Good, solid product that saves time and budget.
August 31, 2019
Good, solid product that saves time and budget.

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with VMware ESXi
We use ESXi for nearly all servers in our school district, very few things left on physical servers. This makes it easy for me (I am the only one in my department managing servers) to work on everything from one centralized location. I almost never have to be on-site with our hosts, and I can spin up new machines on the fly in a few minutes. This also saves us thousands of dollars in hardware costs, which is incredibly important for public education.
Pros
- Snapshots! These are the ultimate way to cover yourself. I create one before installing or updating almost everything because then if something errors out and starts to cause issues you are back to normal working order in seconds rather than hours/days.
- Distributed Switches are quite nice, so long as all of your hosts in a cluster have the same ports, you can set up the virtual switches one time and it propagates out to all of the hosts for that group.
- VMotion/balancing the load in general. Whether you do it manually or use DRS to move your virtual servers around it is incredibly simple to adjust the computing resource for your virtual server to make sure that you are sharing the load evenly across all of your hosts.
Cons
- Updates are pretty much a complete reinstall. This has gotten better over the years, but is still a cumbersome process.
- Sometimes features release before they are fully baked. ESXi 6.5 released and HTML 5 GUI for VCenter that only included "partial functionality."
- It's saved me countless hours of rebuilding servers because of the snapshots.
- We've saved thousands on our annual budget by allowing us to buy a handful of hosts rather than dozens of physical servers.
- One person is able to keep and manage dozens of servers (among other job duties, again, public education) without the management tasks becoming all-consuming and soul-crushing.
I have only limited exposure to VMware's competitors. Not enough to make a meaningful comparison.
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