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

Good, solid product that saves time and budget.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
The interface is fairly intuitive for most things, and the areas that are a little less obvious usually have fantastic documentation in the online knowledgebase. In 3-4 years of managing our ESXi hosts, I think that I have only opened 4-5 support cases for things that I could not figure out myself or find answers to on the website.
I have never waited on hold for longer than 5-10 minutes, and the people I get are always friendly and ready to help. We had one random corner case problem that had to be escalated twice, and even that was handled within a few hours rather than days, which I have experienced with some other companies.
I have only limited exposure to VMware's competitors. Not enough to make a meaningful comparison.
Veeam Backup & Replication, PowerSchool Student Information System, HPE Intelligent Management Center (IMC)
ESXi is great for groups with limited staff or staff that work remotely as 90% of tasks can be done through the GUI. It is also a cost-saver because one robust host can run several virtual machines and cut down on the need to buy multiple expensive physical devices.

VMware ESXi Feature Ratings

Virtual machine automated provisioning
10
Management console
8
Live virtual machine backup
8
Live virtual machine migration
9
Hypervisor-level security
8