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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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$3,995.00
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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.
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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 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
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 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
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
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.
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!
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.
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 12, 2017
Ugly but Useful
This is being used by our information technology department to manage all of our servers that are hosted offsite with a server hosting service. We also use it to manage virtual PCs for outside users to access our internal network. With vSphere, we are able to manage these servers as a unit instead of remoting into individual servers one at a time.
- It does a great job at snapshots and backups.
- Allows for greater remote function.
- Has a robust management software that allows for many customization and options.
- The user interface has a great deal of detail which is nice but can be overwhelming.
- Not very user-friendly or intuitive menus.
- Hard to manage several versions of virtual servers without running into errors.
October 27, 2017
vSphere - Virtually the Best
vSphere is our primary hypervisor being used across our whole company and all data centers to serve all our critical workloads. vSphere enables us to maximize the use of server resources through virtualization and enables cloud behaviors like data center migrations, high availability, resource management, and monitoring. vSphere is simply the most robust hypervisor solution in the marketplace today. The ecosystem created by both VMware and 3rd parties enables IT departments to serve critical workloads 100% to customers and associates. I cannot imagine our data center without vSphere.
- High Availability - The ability to have virtual machines move seamlessly from one host to another either in reaction to hardware failure or proactively for maintenance enables us to serve workloads 100% of the time while still performing all needed maintenance.
- Reliability - Downtime in vSphere is almost unheard of. We haven't had a purple screen occur in over a year, and the last few times it happened it was in response to a change we made or a driver conflict caused by human error.
- Resource scheduling - The ability to allocate resources to highly critical workloads and have those reservations follow the workload within the data center enables IT to deliver promised performance no matter where the workload is in the cloud.
- Software Defined Data Center - If you want to do a software define data center (networking, storage, etc.) VMware has a great vision and ecosystem.
- The Web client is annoying - Ever since they deprecated the C# client, the web client has been a pain to use. The newest HTML5 client seems to finally be addressing this concern, but I still want the fat client back. Nothing was more reliable.
- SDN should be included in pricing - VMware could lead the world into a software-defined network revolution, but for now, it costs so much, that only the most mature IT environments and larger companies can afford to pay to play that game.
April 28, 2017
vSphere is an Excellent Virtualization Platform
It is used company-wide. We run about 95% virtualized. All on vSphere.
- Runs Windows and Linux VMs.
- Stable under heavy load.
- Handles mixed workload well.
- The Flash web client is horrible.
- It can be expensive, especially for features like virtualized networking.
March 17, 2017
Vsphere, tenured use over a long epoch
VSPHERE is used company wide from support to cloud services. It is an integral part of our business that provides the ability to deploy systems quickly via pre developed templates that can be modified or configured as you see fit. Our support staff uses the software to recreate customer issues with installed test infrastructures. Time sync is an issue sometimes, but you merely need to have your own source and you're good to go. I recommend ensuring your staff is familiar with this product. I have used it now at half the companies I have worked for.
- Multiple system management.
- Easy user management.
- Friendly user interface.
- Provides a level of automation.
- Can easily increase system resources.
- Better time sync functionality.
- More verbose template options.
- Ability to add in external application integration.
April 26, 2016
vSphere is all you need.
vSphere allows us to manage multiple clusters across the US and Canada on a single view. Its built-in security layer allows us to assign access based on user credentials. New users will find vSphere relatively easy to learn and use without any training needed. With vSphere having multiple frames you will be able to see what is happening in realtime while you are working, also they have a great search feature that will get a lot of use with the bigger clusters.
- Recent tasks window allows you to see what is going on.
- Search bar is a great tool to use when managing large clusters.
- Plugins for most applications and storage arrays makes it easy to do your work.
- The interface is a little blocky.
- The interface could use some updating.
February 26, 2016
vSphere - See what you're missing!
We currently use vSphere together with Virtual Center across our entire organization. It has allowed us to consolidate 1000's of physical servers into a much smaller foot print while allowing for quicker provisioning of systems to meet business needs.
- vSphere allows us to consolidate what once would have been 1000's of physical servers into a much smaller footprint by virtualizing those workloads. This allows for a much more manageable environment and is a tremendous costs savings for our company.
- DRS is a feature that allows us to distribute workloads across multiple vSphere hosts making it easier to scale out and manage workloads. This feature allows for automated actions to take place to minimize or eliminate performance bottlenecks.
- VMotion is another feature that gives us the ability to migrate workloads without any downtime to other vSphere hosts. This allows for maintenance on our physical hardware or upgrades to that underlying hardware with zero impact to the virtual guests running on it. This is a huge feature of this product.
- If leveraging virtual center for management of your vSphere hosts another feature is the high availability when utilizing clustering. This allows vm guests to restart on working vSphere hosts should you encounter a hardware failure on one of your physical hosts.
- I would still like to see a move to an HTML5 interface for managing virtual center and the vSphere hosts.
- The complete incorporation of the update manager client into the web client would also be a welcome addition.
- I would like to see DRS take into consideration more than just CPU/MEM resources when calculating vmotion migrations. There are other products that do this and I would like to see VMware take a step in that direction.
December 17, 2014
Nice user exSpherience!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
vSphere is used by our IT department to manage multiple virtual machines which support our VOIP platforms.
- vSphere provides a user friendly interface with multiple tabs to manage all aspects of our virtual machines.
- The single interface gives system summaries, alarm and event information and console access.
- You can also open a console session on the individual virtual machines.
- Could make a single button way to regain mouse control from a console session. Currently you need to press CTRL and ALT
August 13, 2014
VMware vSphere: It just works
We currently are using 20 vSphere hosts running 150 server vms. We made the decision to consolidate our entire server infrastructure to drive down TCO and run more efficiently. We recognized the value of virtual technology from the standpoint of resource management as well as DR and SLA initiatives our business requires.
- The first real benefit we experienced was the transition from physical to virtual servers. Tools like VMware vCenter Converter Standalone made the process very simple for our technical team and transparent to our end users.
- The resource scheduler as compared to others such as Hyper-V is second to none. The vSphere hosts handle contention and loads without issue. The alerts and stats given are accurate and insightfull helping you be proactive to any problems.
- Scalability is also a huge benefit. We were able to install vSphere on many different types of physical hardware and have the same experience on all.
- One thing that has been helpful recently is the plug-in support for 3rd party vendors. For example we use Dell Equallogic storage and were able to utilize Dell's Virtual Storage Management (VSM) plug-in directly within vCenter to manage our vm datastores connected to our vSphere hosts. VMware partners with many vendors for better control over all of your technology and more important it's integration with vSphere.
- The biggest complaint for me is the use of the web client. The newest version 5.5 relies very heavily on the use of the web client compared to earlier releases and still leaves me wanting. Using the thick client or C# client app for vCenter to manage vSpere was seamless and intuitive. I understand the move to web based but it still needs work. I still find myself using the thick client for certain tasks.
- Cost is always an issue. VMware products are very expensive but for good reason. I also really dislike the feature differences from standard, enterprise, and enterprise plus. For example enterprise offers DRS for resource management, however to get storage DRS you must have enterprise plus. Just a small annoyance especially when getting a budget approved.