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A whole server cluster in the palm of your hand
Updated January 16, 2020

A whole server cluster in the palm of your hand

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

Overall Satisfaction with vSphere

VMware vSphere is currently being used by the IT and Change Management departments to address test and preproduction virtual machines and perform UAT (User Acceptance Tests) and Regression Tests on every release we perform and authorize. The advantages are several: we have a continuous, fallback-capable pool of servers replicating our internal infrastructure for each project, which we can keep fresh via snapshots between releases, all of this without actually impacting the production infrastructure.
  • Virtualization
  • Accessibility
  • Further compatibility
  • Easier scalability
  • ROI
  • Scalability
  • Hyper-V and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
We opted for vSphere because of our IaaS/PaaS provider. Being one of the pioneers in server virtualization, VMware have proven to be quite reliable and robust, and thus widely adopted by virtualization service providers including ours. Also, the price is noticeably lower using ESX hypervisors with vSphere than using other alternatives, and we can even handle hybrid clouds with it (we have several cloud-based VMs with our provider, but also several local VM ones for legacy systems, both of them handled via vSphere).
We have experienced few situations that require us to escalate a ticket to the provider (that in itself a good sign for robustness of the solution), but when we have had the support team have been quick in providing a solution and/or workarounds to keep our business running with no noticeable service shortages.

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

Yes

Are you happy with VMware vSphere's feature set?

Yes

Did VMware vSphere live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of VMware vSphere go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy VMware vSphere again?

Yes

vSphere excels at handling ESX/ESXi hypervisors. The advantages are several: having a continuous, fallback-capable pool of servers for testing purposes, including imaging, cloning and training; a reliable IaaS platform for mission critical business processes that can be handled even via mobile device (we have taken and restored snapshots of entire server farms via vSphere from our mobile phones in occasions when we're in field work); and an easy to understand and operate frontend for the VMs.

VMware vSphere Feature Ratings

Server Virtualization
8.2
Virtual machine automated provisioning
8
Management console
8
Live virtual machine backup
9
Live virtual machine migration
8
Hypervisor-level security
8

Using vSphere

9 - It's my entire department. All of them have access to two or more virtual servers or workstations, depending on the project in which they are at the moment and the application, system or product they're evaluating or testing. On them, we usually run proof of concepts, regression tests and compatibility evaluations with current or future systems.
4 - Our vSphere (and ESX or ESXi) support operators have experience and knowledge on IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service), being able to provision, deploy, manage and decommission VMs on demand, always keeping watch of the overall ESX or ESXi server resources in order not to affect other running VMs.
  • Server virtualization for testing purposes
  • Server quick provisioning
  • Using VMs for non-traditional tests, such as legacy system testings (with Windows 9x VMs or even Android/Mac OS ones)
  • Using VMs as bridges for network access to resources from geographical restricted locations.
  • Server consolidation
  • Workspace virtualization
We intend to keep our current IaaS provider, and they will keep using VMware in the future for all its advantages, so we'll keep managing our assets via vSphere. Also, we intend to keep an on-premises lab with vSphere/vCenter servers based on ESXi as failover or backup servers for non-essential systems.

Evaluating vSphere and Competitors

  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Analyst Reports
VMWare, one of the virtualization pioneers in the market, has been long known as reliable and stable providers for virtual solutions, and vSphere is not an exception. Most of us have experienced a VMWare product at some point in our careers, so making the transition to ESXi and vSphere is essentiually a natural evolution step in our infrastructure development.