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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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Standard
$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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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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- 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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Reviews
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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 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.
October 24, 2017
My Favorite Virtual Tool
vSphere is used only by IT departments, to include testing and Dev Ops as well. The reason is that is strictly for the use of managing VMWare virtualized servers and environments, and is a fantastic tool for this purpose. It can allow one to quickly create a test environment by cloning the production one, with no impact on the production environment at all. But its main use is in the day to day management of the servers. When used with vMotion and DRS, your environment will seamlessly move servers between physical hosts when there is contention for resources, or failures of networking or hardware.
- "Sandboxing"- or, creating a copy of a production server for testing, is a strong feature for businesses that are in development, or wish to test a new or upgraded application with current live data, or reflecting the current production environment.
- Cloning a server for fast provisioning, such as when rolling out multiple terminal or Citrix servers, etc. Right click, select, and wait a few minutes and you are ready to go!
- I can't say enough about how easy vSphere makes managing servers that are virtualized, from simple to complex. The plugins available for the major SAN vendors alone make it indispensable.
- The Dashboard- The health of any environment is paramount to any IT department- and by extension, any company. IT administrators can see at a glance exactly what needs attention and it's priority.
- Adding storage is still complex, with Linux mount points instead of simply browsing to an IP address or range of addresses, particularly in iSCSI environments.
- Networking can be a headache as well, also due to engineering shorthand and terms instead of more human, commonly used by techs. Again, browsing the network instead of declaring it would be a great addition.
September 12, 2017
vSphere 5.x-6.x
We have two vSphere servers across two sites. Our hosts contains high-availability systems (exchange, active directory, SQL, Windows and Linux operating systems). vSphere allows us to maintain high availability and redundancy with the Esxi hosts without impacting the guest servers. The HA and DRS feature ensure that any hardware failure causes little or no disruption to the guest servers.
- High availability
- Load balance through all the clustered servers using DRS
- Update Esxi servers using update manager
- Bring back Vsphere client for version 6.5
April 04, 2017
vSphere Review
vSphere is being used by our company to manage our multiple virtual servers that run our organization. We use it to manage individual servers, to delegate server resources, to keep a running backup via snapshot of each of our machines, and run routine maintenance on all of our companies servers.
- Keeps all of your servers in one location.
- Easily manage individual servers.
- Easily replace a snapshot if something goes wrong with the server.
- Would like to be able to control multiple Hosts.
- The ability to fullscreen a console session.
- Simpler upgrade option between versions.
March 16, 2017
vSphere - A simple and solid product.
Our school uses vSphere as our main hypervisor. We have used it for the last few years to great success. It is well supported, and the pricing structure is very reasonable in the education sector. It has allowed us to run multiple Virtual Machines on significantly less hardware, have high availability on critical systems, and gives us the ability to spin up new machines in minutes if needed.
- vSphere does a great job of organizing the vast information you have access to. Viewing Hosts, VMs and storage is a simple process.
- Setting up VM templates is fairly painless, and has saved me hours of work building up new servers.
- Setting up High Availability has become a seamless component of our recovery strategy, and vSphere does a great job of making it simple.
- Virtual networking is comprehensive, but not intuitive. I think the process could be simplified and made more user-friendly.
May 06, 2016
VSphere - A multiserver in one server solution
We use vsphere across the entire organization. It has eliminated the issue of having to have downtime of physical and virtual servers. Our physical servers have been up and running with no reboot for about 2 years. Some of our virtual servers get rebooted once a month, some once a week, and some once a day. It allows me to do maintenance on the virtual servers on the fly. If I need to add more disk space, I can do it easily without having to take down the servers.
- Adding disk space on the fly is a big plus. We have a lot files and if I had to take down a server each time to add some more disk space, it would be a real pain.
- The ability to be able to reboot them from a console. If we have a server that is having issues, being able to be reboot it without having to be at the site is a big help.
- Being able to build servers from a template is another great feature. It saves me a lot of time from having to build a server from scratch. I just deploy one of my templates, catch up the updates and in a matter of an hour, we are ready to go.
- VSphere has the ability to scan for updates, it would be nice to be able to incorporate third party updates along with the update manager.
October 09, 2015
Why VMware vSphere is awesome and you should use it
The main use of VMware products for our organization is mainly ESXi and its management component, vCenter Server. It is being heavily utilized across the entire department to host our production, development, staging, and training environments. It address many business problems, chief among them related to money - virtualization helps our business save on physical data center space, power & cooling costs, and physical hardware costs.
- Small attack surface for possible vulnerabilities
- Enables easy maintenance/upgrades for ESXi hosts due to features such as vMotion and DRS.
- Hardware resource management - there are many features built in to the ESXi hypervisor that enable us to get the most out of our hardware platforms.
- Cost - The licenses are purchased per-processor and are rather expensive.
- Complexity - Many features require advanced knowledge to configure.
- Feature integration into vCenter platform - there are certain features (VUM for example) that still require a Windows server to run alongside the vCenter Server Appliance.
August 07, 2014
VmWare vSphere Helps Small Company Handle Large Data
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use vSphere to manage 50 virtual machines on three physical hosts and it has created a difference in our workload and hardware needs that our physical infrastructure and budget would not previously allow. It is used by our entire company to hold our back-end infrastructure, as well as many project related servers, and is managed by our very small team of two administrators.
- The product is very easy to understand and implement. It installs and helps manage multiple hosts and can create a single management point that was not previously available when using physical hardware servers. There are multiple views that can adapt to the administrator with object level permissions that give your IT team flexibility to delegate tasks to less experienced administrators.
- vSphere is a very stable platform, and with the newest database moving to Postgres instead of mySQL or SQL server, it is even more robust and easy to manage. It is very reliable in that we don't have to worry about the management server going down, or the vSphere product having issues that cause us grief.
- vSphere upgrades very easily using an upgrade installer to get you to the latest version. It will upgrade the database and product in one fell swoop, leaving you time to manage the servers themselves instead of dealing with the product itself.
- The newer versions have a Web UI that does not require installation of a desktop software to manage virtual machines.
- The upgrade process, while easy to do, does take some time as it is upgrading the entire database to another version. A progress bar of some sort during this process would be very helpful as you would know that progress is being made rather than wondering if things are hung and you need to start again.
- The actual client application is only available on Windows, so if you have a mac or linux machine, you have to use the Web UI, which, while robust, is not as seamless as the client application itself.