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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)8.989%
- 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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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.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
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June 17, 2023
Flexible Virtualization Software
We use vsphere in our organization as our virtualization and infrastructure platform to provide application and infrastructure services to the business. it is an efficient and extremally flexible platform to grow and assign resources as needed to necessary areas. It works very well to provide backup resources to our backup software. and is very adaptable to disaster recovery tools we have.
- vmotion and enabling 100% uptime
- easy vm backup options
- easy snapshot capabilities for software upgrades
- allow dissimilar hardware in a cluster to manage vms. cheap option for clients who have cost issues for some implementations
- virtual TPM for windows 11 is only available in enterprise licensing. its way too much money for something that's a microsoft requirement
- vcenter continues to get more complex to set up and manage. should be a system that should get easier to manage as it gets more robust. they need to re-think its easibility as it has new releases
- need to rethink the use of SD cards for esx hosts. as that is a great cheap and excellent way of building esx hosts for environments
April 04, 2022
vSphere Review
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We are using the vSphere to manage the virtualization infrastructure, we have more than 1000 virtual servers in every environment like production, development, and test. vSphere provides a centralized management platform to manage all virtual machines.
- High Availability
- vMotion
- Infrastructure virtualization
- Easily we can add and remove the virtual machines
- Integration with Kubernetes
- It should have hardware monitoring
April 04, 2022
A great suite of products
We use vSphere in our organization for our virtualized workloads. vSphereprovides a solution for growing organizations that have way too much of a physical presence. Without vSphere, datacenters would be filled with single-purpose, standalone servers. 99% of our environment currently runs on vSphere. I have used it in my previous jobs and still do in my current one.
- A broad suite of products available to consumers.
- An immense community and tons of knowledgebase/documentation.
March 29, 2022
vSphere is great
Where I work we are a VMware virtual shop, meaning most all of our systems are virtualized. Server virtualization comes with plenty of benefits for a business and it really can improve efficiency when it comes to properly administering server resources like CPU, memory, and storage. Growing your environment by increasing resources on your servers is just a few clicks away using vSphere versus the traditional ordering hardware, scheduling downtime of your hardware servers, and installing resources such as physical memory, CPU power, and storage disks. It is definitely a huge time saver allowing you to focus your time and efforts on other important issues.
- Fast resource provisioning.
- Quick virtual server reboots.
- Solid performance monitoring.
- Clearer documentation on upgrade paths.
- Simpler compatibility matrix.
- Simplify SRM.
March 27, 2022
vSphere - the only infrastructure you would need...
We are using VMware vSphere to manage the enterprise virtual infrastructure which consists of ~300+ servers. We use it for visibility and for managing the host.
- Infrastructure virtualization.
- Resource pooling/scheduling and allocation based on the threshold limits/priorities.
- Provide high availability and parallel processing.
- Nothing specifically identified.
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
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.
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.
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
vSphere is our main hypervisor being used at our organization. We run a variety of technologies and workloads on vSphere-backed VMs; including large Oracle databases, Active Directory, SharePoint, SAP, HRMS, and few other mission critical systems. vSphere has saved our organization spending money on bare-metal hardware.
- Easy VM management.
- Vmotion.
- Editing resources.
- License are expensive, we are considering AHV now.
- Datastore management is not friendly.
- Upgrading is not easy.
April 01, 2020
vSphere: The world of VMware
We use vSphere to manage our virtual server and desktop infrastructure. We have had a push to visualize as many servers as possible. We decided to go with VMware vSphere and have no been disappointed. vSphere has offered us an entire platform of structure and flexibility from hypervisor host management to guest vm configuration. In addition to being an excellent virtual server management infrastructure, it is a great base to build VMware Horizon View on. Everything within vSphere is easy to understand, find, and manage.
- Host Management
- Guest Management
- Streamlines Updates
- Easy to configure and apply Security Technical Implementation Guidelines
- Allow enable EVC without requiring host shutdown
- More detail in recent tasks. Instead of just showing a task called "Reconfigure virtual machine" also have a link to more detailed information as to what was reconfigured, changed or removed.
- Allow searching tasks or events
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.
December 12, 2019
VMware vSphere Review
To manage and monitor a vast portfolio of virtualized applications. We use the product extensively and pay close attention to the current and future feature set that will be made available.
- Manage virtualized servers.
- Monitor virtualized servers.
- More documentation on seldom used features
- Enhanced support experience.
November 07, 2019
Enterprise-level workload virtualization
We use vSphere as our primary hypervisor. It supports all of our virtual servers, as well as handles our high availability and disaster recovery. It helps us get the most out of our hardware.
- It allows us to get the most density out of our hardware.
- It provides high availability/disaster recovery feature.
- Allows for automation in provisioning new resources.
- Expensive to get all the functionality.
October 28, 2019
vSphere is the best!
We've been using vSphere since 2013. We started small with a few VMs and now we have about 200+ including desktop and servers. We like vSphere because it is a very solid product that just works. We like how they keep updating the user interface to make all options available with just a few clicks.
We started by using the free option but we outgrew it very quickly. There are other companies out there but I don't think any other can do what VMWare is doing!
We started by using the free option but we outgrew it very quickly. There are other companies out there but I don't think any other can do what VMWare is doing!
- Easy to deploy VM
- Fast modification of virtual hardware
- Easy interface
- Console options
- Easy way to deploy virtual switches
- Easy to add storage and browse data
- User interface is great but could use help with the HTML5 client (buggy)
- Would like a mobile app that allowed you to do minor tasks or monitoring
- Cost
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.
February 17, 2019
vSphere is enterprise class
vSphere is the primary virtualization technology that we use to maximize our server hardware investment. We are almost 100% virtual and only have a handful of physical machines, which greatly reduces our hardware refresh cycle.
- vSphere is a trusted hypervisor and VMware keeps patches coming and introduces new features as well.
- VMware is a leader in hypervisor technology.
- Nothing comes to mind for vSphere to improve.
November 12, 2018
vSphere is great for test labs!
I use vSphere to connect to my VM host that contains a number of virtual machines for our test environment. vSphere allows me to quickly attach to my VM host to create virtual machines that I run ransomware simulations against. I have a number of servers and workstations and I can edit, delete or reconfigure those VMs quickly. In addition to providing access to my virtual machines in the test environment, I can also use vSphere to gain important information about my host including resource availability, data stores, and network configuration.
- When a VM loses network connectivity and a connection be accessed through other online remote desktop control applications, you can access it from the local network through vSphere.
- Easily create and modify virtual machines.
- Provides a robust interface to monitor host resources.
- Would be nice if events could generate alerts that would be emailed to a administrator
November 05, 2018
vSphere offers a lot of features at a high cost of entry
vSphere (6.0) is used by our entire org. The VMs that run on it cover not only production, but also test/dev op environments. vSphere helped us lower our total physical server count as well as allowing us the ability to run more server instances in our environment that we could not have achieved with physical servers filling up all of our rack space.
- Well supported with at least one new update each year.
- Features are robust compared with competitors.
- Easy to setup and migrate virtual environments.
- Good overview of server work loads and resources.
- High redundancy of compute and storage for high availability.
- Cost can be very high compared with competition.
- Random bugs that do crop up on occasion (but no show-stoppers).
November 05, 2018
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.