Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Fast to deploy new virtual machines It's easy to use Stable and ready for production Free and open source Has a strong community Read full review VSAN storage management and redundancy - high performance IO with built in fault tolerance across the cluster, not reliant on a single hardware item VM fault tolerance. The ability to relocate a running VM and restart VMs from failed or isolated nodes Resource management and alerting. Tracking load across physical systems and allowing us to rebalance for better utilisation Read full review Cons It takes expertise to set up SUSE Harvester for production You need to get used to SUSE Harvester to be as "fluent" as in VMWare ESXi You need to well prepare for system upgrades Read full review 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) Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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
Read full review Usability 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
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Citrix Xen Server.... Great Hypervisor but very limited in terms of functionality
MS
Hyper-V ... [VMware vCenter Server] is better for almost everything and appliance form makes a clear winner for security and ease of deployment
Read full review Return on Investment We can provision more virtual servers It's cheaper than competitor products (tbh - it's free, if you don't need support) It's easy to manage when you get used to it Read full review The positive impact of vcenter is definitely felt in larger organisations in terms of being able to manage multiple servers all in one environment It will decrease the amount of time your server engineers will have to spend in the server room or datacenter. Muhammad Mulla Systems Administrator, Core Infrastructure & Microsoft Systems
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