Item: VMware ESXi
Rating: 9
Author: Richard Potts

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use ESXi within all of our Production, Development, & Testing environments to manage and run critical workloads that the company leverages for revenue generating applications as well as day to day IT infrastructure systems. ESXi is our management center for all of these systems and allows us to modify our virtual environment as needed.

Pros and Cons

Ease of use
Extremely intuitive
Easy to manage

Upgrade procedures could be outlined a bit better
Documentation could be improved to show specific images of tasks
Network integration and interfacing could be easier to navigate

Return on Investment

Decreased application deployment times
Quicker revenue generation due to ease of use
Decreased reliance on multiple admins to get a task complete

Alternatives Considered

Hyper-V

While running through a proof of concept with Hyper-V and VMware ESXi, I found VMware ESXi to be much easier to deploy, administer, and work with overall. Both products are good but I personally found ESXi to be more intuitive to use and the deployment options were also more robust for ESXi.

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

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud

Likelihood to Recommend

ESXi is very well suited for managing and running small to enterprise sized workloads and allows for detailed visibility and management of your workloads within a single view. ESXi has a very low learning curve and allows administrators to ramp up quickly on how to properly and safely manage and deploy virtual environments.

ESXi helped us out a bunch!

Overall Satisfaction with VMware ESXi