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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
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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 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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Reviews
(51-69 of 69)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
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
August 16, 2017
vSphere in Trend
We are cloud service provider, vSphere is being used in the backend for virtualization.
- Resource Management
- Advance management of Virtual Machines easily
- Virtualization of Storage, x86 machines, and network vSphere is quite advanced
- I have only used vSphere so can't compare it with other products from my point of view it is a great product
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.
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 27, 2017
Virtualize your environment with vSphere
We currently only use vSphere in the IT department to virtualize our servers. Since we've added vSphere to our environment we've been able to consolidate 3-5 servers at a time and virtualize them onto one server. This has helped us cut our hardware expenses dramatically. We've also increased our productivity because we're able to use vCenter Operations Manager to manage the servers from a central location. The IT department is also more efficient and has less downtime because we can migrate a virtual server from one physical host to another without having to take the whole network down. Our users do not like to experience downtime so this feature comes in handy when we are experiencing trouble with a physical server and need to move its data so we can work on it. Also, we experience less downtime because vSphere has the ability to switch over to another server if we experience a complete lost. The IT department loves this feature because it's automatic and will notify us of the problem.
- One issue we've encountered several times in the IT department is slow network speeds that are caused by overloaded servers. We would have to manually move data from one server to another to fix the problem or manually shift the priority of applications on the server. Transferring the data would take hours and cause the network to slow down even more and sometimes applications would stop working if we didn't notice that an application was hoarding all the resources on a server. When a server is virtualized, you don't have to worry about these issues at all because if a virtual machine becomes overloaded then it will automatically transfer data and resources to whatever application the IT department sets up as a priority.
- vSphere's backup and restore feature is also very useful. It automatically ensures that data isn't being duplicated when making a backup and it also allows us to create libraries to store the data in. We have our libraries set up by department so if something happens with one library, it won't affect our entire organization. The data is also backed up directly to our storage system so we don't have to use the cloud storage that is available. We aren't ready to store our data in the cloud yet because we don't think that security is strong enough. We currently store our backups offsite and our vSphere software is setup to remotely connect to our backup site when restores are necessary.
- vSphere's restore option is a feature that we use often in the IT department We always have users calling the help desk saying that they accidentally deleted a file and need it restored back to their computer. vSphere's file restore allows us to restore a single file rather than restoring an entire library. We just ask the user for the name and location of the file, find it in the backup log, and restore it back to its proper location. vSphere makes every task easy to complete by using wizards to guide you through most tasks.
- vSphere is very expensive. If a company chooses to virtualize their environment they will need to consider their annual budget and how much it will cost to maintain a virtual environment. Besides having to pay for the initial license, organizations also need to keep up with annual maintenance contracts for each license they purchase. You don't want to go without a maintenance contract because if you need assistance with your virtual environment, you won't be able to get it without a maintenance agreement.
- Besides the pricing, I can't think of anything else that vSphere needs improvement in.
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.
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.
I worked for Cisco systems in Boxborough. And it is currently used by a specific number of users who i provide maintenance of vSphere to. They use it to host their virtual servers on them and use them as test beds for various reasons. I have created almost 100 VMs on their servers using vSphere clients and hence have loved the tool enormously. I hope to keep using it as long as i can. Its a great learning experience for me too.
- It helps you manage your entire network, no matter how big or confusing it is.
- Its user friendly and the GUI is pretty understandable
- The changes that can be made after the VM has been created and cloning of the systems thats available makes the work quite easier and faster
- Just that a better GUI will always be welcomed.
- If there were some hard core tutorials you could have the link to attached with the help community, that would help too
October 05, 2016
VMware vShere
We use vSphere for a wide array of interaction with our virtual server environment, from logging into machine consoles, to maintaining machines, to monitoring our virtual environment.
- Allows easy access to virtual environment
- Allows monitoring of virtual machines
- Allows convenient maintenance of virtual machines
- Console screen size is limited
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.