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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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- 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 Enterprises (1,001+ 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.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
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June 14, 2023
vSphere is the Gold Standard
My organization deploys vSphere in a variety of industries. However, vSphere essentially addresses the same issue within each business. It allows for maximizing computing resources by providing a top tier user computing experience in the most cost effective manner. Rather than continually allocating dollars for hardware refreshes, vSphere provides a central platform that provides the most latest in computing power and efficiency, while being seamless to the end user.This is consistent across all industries and use cases, be it educational, manufacturing, information services, etc.
- Reduce Hardware Cost
- Increase Computing Capacity and Efficiency
- Reduce Downtime
- Complexity
- Initial Installation Cost
- Licensing
March 28, 2022
vSphere review
We use vSphere in our organization as the virtualization solution as such: standalone, cluster, and cloud infrastructure servers running using vSphere solution. The Vsphere solution solved all our problems related to scalability and reliability. The vMotion feature in my opinion is the 'best one' where you can easily move your VM between ESXi without restarting the server.
- Cloud
- Standalone
- Clustering
- Disk mapping for VCS solution.
- Oracle RAC structure.
- VM backups.
March 25, 2022
vSphere one solution to your virtualization problems
Using Vsphere for the following purposes:
- Centralized management platform for Virtual Machines for multiple departments.
- Manages Esxi hosts and vCenter server.
- Hosting multiple servers to use them to create Virtual Machines.
- Segment-wise VM distribution for different team members.
- As a data center backup and disaster recovery.
- Also using it as a private cloud infrastructure.
- Centralized management server to take care of Virtual Machines.
- Easy to add and remove a virtual machine.
- Detailed workflow for creating new VM(s) and removing older one.
- Sometimes IP addresses for VM aren't displayed in the UI panel for VM even though generated.
- No progress on stats on VM turning on.
- Limited ability to keep maximum capacity for a single VM in VMware vSphere.
March 24, 2022
vSphere is the top product for server virtualization
vSphere is utilized for total environment virtualization. This includes server virtualization, end-user desktop virtualization (utilizing VMware horizon view), as well as disaster recovery. By utilizing vSphere, we eliminate the reliance on a specific hardware platform as well as ease standard maintenance tasks through technologies such as vMotion and storage vMotion.
- Server virtualization.
- Live migrations of VM's.
- Resource management.
- Quality management of new releases.
- Constantly increasing licensing costs.
- Quality of 1st level support.
March 24, 2022
vSphere the easy way to manage ESXi hosts
We use vSphere to collectively manage our ESXi servers, virtual desktops, and resources tied to our virtual desktop infrastructure. vSphere allows our organization to manage these resources fully without the need to use other applications as well. We have complete oversight of our virtual desktop infrastructure which in turn has allowed us to deliver a solution that benefits the organization and users.
- Managing machines.
- Snapshots
- Cloning
- Storage
- Missing desktops.
- Quicker provisioning.
March 24, 2022
Review of a great product we have used for years
We use vSphere in our environment as our main virtual infrastructure software. It allows us to save money and resources on server hardware and data center space. vSphere is a great way to consolidate and reduce the footprint of your data center equipment and cost.
- vSphere has a single pane management portal.
- vCenter is a great part of vSphere
- vSphere makes it easy to update.
- vSphere should incorporate multifactor with duo
- vSphere can be challenging to set up secure authentication.
- vSphere uses Microsoft ADFS for secure cards and log-in.
March 09, 2022
vSphere Review
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
In my current organization, I am using vSphere in my project to build servers. We have servers with Linux and Windows platform. Where our critical applications are running. vSphere provide an intface from where we can easily manager all servers in a single window. we can easily scale up or down the resources on servers running under vSphere
- Adding a physical server in vSphere is very easy
- we can build new server using template which make server build very easy
- we can task backup using snapshot and restore very easily
- the user interface of vSphere can be more user friendly
- It should allow multiple vendor to add hardware in UI
- It should have performance monitoring of hardware
We use vSphere exclusively as our hypervisor in our datacenters. We use it for server as well as desktop virtualization. vSphere has allowed us to be extremely flexible with regards to server infrastructure. I can't imagine ever managing an environment without it!
- vSphere has a very robust feature set. HA, DRS and distributed switching are all capabilities that increase uptime and flexibility.
- vSphere has a very broad partner ecosystem. This permits users a much greater selection of solutions beyond what VMware offers.
- Reliability. For me I can reduce it to just that one word.
- The primary improvement I'd like to see in vSphere is its pricing. I feel it is a bit high compared to the market. But I do believe it is the market leader.
- I'd like to see the Enterprise edition brought back. We used it before it was removed and I felt it was a very good small enterprise set of features.
vSphere is currently in use supporting the infrastructure for our server, research, and desktop virtualization platforms. It used across the university system and is the standard for virtualization across the university. It is in use by all faculty, staff, and students. It effectively and immediately solves multiple IT issues like server and application density, hardware vendor lock-in, and substantially reduces application downtime.
- VM management.
- Reducing application downtime.
- Providing fault tolerance for VMs at the OS or hardware layer.
- Reducing excess compute capacity and reducing hardware spend.
- Pricing. vSphere is the most expensive virtualization platform on the market. It's the best, but you pay for it.
- Support. VMware has a great support organization, but the product is so large and complex that sometimes users find bugs before they do.
- Complexity. vSphere used to be extraordinarily simple to implement - over the last decade as features have grown, so has complexity of the solution.
May 06, 2021
VSphere adds a lot to the enterprise and surprisingly it adds to the small business environment as well.
vSphere is used across the whole organization for managing our virtual environment. Specifically we have two esxi hosts, one in each office location, with redundant data storage. What VSphere brings to the environment is the ability to add Virtual TPM encryption to our Windows servers. It would be nice if the built in KMS support applied to the Vcenter standard kit instead of just the plus kit.
- Central management
- Adds Virtual TPM support to the VMWare environment
- Ease of virtual server access
- Built in KMS server could be available to the VSphere Standard kit users.
- Virtual Machines with hardware tied to the VM cant be backed up because of snapshots.
- Regular video cards are not supported in esxi and special hardware must be used instead.
May 04, 2021
vSphere, first step into cloud
vSphere:
The two core components of vSphere are ESXi and vCenter Server. ESXi is the virtualization platform on
which you can create and run virtual machines and virtual appliances. vCenter Server is a service that
acts as a central administrator for ESXi hosts connected to a network.
We are a local deployment partner for VMware products in Bangladesh, most of the customers are Banks, governments, Telco, Pharmaceuticals, and other Manufacturing companies.
Banks run their In-house application, HRMS, Card management systems (CMS), Internet Banking services (IBS), Network Monitoring systems (NMS), Authentication Systems, Central Access Management, Mail servers (Exchange, Zimbra), and other financial applications.
Similarly, Telco's runs their Billing, CDR, VAS, IVR, Mail server, Process automation, on-demand resource allocation for Virtual machines to the department, Internal infrastructure applications (Active Directory, File Server, Access Management system, etc).
Corporates run their ERP, Tally, Access Control System, HRMS, Process automation, surveillance systems.
Manufacturing Industries run their Production Management, HRMS, surveillance systems, Billing, Invoicing, Delivery management application on vSphere.
vSphere provides compute resource utilization, allows users to move workload between physical host/storage called vMotion.
It allows users to perform maintenance activity without/minimum downtime to their production environment. Provides easy provisioning of resources to the business-critical applications.
- vMotion that provides seamless movement of Virtual Machines between physical hosts and datastores.
- Ease of Manage: vCenter provides very good management experience to the users.
- It provides hassle free upgrade of versions, which requires good planning.
- Easy to manage datastore, networks, CPU and memory resources.
- It also allows to convert the physical machine and bring it to vSphere Environment with minimum effort.
- Licensing cost is little bit high
- To manage users should have good knowledge on Virtualization technology, which may require addition training. Which costs around $1200 per person.
- Deployment require expert people, which can be very costly depend on business regions.
March 03, 2020
vSphere is simply best-in-class
vSphere is our primary hypervisor being used at our organization. We run a wide variety of technologies and workloads on vSphere-backed VMs; including large Oracle databases, VDI, Active Directory, OpenShift clusters, student information systems, finance systems, and more. vSphere has saved our organization spending money on bare-metal hardware. It has also allowed us to be much more flexible and efficient with our hardware resources.
- vMotion and svMotion are seamless and efficient.
- Storage, Compute, and Memory thin provision.
- Snapshots are extremely helpful in times where a quick point in time recovery is needed.
- Licensing is expensive.
- Datastore management can have a high administrative cost.
- Web interface can be a bit slower than their client used to be.
January 20, 2020
Great, but a little pricey
Currently, we're using vSphere across our small organization. It allows us to maintain many machines with ease. Instead of creating and managing physical servers, we can spin up test environments quickly.
- Easy VM management, including storage and CPUs.
- Fault tolerance is great.
- Some alerts fail to fire.
- Trouble with Linux support in terms of a standalone client.
January 16, 2020
A whole server cluster in the palm of your hand
VMware vSphere is currently being used by the IT and Change Management departments to address test and preproduction virtual machines and perform UAT (User Acceptance Tests) and Regression Tests on every release we perform and authorize. The advantages are several: we have a continuous, fallback-capable pool of servers replicating our internal infrastructure for each project, which we can keep fresh via snapshots between releases, all of this without actually impacting the production infrastructure.
- Virtualization
- Accessibility
- Further compatibility
- Easier scalability
January 10, 2020
The best on-premises virtualization platform
We use vSphere to manage all our internal VMS. All our departments utilize at least one server for their work, and VMware is our chosen application. It helps consolidate our physical hardware, which used to be around 20-30 servers into only five as our hosts. It also holds VMS on our DMZ.
- Network segregation.
- Fast deployment of VMS.
- Better support for ageing hardware
- Interface can be a little slow.
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
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
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.
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 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!
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
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.