Item: VMware ESXi
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ESXi is our hypervisor platform of choice. We use it to maximize hardware utilization, add high availability to our systems, and make management and deployment of systems faster and easier. Through the use of vCenter, we manage many ESXi hosts, which each run many systems. This has allowed us to consolidate our hardware footprint while maintaining a high number of systems.

Pros and Cons

Live migrations of running VMs between hosts to limit downtime
Low performance impact from virtualization layer on running VMs
Management tools/vCenter make managing multiple VMs easy
Guest OS support

Cost to get all the features you want, e.g. Live Migration
Fat client required to manage individual hosts (getting better with some web consoles currently in development by VMware Labs)
Not as robust without a vCenter implementation

Return on Investment

Allows us to use fewer, but larger servers, which saves on space/power/cooling
Requires less time to patch and maintain hardware than individual servers
Allows us to utilize shared storage across all our servers

Alternatives Considered

Hyper-V

When I was evaluating it, Hyper-V was still relatively new and feature limited. However, now it makes sense for deployment in small all Windows environments and you get a lot for the price (free*). Still, for large deployments ESXi is more feature-rich and flexible.

Other Software Used

VMware vCenter Server, Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam ONE

Likelihood to Recommend

ESXi is best suited for large corporate environments where there will be multiple ESXi servers managed via vCenter. This allows all the benefits of virtualization to shine. It is also effective for lab environments, where the free version can be utilized since high availability and performance are not as critical. It is not as suitable for a small deployment, such as a single server at a remote office, due to the single point of failure it would create.

ESXi in a Nutshell

Overall Satisfaction with VMware ESXi