VMware vSphere Pros and Cons

vSphere allows you to easily implement and manage your vCenter clusters, hosts and guests. It's role based security makes it easy to provide only to required access to the relevant departments. VM templates make it easy to create predefined guests and its virtual networks can easily be integrated with physical ones. Most employees frequently use the vSphere Client to access their desgnated guests, either through its embedded console or by launching its VM Console. Some employees connect to the vCenter through VMWare Workstation allowing them to still use a familiar interface to access their guests. We have not needed to contact customer support due to the rich knowledgebase and helpful forums. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The cost when comparing it to say Hyper-V and not being compatible with certain hardware. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Today's leading platform for virtualization purposes is without a doubt VMware vSphere. There is basically no other hypervisor that would combine an easy way of implementation which goes hand in hand with its operation. The vSphere which is basically VMware hypervisor - ESXi and VMware vCenter server (the main management platform) is a platform that is able to virtualialize vast majority of Operating system nowadays. With years of development and fine tuning it is able to provide support for most features both from Hardware and Software world. It is also integrated with most vendors and their SW capabilities through plugins, which have to be certified for VMware vSphere. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Current situation right after acquisition of VMware by Broadcom may pose some problems to Editions availability - the most used and most valued edition - VMware vSphere ENterprise Plus comes in bundle with other Software which some customers may not find that convinient. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I have been managing the systems and network for a small Engineering / Construction firm for over 20 years, and VMware vSphere has allowed us to grow even with our tight budget. We have been able to consolidate our physical infrastructure, expand our offerings to our internal clients, and expand our server count when the need arises. Using vSphere has allowed us to concentrate on other IT issues because it is solid and just works! The last thing I would say that I like about vSphere is the wide array of 3rd party support and add-ons, we have never felt like vSphere was a bad decision because we could not perform our tasks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

If I had to point out a downside to VMware vSphere it would be the size of the offerings. I mean we are a small company however we scale into an Enterprise license because of our need for redundancy. In being on an Enterprise level license we are paying for features we just would never use, so the canned packages of the levels of VMware vSphere can be viewed as a dislike for us. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

For me, Its High Availability (HA) and Reliability. It provides automated failover capabilities when host server fails or shutdown unexpectedly, the VM running on it are automatically restarted on other available hosts, this will ensure and minimize the downtime process. Also, it provides continuous availability and creating a shadow live like instance of a VM seamlessly takes over without downtime at all. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Licensing and its Costs, for smaller company or organizations or for those limited budgets and IT resources, VMware vSphere is not an option and less priority compared to other which is in the budget range or i think prefer to choose more on open-source as an alternative. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Migration of the virtual machines between physical hosts.

vSphere HA to avoid downtime during maintenance of the physical hosts.

Memory and CPU hot plug features.

Network Management.

Datastore Management.

Virtual OS Management.

Pre-configured template for easy deployment.

Easy to upgrade from older version to newer version.

For advanced level user, it also allows to downgrade the ESXi version.

LDAP / Active Directory based authentication.

Skyline integration for proactive recommendation based on the environment.

Time synchronization between host and virtual machines. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The licensing of product cost is high.

Require to adopt additional licenses and training for manageability.

Single issue taken care per support ticket. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

When VMware first introduced the concept of server virtualization for commodity hardware platforms, many where skeptical about this virtualization thing being possible at large scale at all. Due to it's superb manageability, great compatibility with mainstream hard- and software from other vendors, straight forward implementation and a well tuned vendor support organization vSphere offers a rock solid foundation for infrastructure virtualization in general.

There are very few mature alternatives (if any) in the market that offer comparable reliability, scalability and manageability. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Broadcom's acquisition of VMware has rocked the boat heavily in the past year or so. Although VMware's proposition has become clear and licensing options have become much more transparent, price hikes and the uncertainty around pricing development toward the future make that users are actively looking for alternatives. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is absolutely stable and doesn't require a lot of practice to learn.

One of the first things I encorage our trainees to do is to install and configure VMware vSphere.

It is perfectly interacting with other VMware products which makes it very reliable and easy to manage.

It is very quick to setup up or reinstall a ESXi-Node with a VMware vSphere ISO or when adding Nodes to existing environments the more or less automaticly are beeing deployed and configured.

Thanks to the very simple to use but perfectly integrated lifecycle management, there is no more need for after hours patching or working on weekends. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is necessarry to cross check with the HCL because of a high risk of incompatibility with hardware that VMware doesn't support.

As only certified hardware is supported according to HCL, this leaves little to none room for flexibilty in using different components than listed in the HCL.

In certain cases a hardware vendor is quicker delivering a firmware-/drivers update than VMware updating the vSphere HCL.

Following this can cause troubles keeping a vSphere-Node oder Cluster uptodate by using single image with vendor addon. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Very stable product considering so many variables (different HW vendors, architecture design, quantity of settings etc).

Also since ages - still easy to use and quite easy to implement, even we are getting more and more options/features in every new release version.

It's easy to integrate with current software and hardware.

Can say much about customer support as I didn't have many occassions to work with then, as there were only few cases that required additional support. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I would expect some better integration with current devops/automation tools (Ansible, Chef etc) or even with PowerCLI.

Maybe also some of the recent changes related with Broadcom aquisition like there was problem with licensing changes or KB links didn't worked/pointed out to wrong places (still there are few not fixed). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like being able to see the load on the different hosts so I can easily balance them manually. I also like being able to find and see the settings of the hosts and vms as well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The major issue I have ran into with vSphere is remembering that I am not dealing with physical servers and physical objects (example: networking). This has made the issue of trying to track down performance issues, in regards to SAN access a bit of a problem. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One of the things I like the most about vSphere is the flexibility. I can deploy across any number of hardware configurations, and even create mixes (of hardware) in my environment to suit business needs. That flexibility has allowed me to deploy workloads with ease, and significantly faster than I would have pre-virtualization for certain. The consistency in the product lines is another thing I really appreciate. I know when I sit at a console what I expect to find, where to find things, and how to accomplish my tasks without having to go to a new training class for every feature update or tool. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As always, the thing that is the hardest to contend with as a customer is the licensing costs and the changes in licensing models. I've been through many iterations of both with vmware throught the years and while I recognize the licensing is supporting the brains that do make my life easier...the constant changes and challenges with licensing, especially with the switch in ownership to Broadcom have been disappointing. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.