Likelihood to Recommend More appropriate for:
Pure Microsoft ecosystem environments (Windows Server and SQL server) and the most common Linux and UNIX platforms. Environments where cost is less of a factor than settling on a single platform for monitoring Environments where the administrators are familiar with the setup and installation of SCOM. Less appropriate for:
Pure UNIX/Linux shops, especially versions not supported out of the box by SCOM. Shops that cannot afford the engagement to setup/configure and maintain on a continuous basis. Shops that cannot dedicate personnel to the care and feeding of SCOM, especially when supporting larger environments. 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 Allows us to visualize our systems in a single interface and see the status of health as well as relevant performance metrics. A flexible and powerful interface with active alerting covering domain controllers, SQL servers, etc... Allows you to customize your views and workspaces for specific tasks and needs. Reporting is powerful and flexible. 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 One of the biggest drawbacks to SCOM is the sheer scope and complexity of the system. This can be a pro and a con. The system is very customizable, what you put into it is what you'll get out of it. That said, the learning curve is fairly steep. An organization needs to be committed to putting time and resources into SCOM to get the most out of it. I've heard stories from colleagues of several different companies that invested in SCOM and then abandoned it due to the excessive time and care required. SCOM is expensive. Not only is the enterprise licensing costly, SCOM requires it's own servers, operational and warehouse databases to be maintained. The OOB SCOM reports are a bit clunky and feel outdated. 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 Hard to get support. The product is not being actively developed anymore, so it is hard to get new features for the product.
Read full review 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 Altiris and WSUS and in the beginning Altiris had the better admin interface than SCOM, but it is no longer the case as SCOM has refined their admin interface. Altiris still has better and more robust group assignments for management roles and those two other tools can better manage non Windows OS devices than SCOM but for a large enterprise Windows shop, if you can afford it, SCOM is the way to go.
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 It has allowed us to provide an Enterprise Event/Alert management solution to the Global company It has taken a long time to get it to provide valuable alerts and information, lots of user resources and investment. It assists with 24/7 monitoring and out of hours support 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