My Favorite Virtual Tool
October 24, 2017
My Favorite Virtual Tool
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with vSphere
vSphere is used only by IT departments, to include testing and Dev Ops as well. The reason is that is strictly for the use of managing VMWare virtualized servers and environments, and is a fantastic tool for this purpose. It can allow one to quickly create a test environment by cloning the production one, with no impact on the production environment at all. But its main use is in the day to day management of the servers. When used with vMotion and DRS, your environment will seamlessly move servers between physical hosts when there is contention for resources, or failures of networking or hardware.
- "Sandboxing"- or, creating a copy of a production server for testing, is a strong feature for businesses that are in development, or wish to test a new or upgraded application with current live data, or reflecting the current production environment.
- Cloning a server for fast provisioning, such as when rolling out multiple terminal or Citrix servers, etc. Right click, select, and wait a few minutes and you are ready to go!
- I can't say enough about how easy vSphere makes managing servers that are virtualized, from simple to complex. The plugins available for the major SAN vendors alone make it indispensable.
- The Dashboard- The health of any environment is paramount to any IT department- and by extension, any company. IT administrators can see at a glance exactly what needs attention and it's priority.
- Adding storage is still complex, with Linux mount points instead of simply browsing to an IP address or range of addresses, particularly in iSCSI environments.
- Networking can be a headache as well, also due to engineering shorthand and terms instead of more human, commonly used by techs. Again, browsing the network instead of declaring it would be a great addition.
- We were able to eliminate the need for several racks and UPS for same by consolidating 35 servers onto 3 blades- Huge dollar savings in hardware.
- By doing this consolidation, we were able to take advantage of Microsoft's Datacenter licensing as opposed to per server, creating a net savings on the software licensing.
- Our objective of 24/7/365 availability is only possible through this method
VSphere is easier to use and more mature than Microsoft's offerings, coming as it is from the company that invented virtualization. It has a pleasant dashboard and pleasing layouts, which are intuitive and easy to navigate- they just make more sense (to me) than the Hyper-V environments I tried. The support is also less cumbersome.