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Intuitive User Interface: Reviewers have consistently praised the intuitive and easy-to-navigate user interface of vCenter, with many …
Starting at $6,044 per year
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What is VMware vCenter?
VMware vCenter is an advanced server management software that provides a centralized platform for controlling vSphere environments for visibility across hybrid clouds. VMware vCenter is no longer sold as a standalone product and is now available as a part of…
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Basic
6,044
On Premise
per year
Production
6,244
On Premise
per year
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
VMWare vCenter Server 6.0 Installation & Configuration Step by Step
YouTube
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is VMware vCenter?
VMware vCenter is an advanced server management software that provides a centralized platform for controlling vSphere environments for visibility across hybrid clouds. It offers centralized visibility and simplified management at scale, and extensibility across the hybrid cloud, from a single console. VMware vCenter is advanced server management software that provides a centralized platform for controlling VMware vSphere environments, allowing users to automate and deliver a virtual infrastructure across the hybrid cloud with confidence.
VMware vCenter is no longer sold as a standalone product and is now available as a part of VMware Cloud Foundation.
VMware vCenter is no longer sold as a standalone product and is now available as a part of VMware Cloud Foundation.
VMware vCenter Integrations
VMware vCenter Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux, Mac |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
VMware vCenter is an advanced server management software that provides a centralized platform for controlling vSphere environments for visibility across hybrid clouds. VMware vCenter is no longer sold as a standalone product and is now available as a part of VMware Cloud Foundation.
Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.
The most common users of VMware vCenter are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Pros
- Cons
Intuitive User Interface: Reviewers have consistently praised the intuitive and easy-to-navigate user interface of vCenter, with many users stating that it made tasks easy and allowed for efficient management of complex infrastructure components. Centralized Management Capabilities: Numerous reviewers appreciated the centralized management capabilities of vCenter, which provided a single portal to handle hundreds of virtual machines efficiently. This feature allowed users to easily manage, allocate resources, and migrate VMs or workloads. Fast Server Provisioning and Cloning: Several users highlighted vCenter's ability to spin up, delete, and clone servers within minutes as a defining feature in modern data centers. This functionality was particularly helpful for provisioning and automation tasks.
High Price: Some organizations have found it difficult to justify the expense of VMware vCenter due to its high price. This sentiment is shared by several users who feel that the cost of vCenter is quite expensive.
Troubleshooting Challenges: Gaining insight into problems without a third-party application or VMware add-on can be challenging, making troubleshooting difficult for some users. This has been a common concern raised by reviewers who mention the need for additional tools to effectively troubleshoot issues in vCenter.
HTML5 Client Preference: Some users do not prefer the push towards using only the HTML5 vSphere client and express their desire for a cleaner and simpler integration with PowerCLI. The preference for the previous client version over HTML5 has been mentioned by multiple users as well.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
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May 05, 2022
vCenter Makes It Easy to Manage vSphere.
- The ability to monitor CPU and RAM resources.
- Migration of VMs to other ESXi servers when necessary.
- Make changes to vDisk space without taking down the VM server.
- Creating new VMs from templates.
- VMware Tools is not always installed by vCenter appropriately to the VM servers like it should be when configured in vCenter.
- Better management of VM snapshots and error messages when snapshots cannot be removed.
- Better feedback or information (like dialog boxes) when some of the processes take a while to complete.
November 15, 2021
Improved VM Management
- Good UI.
- Mostly intuitive to navigate.
- Aggregates info from multiple vSphere servers into one.
- Allows easy management and snapshot of VMs.
- Updating was not the most intuitive.
- The HTML5 version was released and did not have all of the features that the Adobe Flash version did in the past.
- Some things were very easy and intuitive while some decisions just didn't make much sense.
June 18, 2021
VMware vCenter Server makes management a breeze
- It makes cloning servers extremely easy, which is helpful when you need 20+ servers with the same specs.
- Being able to give other users access to VMware vCenter Server without allowing them to see everything, or modify the server hardware is a nice feature. It minimizes calls for things like server reboots from our development team, allowing us to focus on bigger projects.
- The various statistics under the monitor tab are nice to have. They assist greatly when troubleshooting and determining if it's an issue with the server, host, or datastore.
- The built in console isn't the best. It's a minor issue, but when a server is offline, you rely heavily on console access. Unless you also have vmware workstation, console access can be a real pain.
- The on prem server has to be rebooted more often that one would think. While I'm a firm believer of periodically rebooting servers, this one seems to need reboots weekly.
- The recent tasks pane could use a refresh. It can often be troublesome when trying to keep up with specific tasks in progress. There used to be a search option, but I no longer see it after a recent upgrade.
June 10, 2021
vCenter will save your day... Every Day!
- Snapshots! vCenter does it exceptionally well.
- Single Portal to Manage, Allocate resources or to Migrate VMs or workloads
- Creating New VMs and Templates
- Network and Storage Management
- Update Manager needs improvement
- User Permissions are not clear to define
- Intermittent issues with AD connectivity
- Version 6.5 and 6.7 are lucking Full HTML 5 client experience
May 25, 2021
VMware vCenter Server makes VM management easy
- Cloning and managing VMs
- Administration of ESXi servers
- Failover
- Email notifications can be annoying, and initial setup doesn't always work
- Quite expensive
- Provide a one stop shop for all things virtual
- Ease of management for individual hosts and virtual servers
- Visibility into the virtual infrastructure
- Better use of Snapshots or remove all together
May 19, 2021
VMware powering OT
- VSAN storage management and redundancy - high performance IO with built in fault tolerance across the cluster, not reliant on a single hardware item
- VM fault tolerance. The ability to relocate a running VM and restart VMs from failed or isolated nodes
- Resource management and alerting. Tracking load across physical systems and allowing us to rebalance for better utilisation
- The location and layout of some configuration options are difficult to find/change. It does make tuning the system and resolving small issues hard sometimes, especially for less common options.
- Alerting and thresholds, some built in alerts are not as configurable as other systems, and alerts can be hard to manage. It is probably a good idea to disable some alerts and rely on a third party management system.
- The virtual switch is quite powerful, however inter-host switch comms are still via trunk links out to switchgear, it would be great if VMware could trunk the traffic between hosts a little more seamlessly
May 13, 2021
VMware vCenter reviewed 4 U
- Flexible
- Reliable
- Easy to navigate
- Be sure you have the latest release, otherwise, you will have to [rely] upon Java to connect
May 13, 2021
Virtual Environment Management At A Glance
- It is highly scalable.
- Makes it easy to manage your virtual environment.
- Makes it easy to monitor your virtual environment.
- It can make your environment high available.
- It is quite easy to install and use.
- There are so many options, sometimes it is tough to keep the overview.
- For troubleshooting, the information level in logs in the UI is too [low].
- In general there is a lot you can do with vCenter Server.
May 12, 2021
Worth the extra cost
- VMotion
- Fault tolerance
- Multi host / multi site management
- Provisioning and automation
- Mobile app! (But there are 3rd party alternatives)
April 24, 2020
A Flexible Virtualization Platform That Fits the Needs of Small to Enterprise Businesses
- 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.
- 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.
January 31, 2020
VMware vCenter Server - A must for any VMware shop
- 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.
- 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
VMware vCenter Server Review
- 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.
July 24, 2019
Virtualization Management at it's best
- 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
July 10, 2019
vCenter makes my life much easier.
- 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).
- 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.
March 27, 2019
VMware vCenter
- 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.
March 22, 2019
Virtual World Indeed
- Easy provisioning
- Centralized Data Center
- Cost Benefit efficient
- GUI
- Ease of use
- management
January 14, 2019
VMware vCenter Server – The Best in Server Virtualization
- 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.
November 13, 2018
VMware vCenter is the only Virtual Infrastructure You Need!
- 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.)
August 28, 2018
VMware vCenter Server, The Virtual Machine Epicenter
- 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)
August 07, 2018
The best way to manage your VMware vSphere Hosts/Environment
- 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.
- 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.