Why is VMware the best?

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Why is VMware the best

VMware is considered one of the leaders in virtualization technology and is widely regarded as the top choice for enterprise-level virtualization. There are several key reasons why VMware stands out from the competition and is the preferred platform for many large organizations and data centers.

VMware’s Technology Leadership

VMware was founded in 1998 and was one of the first companies to develop commercial software for virtualization. They have been at the forefront of virtualization technology for over 20 years and are continuously innovating. Some of VMware’s technical innovations and advancements include:

  • VMware ESXi hypervisor – A bare-metal hypervisor that installs directly on server hardware for maximum performance and efficiency.
  • VMware vSphere – An industry-leading virtualization platform built on the ESXi hypervisor.
  • VMware vMotion – Allows live migration of virtual machines between hosts with no downtime.
  • VMware High Availability – Provides automated failover and recovery of virtual machines.
  • VMware vSAN – A distributed storage platform that pools locally-attached disk storage.
  • VMware NSX – Network virtualization and security platform for software-defined data centers.

VMware has developed many of the foundational technologies in x86 virtualization. Their continued commitment to R&D allows them to offer the most advanced capabilities to customers. Many competitors have had to play catch-up to VMware’s innovations.

Breadth of Features and Functionality

The VMware vSphere stack provides a very extensive feature set covering all aspects of virtualization management including:

  • Server consolidation and hybrid cloud
  • Storage virtualization and management
  • Network virtualization and security
  • App mobility and continuity
  • Automated operations
  • Business continuity and disaster recovery

This comprehensive capability set allows customers to meet a wide range of data center virtualization needs from a single vendor. Competitor platforms often require piecing together products from multiple vendors to try and match VMware’s capabilities.

Industry-Leading Performance and Scalability

VMware virtualization platforms are optimized for maximum performance and ability to scale, two critical requirements in enterprise environments:

  • The ESXi hypervisor provides bare-metal performance with very low overhead.
  • vSphere utilizes vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) to dynamically allocate and balance resources.
  • VMware clusters scale to 64 hosts and 8000 virtual machines.
  • vSphere supports virtual machines with up to 128 vCPUs and 6TB of RAM.
  • VMware vSAN allows building shared storage with petabyte-level capacity.

The combination of a high-performance hypervisor and centralized management allows VMware environments to support demanding enterprise applications and massive server consolidation ratios.

Broad Platform and Hardware Support

VMware provides extensive support for a wide range of hardware platforms including:

  • Industry standard x86 servers from vendors like Dell, HP, Lenovo, Cisco, HPE, and more.
  • Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) from all major HCI vendors.
  • Support for all-flash, hybrid, and HDD storage configurations.
  • Certification for leading network vendors including Cisco, Arista, Juniper, Mellanox, and more.

This universal hardware support provides customers maximum flexibility and allows them to use VMware with their existing server infrastructure investments. It also prevents vendor lock-in situations.

Industry-leading Reliability and Uptime

Minimizing downtime is critical for enterprise data centers and VMware virtualization delivers excellent reliability:

  • The ESXi hypervisor has been designed for maximum uptime and stability.
  • vSphere HA and Fault Tolerance provide redundancy against hardware failures.
  • vSphere automated restarts, load balancing and failover ensure availability.
  • Patch management with VMware vSphere Update Manager simplifies maintenance.

VMware’s advanced availability capabilities give customers confidence their applications and workloads will maintain continuity of operations.

Robust Security Features

Securing critical infrastructure is a top concern for IT organizations. VMware offers many security capabilities:

  • ESXi Secure Boot ensures hypervisor integrity.
  • Granular permissions with vSphere allow delegated access control.
  • VM encryption ensures data security and privacy.
  • VMware NSX micro-segmentation and distributed firewalling.
  • Integration with third-party security tools through APIs.

VMware security is multi-layered spanning the hypervisor, management, network virtualization and integrations with security ecosystem.

Cost Savings Through Consolidation

One of the main drivers for virtualization is to reduce hardware costs through consolidation. With VMware, organizations can achieve very high consolidation ratios leading to major cost reductions. Some examples include:

  • Server consolidation ratios of 15:1 or 30:1 in some cases.
  • 90%+ reduction in physical servers.
  • Lower costs for data center space, power and cooling.
  • Reducing provisioning time from weeks to minutes resulting in agility and responsiveness.

The efficiency and utilization delivered by VMware virtualization results in savings that provide rapid ROI for deployment costs.

Broad Ecosystem of Partners and Integrations

VMware works closely with a vast ecosystem of technology partners and supports integration with many infrastructure and management tools including:

  • Leading server, network and storage vendors.
  • Backup, disaster recovery and business continuity solutions.
  • Security, monitoring, and management platforms.
  • Cloud solutions such as VMC, AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
  • Developer frameworks, automation and DevOps tools.

This extensive interoperability allows customers to leverage VMware as part of their overall data center architecture and strategy.

Industry Recognition and Trust

As the market share leader in data center virtualization, VMware is widely viewed as the trusted standard by enterprise IT:

  • Over 500,000 customers including 100% of Fortune 100 companies.
  • Consistently leading technology analyst evaluations and rankings.
  • Gartner Magic Quadrant leader for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure.
  • Forrester Wave leader for Hyperconverged Infrastructure.
  • Widely used in mission-critical applications across various industries.

VMware’s position as the recognizable industry leader gives customers confidence in the platform capabilities and company viability.

Simplified Management and Automation

VMware provides tools to simplify management at scale and enable automation:

  • vCenter Server provides centralized management and monitoring.
  • vRealize Operations Manager monitors performance and resources.
  • vRealize Automation and vRealize Orchestrator for infrastructure automation.
  • REST APIs available for all products.
  • Integrates with popular automation frameworks like Ansible, Chef, Puppet.

With comprehensive but easy to use management tools, VMware environments can be less complex and reduce administrative overhead.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

VMware offers built-in capabilities for data protection and disaster recovery:

  • Native backup and recovery with VMware Data Protection.
  • Replication solutions for BC/DR with vSphere Replication.
  • Integration with leading backup software vendors.
  • Solutions like VMware Site Recovery Manager for automated DR orchestration.
  • Stretch clusters with metro storage clustering.

These features help ensure application uptime and quick recovery from outages or disasters.

Hybrid Cloud and Portability

VMware supports seamless hybrid cloud deployments:

  • vSphere allows managing private and public cloud VMs consistently.
  • Hybrid cloud control plane through software like vRealize.
  • Cloud mobility with live migration across environments using vMotion.
  • Cross-cloud networking and security with VMware NSX.
  • Write once, run anywhere portability with VMware Cloud Foundation.

The ability to operate smoothly across on-premises data centers and public clouds provides flexibility and prevents lock-in.

Transition from Legacy Virtualization

For organizations running legacy virtualization platforms, VMware makes migration straightforward:

  • Migration tools from Citrix XenServer, Hyper-V and other hypervisors.
  • Re-hosting through VMware Converter for quick lifts and shifts.
  • Optimized migrations to vSphere with minimal downtime.
  • Familiar functionality and interfaces for admin training.

With quick and reliable migration paths, moving to VMware virtualization is low risk and high reward.

Conclusion

In summary, there are numerous compelling reasons that VMware has become the de facto standard and leader for enterprise data center virtualization including:

  • Pioneering technology innovations and capabilities.
  • Industry-leading performance, scalability and uptime.
  • Robust security and ecosystem integrations.
  • Lower TCO through consolidation savings.
  • Trusted platform with proven large-scale deployments.
  • Enables hybrid cloud and application mobility.
  • Streamlined management and automation.

For these reasons, VMware continues to be the virtualization platform of choice for mission-critical systems in organizations across industries and the globe.