VMware ESXi for everyone!
January 12, 2020

VMware ESXi for everyone!

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

Overall Satisfaction with VMware ESXi

We leverage VMware ESXi as our main hypervisor, spread across multiple hosts. It is used to support a large amount of VM's that we use for day to day business operations, as well as a separate network for our lab. It is utilized by our entire organization because each department is tied to at least a handful of VM's. Our Engineering team manages the environment, and it solves a lot of problems for us. We consistently perform P2V conversions of other equipment and then place it on our virtual infrastructure for easier management and backups. We continue to use it because of the outstanding reliability that we see within the environment, and the ease of patch management that is becoming more and more necessary as technology becomes more readily available.
  • It has more virtual operating system support in real life applications, not just in paper.
  • Migration from previous versions is a breeze. With vCenter, it can even be automated.
  • During the upgrade procedures, problem VIB's are sometimes a pain to find - This was remedied with the release of full HTML though, so this particular problem is only applicable to management via flash.
  • Automatic cleaning of Zombie VDK files would be an incredibly nice feature to have.
  • We have been able to consolidate equipment to save valuable rack space.
  • Simplified, central management reduces labor and training costs.
ESXi is the easiest to implement, almost every vendor supports a virtual appliance now. ESXi is also extremely reliable with an easy to follow licensing structure. This makes new deployments and consulting much more fluid and in turn easier to make recommendations as business needs change for my clients. I recommend this against any other hypervisor, with the exception of certain applications that are more suited for containers.
VMware TAC (Technical Assistance Case) is amazing. They are quick to reach out after a case is made, and will work diligently with you to resolve your issue. I have yet to have a case that I, or a client of mine, have made that VMware support was unable to resolve within 24 hours. Most cases that are made with them are solved much quicker, with a realistic timeline of 1-4 hours being typical.

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

ESXi is well suited for every business model out there, that requires flexible management options of multiple servers. It is reliable, saves resources, time and money by allowing you to have one powerful box wearing many hats, instead of multiple cheaper boxes wearing individual hats. This is perfect for allocating resources appropriately as business needs are constantly changing and scaling and usually unpredictable rates. Conversely, ESXi is not suitable for environments that need to maintain computers without a domain, or need for server infrastructure. This is almost non-existent in the current climate, however.

VMware ESXi Feature Ratings

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