Item: VMware ESXi
Rating: 6
Author: David Riberdy

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

VMware ESXi is used for all of our Production and Test/Development environments in our organization.

Pros and Cons

The ability to seamlessly migrate a virtual machine from one host to another is a vital part of the virtual experience in 2023.
Metrics and statistics easily allow us to understand where pain points can be in the environment and to change or correct them for a better experience.

In my experience, service and Support is severely lacking from VMware. Over time this has gotten worse to the point where it is easier not to open a case and just guess at a solution.
In my opinion, pricing has gotten increasingly worse over time as well. Every year there seems to be a new way of licensing that is only in an effort to suck more money from the consumer.
They have been pushing more and more to the cloud but their services are not ready for primetime when they do. Horizon licenses are now pushed from the Cloud services and, in my experience, they did not work in the beginning and even now are a pain to use, so I dread going to the same for VMware ESXi.

Return on Investment

In my experience, some versions of VMware ESXi destroyed hosts and caused us serious downtime, and it took a while for support to admit it was the new version.
We have been able to migrate VMs around when there have been hardware issues with 0 downtime and no consumer impact.

Neither of these two products have really been a 100% replacement for VMware ESXi but they are getting closer and closer and with the new licensing agreements that VMware is trying to push out, could start eating at the lower hanging fruit. VMware ESXi still has some nicer capabilities but I see that in the next few years, at least Prox Mox will start taking market shares.

Key Insights

Do you think VMware ESXi delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with VMware ESXi's feature set?

Yes

Did VMware ESXi live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of VMware ESXi go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy VMware ESXi again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Before, I would have said that VMware ESXi would have been great in all environments, but now I can see a case for other options in everything but the most important of Production. Test and Development environments don't always need all of the advanced features of VMware ESXi and could probably use some other form of virtual server.

VMWare ESXi is not longer the king of the mountain due to poor service and support

Overall Satisfaction with VMware ESXi