Item: VMware ESXi
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

VMware ESXi is the global standard for virtualization within the company. It solves the problem of needing to run thousands of physical servers, allowing us to consolidate and run everything on a few physical hosts distributed across several datacentres around the globe.
VMware ESXi provides solutions for monitoring and managing these hosts through a single-pane-of-glass product (vCenter) and advanced diagnostics and metrics (vROPs) for an end to end solution.

Pros and Cons

Virtualization
Snapshots

Management via GUI vs CLI
Technical Support

Return on Investment

Massive savings on hardware purchases over a typical six year hardware refresh cycle.
Reduction in management overhead through standardization and consolidation, require less resources to manage thousands of servers.

Alternatives Considered

Nutanix AHV, Hyper-V, Citrix Hypervisor (formerly XenServer), Azure Virtual Machines and AWS Lambda

At the time of standardizing, Vmware ESXi was a more industry mature product with better support and best integration with 3rd party offerings.

Support Rating

VMware ESXi, five years ago, was excellent, but lately, it has gone downhill, specifically with intra-company product integration. It would seem that product development teams do not communicate with one another. One example from personal experience was the integrations of NSX with ESXi - we encountered daily purple screens, and it took weeks to diagnose the issue finally and finally for a bug to be discovered, resolved with a new patch. The VMware ESXi product offerings are now so vast that it is difficult for the support teams themselves to keep up.

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

Nutanix Acropolis, Nutanix Prism, Nutanix Prism Pro, Hyper-V

Likelihood to Recommend

VMware ESXi has an offering for all levels of of the business starting eith their free license all the way through to Enterprise Plus for advanced datacenter, critical workloads.VMware ESXi makes sense for development and production workloads for both backups and testing scenarios where minor r major changes can be snapshotted for quick rollbacks or cloning for longer term changes. VMware ESXi comes with distributed switching for standardizing networking across hosts and baseline configuration checks for consistent host config and self-healing.
A solution for every need it licensing and pricing should be discussed with a reseller.

Good solution for every level.

Overall Satisfaction with VMware ESXi