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VmWare vSphere Helps Small Company Handle Large Data
August 07, 2014

VmWare vSphere Helps Small Company Handle Large Data

Aaron Myers | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

5.5 Essentials Plus

Overall Satisfaction with vSphere

We use vSphere to manage 50 virtual machines on three physical hosts and it has created a difference in our workload and hardware needs that our physical infrastructure and budget would not previously allow. It is used by our entire company to hold our back-end infrastructure, as well as many project related servers, and is managed by our very small team of two administrators.
  • The product is very easy to understand and implement. It installs and helps manage multiple hosts and can create a single management point that was not previously available when using physical hardware servers. There are multiple views that can adapt to the administrator with object level permissions that give your IT team flexibility to delegate tasks to less experienced administrators.
  • vSphere is a very stable platform, and with the newest database moving to Postgres instead of mySQL or SQL server, it is even more robust and easy to manage. It is very reliable in that we don't have to worry about the management server going down, or the vSphere product having issues that cause us grief.
  • vSphere upgrades very easily using an upgrade installer to get you to the latest version. It will upgrade the database and product in one fell swoop, leaving you time to manage the servers themselves instead of dealing with the product itself.
  • The newer versions have a Web UI that does not require installation of a desktop software to manage virtual machines.
  • The upgrade process, while easy to do, does take some time as it is upgrading the entire database to another version. A progress bar of some sort during this process would be very helpful as you would know that progress is being made rather than wondering if things are hung and you need to start again.
  • The actual client application is only available on Windows, so if you have a mac or linux machine, you have to use the Web UI, which, while robust, is not as seamless as the client application itself.
  • In using vSphere as our virtualization technology, we have been able to leverage our technicians to other projects and companies to do setup and support of the VMWare vSphere product.
  • In virtualizing our environment, we find that we save significantly on our power and cooling bills as there is less heat created and less energy used with less physical hardware.
  • The flexibility that the product has given us has been very freeing. If a new project needs a new server to be created, we simply have to login and create a new virtual machine instead of finding appropriate hardware and making sure we have enough resources and rack space for the new machine
  • Microsoft Hyper-V,XenServer
vSphere is by far the easiest and most stable virtualization software out there. It works extremely well and blows others away. Even though Hyper-V is licensed much cheaper, you get what you pay for as vSphere is a better product overall and fits our business in a much more usable way than the Microsoft competitor.
We are constantly looking for change that will benefit our company. We are not ones to stick with a product simply because it is what we know, but rather looking for what fits us best. We can't imagine another product on the market today doing a better job of handling our infrastructure than vSphere.
vSphere is really a great product for any size company that has more than 10 physical servers as those can be consolidated to two physical machines and managed in one interface. This creates the ability to do more remotely than you could previously, and, depending on your hardware setup, you can have automatic failover for when a piece of hardware truly does fail.

vSphere Implementation

Just make sure that when you implement, that the person implementing truly knows what they are doing and has a plan of action coming in. Since our initial implementation using a consulting service, I have implemented a few vSphere just from what I learned at the initial implementation and use over time, and the person implementing really needs to know what they are doing or you will miss out on features that may help you down the line.
  • Vendor implemented
  • Professional services company
PC Connection handled our purchasing and implementation of the vSphere originally when 4.0 was the current version. They did a great job contracting out the job and finding someone that fit our needs.
Change management was minimal
  • We never realized how much we didn't know about what kind of switches we needed for our data storage setup. We implemented an iSCSI SAN at the same time, so we were surprised at the different features that the various switches had to have to house all of the features we were capable of having.