Why VMware vSphere is awesome and you should use it
October 09, 2015
Why VMware vSphere is awesome and you should use it
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
5.5
Modules Used
- vSphere, vRealize Operations Manager, ESXi
Overall Satisfaction with VMware Server
The main use of VMware products for our organization is mainly ESXi and its management component, vCenter Server. It is being heavily utilized across the entire department to host our production, development, staging, and training environments. It address many business problems, chief among them related to money - virtualization helps our business save on physical data center space, power & cooling costs, and physical hardware costs.
- Small attack surface for possible vulnerabilities
- Enables easy maintenance/upgrades for ESXi hosts due to features such as vMotion and DRS.
- Hardware resource management - there are many features built in to the ESXi hypervisor that enable us to get the most out of our hardware platforms.
- Cost - The licenses are purchased per-processor and are rather expensive.
- Complexity - Many features require advanced knowledge to configure.
- Feature integration into vCenter platform - there are certain features (VUM for example) that still require a Windows server to run alongside the vCenter Server Appliance.
- Increased employee efficiency - We're able to provide access to resources quicker than with a physical infrastructure
- Increased hardware utilization - Rather than running a bunch of physical servers at 10% utilization, we can run ESXi hosts at 75% utilization and make better use of the hardware that we own.
- Customer service - we're able to more rapidly provision virtual machines for our different departments, thereby providing a high level of customer service and not being a roadblock to other departments and their assorted project deadlines.
For an enterprise solution, picking VMware vSphere was an easy choice for us. The combination of the small attack surface of the purpose-built hypervisor (i.e. not Windows), the powerful management platform, and the features (particularly intelligent load balancing via DRS and the Distributed vSwitch) helped push us over the edge, so to speak, into a VMware purchase.