Server virtualization done right
November 18, 2019

Server virtualization done right

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with VMware ESXi

VMware ESXi is used to host our server farms, it provides us with high availability and optimizes the use of our hardware, allowing us to better use the available hardware. The high availability part comes into play when hardware failures occur or maintenance is required. Allowing the virtual servers to be moved easily to different hosts.

Pros

  • High Availability
  • Resource management
  • Hardware virtualization

Cons

  • The licenses policy are not very rigid and the best options are stuck behind the most expensive license.
  • Configuration management is limited versus some other products currently on the market.
  • Better/simpler automation would be great, for example automated ways of doing blue green would be very welcome.
  • We were able to reduce license cost and management cost, by reducing the total number of machines we had to support by leveraging their HA features.
  • It allowed us to increase the density of our VMs to physical server ratio. Cutting back on the amount of servers we manage.
  • After you get pulled into the ecosystem, easy to lose control of the growth, you need to keep control of servers that are being provisioned and decommissioned.
Hyper-V has some strong points, mostly on license costs. The remote replicas they use are useful but the actual high availability in case of a disaster is still a good way away from what ESXi can provide (assuming you paid for the license). It is a good platform when money is a concern, it does provide support for Linux currently but ESXi is still ahead of the curve here.
ESXi has been around for a long time, it is relatively easy to find decently skilled engineers to support your platform and the support you get from their partners or VMware direct is very good. When you talk to them you feel like you are talking to people that have known the product for years and not someone that just got trained when he took that job.

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

VMware has been the standard for years regarding server virtualization. They are still the best in this field, providing a very solid platform with well-tested features. If you are running your applications on classical servers and have not made the jump to the container space yet, ESXi is a great solution for your needs.

VMware ESXi Feature Ratings

Virtual machine automated provisioning
7
Management console
9
Live virtual machine backup
8
Live virtual machine migration
10
Hypervisor-level security
9

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