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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 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
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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
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 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
March 03, 2020
vSphere is simply best-in-class
vSphere is our primary hypervisor being used at our organization. We run a wide variety of technologies and workloads on vSphere-backed VMs; including large Oracle databases, VDI, Active Directory, OpenShift clusters, student information systems, finance systems, and more. vSphere has saved our organization spending money on bare-metal hardware. It has also allowed us to be much more flexible and efficient with our hardware resources.
- vMotion and svMotion are seamless and efficient.
- Storage, Compute, and Memory thin provision.
- Snapshots are extremely helpful in times where a quick point in time recovery is needed.
- Licensing is expensive.
- Datastore management can have a high administrative cost.
- Web interface can be a bit slower than their client used to be.
January 20, 2020
Great, but a little pricey
Currently, we're using vSphere across our small organization. It allows us to maintain many machines with ease. Instead of creating and managing physical servers, we can spin up test environments quickly.
- Easy VM management, including storage and CPUs.
- Fault tolerance is great.
- Some alerts fail to fire.
- Trouble with Linux support in terms of a standalone client.
December 17, 2019
vSphere Review
We have few different environments--managed hosting, internal cloud, VDI, lab. Our developers are using vSphere with cloudstack for the automation and testing out product.
- 7 without flash is really helpful
- vSphere without PSC is helpful
- Desktop client to connect the vSphere
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 26, 2019
One of the best virtualisation systems.
We use vSphere for our Client & Server infrastructure in a cluster of 7 Hosts. We host mostly Windows Servers and Clients. The Cluster is working very stable. Creating a server only takes a few minutes. You can manage all settings like CPU or RAM in just a few clicks. Very easy to use.
- Fast VM deployment.
- Support a lot of OS.
- Strong support.
- Very stable hypervisor.
- Many small bugs that can steal a lot of time.
- The HTML 5 console is not fully working. You will miss some features like Ova deployment.
- Migration is not that easy.
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.
December 22, 2018
vSphere gets the job done.
We use it to virtualize our servers and applications. We are about 60% virtualized hoping for about 75% and only leave the things that actually need its very own hardware to run correctly. We use it in IT to provide services to the other departments and the university as a whole.
- Vmotion.
- Easy of use.
- UI is terrible.
- Fully featured HTML client.
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.
April 16, 2018
Great tool for virtual server environment
We decided to use vSphere on my client to virtualize all the company's servers (approximately 100 users)
With this we get to dispense with all physical servers.
- Ease of implementation of virtual servers
- Simple maintenance of servers, scalability of resources, etc.
- Reliability and robustness
- We haven't found any functionality missing. It fulfills its function perfectly
March 23, 2018
vSphere Beast!
vSphere is used throughout my company, we use the solutions in-house and many of our clients use vSphere too.
Some of the deployment are on vSphere and hosted in a VDI environment where clients are running A to Z of everyday stuff on Hosted VDI. It's proving to be really cost effective and availability through private cloud makes it 100 % reachable from anywhere anytime.
Some of the deployment are on vSphere and hosted in a VDI environment where clients are running A to Z of everyday stuff on Hosted VDI. It's proving to be really cost effective and availability through private cloud makes it 100 % reachable from anywhere anytime.
- Cloud-based deployment makes it easier to access your desktop from anywhere on any device
- Less hardware cost (end users running thin clients and using hosted VDI's )
- Better management, security, and provisioning of the machine is simple and easy
- Pricing for home users (users running building labs, 60 days evaluation period - not enough imho)
- Vmotion | tools | configuration issues
- Lack of information (Knowledge base)
March 16, 2018
Virtual life
vSphere is being used primarily by the system administrators in the information technology department to manage all virtual workstations, virtual servers and the resources assigned to them. Allows for ease of management of all of our servers in our infrastructure. Also provides a failover system for maintaining a high level of uptime in the event of a host going down.
- VMware vCenter Server, which manages vSphere environments. Can be used to monitor virtual machine environment - hosts and VMs.
- VMware vSphere Client, which is used to install and manage virtual machines. Great way to centrally manage all servers and workstations.
- VMware VMFS, the file system component from VMware.
- Pricing. It can get costly with the licensing depending on the size of your environment.
- Better compatibility. Some applications do not run as well on a virtual machine as they do on a physical box.
- Learning curve for staff to be able to be fully functional and troubleshoot in vsphere environment.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.