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VMware vSphere

VMware vSphere

Overview

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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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

vSphere is a versatile product that has found widespread use across various industries and organizations. Users rely on vSphere to manage …
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vSphere is great

10 out of 10
March 29, 2022
Incentivized
Where I work we are a VMware virtual shop, meaning most all of our systems are virtualized. Server virtualization comes with plenty of …
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vSphere Review

10 out of 10
March 09, 2022
In my current organization, I am using vSphere in my project to build servers. We have servers with Linux and Windows platform. Where our …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 5 features
  • Live virtual machine migration (64)
    9.6
    96%
  • Virtual machine automated provisioning (61)
    9.1
    91%
  • Management console (66)
    8.9
    89%
  • Hypervisor-level security (61)
    8.0
    80%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

View all pricing

Standard

$995.00

Cloud
per year

Enterprise

$3,995.00

Cloud
per year

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

vmware vsphere esxi removing snapshots manually from ctobob

YouTube

Demo of vSphere 5.5's New Flash Read Cache

YouTube

VMware vSphere 5 HA Demo

YouTube

vSphere 7 - How to get started with vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM)

YouTube

How to delete the vCLS VMs

YouTube

Demo of OVF Template Deployment in vSphere 4

YouTube
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Features

Server Virtualization

Server virtualization allows multiple operating systems to be run completely independently on a single server

8.9
Avg 8.3
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Product Details

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:

  • 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 TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

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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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(272)

Community Insights

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!

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

(1-3 of 3)
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Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
vSphere has been well suited for us in the following areas. 1. Building out new servers. 2. Easy to set up test servers. 3. Easy to set up and test in an isolated network. 4. Easy to manage server resources. 5. Easy to manage user access to VCenter.
Server Virtualization (4)
87.5%
8.8
Virtual machine automated provisioning
80%
8.0
Management console
100%
10.0
Live virtual machine migration
80%
8.0
Hypervisor-level security
90%
9.0
  • The positive impact has been the cost of managing server hardware.
  • Having to only update firmware on limited hardware has saved time and money.
  • We have reduced our server hardware footprint in our data center by 90 percent.
We have had to use vSphere support on several occasions and every time they have resolved our issues or have provided us with direction. Sometimes issues that arrive are problems that are caused by updates or config with other applications or operating systems. vSphere support has helped us in those situations as well.
vSphere's usability has been great for us. vCenter gives us a single pane of glass to manage all of our ESXi host and virtual servers. We can update and manage any aspect of the virtual infrastructure.
10
All functions of our technology department. Anyone who uses a server or application logs into vCenter (A part of vSphere).
1
We only have one certified employee that manages the support of vSphere.
  • Failover support for high availability of virtual servers.
  • Ease of use.
  • Data center consolidation.
  • None that I can think of.
  • Not sure
We have been using vSphere for so long we would not use any other product because it's been so reliable.
Cisco Secure Endpoint (formerly Cisco AMP)
No
  • Prior Experience with the Product
We have had a great experience with vSphere.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
VMware vSphere is currently being used by the IT and Change Management departments to address test and preproduction virtual machines and perform UAT (User Acceptance Tests) and Regression Tests on every release we perform and authorize. The advantages are several: we have a continuous, fallback-capable pool of servers replicating our internal infrastructure for each project, which we can keep fresh via snapshots between releases, all of this without actually impacting the production infrastructure.
  • Virtualization
  • Accessibility
  • Further compatibility
  • Easier scalability
vSphere excels at handling ESX/ESXi hypervisors. The advantages are several: having a continuous, fallback-capable pool of servers for testing purposes, including imaging, cloning and training; a reliable IaaS platform for mission critical business processes that can be handled even via mobile device (we have taken and restored snapshots of entire server farms via vSphere from our mobile phones in occasions when we're in field work); and an easy to understand and operate frontend for the VMs.
Server Virtualization (5)
82%
8.2
Virtual machine automated provisioning
80%
8.0
Management console
80%
8.0
Live virtual machine backup
90%
9.0
Live virtual machine migration
80%
8.0
Hypervisor-level security
80%
8.0
  • ROI
  • Scalability
  • Hyper-V and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
We opted for vSphere because of our IaaS/PaaS provider. Being one of the pioneers in server virtualization, VMware have proven to be quite reliable and robust, and thus widely adopted by virtualization service providers including ours. Also, the price is noticeably lower using ESX hypervisors with vSphere than using other alternatives, and we can even handle hybrid clouds with it (we have several cloud-based VMs with our provider, but also several local VM ones for legacy systems, both of them handled via vSphere).
We have experienced few situations that require us to escalate a ticket to the provider (that in itself a good sign for robustness of the solution), but when we have had the support team have been quick in providing a solution and/or workarounds to keep our business running with no noticeable service shortages.
9
It's my entire department. All of them have access to two or more virtual servers or workstations, depending on the project in which they are at the moment and the application, system or product they're evaluating or testing. On them, we usually run proof of concepts, regression tests and compatibility evaluations with current or future systems.
4
Our vSphere (and ESX or ESXi) support operators have experience and knowledge on IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service), being able to provision, deploy, manage and decommission VMs on demand, always keeping watch of the overall ESX or ESXi server resources in order not to affect other running VMs.
  • Server virtualization for testing purposes
  • Server quick provisioning
  • Using VMs for non-traditional tests, such as legacy system testings (with Windows 9x VMs or even Android/Mac OS ones)
  • Using VMs as bridges for network access to resources from geographical restricted locations.
  • Server consolidation
  • Workspace virtualization
We intend to keep our current IaaS provider, and they will keep using VMware in the future for all its advantages, so we'll keep managing our assets via vSphere. Also, we intend to keep an on-premises lab with vSphere/vCenter servers based on ESXi as failover or backup servers for non-essential systems.
No
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Analyst Reports
VMWare, one of the virtualization pioneers in the market, has been long known as reliable and stable providers for virtual solutions, and vSphere is not an exception. Most of us have experienced a VMWare product at some point in our careers, so making the transition to ESXi and vSphere is essentiually a natural evolution step in our infrastructure development.
Chris Sumrall | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
I believe VSphere would be well suited anywhere. I like the idea of having one physical server and separate virtual servers for different applications (i.e File Servers, Application Servers, Domain Servers).
Server Virtualization (4)
100%
10.0
Virtual machine automated provisioning
100%
10.0
Management console
100%
10.0
Live virtual machine migration
100%
10.0
Hypervisor-level security
100%
10.0
  • It has had a positive ROI. We were able to set up 20 servers for the price of 3 Physical Virtual Servers. Also along with the MS Datacenter licensed per server, we haven't had to buy a new server when we need to add additional ones.
I have used Micrsoft's Hyper-V Server in the past and I hated it. Microsoft's products can consume a lot of memory some times and running Hyper-V was like having a memory hog running on a memory hog. With VSphere there is no slow down when it comes to resources if properly set up.
Veeam Backup & Replication
The IT Department uses it to manage the servers, everyone elses uses the virtual servers built within VSphere.
4
You have to have a basic understanding of how VSphere functions to do the simple tasks. For the more indepth reviewing and troubleshooting you have to have some knowledge of Linux.
  • Server uptime
  • Server Mainteance
  • ROI
  • We use pano clients for some of our computers. This allows us to run a windows pc in the virtual environment with a zeroclient (only a box, video port, usb and network port) while the PC is up and running all the time in the virtual environment.
  • Some day I hope to implement VMWare VDI along side of the VSphere.
It is a really rock solid product with a lot of great uses.
No
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Prior Experience with the Product
  • Vendor Reputation
The uptime and ease of managing the servers.
I wouldn't.
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