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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 …
Continue reading
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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)
    8.8
    88%
  • Hypervisor-level security (61)
    8.0
    80%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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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

(1-25 of 69)
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Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If you need single hosts with limited requirements the free version of esx is great to help those customers. for small, medium, and large businesses vsphere has all the functions and capabilities to run your business. i can say though it does cost extra versus Hyper-V as you need vmware licensing to cluster this all together. but vmware does have a number of license options available to meet the needs of pretty much any customer requirement.
June 17, 2023

VMWare vSphere.

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
vSphere is well suited for environments that run a big amount of virtual machines that need to keep them all in one place. vSphere allows you to monitor a big amount of Virtual machines. It would be less suitable for environments with a small number of virtual machines that could be monitored individually.
M. Randy Harris, Jr. | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
vSphere is THE premiere virtualization platform. It's platform, support, and feature richness surpasses any other competing platforms and is the Gold standard for virtualization. Their research and development department continually innovates and introduces new features as the industry evolves.
April 04, 2022

vSphere Review

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We are using the vSphere to manage the virtualization infrastructure, its provide the centralization platform to manage all virtual machines. Easily we can add and remove the VMs and scale up and done the VMs resources. Its well suite for all type of organization.
We can create the multiple VMs on single physical server and can deploy different application database.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
vSphere's suite of products can get expensive but are generally best in segment. They have a strong team and generally know what they are doing. For most small businesses, I feel there are more affordable options out there that can generally do most things well enough if vSphere is out of your price range.
March 29, 2022

vSphere is great

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
vSPhere is great for large or small organizations. It is easy to scale and add additional ESXi hosts. You can quickly create virtual machines for all types of environments including test, dev, and prod. If you are a small shop, you simply need to have a couple of ESXi hosts to be able to spin up dozens of virtual machines to manage your different apps. If you are a large environment, you can easily create clusters with multiple ESXi hosts in each and easily manage your apps or test, dev, and prod environments in a very organized way. Perhaps less appropriate in scenarios where Microsoft Hyper-V is preferred.
March 28, 2022

vSphere review

Daniel Moraes Silva,LPIC2,MBA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We can list some scenarios where vSphere solutions work very well as such: WMS solutions, Tomcat portals, Transportation solutions, cloud computing deploys, LDAP/Tacacs authentication solutions, and radius solutions. A scenario where vSphere needs some improvement - OracleRAC solution, where this one does not work as desired in our point of view.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The primary reason why we're leveraging vSphere is to consolidate our workloads and realize the other benefits that virtualization provides. For example, create HA or VM-level HA to facilitate DR. Essentially, we use vSphere for all of the reasons that people use a virtualization layer. Apart from having HA/DR capabilities - been able to vMotion servers (in real-time) to multiple other hosts (including different clusters/sites) which would act as easy management for backup and security.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Well suited cases :
  • Small businesses using VMware vSphere essential kits.
  • Meets demands of high-performance application and memory-intensive databases.
  • Multiple OS setups allowed
Less optimal scenarios:
  • When you need a single VM in vSphere to be extremely resource-intensive.
  • Not suited for large businesses.
  • No https website inside the VPN for the company.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Enterprise organizations with a large number of servers are well suited to use vSphere. Due to the licensing costs, there can be a high price tag. Smaller organizations without the budget or expertise to manage the environment should probably avoid it.
Heeran Rathod, BSc | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
vSphere is well suited when you have to deliver a solution that is going to require a vast number of virtual machines. It allows for quick provisioning of machines that can aid less downtime or business impact.

It is not that well suited if you are only going to be using a small number of ESXi servers or a small virtual infrastructure. It's overkill in that kind of scenario.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
March 09, 2022

vSphere Review

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We can have multiple hardware server attached to vSphere and we can easily move the Linux or Window server through vMotion in case of any issue on that particular hardware failure or in case of any performance issue. In case of IBM pSeries server hardware ,we can't use vSphere and build LPARs for AIX and Linux servers.
John Predmore | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I believe vSphere is still the go to hypervisor on the market. I know there are others that have come a long way from when they were introduced, but they still have a ways to go. I believe that in all but the smallest IT environments virtualization makes sense for servers, and vSphere is where you should start.
Steve Athanas | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
vSphere should be at the top of the list for any company that is still using physical servers, or is looking to being a cloud migration journey. Additionally, companies that are currently leveraging on-premises hypervisors should strongly consider a migration to vSphere given the superior industry recognition the product has. VMware has invested substantially more resources into this market and their products than competitors, and has a broad ecosystem of partners to maximize the ROI.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
vSphere is well suited for multiple VMWare hosts and can be very useful in larger enterprises where vMotion is used to load balance and failover running virtual machines. In smaller businesses with one or two hosts then the features can be overkill. The addition of virtual TPM support is a very nice addition to provide vm security in a more Microsoft supported methodology.
Md Tanjil Islam Bappi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Good [about vSphere]:
1. Easy to manage
2. Easy provisioning Virtual Machines.
3. Allows to create clone, export the VMs.
4. Allows to move between hosts even in some cases it allows to move machines between different data-center.
5. Allows hot add on CPU, Memory.
6. Advanced Network Management features.

Bad [about vSphere]:
1. Licensing Costs are high.
2. Training Costs are high.
3. Professional deployment costs also high.
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
With the HCI becoming more popular, you have to look at your priorities. If basic needs are fulfilled, then you're good to go with AHV. There are whitepapers now that AHV supports SAP and S4/Hana. When we purchase them back then, there werent any whitepapers, hence why we deployed VMware on top of our Super Micro Nutanix box.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
vSphere is the complete vmware package. If you are interested in becoming a vmware customer, vSphere makes the entire management platform nice to work with. The benefits of working with virtual machines is made possible by vSphere. I cannot think of any scenario where vSphere would not be a great solution for managing virtual servers.
Chris Saenz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Without vCenter (VMware management software), vSphere is suited for small businesses that have disparate storage and networking. vSphere is an enterprise-class hypervisor that can run a diverse variety of workloads. Technically, it is best-in-class for all functions and features, and can be implemented on a variety of workloads (database, VDI, etc.). According to white-papers, third-party tests, and my experience, virtual technologies add only negligible performance differences versus bare-metal systems.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If you're looking for a convenient way of test and delete, then this is for you! You can quickly build an isolated network like a DMZ and test away without harming your production kit. Backing up VMs is ideal, too, as you can redeploy the entire system in a few minutes. The only thing I could think of as to why you wouldn't want this would be cost, or if you're looking to place your infrastructure in the cloud.
December 24, 2019

VSphere: simply the best.

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's great for managing a large Enterprise-grade fleet of in-house servers, especially across multiple sites—it really shines there. It's less suited to managing a small fleet—you may find that you don't need all the features and can get by with Microsoft Hyper-V or another cheaper alternative.
December 17, 2019

vSphere Review

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
vSphere is well suited for our internal cloud. Since we are moving to AWS and decided not to migrate to VMware on AWS, I think in another 2 years we will be out of VMware.
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