ESXi is the go to for virtualization
March 31, 2022

ESXi is the go to for virtualization

James Jakimowicz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with VMware ESXi

VMware ESXi is used as our primary means of deploying virtual machines for any business purpose with approximately 200 virtual machines across our own infrastructure and customer infrastructure. We find it to be very user friendly with good reliable performance. ESXi has earned our trust for on-prem server deployments.
  • Reliability - very well suited for production environments
  • Easy to setup, use, and maintain
  • ESXi supports a vast majority of operating systems
  • Flexible - it can be configured to suit particular needs
  • It can get expensive
  • Its reliability allows our team to spend more time on business objectives and less time maintaining our virtual infrastructure
  • Its ease of use and its familiarity cuts down on training time necessary and mistakes
  • Consolidation of rack space by using fewer but more capable servers
At the time we did our comparison we found that VMware scaled much better than Hyper-V, lighter weight, and much more reliable. My recommendation if Hyper-V is needed for anything such as Windows containers, is to use nested virtualization and installing Windows Hyper-V within ESXi.

oVirt's biggest advantage is its cost which makes it very tempting, but its less user friendly and at the time of our comparison was lacking some features that we liked in ESXi.

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

VMware ESXi is well suited for both production or lab environments and it is a common virtualization solution so gaining familiarity with it will be beneficial to anyone using it. I think it is an appropriate recommendation for a vast majority of use cases for hypervisor solutions with very few exceptions that I would consider to be very specific or special/unique cases. For general virtualization VMware ESXi is the way to go.

VMware ESXi Feature Ratings

Virtual machine automated provisioning
10
Management console
9
Live virtual machine backup
8
Live virtual machine migration
10
Hypervisor-level security
8

Evaluating VMware ESXi and Competitors