Item: VMware ESXi
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We leverage ESXi and VCenter to host all of the university's virtual machines and appliances. This has allowed us to dramatically increase our effective use of space in the data center as well as increased our flexibility with our end users to meet the business requirements that they have for their application needs.

Pros and Cons

HA protection
Workload Balancing
Elastic resource allocation

We are looking for more flexibility with vvol usage
Better and more descriptive error logging in vcenter
Permission structure can occasionally get confusing

Return on Investment

Great reduction of overhead from previous physical host requirements
Increased security due to lower attack vector
Cooling costs and space from a datacenter perspective

Alternatives Considered

Hyper-V

Hyper-V while perfect in terms of price lacked a lot of the flexibility and robust HA that we needed in an enterprise product. This along with the ease of use and granularity of control made the choice to stay on ESXi/VMWare a no-brainer for our school.

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

Likelihood to Recommend

At the moment I don't know of a better baseline product to provide the virtual machine flexibility that VMWare has. With the power of ESXi and the ability to leverage other VMWare software products with it, you are able to use it to cover just about any VDI, Local Cloud, or simple server needs.

Great Product!

Overall Satisfaction with VMware ESXi