. We are about 60% virtualized hoping for about 75% and only leave the things that actually need its very own hardware to run correctly. We use it in IT to provide services to the other departments and the university as a whole.
- Vmotion.
- Easy of use.
- UI is terrible.
- Fully featured HTML client.
November 12, 2018
vSphere is great for test labs!
I use vSphere to connect to my VM host that contains a number of virtual machines for our test environment. vSphere allows me to quickly attach to my VM host to create virtual machines that I run ransomware simulations against. I have a number of servers and workstations and I can edit, delete or reconfigure those VMs quickly. In addition to providing access to my virtual machines in the test environment, I can also use vSphere to gain important information about my host including resource availability, data stores, and network configuration.
- When a VM loses network connectivity and a connection be accessed through other online remote desktop control applications, you can access it from the local network through vSphere.
- Easily create and modify virtual machines.
- Provides a robust interface to monitor host resources.
- Would be nice if events could generate alerts that would be emailed to a administrator
November 05, 2018
vSphere offers a lot of features at a high cost of entry
vSphere (6.0) is used by our entire org. The VMs that run on it cover not only production, but also test/dev op environments. vSphere helped us lower our total physical server count as well as allowing us the ability to run more server instances in our environment that we could not have achieved with physical servers filling up all of our rack space.
- Well supported with at least one new update each year.
- Features are robust compared with competitors.
- Easy to setup and migrate virtual environments.
- Good overview of server work loads and resources.
- High redundancy of compute and storage for high availability.
- Cost can be very high compared with competition.
- Random bugs that do crop up on occasion (but no show-stoppers).
November 05, 2018
VSphere is key to Virtual environment success
VSphere is obviously the tool we use to manage all of our virtual machines in our VMWare environment.
It really gives us a full dashboard of the health of our entire infrastructure.
- Manages the health of our servers.
- Gives us the interface to make all necessary changes to our servers.
- The console view makes it so easy to quickly see what’s going on with the server.
- Now that we have upgraded to the latest version, things work great!
November 05, 2018
VMware vSphere - Is a mutliple server management must-have
We use it to run all our VM's/Servers for the Organization. It helps us to better manage the company and allow us to easily spin up new servers when they are needed by the org.
- It allows for high availability if you have it setup with redundancy.
- Can segregate VM's to different VLAN's, providing separation of duties.
- Easily manage all servers from one UI Web/(Older Verisons)Client.
- Some parts are not intuitive and take research or training to figure out.
- Classes to take exams to get certified in vSphere can be expensive.
- ESXi upgrades can be a pain if you are doing them yourself.
October 26, 2018
Best Virtual Hosting Software available
We use vSphere across our entire organization. We no longer run any physical servers. vSphere has reduced our physical server count from over 200 down to 6 vSphere host servers. Having a shared server infrastructure along with shared storage makes using vSphere easy and provides great options for backup and DR.
- Having a single pane of glass that allows you to manage all your vSphere virtual machines is a great time saver.
- vSphere Provides virtual machine system performance either by realtime or by day, week, month, year.
- Being able to take a virtual machine snapshot is a great feature that can be used as a quick backup solution when performing vm maintenance.
- While having the ability to take virtual machine snapshots is great it would be nice to have a single spot to see any virtual machine with a current snapshot.
- Resource pools and VM reservations can become tricky to understand and configure. I think VMware needs to work on simplifying this feature.
- The latest version of vSphere are now primarily managed by a web interface. This is great but does not offer the same level of ease of usability that the previous console versions did. All the features and functions are there but it is not as smooth and reliable as the console version.
We use VMWare vSphere at my business now for the last few years now and have implemented across the whole company now and all our servers because it makes our servers hardware independent and if we ever have a problem, we can restore our servers from a VM backup quickly and easily without any reconfiguration. When we have a hardware failure, we simply move the server VM to a different vSphere host effortlessly. Also when a server is running low on resources, we simply allocate more resources to that server on the fly and its back up to speed and running nicely again! So easy and convenient to setup and maintain as well and VMWare is always releasing updates with new features and functionality and stands behind their products 100%.
- Makes your server hardware independent, so you no longer need to worry about hardware failure and where to find specific replacement parts.
- Reallocation of server resources quickly and on the fly, so if your server is slowing down, you can beef it up with a few clicks of the mouse.
- Server recovery, when there is a problem, you can restore a backed up entire virtual server to the recovered host or a new host quickly and easily.
- Pricing, VMWare does have several free options available for people that want to handle a lot of the management themselves, but if you want to get the top of the line fully managed version of vSphere, it can be quite pricey.
- Working with server hardware makers to make it clear which server hardware is compatible with vSphere, sometimes it can be hard to figure out if a server box is compatible with vSphere.
April 26, 2018
vSphere 6.5 Review
vSphere is used across our whole organization by the IT department. vSphere allows us to run multiple virtual servers on one single physical server, which makes server management very easy. The ability to take snapshots of virtual machines and roll back at any given time when faced with a problem is simply amazing.
- Taking Snapshots of VMs and roll back to the previous state when faced with a problem.
- Template creation - Once you have that perfect template you can easily create new VMs. Very useful feature.
- VMotion - Being able to perform live migrations of a virtual machine from one physical server to another, without any downtime.
- vSphere crushes the competition in all aspects, the only negative thing is the license price. Very expensive.
April 16, 2018
Great tool for virtual server environment
We decided to use vSphere on my client to virtualize all the company's servers (approximately 100 users)
With this we get to dispense with all physical servers.
- Ease of implementation of virtual servers
- Simple maintenance of servers, scalability of resources, etc.
- Reliability and robustness
- We haven't found any functionality missing. It fulfills its function perfectly
April 09, 2018
vSphere for virtualization needs
It's used across the whole organization. In fact, we virtualized almost all our environment. It's cost-effective and the deployment is faster and more convenient.
- Possibility to move load from servers using the vmotion across a VMWare Cluster
- Possible to increase ressources live, for example add more RAM ou CPUs
- Provisionning of new servers is really fast and easy
- Licences of more advanced versions with more features are expensive
March 23, 2018
vSphere Beast!
vSphere is used throughout my company, we use the solutions in-house and many of our clients use vSphere too.
Some of the deployment are on vSphere and hosted in a VDI environment where clients are running A to Z of everyday stuff on Hosted VDI. It's proving to be really cost effective and availability through private cloud makes it 100 % reachable from anywhere anytime.
Some of the deployment are on vSphere and hosted in a VDI environment where clients are running A to Z of everyday stuff on Hosted VDI. It's proving to be really cost effective and availability through private cloud makes it 100 % reachable from anywhere anytime.
- Cloud-based deployment makes it easier to access your desktop from anywhere on any device
- Less hardware cost (end users running thin clients and using hosted VDI's )
- Better management, security, and provisioning of the machine is simple and easy
- Pricing for home users (users running building labs, 60 days evaluation period - not enough imho)
- Vmotion | tools | configuration issues
- Lack of information (Knowledge base)
March 16, 2018
Virtual life
vSphere is being used primarily by the system administrators in the information technology department to manage all virtual workstations, virtual servers and the resources assigned to them. Allows for ease of management of all of our servers in our infrastructure. Also provides a failover system for maintaining a high level of uptime in the event of a host going down.
- VMware vCenter Server, which manages vSphere environments. Can be used to monitor virtual machine environment - hosts and VMs.
- VMware vSphere Client, which is used to install and manage virtual machines. Great way to centrally manage all servers and workstations.
- VMware VMFS, the file system component from VMware.
- Pricing. It can get costly with the licensing depending on the size of your environment.
- Better compatibility. Some applications do not run as well on a virtual machine as they do on a physical box.
- Learning curve for staff to be able to be fully functional and troubleshoot in vsphere environment.
February 05, 2018
One of the best virtualization software
In my organization vSphere is used to autonomously manage multiple virtual machines and servers dedicated to individual users without having to create new machines to [properly] y dispose of them after a short time. Sometimes virtual machines are used even just to create parallel environments to test certain developments and only for a limited period of time.
- Immediate machine clone management
- Fast resize of resources
- Instant snapshot and restore
- Requires an environment to install the infrastructure
- Requires a minimum of experience in virtual machines
- Requires continuous monitoring of the resources used to optimize the server as much as possible
Our organization originally purchased vSphere to begin consolidating servers. We're a smaller organization with around a dozen virtual servers. Our IT department is small, being able to manage all of our servers from a single interface has been more powerful than we could have imagined. Also, our backup and disaster recovery strategy has been greatly simplified. Servers can be moved on the fly, upgrading the underlying server hardware is also a breeze, as all the virtualized servers are built on a standardized virtualized hardware.
- Snapshots - Upgrading an underlying OS and software is so much easier now with snapshots, if something goes wrong, rolling back to a snapshot is a breeze, and will put you back to a point before the process started.
- Remote management is much easier, everything can be found under one interface, reducing the need to use third party tools.
- Highly available - workloads can be seamlessly moved without an interruption of service. Server hardware can be upgraded and replaced with little to no downtime.
- Templates - Provisioning a new server can be done in minutes with a few clicks.
- Web interface - There is no longer an installable desktop client for management. While the web interface works fine, there is definitely room for improvement, when the interface is entirely moved away from flash and over to HTML5 that will be a huge step forward.
- Pricing - The pricing makes it harder to justify for a small business when Microsoft is giving away virtualization.
December 13, 2017
vSphere the measure by which Virtualization is Rated!
As the single source hypervisor and on-premises virtualization platform, vSphere provides increased uptime and system availability across all lines-of-business. We have chosen VMware vSphere as our virtualization platform to ensure stability and supportability of our business services.
- VMware scales CPU sharing to a point that it is no longer a sizing constraint for virtualized infrastructure.
- The ability to ensure system availability and performance through DRS and HA capabilities has given us a starting point of 4-9s of uptime before we add application or operating systems capabilities.
- The ability to scale vSphere hypervisors to host even multiples of very large database instances, provides improved scale-ability in our datacenters.
- The key missing component, which should not be terribly difficult to do, would be to assign cost values by component and object within vSphere that could then be tracked and associated based upon key values defined by component.