Suse's Harvester is a cloud-native hyperconverged infrastructure. It is used to unify infrastructure workloads with Harvester and is designed to help operators consolidate and simplify their virtual machine workloads alongside Kubernetes clusters. Harvester is presented as a next generation of open-source hyperconverged infrastructure solutions designed for modern cloud-native environments. Suse Harvester is open source and free to use.
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VMware vCenter
Score 9.1 out of 10
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VMware vCenter is an advanced server management software that provides a centralized platform for controlling vSphere environments for visibility across hybrid clouds. VMware vCenter is no longer sold as a standalone product and is now available as a part of VMware Cloud Foundation.
It's great for provisioning any kind of virtual servers, but for now, we use it to provision only servers for Rancher managed Kubernetes clusters. But we are considering to provision also virtual servers for all kinds of needs on SUSE Harvester in the near future, as it's getting more and more mature with every release.
The VMware vCenter server is very useful in maintaining the CPU/RAM/datastore resources are balanced when there are multiple ESX/ESXi host servers. It is clear what resources are being used, and it is easy to migrate VMs to different ESX/ESXi hosts. Being able to remotely connect to the VM servers in vCenter when you cannot have other remote connections helps in maintenance and troubleshooting.
Currently, the HTML 5-based vSphere Client lets you manage the essential functions of vSphere from any browser, however, it would be nice if they would port all management functions over to the HTML 5-based Client.
Performing updates and upgrades to the infrastructure is a bit challenging for someone that may not be as intimate with vSphere. I think the updates/upgrades should be more integrated into the UI and provide the ability to push to the hosts, etc...
It would also be nice to have a more robust snapshot management tool to prevent snapshot overgrowth. It would be nice to be able to set a lifespan for the snapshot(s)
We are very dependent on this software, it has become a much needed tool to perform the daily tasks that are required to maintain the virtual server environment. VMware has become very pricey over the years, so we are looking for alternatives for cost savings strategy, but nothing has been found to be on par to what we are currently using
VMware vCenter Server does a great job with maintaining your virtual environment. It has great role based features to delegate various administrative tasks to multiple users. It is an excellent 'all in one' dashboard for viewing all aspects of your vSphere infrastructure. All alerts to software and hardware issues are easy to trace from this interface
VMware support has always been fantastic and they have been invaluable in solving tougher issues that have been run into. Most of the time, any oddities encountered are fixed by available updates. This can be deduced by support quickly with logs within vCenter. We have not run into something yet that support was unable to help with. They either have a solution already, or they are able to find one quickly.
Since moving away from the Windows Server hosting the vCenter application and instead using a virtual appliance, it has become much easier to implement and deploy the new versions. We can easily create a snapshot or clone of the vCenter vApp to ensure any problems encountered during the upgrade can be mitigated with a fall back to the old version to prevent unscheduled downtime.
We used ESXi for years and were happy with it. Then we implemented Rancher managed Kubernetes clusters with nodes provisioned on VMware ESXi. Later, when SUSE Harvester came out, we started to provision SUSE Rancher nodes on Harvester. Both VMware ESXi and SUSE Harvester are great products, and I think - we are keeping both, at least for now, when SUSE Harvester is a young project.