Item: VMware ESXi
Rating: 8
Author: Ethan Tran

Overall Satisfaction with VMware ESXi

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used it in conjunction with vcenter to manage our virtual machines. It is partially used by our department. The business problem it addresses is to allow us to create a test environment and maximize hardware infrastructure.

Pros and Cons

Pros

GUI is very easy to use. Learning curve is low.
This software can be deployed for many nodes through puppet.
The ability to do snapshot restores quickly is great compared with ovirt.

Cons

To utilize vmware esxi fully, you need to couple it with paid software (vcenter).
Not easy to automate the deployment this software on many nodes unless you purchase vcenter or puppet.
No ability for DRS unless you buy vcenter.

Return on Investment

It allow us to maximize our hardware infrastructure.
Negatively if we need to manage more than 10 nodes, we have to purchase vcenter.
It saves us time when we want to quickly deploy test environments.