After using VMWare for all these years it still feels like magic
October 22, 2019

After using VMWare for all these years it still feels like magic

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with VMware ESXi

We host probably 95% of our servers on a 9 host VMWare server cluster containing over 200 virtual machines. We also have a colocation and remote office that we run a couple VMWare hosts at with a handful of machines at each location as well. Running our business on VMWare has been incredibly amazing over the years, it allows so much flexibility and scalability as well as cost and data center footprint reduction.

Pros

  • Ability to stand up a new virtual server within a few minutes.
  • Cost reduction due to fewer hardware purchases throughout the year and saves on electricity due to fewer physical servers running in the data center.
  • Ability to make virtual hardware changes on the fly such as adding more CPU or RAM or increasing hard drive space within minutes.

Cons

  • The new web UI that was forced upon us with version 6 isn't bad now but still preferred the old thick client as it was faster and familiar.
  • I wish they maintained support for older hardware for longer, usually, we find after a couple of big revisions the old servers aren't totally compatible and we like to use our hardware for many years more than most people probably do
  • Licensing can be a bit confusing.
  • Helped lower our electric bill due to less physical hardware in our data center.
  • Helped efficiency in that I can stand up a new server within minutes.
  • Negative effects have rarely been felt, but there were a couple of times where something happened with our storage or cluster and we lost all servers for a short time at once. That's generally harder to happen if you have a full physical environment but it's so rare and generally can be avoided.
We have never used anything other than VMWare.
Every time we have contacted support they were more than helpful, very knowledgeable, and very friendly. One time we even had a down situation and found due our hardware being end of life we technically were not under support but I explained how bad the situation was and she went ahead and stayed on the call and helped me over the new few hours and we got everything back up, I was very grateful for that.

Do you think VMware ESXi delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with VMware ESXi's feature set?

Yes

Did VMware ESXi live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of VMware ESXi go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy VMware ESXi again?

Yes

Luckily since VMWare ESXi itself is free, a small company could definitely take advantage of it, so it works for small to large enterprises. Any company could also stand it up just to do testing if they don't want to set up a production environment, then easily take it to production if they find it suitable.

VMware ESXi Feature Ratings

Server Virtualization
9.6
Virtual machine automated provisioning
10
Management console
8
Live virtual machine backup
10
Live virtual machine migration
10
Hypervisor-level security
10

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