VMware ESXi, still the market leader for a reason.
December 03, 2019
VMware ESXi, still the market leader for a reason.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with VMware ESXi
VMware ESXi is the hypervisor OS of choice for our organization. We use it to host virtualized servers and appliances and improve the efficiency of the consumption of our hardware. By virtualizing your environment you are able to get the most out of your investment in physical compute resources. VMWare can be run from as small as a single host all they way up to a multi-site cloud configuration. It is a fit for any size environment and various IT budgets.
- Stability and maturity are key. VMware has been around for a long long time and continue to be a market leader by far.
- The biggest differentiation versus competitors products are the performance and scalability of the VMFS file system as well as the vast library of integrated offerings in the marketplace.
- They continue to improve on moving from Flash to HTML 5 based management.
- I'd like to see more flexibility in how multi-site VCSA redundancy can be deployed.
- I'd like to see some of the automation and orchestration tools become more affordable for the small to mid-sized business market. vRA/vRO/vCloud..
- We have been able to successfully virtualize 99% of our servers and dramatically reduce our datacenter footprint. This saves us enormous amounts of money in hardware, power, and cooling costs alone.
When Microsoft Hyper-V 2012R2 was released, the company I was working for at the time decided to go all-in with Microsoft to "save" money on VMware licensing costs. This was an extremely large environment. Several hundred ESX hosts handling 10's of thousands of virtual servers. At scale, there were some things that VMware clearly excelled in over Hyper-V. First and most importantly is storage performance. VMWare built the VMFS filesystem from the ground up to be a cluster-aware file system that could be accessed concurrently by multiple hosts. Compare that to Microsoft which uses CSV storage which is nothing more than NTFS with a cluster-aware management overlay. Ultimately, the NTFS volume can still only be read or written to by one host at a time, so that leads to massive amounts of intracluster network chatter solely for storage operations. Small environments, not a big deal. Large environments it can be crippling if you don't have a dedicated RDMA storage network in place. Which by the way is very expensive. Also, the management and integration from 3rd party vendors and products are nowhere near as mature as VMWare. For our team, it was a no-brainer and eventually, management also decided to move back from Hyper-V to VMware and hasn't regretted it.
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