VMware vSphere

What do you like best?

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.

What do you dislike?

The licensing of product cost is high.

Require to adopt additional licenses and training for manageability.

Single issue taken care per support ticket.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

1. Please consider at least four or more hosts into your infra.

2. Please purchase the license for vCenter also, which is a very great tool to make life easier.

3. Please use professional service to deploy the infra, which might cost a little but payback.

4. Do a complete analysis of requirements and growth.

5. Must use shared storage, preferably SAN (FC or iSCSI)

6. If there are multiple sites, make sure all are reachable because there is a feature that allows to migration of virtual machines across the sites.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We run Mail Server, web server, database server, application server, Human resource management system, supply chain management system on vsphere.