Item: VMware ESXi
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using VMWare ESXi as our primary virtualization platform across our server rooms. We are using it on our hyperconverged nodes to allow scalable compute across all our machines. We use it to provision virtual machines for all business tasks and have it running 24x7 throughout our on-premise cloud. It is used daily [frankly always] and allows us to scale our infrastructure virtually instead of physically, saving hardware costs.

Pros and Cons

Virtualization is powerful and feature rich
Highly scalable from one node to thousands

Challenging to learn initially
High cost of implementation

Return on Investment

Ease of use and industry support makes configuring it simple and easy
Well rounded platform allows rich live migration and backup features

Alternatives Considered

Citrix Hypervisor (formerly XenServer), Hyper-V and Proxmox VE

Comparing ESXi to the other big three hypervisors, VMWare ultimately comes out on top. Initially, we built our server farm on top of XenServer for a few years, since it was stable and everyone was already somewhat familiar with it. However, given the recent drama with XenServer and its licensing issues, we ran into a few hurdles. We moved over to the open-sourced XenServer [which follows the main release pretty closely], but had issues not only with certain Windows VM's perpetually crashing on known good hardware, but also certain feature support like GPU virtualization and USB-passthrough. We eventually made the switch to VMWare ESXi as that's what our team had been running in their home-labs to diversify their experience. We did not experience any of the same issues under ESXi as we had on XenServer and the features we were looking for were all there and easy to use.

Hyper-V runs on Windows Server and was considered to be way too heavy to use in a reasonable way. Proxmox was ultimately written off for being a solely community support kind of hypervisor and is somewhat regarded as only the enthusiast hypervisor, not completely professional.

Support Rating

I have not used direct support from VMWare for our implementation as we have a competent internal team to manage our servers.

VMWare's documentation provided online is definitely a decent starting point and covers most of the issues that may arise during typical day to day usage of ESXi. Any additional one-off issues that we found, we were able to confidently get answers from third party sources due to VMWare's wide adoption across the IT industry, with almost every major hypervisor buildout using it as its base. We have yet to scratch the surface of what ESXi is able to do so we have plenty of community support all around.

Key Insights

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

Other Software Used

Ubuntu Linux, Elasticsearch

Likelihood to Recommend

Recommending a Type 1 hypervisor for virtualization, you really don't have that many options. If I were forced to recommend one, VMWare ESXi would have to be my primary choice for its rich feature set, wide variety of support and compatibility, and overall industry acceptance. You will be hard pressed to find a software as prevalent as VMWare ESXi in most on-premise servers, and has not only industry but also hobbyist support. VMWare documentation may be a bit lacking in certain areas but community support more than makes up for that.

Industry leading hypervisor - for good reason!

Overall Satisfaction with VMware ESXi