Likelihood to Recommend IBM Power VM is well suited in a large environment where we have to run multiple virtual machines on a single hardware and utilize the hardware more efficiently. It directly saves the cost of the organization. Due to the high licensing cost of IBM Power VM, it's less appropriate for smaller, less critical applications that do not need a lot of performance.
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 Offers a very granular virtualization of each core. Provides a quick and easy environment to build and maintain. Is rock solid and provides a reliable production environment. 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 We have yet to upgrade VIOs from 2.2.0 to 2.2.3 which will provide the more GUI centric management, however, making the VIO servers easier to manage would be one area. I think this is done with the latest versions of HMC and PowerVM. More real-time and historical performance reporting. 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 The product works. It provides the proven environment to support IBM's primary operating systems that run on the IBM Power processing systems. This by extension includes the IBM various storage products that work within that environment. It has proven to be seamless as the environment has grown and as various new products and version updates have been added. As with most IBM products, the support is excellent.
Read full review 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 IBM PowerVM is the best and most stable product in the virtualization market. It gives the best performance with IBM Power Server, especially its best solution, where we have to run critical applications and save applications licensing costs. It provides a lot of good features like LPM, shared processor pool...etc, which makes the environment more flexible.
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 are able to run several LPARs on one frame, which means we do not need to buy as many physical servers. That saves on floor space, power, and heating and cooling of the data center, among other things. Using LPM allows us to do maintenance on a frame without impacting the LPARs, giving us greater uptime. 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
Read full review ScreenShots