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April 24, 2020
vCenter Server is used for the internal infrastructure. It is also used at numerous clients with only two or so using Hyper-V instead. It is a very scalable and easy to use platform for virtualization. Maintaining the infrastructure is also easy to deal with. It's been a fantastic tool to help clients go from a physical environment to a virtual one, and we haven't had anyone regret the decision.
- High Availability. It's simple to get an HA cluster set up and to maintain it. The failovers happen seamlessly and have definitely helped clients throughout various issues.
- Resource Management. vCenter is very good at managing resources and balancing load to keep everything running well.
- Support. Any time VMware support has been consulted, the experience has been fantastic. Support is always one of the most important aspects of a product, and VMware doesn't disappoint.
- Licensing. I understand that a company is motivated to do what is best for its business, but some of the licensing model changes have come off as greedy. A more recent one was specifically designed to combat the usage of extremely high core count server CPU's coming out now. Getting hosts in a dual socket configuration used to be the sweet spot for value, but this change will most likely upset that option.
January 31, 2020
Our entire infrastructure is virtualized, and we standardized on VMware vCenter Server for our hypervisors. We don't have a massive amount of hosts in our environment (only 6), but it is still enough that managing them without VMware vCenter Server would be a pain. We use the VMware vCenter server to manage all our hosts, and it makes it very easy to do so from a single console.
- Easy to manage multiple ESXi servers and VMs
- GUI is easy to use and relatively intuitive
- HTML5 console is a massive improvement over flash, but it is still a bit slow on response time.
- Some administrative pages are challenging to find and use.
March 20, 2020
We use vCenter server to manage our on-premises VMWare VSphere environment. We currently have two instances of vCenter installed at our university - one for managing our main vSphere clusters, and a separate one at a remote campus for managing the vSphere cluster in our DR data center. Users are typically from within the technology services department.
- vCenter is, in my opinion, the only way to go for managing vSphere clusters - it centralizes management for all of the ESX hosts as well as all of the VMs themselves.
- vCenter is extremely good at consolidating all of the information you need to know about your ESX hosts and your VMs in to one easily referable location.
- vCenter makes it easy to allocate all of the compute and storage resources in your vSphere clusters in the most efficient way possible.
- The vSphere web client is sub-par. The interface is slow and difficult to navigate. The old standalone client was/is better to use, but for some functionality, you are forced to use the web client.
July 24, 2019
VMware vCenter Server is used to manage our enterprise production VMware host clusters. We have approximately 50 hosts each hosting around 40 VM guests running production applications supporting campus wide functions. Since the clusters are in a distributed environment with fail over capabilities enabled, vCenter is essential for managing these migrations and disaster recovery strategies. Without this software, all functions would have to be performed manually on each host with a great deal more downtime than currently experienced between migrations.
- VMware environment client accesss
- VMware host adminstration
- VMware Cluster management
- VMware alerts management
- Transition from Windows Application to Web Client has been difficult
- vCenter fail over needs improvement
- Linked vCenters cause slow down when network links are down
- Snapshot remediation needs more automation for cleanup processing
January 09, 2020
VMware vCenter is the heart and soul of our virtualized infrastructure. This simple but expansive management tool allows us to manage our infrastructure throughout the full lifecycle (deploy, maintain, decommission). It provides powerful clustering features which allow for load balancing across compute, memory, and storage. Robust alerting capabilities allow administrators to move from a reactive approach to proactive.
- Manage large sets of complex infrastructure components
- Stay up to date with latest security patches through integrated vsphere update manager
- Management of multiple vCenter instances can be challenging at times
- HTML5 client is missing a lot of features from the flash client
November 12, 2019
vCenter serves as the core of all our data center operations in multiple locations throughout the Pacific Northwest and northern Canada. It facilitates a standardized platform across our enterprise for managing data center operations and server infrastructure. Utilizing VMware vSphere Content Libraries, we are able to synchronize templates across data centers, allowing for the simplification of template management and having a common management platform enables our IT teams to easily move from one environment to another for a variety of daily tasks and server infrastructure management.
- VM resource management. It is very simple to manage a VM’s compute and storage resource allocations, expanding and even removing excess resources when necessary.
- VMware’s platform enables a highly available infrastructure environment with even minimal hardware resources. Setting up host infrastructure and storage clusters is simple and easy to manage.
- In recent years, VMware’s vSphere environment, at which vCenter Server is the center, has become so feature-rich that quality control has suffered quite a bit. While many features are extremely nice to have, the core components of the software (snapshots, changed block tracking, and other various features) have become ‘buggy’ at release, causing pause before updating to the latest and greatest. vSphere 6.7 has been around for about 2 years as of this writing and we have only just adopted it due to many of the initial bugs that were apparent for integrated services, such a Veeam, that have become critical components of our infrastructure. It would be great if VMware would spend more time on quality control before releasing major feature releases in the future.
- As with many large companies, the VMware support organization is tough to navigate unless you have a critical, hard-down outage of some sort.
VMware vCenter Server is being used widely in the organization. Our company right now is a heavy user of VMware products and the whole infrastructure is 90% virtualization. The benefits we get from it like fast provisioning, monitoring, centralization, and cost efficiency in the company goal to be digital. We mostly use it as our main infrastructure platform to cater business unit server needs and in that regard it is a complex technology that needs to be learned over time and managed properly to reach its potential for consumption.
- Easy provisioning
- Centralized Data Center
- Cost Benefit efficient
- GUI
- Ease of use
- management
April 09, 2019
We use vCenter Server to manage our entire VMware footprint, which also happens to be 98% of our infrastructure. It makes centrally managing several hosts and numerous servers a breeze, and makes HA and uptime seem simple.
- High Availability is built into it. As long as you have enough hosts to provide resources, you're not likely to experience a full outage that can be blamed on VMware.
- The ability to spin up, delete and clone servers, all within minutes, defines current data centers.
- The central pane of glass for all of your servers allows one Systems Administrator to handle hundreds of virtual machines efficiently.
- Everything labeled VMware comes with a price, and vCenter is no different. Some orgs just can't justify the expense.
- Gaining insight into problems without a third party application or VMware add-on to assist can be difficult.
- Cleaner, simpler integration with PowerCLI would go a long way to making it a better overall product.
July 10, 2019
We've used VMware vCenter for about eleven years. It is used by two IT departments at two different data centers across the company. While virtualization with vSphere is possible without vCenter, I would not want to be without its management and resiliency tools. In addition, there are many helpful vendor tools that you can take advantage of and add to your vCenter's capabilities.
- DRS
- HA/FT
- vMotion for maintenance
- Storage vMotion for expansion/portability
- Until recently, the web client for management was horrible.
- Discontinuation of the C# client.
- VMWare support blames everything on underlying storage (sometimes it's true).
vCenter is currently just used by the IT department, it is used to manage servers all over the world. It allows us to effectively manage all our VM's and hosts.
- It allows us to very easily manage all our VM's and Hosts.
- VMware provides good training to use vCenter, for example the VCA course.
- It very easily allows us to mass update all our hosts, and VM's.
- We sometimes have problems with various browsers and vCenter, for example update manager wont work for us with Chrome, but it does with IE.
- Some of the upgrade routes for the vCenter appliance can be abit tricky to do.
August 28, 2018
VMware vCenter Server is being utilized to virtualize our entire server infrastructure. It addressed the need for our company to grow its IT server resources quickly and effectively. Originally, we started out with a 1U rack server running the free version of VMware and 5 VM's and that was scary having all those eggs in one basket. With VMware vCenter Server managing 3 hosts and 17+ virtual servers, we were able to roll out resources and scale our data stores as business requirements dictated.
One significant business problem that VMware vCenter Server solves is the scalability and migration. We are currently planning an upgrade/rollout to HCI coupled with VMware vCenter Server, which will provide our company with a more powerful set of tools in data migration and datastore expansions.
One significant business problem that VMware vCenter Server solves is the scalability and migration. We are currently planning an upgrade/rollout to HCI coupled with VMware vCenter Server, which will provide our company with a more powerful set of tools in data migration and datastore expansions.
- First and foremost, it provides a platform for us to virtualize our servers and it does it very well. Having the ability to spin up a new server from a template in a matter of seconds is amazing and saves precious time and resources.
- VMware vCenter Server also provides the ability to view performance & statistical data that assists my team in balancing our host environment. Leveraging the vMotion functionality, we can quickly move VMs from one host to another for maintenance purposes, etc...
- VMware vCenter Server also make it easy to add / modify hardware configurations within the VMs setup. Adding RAM, hard drive space, processor cores, etc...is as easy as it gets.
- VMware vCenter Server makes it easy to backup and restore a VM from the console. You can quickly create a backup of any VM and store it during upgrades, etc...for easy roll backs.
- 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)
May 11, 2018
As the IT Manager of the company we use VMware vCenter Server to consolidate our main core ERP systems, also several virtual servers running from Oracle to MS SQL Servers are deploy, managed and backed up using the VMware vCenter solution, for us is a relieve of scheduled tasks to roll out backups, increase resources on demand, and also to provide more disk space to our server live, the only issue foreseeing is that we need to invest in the hardware to be head to head with all the tools and get the most from the VMware vCenter Server.
- I can manage as many as 1000 and more machines in the virtual world. A unit vCenter Server can easily manage 1,000 host profiles without reducing the user experience.
- With the linked mode in operations, you can link together up to 10 VCenter Servers and manage 30,000 machines across remote locations. Currently I have vCenter Servers up and linked doing an awesome job and keeping safe my ERP core.
- It is super simple to deploy a structure. This software is particularly designed for Linux based systems and it just takes one step to migrate all of your information from a Windows vCenter Server to the Linux platform, I strongly recommend this for VMware vCenter Admins or IT Administrators.
- The Linked Mode allows you to replicate permissions, licenses and roles. So you may be able to access your infrastructure simultaneously from different platforms.
- UIX can always be more intuitive for basic to mid level admins.
- Analyzing many systems simultaneously can impact vCenter Server performance but this comes up when the hardware performance gets overwhelmed
- It's almost 90% dedicated for Linux based platforms.
August 06, 2018
My company is about 95% virtualized using VMware vSphere. Because of this, we use VMware vCenter Server to manage our environments. We currently have 4 VMware vCenter Server deployments that I support/manage. Each one is for a specific site and we use it to manage the VMware vSphere Hosts at that site/function. With this tool, we can add new vSphere Hosts, deploy virtual machines, manage the host virtual switches, add/remove storage, etc.
- Centralized Management of your VMware vSphere Hosts
- Centralized Management of your Distributed Network Switches
- Deployment and management of VMware vSAN Clusters
- Creation and management of Storage Clusters
- vCenter High Availability can be a challenge
- The learning curve can be high with all the features and functionality.
- Securing your virtualization environment can be very challenging.
March 28, 2018
Our whole environment, upwards of 800 servers across multiple sites is 99.9% virtualized on VMware and we use a vCenter server to manage it all. It allows you to manage multiple hosts, storage, sites and recovery from a single management console. VMware vCenter Server as a management tool for our environment is used by the specific teams that require access to manage virtual machines, ESX hosts, storage or backups.
- VMware vCenter Server is particularly good at Distributed Resource Scheduling or DRS.
- vCenter server is also great in terms of providing High Availability across virtualization hosts in a cluster configuration, providing reassurance and resilience in case of failure.
- vCenter's VSAN capability allows smaller organizations to have a resilient shared storage infrastructure without having to pay for a large SAN environment.
- The worst thing about the server is the flash based web console. VMware really needs to put some development time into a proper HTML5 console.
March 09, 2018
The IT team uses vCenter server to manage our virtual environment. We have 8 hosts that contain a few hundred servers ranging from domain controllers, to file servers, to database servers. Our entire infrastructure is virtual so a solid hypervisor and accompanying tools are key. With vCenter, we are able to provide a stable environment with vMotion and manage all of our servers no matter where they float to in the cluster. We are tasked with responding quickly to requests for more storage space, servers for applications, and database growth. vCenter allows us to perform these tasks in minutes without having to worry about which host we're on at the moment. It provides a true one-stop-shop for our VMWare environment.
- The one thing that is does the best is provide a single place from which to view my entire virtual environment. I've dealt with environments of two hosts with a few guests and environments with 8 hosts and hundreds of guests...it both cases it saves valuable time trying to see what my guests are up to and what the host environment is behaving.
- vCenter provides me a stable environment. vMotion not only provides protection against a single host going down, but also helps keep resource consumption down by moving busy servers to less busy hosts. All of this is done without taking the guest down. This means no more late nights of staying up to have a non-busy maintenance window. With vMotion and storage vMotion, I can do my job during business hours.
- When I need to provision a server, it's a matter of a few minutes to deploy a template. If I need to increase RAM or drive space on a server because the drive filled up, I can do that in seconds. It let me have a single place where I can very quickly respond to many different types of challenges I face.
- I still am not happy with the web interface. While convenient in that I can access vCenter from anywhere I have a browser connection, It feels slower than the thick client and if I'm doing anything that takes longer than a few minutes, I'll always opt for the thick client.
Vmware vCenter Server is the bulletproof standard for managing our VM environment. It's extremely powerful, providing features like vMotion, VMware High Availability, Update Manager and DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler). You haven't lived until you have vmotioned a VM from one ESXi host to another! It moves magically, hardly dropping a ping.
- Centralized management of your VMs
- One pane of glass
- Virtual appliance vCenter is easy to install and update
- I'm not a big fan of the push towards HTML5 only vSpehere client
- Sometimes you have crashing or timeouts
- As with all complex software you can get complex errors and bugs can be interesting to get to the root of
April 10, 2017
Managing multiple ESXi Hosts is no easy task, especially if you wish to take advantage of the VMware automation features. Once you have 2 or more hosts vCenter Server becomes a necessity. While it used to be that you needed Windows Server to deploy and run vCenter, VMware has been steadily improving the Linux appliance (vCSA), to the point where almost all functionality is now included.
From a business standpoint it is a winner because:
From a business standpoint it is a winner because:
- There is no need to pay for a Windows OS license for vCenter Server
- There is no need to upgrade the Windows OS or maintain third-party tools on the server running vCenter
- Because there is no Windows OS or vCenter application to install in windows, the deployment is very fast.
- Multiple hosts management
- Allows for Cloning, Host and Datastore Migrations
- Allows for power management across multiple hosts
- The HTML5 Web interface of vCenter (VCSA) install not inclusive of all functionality.
- Auto-Updates of the appliance are still lacking
- Deployment wizard is a bit buggy and cumbersome
April 04, 2017
I work for a managed services IT provider. All of our clients utilize VMware vCenter Server. vCenter Server makes our lives very easy when it comes to managing Virtual Servers and Workstations. vCenter Server keeps all of our virtual machines in a central location making them very easy to manage. If we have a host that needs maintenance, vCenter Server allows us to live migrate the virtual machines to another host so we can perform the maintenance with no downtime.
- VMware vCenter Server takes all of my Virtual Machines a from multiple hosts and makes centralized management a reality. I need to access only one interface and can make changes or access all of my hosts, datastores, and virtual machines.
- VMware vCenter Server offers vMotion a service that is extremely important in all of the environments I manage. I am able to migrate virtual machines from one host to another without shutting down the virtual machine. This allows me to free up resources on a host or empty a host completely so maintenance or a reboot can be performed.
- VMware vCenter Server allows me to access it via a web browser. I can then console into any of my virtual machines using only the web browser. My VMs open in a seperate tab and I am able to control it just as if I were in front of the physical console.
- There is definitely a learning curve when using vCenter Server. You can't just jump right in, you need to do your research first and possibly acquire some training.
- Migrating VMware vCenter Server from either the Windows version to the Linux Appliance or upgrading the Linux Appliance to the newest version of the Linux Appliance isn't always the easiest experience.
June 29, 2017
As an IT firm, we deploy VMware both in-house and for many clients to consolidate hardware and reduce costs. Virtual servers on one more powerful host is far more cost efficient than multiple smaller servers. It takes up less space on premises and the hardware you purchase for a VMware host is far more reliable than what you would buy for smaller individual servers. Larger servers as VMware host also have the advantage of redundancy in hardware so you almost never have everything go down.
- Consolidation of hardware resources.
- Hardware redundancy.
- Cost effective deployment of new servers.
- The web UI leaves something to be desired, but this is being addressed in vCenter 6.5 and beyond.
- Some hardware settings can be a bit obtuse.
It is being used for my whole virtual environment. It consolidates all virtual workloads into one pane of glass. Both development and production workloads are managed.
- Consolidates all hosts by your groupings.
- Performance metrics.
- Integrated tools.
- Built in performance tools instead of having to use vcops.
April 13, 2017
We use vCenter across the whole organization. We have two sites with VMware 6.0 in stretched cluster to have a redundant and geographically distributed environment to ensure the provision of services even in the event of a fault and also to have a recovery time near-zero data loss. With this configuration, we decided to abandon the VMware SRM feature.
The implementation and management is not so difficult and is a good solution but with elevated costs.
The implementation and management is not so difficult and is a good solution but with elevated costs.
- Analysis
- Management of VMs
- Easy to use
- The elevated licensing costs have a big impact. We are finding different solution to escaoe from a lock-in infrastructure
- Centralized view
March 14, 2017
It is used by our IT department and across the whole IT organization globally. It addresses the ability to deploy servers at remote and local sites without the lag time of purchasing additional hardware resources as well as flexibility and high availability capabilities.
- High availability across different physical servers and storage for virtualized server compute.
- Multiple network configurations/management
- Flexible resource management/memory/storage
- Hardware passthrough sometimes an issue
- Network configuration can sometimes be challenging
- ESX firewall management features somewhat hidden
We currently have vCenter server installed on its own Windows 2012 VM. We did not go with the virtual appliance. It is managing our 8 host, HA, vSphere 6.0 cluster. This cluster houses 100+ VMs. vCenter Server allows us to manage all of the hosts from one pane of glass.
- One pane of glass management allows us to control all of our hosts from the same portal.
- Host profile setup allows us to basically clone an existing host to a new host and make sure the cluster requirements are met.
- Ease of use. Very easy to template a VM, Clone a VM, set up HA, network the hosts.
- Lack of good reporting. VMware strips out quality reporting tools and packages them up in other licensed software. Makes it more expensive.
- Expensive. All VMware licensing is expensive in comparison to their competitors.
December 15, 2016
As a support engineer I support more than 1000 servers for a well known Telecom operator in India, running on ESXi 5.5 and managed by vCenter Server 5.5. Managing currently running VNF on these servers using vCould director and vCenter. These servers are designed to support IMS and TAS applications related to Telecommunication.
- All servers at one place
- Management at ease
- Fast accessibility to server nodes
- In 5.5, networking requires some improvement.
- In 5.5, one dashboard is required to see health/performance of all the servers.
I have deployed vCenter server 5.5 for one of the leading Indian Telecom operators to virtualise a telecom application server (VNF). This vCenter Server is licensed with the enterprise plus edition. It manages more than 1000 HPGen8 blade servers installed with Esxi 5.5
- Single platform to monitor, manage and configure many servers
- SSO feature for authenticity
- Enhaced linked mode for mutisite vcenter intergeration
- Ease of use
- In 5.5 all improvements were done
- In 6.0 there are some new features in the HA module
vCenter Server Scorecard Summary
What is vCenter Server?
vCenter Server from VMware is a virtualization management solution for vSphere.
Categories: Virtualization Management
vCenter Server Integrations
vCenter Server Pricing
- Does not have featureFree Trial Available?No
- Does not have featureFree or Freemium Version Available?No
- Does not have featurePremium Consulting/Integration Services Available?No
- Entry-level set up fee?No
| Edition | Pricing Details | Terms |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | 6,044 | per year |
| Production | 6,244 | per year |
vCenter Server Technical Details
| Deployment Types: | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems: | Windows, Linux, Mac |
| Mobile Application: | No |