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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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6,044
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6,244
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VMWare vCenter Server 6.0 Installation & Configuration Step by Step
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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. 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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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.
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Reviews
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April 12, 2018
VMotion is the bomb
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
March 28, 2018
vCenter - 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.
March 15, 2018
The 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.
March 09, 2018
vCenter Server is a purchase we don't regret
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.
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.
October 24, 2017
VMware still the King
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.
October 16, 2017
Vcenter 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.
September 25, 2017
vCenter Server - the VMware management tool
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.
September 12, 2017
shrink your datacenter, grow your efficiency with vCenter
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.
August 07, 2017
Virtualize the pain away with vCenter Server!
vCenter server helped us modernize our testing infrastructure from being a fully bare-metal shop to utilizing virtual machines for any and all use cases that make sense. Specifically, our evaluation department benefited most directly from this change, as they were previously constrained by available physical machines. Now, with vCenter Server, and the ability to templatize common machine requirements. Providing an easy way for evaluators to easily create and destroy machines as needed for their testing efforts simplifies the complex management of physical machines. We've also deployed an in-house framework that leverages the comprehensive vCenter API for performing automation of our nightly tests.
- vCenter API/Power CLI. These tools provide an easy way to interface and automate interactions with vCenter, and expand its functionality nearly to the limits of your imagination. We've dramatically improved the quality of our software by integrating our automation with vCenter for easily reused or destroyed testing environments.
- Templates and customization specifications. Together, these two features provide users a very easy way to create multiple instances of known machine configurations, and have them configured specific to your application, need, or development team. This is a powerful feature that saves a substantial amount of time in set up, especially if you prefer short-term virtual machines, rather than long-term maintenance.
- Snapshots. Ok, I might get crucified by the IT guys who manage vCenter and hate snapshots with a passion, but they are an incredibly useful tool for doing exploratory testing. They enable developers and evaluators alike to perform the iterate / test cycle in a much quicker manner than ever before. Moreover, it enables that same group to limit down time after a failed attempt by being able to revert back to a known good state in mere seconds. This feature should be strongly considered for any deployment.
- Clients. vCenter has long been trying to abandon the locally installed thick client in favor of a web client. The problem is, the web client still isn't a good user experience. Installing plugins, having poor performance, etc, makes users continue to use the thick client for a majority of tasks.
- Virtual Machine management could improve. I understand there are specific ways of managing Windows updates, etc, but it seems too complex to attempt. I'm not sure if its feasible, but I'd love one-button management across all my virtual machines AND their snapshots.
- Customization Specifications could be more robust. When they fail, it is often frustrating to figure out why. At this point, its a vague middle ground in between vCenter and Windows, but providing easier methods of diagnosing the failure would be well received.
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.
April 13, 2017
The Past, maybe the present, but not the future
We use vCenter across the whole organization. We have two sites with VMware 6.0 in stretched cluster to have a redundant and geographically distributed environment to ensure the provision of services even in the event of a fault and also to have a recovery time near-zero data loss. With this configuration, we decided to abandon the VMware SRM feature.
The implementation and management is not so difficult and is a good solution but with elevated costs.
The implementation and management is not so difficult and is a good solution but with elevated costs.
- Analysis
- Management of VMs
- Easy to use
- The elevated licensing costs have a big impact. We are finding different solution to escaoe from a lock-in infrastructure
- Centralized view
April 10, 2017
Why you need vCenter Server and can't live without it
Managing multiple ESXi Hosts is no easy task, especially if you wish to take advantage of the VMware automation features. Once you have 2 or more hosts vCenter Server becomes a necessity. While it used to be that you needed Windows Server to deploy and run vCenter, VMware has been steadily improving the Linux appliance (vCSA), to the point where almost all functionality is now included.
From a business standpoint it is a winner because:
From a business standpoint it is a winner because:
- There is no need to pay for a Windows OS license for vCenter Server
- There is no need to upgrade the Windows OS or maintain third-party tools on the server running vCenter
- Because there is no Windows OS or vCenter application to install in windows, the deployment is very fast.
- Multiple hosts management
- Allows for Cloning, Host and Datastore Migrations
- Allows for power management across multiple hosts
- The HTML5 Web interface of vCenter (VCSA) install not inclusive of all functionality.
- Auto-Updates of the appliance are still lacking
- Deployment wizard is a bit buggy and cumbersome
April 04, 2017
VMware vCenter Server: An invaluable tool
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.
March 24, 2017
The best way to manage a virtual infrastructure
vCenter is at use both at the company I work for as well as other companies that use our software. It is great for centralized management of a virtual infrastructure.
- Infrastructure Management
- Virtual Machine Management
- Reporting
- The web interface normally gets mixed reviews
- It is resource intensive at 4vCPU and 16GB of ram
- Could be less complex
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
February 24, 2017
vCenter 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.
December 15, 2016
Single place to manage servers
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
As a support engineer I support more than 1000 servers for a well known Telecom operator in India, running on ESXi 5.5 and managed by vCenter Server 5.5. Managing currently running VNF on these servers using vCould director and vCenter. These servers are designed to support IMS and TAS applications related to Telecommunication.
- All servers at one place
- Management at ease
- Fast accessibility to server nodes
- In 5.5, networking requires some improvement.
- In 5.5, one dashboard is required to see health/performance of all the servers.
October 11, 2016
One stop to manage servers
I have deployed vCenter server 5.5 for one of the leading Indian Telecom operators to virtualise a telecom application server (VNF). This vCenter Server is licensed with the enterprise plus edition. It manages more than 1000 HPGen8 blade servers installed with Esxi 5.5
- Single platform to monitor, manage and configure many servers
- SSO feature for authenticity
- Enhaced linked mode for mutisite vcenter intergeration
- Ease of use
- In 5.5 all improvements were done
- In 6.0 there are some new features in the HA module
August 23, 2016
VMware server review
IT is the only department using vCenter Server in our organization. We use it to manage our 35 virtual servers. It allows us to have one pane of glass to manage all the servers in one tool.
- You can see issues relating to the VMs in one window.
- Quickly address any virtual hardware upgrades.
- Upgrade all patches from one window and accomplish the upgrade quickly.
- I don't see any need to change anything at this time. I believe the software does exactly what I need it to do. We use it daily to monitor the severs and there are possibly features we can use more often that we don't. But for what we use it for, it does what I need it to do.
June 02, 2016
VMware Vcenter will change your server room
We have over 50 physical servers running VMware, managed by VCenter. This gives us great flexibility in server backups and resource utilization.
- Very easy to change resources, e.g.: add ram, processors, hard disks, etc.
- Create snapshots on servers when making changes is a great feature.
- Create live server backups.
- Implementing a snapshot reminder could be useful. Snapshots tend to grow large and can be forgotten. So an option to have an alarm or email reminder set for specific VMs could be useful.
May 24, 2016
vCenter Makes it Easy
We use VMWare vCenter Server to manage our VMWare environment. It gives us one place to go to manage servers and desktops. It allows a small team to handle a larger workload compared to when we were using solely physical servers and pcs.
- Manage virtual servers
- Allow for monitoring of error and alerts
- Snapshots make it easy to revert to a previous state before an update or application was applied.
- User interface could be a little cleaner
- Console sometimes has a lag
- Certificates can be an issue when deployed to a linked clone pool
February 08, 2016
vCenter or bust
VMware vCenter Server is being used by IT and dev to control environments and get reporting on the overall status of the environment. We are not using any of the add-on features, such as Orchestrator or SRM. It is extremely functional and easy to use - between the enterprise and features in 6.0 - it is leaps and bounds ahead of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), XenCenter, etc.
- Ease of management of the actual VCenter server. Deploying and upgrading has become trivial since the release of VCA.
- Built-in ESXi monitoring and pre-determined alarms keep us ahead of issues- especially with integration into the HP onboard sensors.
- There are several failsafe features built-in - example: when moving ports to a distributed switch, if connectivity fails, it moves them back automatically.
- Very expensive - especially considering that with standard and above it is not optional. I think they should bundle it in with some ESXi levels.
- The lack of a good mobile web UI is disappointing.
- Leverages flash... support for various browsers for the client integration tools after flash/browser upgrades is spotty.
February 02, 2016
VMware vCenter Server is the way to go!
VMware vCenter Server is being used heavily by my organization. We rely on it daily for supporting the numerous applications that run our core business. From deploying web servers to database servers to application servers, VMware vCenter Server handles nearly all cases where a new server is needed.
VMware vCenter server is mainly managed by the group I am a part of (infrastructure), but what VMware supports and what runs on the servers deployed therein is used across the entire organization. Some of the main business problems it addresses are:- Data center size. With vCenter server, we were able to drastically reduce our data center footprint.
- Data center power consumption. With vCenter server, we were able to drastically reduce our power consumption footprint.
- Ease of server management. VMware vCenter server makes managing large numbers of servers easy.
- Speed and efficiency. Our team is able to quickly deploy servers through vCenter.
- Ease of server/application support. Features like snapshots, memory hot-add, and HA (high availability) make supporting servers, applications, and databases a breeze.
- Ease of server backups. Server backups are easier with virtual servers.
- The list goes on and on!!
- Speed and efficiency. Our team is able to quickly deploy servers through vCenter. Things like cloning servers, deploying servers from templates, and even creating a VM from scratch is just a few clicks. You have a new VM up and running in a matter of minutes!
- Ease of server/application support. Features like snapshots, memory hot-add, and HA (high availability) make supporting servers, applications, and databases a breeze. Taking a snapshot before a patch or upgrade can save hours if not days worth of time in the event of an issue or problem caused by said patch/upgrade. The ability to add "hardware" like RAM or hard drive space on the fly while the VM is running is like a server admin's dream. HA is a life saver! You can lose an entire physical host and your VM will be "magically" brought back online on another available host in the cluster. Though you have a short outage, your VM is back up and running before you can say "downtime".
- Ease of server backups. Server backups are easier with virtual servers. There are many options as far as choices go for backing up VMs and with VMware vCenter server, it makes backing them up a breeze no matter your choice of backup flavor!
- Ease of server management. VMware vCenter server makes managing large numbers of servers easy. Features like DRS (distributed resource scheduler) can allow you to balance your workloads for optimized performance. It can also allow you to give your resource intensive servers higher priority to those resources. Also, the ability to adjust many many many features on the fly with minimal to no service disruption is huge!
- Pricing. However, you do get what you pay for, enterprise world class software. Alternatives (if you can call them that) like Hyper-V and Virtual Box are a sad comparison.
- Learning curve. Disclaimer: any typical I.T. professional will be able to pick up VMware vCenter Server fairly quickly. However, there is just a wealth of features and configuration options that can be overwhelming to a newcomer.
- Not many other cons. There is a reason VMware is the market leader in virtualization.
January 29, 2016
Virtualization is the future..
We use vCenter Server to host all of our in house servers including Exchange, Data Server, Printer Server, AD Servers etc. We have eliminiated 10-12 big server hardware and virtualized them using VMware. It's very easy to manage all these servers in one place through vCenter Server.
- It centrally manages all your virtual servers in one place.
- Moving a virtual server between ESXi is smooth whenever needed.
- Cloning, backing up data and recovery is faster in case there is any disaster.