Azure Virtual Machines vs. VMware vSphere

It's well suited to delivering information about our sports events as during the events a lot of processing power is needed and instantly becomes available by scaling out when the event is over the service can be scaled right back making massive savings. We use it for football, horse racing, Olympics games etc, it is also used when things happen in the world like right now there is a lot of concern over the Russia and Ukraine conflict, since the demand for this information is high we instantly scale to meet the demand of our news feed services. I believe up to 90% of the UK's News, sports and media information actually passes through our computer systems, we are a market leading news and information service and Azure Virtual Machines provide us with the reliability that we need so that we can provide a rock solid reliable news and information service to the world.

Incentivized

vSphere is well suited for multiple VMWare hosts and can be very useful in larger enterprises where vMotion is used to load balance and failover running virtual machines. In smaller businesses with one or two hosts then the features can be overkill. The addition of virtual TPM support is a very nice addition to provide vm security in a more Microsoft supported methodology.

Incentivized

• You can login to Azure VMs using SSO with your Azure Ad account
• Azure VMs are securely accessible from anywhere in the world, with Azure Bastion
• You can execute scripts on the VM from the Azure portal without logging in to it

Incentivized

• Taking Snapshots of VMs and roll back to the previous state when faced with a problem.
• Template creation - Once you have that perfect template you can easily create new VMs. Very useful feature.
• VMotion - Being able to perform live migrations of a virtual machine from one physical server to another, without any downtime.

Incentivized

• Pricing can be a concern if you are truly agnostic to which cloud you are building your particular solution in.
• The UI, as is the case with any cloud provider, is crowded.
• As with any cloud provider, it can be difficult to tune in exactly the right amount of servers for your needs...you might find yourself under/overprovisioning.

Incentivized

• Allow enable EVC without requiring host shutdown
• More detail in recent tasks. Instead of just showing a task called "Reconfigure virtual machine" also have a link to more detailed information as to what was reconfigured, changed or removed.
• Allow searching tasks or events

Incentivized

We are constantly looking for change that will benefit our company. We are not ones to stick with a product simply because it is what we know, but rather looking for what fits us best. We can't imagine another product on the market today doing a better job of handling our infrastructure than vSphere.

They are very easy and intuitive, very easy to deploy

Incentivized

Very useful for environments where space and energy consumption are issues and management is not very keen on upfront spending on hardware every time whenever requirement comes from any dept for provisioning a machine for their occasional use, easily can be done in case of VMware vSphere in few clicks. Backup, security, monitoring and management everything is covered but at additional cost.

Incentivized

I give the overall support for Azure Virtual Machines a 7 because I think while the overall support do a great job there are still areas that it could improve on such as efficiency and speed. So while I only give it a 7 and it has some issues it is still better than the overall support at Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.

Incentivized

I rarely ever have to contact support and when I do need to resolve an issue, there is always an abundance of kb articles and research information available that can help quickly resolve the issue. Depending on the type of support contract you have, you may get support from some offshore group in another country and this could be a little challenging because of the language barrier.

Incentivized

Just make sure that when you implement, that the person implementing truly knows what they are doing and has a plan of action coming in. Since our initial implementation using a consulting service, I have implemented a few vSphere just from what I learned at the initial implementation and use over time, and the person implementing really needs to know what they are doing or you will miss out on features that may help you down the line

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's Compute supports Windows, but is really geared towards Linux. You can install Windows on some Linode servers, but again, Linode is geared towards Linux. AWS does everything but is complex and can have high costs. If you want to host Windows servers in the cloud, nothing beats Azure. From licensing to management, Microsoft Azure provides the easiest way to deploy and manage Windows Servers in the cloud, especially if you utilize other Microsoft services like Microsoft 365 an Visual Studio subscriptions.

Incentivized

vSphere provides more control over the Virtualization environment.

It allows users to have great management User Interface with lots of dynamic features.

VM creation.

Perform vMotion.

Network Management.

Datastore Mangement.

Cluster Management.

Schedule tasks.

Affinity and anti-affinity rules.

Easy to upgrade.

Backup the configuration data which can be restore after a disaster.

Incentivized

• It's so easy to spin up new instances, that it becomes also to easy to have to many of them to manage. Many teams end up with a couple of hundreds of VMs after a short while, making the whole thing very hard to maneuver
• Azure VMs are the next step for us to rely on Onprem servers, and leaving the management of the infrastructure to the professionals
• The ease of use, is also important when our main focus is to deliver new applications and integrations fast, and not having to worry about infrastructure. We sell bottles, not CPUs

Incentivized

• Having vSphere helped my business quickly recover from a ransomware attack which would have crippled us for weeks if we were not virtualized. I think the ROI on something like that is immeasurable.
• vSphere has allowed my company to purchase bigger server hardware to host 3 or 4 virtual servers, which was at a cost much lower than buying 3 or 4 server hardware boxes, saving us thousands each time we need to upgrade hardware.

Incentivized