Item: VMware vSphere
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Vpshere is used to manage our entire fleet of in-house servers and will soon be used to manage our storage servers as well. Every department in my organization will have its servers managed by it and VSphere allows us to easily manage our in-house virtualized inventory from a single pane of glass.

Pros and Cons

Great suite of tools
Easy centralized management

Still needs Flash for a few things.
Menu structure not really intuitive.

Return on Investment

Time involved in managing VMs is much reduced.
Automation frees up engineers for other tasks.

Alternatives Considered

Hyper-V and Citrix Hypervisor (formerly XenServer)

There's no comparison, VMWare is the market leader. It's pricey, but its feature set is years ahead of the competition. In particular, the ability to manage a large fleet of servers across multiple sites through a single pane of glass is great!

Support Rating

In my organization, we don't need to contact VMWare support very often, but when we do, they've always been excellent. The specialist teams really know their stuff and they've always been very active in resolving any issues we might have. In particular, their Enterprise-level support is way ahead of the competition.

Key Insights

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

Other Software Used

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Likelihood to Recommend

It's great for managing a large Enterprise-grade fleet of in-house servers, especially across multiple sites—it really shines there. It's less suited to managing a small fleet—you may find that you don't need all the features and can get by with Microsoft Hyper-V or another cheaper alternative.

VSphere: simply the best.

Overall Satisfaction with vSphere