My experience using VMware ESXi
February 23, 2017
My experience using VMware ESXi
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with VMware ESXi
I currently support and manage multiple VMware ESXi environments for my organization. We have environments for production, QA/Dev, VDI, etc. Using ESXi allows us to provide fault tolerance to our virtual machines, reduce our hardware footprint and in doing so reduce the amount of power and HVAC needs in our data center.
- VMware ESXi is number one in server virtualization for a reason. They have been doing it for a very long time and do it well!
- The ability to migrate workloads between hosts or even across different vCenters with no downtime is amazing.
- Being able to virtualize the storage with vSAN and networking with VDS switches or NSX is amazing!
- As vSphere has been my primary area of focus for the last 6 of the 10 years I've been using it, I really don't see problem areas anymore. The product has grown and continues to grow!
- Learning the entire VMware product family is not an easy thing to do without training. I recommend setting up a lab at home to learn. Look into the VMware User Group's VMUG Advantage program for licenses for a home lab.
- ESXi has allowed us to retire a large amount of older hardware and virtualize it without having to purchase additional hardware, reducing our overall server hardware count and bringing down the AC/power costs.
- It gives us fault tolerance for our VMs via vCenter High Availability. It will automatically restart the VMs on other hosts in the cluster in the event of a host failure.
- vCenter DRS migrates the workloads across the cluster to balance the resources being used.
- When one of our SANs is being retired, we've able to migrate VMs to new datastores while the VM is live with no downtime.