TrustRadius
vCenter Server from VMware is a virtualization management solution for vSphere.https://media.trustradius.com/product-logos/GD/F9/TSV87TTCSLG9.pngVirtualization Management at it's bestVMware 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,10,Overall environment view provides quick stats for management Pricing has increased over the years of usage, but we have become heavily reliant on this tool This software has provided critcal functionality needed during data center outages Maintenance and patching is much easier with the builtin Upgrade Manager feature,Hyper-V and Citrix Hypervisor (formerly XenServer),OneDrive, New Relic, Tufin Orchestration Suite,75,5,Monitor VMware Manage VMware Maintain Cluster Stability Manage virtual network switch Grant console access to servers as needed,We have been able to allow virtual console access to 'off network' systems that would otherwise require a KVM module in the physical data-center We have been able to provide temporary additional resources when demand is high without purchasing additional hardware We have been able to shutdown a data center without loss of services due to automatic fail over capabilities between hosts We have been able to create automatic snapshot backups on servers and restore to a separate clone for testing or restores,Long distance off site fail over Enhanced VDI Container deployment Testing software,9,No,Product Features Product Reputation Prior Experience with the Product Vendor Reputation,I would like to get more accurate subscription pricing before we commit to this product. VMware has tiered pricing plans, but it is not always clear what you get at each level. We now have some features that we don't need and are missing some features that we do need. An integrated package would be better than pay per piece.,Implemented in-house,No,Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled,Locked snapshots Misconfigured network ports Locked cd-image mounts VMFS needed to be upgraded,9,We try to stay up to date on all of our products to be sure we are not exploited by any security vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, we got to the 'bleeding edge' on a new version of vSphere that was not completely compatible with our hardware (even though it was not mentioned in the documentation). VMware Support went directly to the developer of this package and created a custom patch to resolve our issue before releasing it to the general public.,7,Web Console view Migration Snapshots Power Control Host maintenance mode,Datastore uplaods Distributed Virtual Switch configurations LDAP Web Client browser extensions Certificates,No,9Virtual World IndeedVMware 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,9,Return on investment is great SLA for producing Server Turnaround time for troubleshooting Infrastructure related issues,,Microsoft Power BI, Rubrik, Salesforce App CloudvCenter is the Standard for Enterprise Virtual machine management for a reasonWe 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.,9,We have over 100 servers, and it only takes part of a Sys Admins week to manage them. In a larger environment, add-ons like NSX and vRealize could add tremendous efficiencies to both security and resource management.,Ansible, Cisco ASA, NginxvCenter makes my life much easier.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).,9,vCenter makes backups much easier because the backup API is present. The backup API in vCenter makes a limited DR available at a reasonable cost. The HA option makes host server maintenance so much easier.,Hyper-V,Veeam Backup & Replication, Microsoft Office 365, SAP HANAVMware vCentervCenter 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.,10,vCenter has positively impacted our business in that we can quickly and easily respond to issues, We can quickly and easily update all our hosts and VM's saving us alot of time,,McAfee Endpoint Security, Pluralsight, Mitel MiCollab, Aryaka WAN Optimization-as-a-ServiceVMware vCenter Server, The Virtual Machine EpicenterVMware 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.,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),10,Positive: Prior to our growth, we had 5 physical servers in a rack performing various tasks. The implementation of VMware vCenter Server allowed us to consolidate all 5 servers into a virtual environment and build upon VMware vCenter Server. We quickly grew to over 17 servers in less than 6 months and we able to provide resources in less time and money over purchasing 17 physical servers and having to buy additional racks, battery back ups, etc... Positive / Negative: (Only if you don't keep up with maintenance & licensing) We are a relatively small business but we have enterprise class needs for both performance and scalability. VMware vCenter Server is an excellent product in my opinion and having the peace of mind in having technical support, and maintenance upgrades from VMware adds to leveraging the most ROI out of the product. In the 5 years I have been using VMware vCenter Server, I have not really found any real negatives that are significant enough to report. I like the fact that we can perform maintenance on the system when needed without my users ever knowing that we are working on it. When you work for a company that runs pretty much 24/7, it's like changing a tire on a moving vehicle and VMware makes it possible.,WatchGuard NGFW, Cisco Meraki Wireless Access Point, Veeam ONEVMware vCenter Server – The Best in Server VirtualizationWe have been using VMware vCenter Server since 2010 and now have three of our large sites utilizing this virtualization product. We have 8 physical servers running ESXi at one site attached to a SAN, 5 physical servers running ESXi at another site attached to a SAN, and at our 3rd site we are utilizing this on a Dell VRTX with 4 blades and internal storage. We have HA (High Availability) and DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) set up as well. For a larger environment with many needs and a small IT staff, VMware is a great product. Our three sites with VMware are 90+% virtualized.,We use vCenter to manage our virtual infrastructure. It gives us centralized management of the virtual environment. It is a very stable, mature product. Ability to create new VM’s easily from base templates reduces time significantly and keeps servers consistent. Ability to copy VM’s to use as test environments prior to major upgrades or changes. Ability to do snapshots prior to doing work/changes/update, which allows a rollback to the previous system state to put a production server back online for use in the event that something goes wrong. Ability to migrate a VM from one host to another or from one datastore to another while the VM is active. Users are usually completely unaware of any change during this process. Ability to utilize the entire physical server CPU and memory to run independent VM’s where there are no concerns of applications not working well together. Ability to add additional resources (CPU's, cores, memory, storage, etc.) to existing VM’s. Ability to backup VM’s as a snapshot. This will allow us to restore the VM, explore it to restore specific host files, or move the backup to another site and restore it there for DR (Disaster Recovery). Has a converter available to do a P to V (Physical to Virtual ) and V to V (Virtual to Virtual ) migrations.,Not a big fan of the browser-based client. I started using the vSphere Client (Thick)and prefer this over the browser-based client, although you cannot do all functions from the Thick client and sometimes have to use the browser-based client. As of 6.5, you are forced to use the browser-based client. I wish VMware had continued the thick client instead. Upgrading or updating VMware is not an easy task for lesser experienced administrators. There are many best practice considerations to explore before attempting these tasks and there is always a risk. The cost to purchase and cost to renew support. The ongoing support costs are high, but required, because you become dependent on the entire infrastructure. Lapse of support cost you reinstatement fees. Upgrades depend on having SnS. The licensing model is a bit daunting to understand, and VMware changes the model, which only adds to the difficulty to understand.,10,I think that the overall ROI is definitely worth the investment in larger sites/environments. The reduction of physical server sprawl, hardware maintenance costs, power and cooling requirements, and all the pros listed previously, makes VMware a worthwhile investment.,Veeam Backup & Replication, SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, Microsoft Office 2016VMware vCenter is the only Virtual Infrastructure You Need!Our department uses vCenter to provide VMs within the unit to host our infrastructure and critical applications. It solves issues in terms of cost, rack space, energy costs, and the list goes on. In addition, our university as a whole uses vCenter to supply VMs for security initiatives and run critical applications with their VMware environment as well.,Ease of use in creating new virtual machines Easily update ESXi hosts and VMware tools across the environment Works will with storage plugins, and other metric plugins that are useful for our department.,Easier upgrade paths to the newest versions More integration with other sister products (SRM, vSphere Replication, etc.),10,Saved tons of money on consolidating rack space by virtualizing physical servers to virtual machines Saved money on electrical bills with less power consumption since there is a less physical footprint inside the rack space Saved money on not having to have more employees to manage more hardware.,Microsoft Application Virtualization,SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, VMware Site Recovery Manager, Pure Storage FlashArrayVMware vCenter Server- Great Virtual Server Solution!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.,9,The budget can turn into a mess if you don't have a strong design to fulfill all of the business requirements, you can fall into a deep dive of over rated purchases. VMware vCenter Server will take you to the next level of business investment over private virtual server solutions, and will protect and manage all of your virtual assets with great ease. For the small size company the initial investment can be overwhelming but if you're expecting to grow faster and develop more solutions and integrate more software and services VMware vCenter Server has your back.,,Hyper-V, XenServer, Proxmox VE,2The best way to manage your VMware vSphere Hosts/EnvironmentMy 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.,10,vCenter has enabled my company to be able to do more with less. The features such as Virtual Distributed Switches, VMware vSAN, etc have enabled us to centrally manage the networking of our Virtualization Environment as well as save money on our remote office implementations. Training someone with little to know experience with vCenter can be a big task for small teams.,XenApp,Veeam Backup & ReplicationvCenter - If you run ESX, you should definitely have it!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.,9,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.,Hyper-V,Remote Desktop Manager, CohesityvCenter Server is a purchase we don't regretThe 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.,10,It has had a positive impact in that it saves our system admins a lot of time. We can do maintenance during the day and don't have to bounce between hosts to interact with different guests. It reduces downtime which, in turn, saves us money. When our systems are down, our users cannot do their jobs and the company suffers for it. Being able to manage snapshots and quickly revert if a patch or upgrade goes wrong is an amazing thing.,Hyper-V,Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Safe Backup, SQL Diagnostic ManagerVMotion is the bombVmware 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,9,Simplified VM management One pane of glass to many parts of the environment (backup, SAN etc..) VMotion is the bomb,M-Files, QlikViewThe best of... virtualization.We use vCenter to house our 30+ VMs spread across 9 different hosts. It addresses many different problems for us. It gives us great failover, flexibility, and allows us to maximize the potential of our hardware.,vMotion is incredible to allow us to migrate to new clusters/hosts while minimizing downtime. The simple, easy to use centralized management capabilities of the new web interface makes it easy to get up and going, as well as managing and making changes anytime you need to. It's very versatile and allows us to spin up, test, and deploy new types of VMs easily and efficiently.,I would like to see it be as simple to add the vCenter Server to a Windows Domain as it is a Windows desktop OS.,9,It saves time and is very powerful. It's pricey.,Proxmox VE,ConnectWise Control (formerly ScreenConnect), Windows Server, Skype for BusinessVcenter center.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.,8,Easy management low time investment for operation. It's good they have moved to an appliance with a built in database . This is a headache in the 5.5 environment.,Turbonomic (formerly VMTurbo)VMware vCenter Server - The right Virtualization Management SolutionThe product is being used by my clients as well as my organization to quickly deploy, test and manage virtualized environments to support business applications. The critical focus for this solution is the ability to support a primarily-mobile workforce, and meet requirements for quickly implementing computing environments used in application/product development, distribution center deployments, and product testing activities. Of interest, is its ability to enable monitoring of DRS, HA, clustering and vMotion components, at a competitive price point.,Centralized control for multiple VM hosts simultaneously, including inventory management. This provides easy and effective platform that maximizes support resource time and costs. Scalability/capacity management and reporting, which provides organizations with a flexible and powerful function for meeting the dynamic nature of their businesses. Plug-in extensibility, which enables technology groups to deploy, manage and monitor server security, backup, and network control features within a single console, further-increasing platform support activities.,Nothing that applies to the customer base I have supported, other than I have seen and heard from colleagues about problems with ESXi intermittent connection issues, and perhaps the complex nature of plug-in integration.,10,From our organization's perspective, the ROI was realized in less than one year, as this allowed us to manage the environments internally and do away with 3rd-party vendors. Our clients have stated similar results, but in 2 examples, they stated that their primary benefit was their ability to quickly manage their computing resources when business changes occurred.,,oVirt, Proxmox VEshrink your datacenter, grow your efficiency with vCenterWe currently use VMware vCenter to manage our 250 virtualized servers. We have eliminated all but a couple physical servers. vCenter has allowed us to reduce costs across the board, from power consumption to datacenter space. We have also benefited from having one tool to manage all of our servers, instead of having to use multiple web portals and rdp connections.,It integrates with our storage products and easily helps us both deploy and adjust our disk usage on the fly. You can easily see now only the space available, but also which servers are using what storage at any given time through one relatively simple interface. vCenter vmotion works well to migrate servers between hypervisors. This comes in handy both when balancing resource usage, but also when a hypervisor needs some maintenance or repairs. We can easily and quickly vacate a hypervisor and get work done with no downtime on the servers. vCenter's server console runs smoothly with minimal resources. This allows us to have access to, sometimes, many servers simultaneously without tasking the client resources. VMware vCenter allows us to quickly and easily add memory and other virtual hardware to servers very quickly to fix performance issues.,Not all applications fully support virtualization. vCenter isn't aware of those applications at all, so you need to be careful to configure your settings so that servers that don't like being moved aren't moved during production times. You don't want a SQL server getting migrated during your work day. vCenter has moved away from the desktop client in the newer versions in favor of the web version. The desktop, in my opinion, is superior. They have begun making some features web only, so they have been very passive aggressive in trying to slowly move people over to the web client. We have had issues where granular permissions created problems. The error logs as a general error and doesn't recognized that a task failed because of permissions, you need to review and figure that out. It would be nicer if a permissions problem referenced that in the event log to simplify troubleshooting.,8,Costs in our datacenter for electric and hvac have been reduced greatly by replacing dozens of individual servers with virtualized servers. We are now able to quickly adjust resources as software requires. If a server is running out of memory or disk in the middle of the day, we are able to quickly add resources and stabilize the systems before performance of the software is negatively impacted. vCenter has helped our resiliency and flexibility in our primary datacenter. We are currently working towards adding redundancy across 2 datacenters with vCenter.,Hyper-V,Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Exchange, Skype for Business, BMC Track-It!, Forcepoint TRITON, Dean Evans and Associates Event Management Software, Quest Identity Manager, Veeam Backup & ReplicationVMware still the KingvCenter was used as our primary virtualization hyper visor before we migrated to Hyper-V. We hosted about 500 VMs of different operating systems. Depending on how it is implemented, it can have tremendous ROI and can consolidate datacenter infrastructure.,Virtualize Servers Virtualize networking Consolidate infrastructure,The licensing can be confusing, especially when you don't necessarily know what functionality you might need. Pricing can be prohibitive. Other vendors (Microsoft) are increasing market share with a lower price point. Integrate cloud functionality so that workloads can seamlessly be deployed wherever you want.,8,It can have tremendous ROI depending on how you build your infrastructure. Some companies have 100+ VMs per host. Costs can really add up depending on the functionality you use. Support is getting very good. The company is feeling the competitive heat, and their support has really improved in the last year.,Hyper-V,Hyper-VvCenter Server - the VMware management toolWe use vCenter to manage more than 2,000 ESXi servers across the world. Our server administrators use vCenter to manage more than 10,000 virtual servers.,vMotion, Storage VMotion, DRS and HA are vCenter features that I really like that work very, very well. vCenter server strengths - stability and great GUI,VMware needs to improve the web client. For some tasks, the old VI client is much faster. They need to find the way to manage VDS if you have a vCenter outage.,9,vCenter has a positive impact because you can manage hundreds of virtual servers and ESXi host from a central location. No negative impact.,Turbonomic (formerly VMTurbo)Why you need vCenter Server and can't live without itManaging 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: There is no need to pay for a Windows OS license for vCenter ServerThere is no need to upgrade the Windows OS or maintain third-party tools on the server running vCenterBecause 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,10,Great ROI was achieved with our deployment of vCenter since we had to manage many hosts. The automation features of VCS saved countless hours of manual work. It was positive in the fact that we were able to develop "gold server" and thus allow deployment of templates and clones very fast, reducing time to setup a new Windows or Linux VM from hours to seconds.,,Veeam Backup & Replication, Turbonomic (formerly VMTurbo), SolarWinds Web Help DeskVMware vCenter Server: An invaluable toolI 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.,10,Although a little pricey, if your environment had multiple hosts, VMware vCenter Server is highly worth the cost. After your start using it, you will never be able to go back to situation where you don't. Implementing VMware vCenter Server has greatly improved the productivity of our technicians. Less time is being spent logging into multiple hosts searching for a particular virtual machine. We simply log into vCenter and everything is right there in front of us. VMware training can also be a bit on the pricey side, but if you want to correctly implement vCenter and do it right, I highly recommend seeking out a VMware training program.,Hyper-V,Datto, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Kaspersky Endpoint Security, Malwarebytes, Kaseya Virtual System Administrator (VSA), Kaseya AuthAnvil, Autotask, Microsoft Office 365VMware vCenter leads the pack in hypervisor technologyAs 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.,10,VMware has drastically reduced the work required in deploying new servers. Deploying a whole new physical machine could take 4-8 hours, but creating a virtual machine on a vCenter server can be done in less than 1 hour.,Hyper-V and Oracle VM VirtualBox,Veeam Backup & Replication, Symantec Backup Exec, Microsoft Office 2016, Skype for Business, SlackThe Past, maybe the present, but not the futureWe 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.,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,8,N/A,Nutanix,Nutanix PrismVMware vCenter Server - Essential for sharing compute resources across an enterpriseIt 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,10,Positive impact on the servers that are required to be purchased. Positive impact on the storage requirements needed by purchasing a high availability SAN. Positive impact on server reliability.,,OneNotevCenter is the Best!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.,10,It has had a positive impact on productivity. The ability to manage all 8 of our hosts from one portal cuts down drastically on management time. The ability to cluster our resources means we are agile and highly redundant.,Hyper-V,PRTG Network Monitor, Netwrix Auditor, Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Compellent
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VMware vCenter Server
154 Ratings
Score 9.2 out of 101
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vCenter Server Reviews

vCenter Server
154 Ratings
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Score 9.2 out of 101

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Rick Lupton profile photo
July 24, 2019

Virtualization Management at it's best

Rick Lupton
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
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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
vCenter is well suited to any enterprise environment needing to run enough VM guest servers to need more than one host or when needing fail over and disaster recovery capabilities. vCenter might be overkill in testing or education environments where the advanced features are not needed. Since vCenter requires either per host CPU licensing or VM subscription model pricing, this has to be a consideration as well. There are other free tools for managing VMware; however, they are no match for the great functionality of vCenter.
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Jewemars Christian Riano profile photo
March 22, 2019

Virtual World Indeed

Jewemars Christian Riano
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
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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
I would recommend it to my colleagues if they are in need of a virtual infrastructure. It is very powerful product that can cater to business needs in terms of infrastructure needs and data center space. It is also great for harnessing full capabilities of server provisioning by it's technology inside which means no need to purchase other products for improvements.
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Tom Erdman profile photo
April 09, 2019

vCenter is the Standard for Enterprise Virtual machine management for a reason

Tom Erdman
Score 9 out of 10
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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.
vCenter is the de facto standard for managing your enterprise virtual machine footprint. That being said, it does come with an enterprise price tag.
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July 10, 2019

vCenter makes my life much easier.

Verified User
Score 9 out of 10
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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).
If you are going to manage more than one vSphere host, I believe it to be a necessity. Yes, there is an associated cost. I believe it is about $500 for the basic license (or used to be about that much). vCenter Server enables you to get the most from your server investment. Depending upon your license, you gain features such as automated or manual distributed resources, moving VMs from one server to another to allow for maintenance, automated failover if a host goes down, distributed switching and storage vMotion.
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March 27, 2019

VMware vCenter

Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
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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.
If you use a large number of ESXI hosts then vCenter is also a must, it allows for easy central management and integrates well into monitoring software.
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Joe Spradlin profile photo
August 28, 2018

VMware vCenter Server, The Virtual Machine Epicenter

Joe Spradlin
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
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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.
  • 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)
I believe that for many companies that need to virtualize their server environment, VMware vCenter Server would be very well suited. There are still some instances where virtualization is not an option, however those are few and far between. In our case, we have 995 of all our servers virtualized, however one of our servers (physical) is a license server for a particular product, and the licensing does not allow for virtualization at this time. Not having to manage so many physical servers plus the associated hardware makes the ROI easy to re-coup.
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January 14, 2019

VMware vCenter Server – The Best in Server Virtualization

Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
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We have been using VMware vCenter Server since 2010 and now have three of our large sites utilizing this virtualization product. We have 8 physical servers running ESXi at one site attached to a SAN, 5 physical servers running ESXi at another site attached to a SAN, and at our 3rd site we are utilizing this on a Dell VRTX with 4 blades and internal storage. We have HA (High Availability) and DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) set up as well. For a larger environment with many needs and a small IT staff, VMware is a great product. Our three sites with VMware are 90+% virtualized.
  • We use vCenter to manage our virtual infrastructure. It gives us centralized management of the virtual environment. It is a very stable, mature product.
  • Ability to create new VM’s easily from base templates reduces time significantly and keeps servers consistent.
  • Ability to copy VM’s to use as test environments prior to major upgrades or changes.
  • Ability to do snapshots prior to doing work/changes/update, which allows a rollback to the previous system state to put a production server back online for use in the event that something goes wrong.
  • Ability to migrate a VM from one host to another or from one datastore to another while the VM is active. Users are usually completely unaware of any change during this process.
  • Ability to utilize the entire physical server CPU and memory to run independent VM’s where there are no concerns of applications not working well together.
  • Ability to add additional resources (CPU's, cores, memory, storage, etc.) to existing VM’s.
  • Ability to backup VM’s as a snapshot. This will allow us to restore the VM, explore it to restore specific host files, or move the backup to another site and restore it there for DR (Disaster Recovery).
  • Has a converter available to do a P to V (Physical to Virtual ) and V to V (Virtual to Virtual ) migrations.
  • Not a big fan of the browser-based client. I started using the vSphere Client (Thick)and prefer this over the browser-based client, although you cannot do all functions from the Thick client and sometimes have to use the browser-based client. As of 6.5, you are forced to use the browser-based client. I wish VMware had continued the thick client instead.
  • Upgrading or updating VMware is not an easy task for lesser experienced administrators. There are many best practice considerations to explore before attempting these tasks and there is always a risk.
  • The cost to purchase and cost to renew support. The ongoing support costs are high, but required, because you become dependent on the entire infrastructure. Lapse of support cost you reinstatement fees. Upgrades depend on having SnS.
  • The licensing model is a bit daunting to understand, and VMware changes the model, which only adds to the difficulty to understand.
Larger environments/sites benefit greatly using VMware vCenter Server. You can consolidate many physical servers into the ESXi host environment and reduce your ongoing maintenance cost by reducing power consumption and cooling needs. If there are limited IT staff, VMware vCenter Server allows for easier management and monitoring of your servers. It speeds up the process of adding servers or resources to existing servers. Allows the best utilization of all the CPU, memory and storage resources. It is less appropriate to use in smaller environments, as cost usually exceeds the benefit.
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November 13, 2018

VMware vCenter is the only Virtual Infrastructure You Need!

Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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Our department uses vCenter to provide VMs within the unit to host our infrastructure and critical applications. It solves issues in terms of cost, rack space, energy costs, and the list goes on. In addition, our university as a whole uses vCenter to supply VMs for security initiatives and run critical applications with their VMware environment as well.
  • Ease of use in creating new virtual machines
  • Easily update ESXi hosts and VMware tools across the environment
  • Works will with storage plugins, and other metric plugins that are useful for our department.
  • Easier upgrade paths to the newest versions
  • More integration with other sister products (SRM, vSphere Replication, etc.)
vCenter is a critical component when managing multiple hosts to initiate DRS and HA. In addition vCenter is the command center to also implement other helpful products for disaster recovery like SRM and vSphere Replication.
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Victor Arana profile photo
May 11, 2018

VMware vCenter Server- Great Virtual Server Solution!

Victor Arana
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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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.
VMware VCenter Server is great for companies that will invest in a decent server to run as many services as they're willing to manage and do an a decent kick start deployment of Domain Services, File Server and also is great for virtual Data Base instances. I would strongly recommend this for Linux Server Base solutions it will give you 1000% and more from the very beginning for Windows Server solutions particularly I'll choose MS Hyper V vCenter but this is only my humble opinion.
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Ben Liebowitz profile photo
August 06, 2018

The best way to manage your VMware vSphere Hosts/Environment

Ben Liebowitz
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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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.
As someone that's been using vCenter for about 10 years now, I find it very easy to use to manage my virtualization environment(s). I'm able to see everything from one interface as well as manage my virtual servers.
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Muhammad Mulla profile photo
March 28, 2018

vCenter - If you run ESX, you should definitely have it!

Muhammad Mulla
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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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.
vCenter is well suited if you need to virtualize servers across 3 or more physical hosts. If you have fewer than 3 hosts there are too many features that you will not be able to take advantage of. Always ensure, for best support, that any physical hardware you purchase is present on VMware's comprehensive support matrices.
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Greg Goss profile photo
March 09, 2018

vCenter Server is a purchase we don't regret

Greg Goss
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
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.
If you have more than one host and your company can support the cost of vCenter Server, then you should seriously consider the purchase. It is the best (really only) way to scale your VMware environment. If you only have one host, then this is not for you as the benefits would not outweigh the cost.
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Michael Ellerbeck profile photo
April 12, 2018

VMotion is the bomb

Michael Ellerbeck
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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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
If you need a great hypervisor manager then VMware vCenter Server is the one for you. Easy to install, easy to use, powerful. It really is good stuff. With plugin extensibility you are able to manage various things like your storage area network (nimble, equallogic etc...) you can also install plugins for backup (veeam) or site recovery (zerto). It really is very powerful
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March 15, 2018

The best of... virtualization.

Verified User
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
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We use vCenter to house our 30+ VMs spread across 9 different hosts. It addresses many different problems for us. It gives us great failover, flexibility, and allows us to maximize the potential of our hardware.
  • vMotion is incredible to allow us to migrate to new clusters/hosts while minimizing downtime.
  • The simple, easy to use centralized management capabilities of the new web interface makes it easy to get up and going, as well as managing and making changes anytime you need to.
  • It's very versatile and allows us to spin up, test, and deploy new types of VMs easily and efficiently.
  • I would like to see it be as simple to add the vCenter Server to a Windows Domain as it is a Windows desktop OS.
Any environment that requires utilization of multiple servers across multiple hosts and wants minimum downtime through the use of high availability and fail over alongside simple, centralized management will benefit from vCenter Server.
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John Dopson profile photo
October 16, 2017

Vcenter center.

John Dopson
Score 8 out of 10
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Verified User
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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.
It is the go to tool for esx management very easy to use and most day to day features built in.
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January 25, 2018

VMware vCenter Server - The right Virtualization Management Solution

Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
The product is being used by my clients as well as my organization to quickly deploy, test and manage virtualized environments to support business applications. The critical focus for this solution is the ability to support a primarily-mobile workforce, and meet requirements for quickly implementing computing environments used in application/product development, distribution center deployments, and product testing activities. Of interest, is its ability to enable monitoring of DRS, HA, clustering and vMotion components, at a competitive price point.
  • Centralized control for multiple VM hosts simultaneously, including inventory management. This provides easy and effective platform that maximizes support resource time and costs.
  • Scalability/capacity management and reporting, which provides organizations with a flexible and powerful function for meeting the dynamic nature of their businesses.
  • Plug-in extensibility, which enables technology groups to deploy, manage and monitor server security, backup, and network control features within a single console, further-increasing platform support activities.
  • Nothing that applies to the customer base I have supported, other than I have seen and heard from colleagues about problems with ESXi intermittent connection issues, and perhaps the complex nature of plug-in integration.
VMware vCenter Server is the right choice for organizations deploying primarily, virtual environments. For those companies where physical servers are the primary deployment strategy, perhaps the appliance solution is a better option.
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September 12, 2017

shrink your datacenter, grow your efficiency with vCenter

Verified User
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We currently use VMware vCenter to manage our 250 virtualized servers. We have eliminated all but a couple physical servers. vCenter has allowed us to reduce costs across the board, from power consumption to datacenter space. We have also benefited from having one tool to manage all of our servers, instead of having to use multiple web portals and rdp connections.
  • It integrates with our storage products and easily helps us both deploy and adjust our disk usage on the fly. You can easily see now only the space available, but also which servers are using what storage at any given time through one relatively simple interface.
  • vCenter vmotion works well to migrate servers between hypervisors. This comes in handy both when balancing resource usage, but also when a hypervisor needs some maintenance or repairs. We can easily and quickly vacate a hypervisor and get work done with no downtime on the servers.
  • vCenter's server console runs smoothly with minimal resources. This allows us to have access to, sometimes, many servers simultaneously without tasking the client resources.
  • VMware vCenter allows us to quickly and easily add memory and other virtual hardware to servers very quickly to fix performance issues.
  • Not all applications fully support virtualization. vCenter isn't aware of those applications at all, so you need to be careful to configure your settings so that servers that don't like being moved aren't moved during production times. You don't want a SQL server getting migrated during your work day.
  • vCenter has moved away from the desktop client in the newer versions in favor of the web version. The desktop, in my opinion, is superior. They have begun making some features web only, so they have been very passive aggressive in trying to slowly move people over to the web client.
  • We have had issues where granular permissions created problems. The error logs as a general error and doesn't recognized that a task failed because of permissions, you need to review and figure that out. It would be nicer if a permissions problem referenced that in the event log to simplify troubleshooting.
If you are doing more than a few servers virtualized, vCenter is the way to go. It allows you to manage a lot of servers and resources pretty easily and cleanly. You will need some training or hire a good consultant to help with the initial setup. If you are only planning on virtualizing a small group of servers, it will be a lot of effort to get configured on set up with little chance to realize a real ROI.
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October 24, 2017

VMware still the King

Verified User
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
vCenter was used as our primary virtualization hyper visor before we migrated to Hyper-V. We hosted about 500 VMs of different operating systems. Depending on how it is implemented, it can have tremendous ROI and can consolidate datacenter infrastructure.
  • Virtualize Servers
  • Virtualize networking
  • Consolidate infrastructure
  • The licensing can be confusing, especially when you don't necessarily know what functionality you might need.
  • Pricing can be prohibitive. Other vendors (Microsoft) are increasing market share with a lower price point.
  • Integrate cloud functionality so that workloads can seamlessly be deployed wherever you want.
In a devops environment where self provisioning is needed, VMware can shine. In smaller installations, it can be very, very easy to get up and running (the same can not be said for Hyper-V and other competitors). The days of buying servers for single use are over, and VMWare is the top choice to virtualize.
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September 25, 2017

vCenter Server - the VMware management tool

Verified User
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use vCenter to manage more than 2,000 ESXi servers across the world. Our server administrators use vCenter to manage more than 10,000 virtual servers.
  • vMotion, Storage VMotion, DRS and HA are vCenter features that I really like that work very, very well.
  • vCenter server strengths - stability and great GUI
  • VMware needs to improve the web client. For some tasks, the old VI client is much faster.
  • They need to find the way to manage VDS if you have a vCenter outage.
vCenter is the management tool for any VMware environment, it is always well suited.
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Stefan Semo profile photo
April 10, 2017

Why you need vCenter Server and can't live without it

Stefan Semo
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
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:

  • 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
When managing multiple hosts VCS is mandatory, however in environments where hosts are running separately and independently, it is not needed.
Read Stefan Semo's full review
Michael Kerzner profile photo
April 04, 2017

VMware vCenter Server: An invaluable tool

Michael Kerzner
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
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.
If you are in an environment that utilizes multiple ESXi hosts with multiple virtual machines on each, VMware vCenter Server is an invaluable tool that will not only make your life easier, it will greatly improve your productivity. Centrally managing hosts and virtual machines is a no-brainer when it comes to saving valuable time that none of us really have in today's IT world.
Read Michael Kerzner's full review
Ashley Davis profile photo
June 29, 2017

VMware vCenter leads the pack in hypervisor technology

Ashley Davis
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
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.
vCenter server is useful in almost all scenarios. Its function as a hypervisor that gives you the ability to run multiple servers on one host means that you can easily organize the functions of the virtual machines. No more MySQL running on the domain controller and causing issues when a reboot is necessary. On the other hand, it may not be necessary for very small deployments where only one or two servers are necessary.
Read Ashley Davis's full review
Flavio Mancini profile photo
April 13, 2017

The Past, maybe the present, but not the future

Flavio Mancini
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
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.
  • 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
Well suited in environment that need specific features that only VMware solution can offer in the better way, like the use of NSX.
But if you need the general benefit of virtualization you can choose a different solution.
Read Flavio Mancini's full review
Andrew Salinger profile photo
March 14, 2017

VMware vCenter Server - Essential for sharing compute resources across an enterprise

Andrew Salinger
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
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
VMware suits our organization for easily managing computing resources across multiple physical servers. It functions great with vMotion and upgrading servers with little to no downtime necessary when properly executing migrations. End users are left completely unaware of the server resource migrations that occur behind the scenes. Physical hardware failure resulting in a complete server rebuild became a thing of the past with VCenter Server.
Read Andrew Salinger's full review
Steven Hiersche, Jr. profile photo
February 24, 2017

vCenter is the Best!

Steven Hiersche, Jr.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
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.
VMware server is well suited for businesses that have more than one vSphere host in their environment.
Read Steven Hiersche, Jr.'s full review

vCenter Server Scorecard Summary

Likelihood to Recommend (154)
9.2
Likelihood to Renew (1)
9.0
Usability (2)
9.0
Support (1)
7.0
Implementation (1)
9.0

About vCenter Server

vCenter Server from VMware is a virtualization management solution for vSphere.
Categories:  Virtualization Management

vCenter Server Integrations

vCenter Server Technical Details

Operating Systems: Unspecified
Mobile Application:No