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VMware vCenter

VMware vCenter

Overview

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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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Intuitive User Interface: Reviewers have consistently praised the intuitive and easy-to-navigate user interface of vCenter, with many …
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Improved VM Management

8 out of 10
November 15, 2021
Incentivized
It was used by a few departments across the organization for management, organization, and load balancing of VMs in our data center. Apart …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

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Pricing

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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
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Product Demos

VMWare vCenter Server 6.0 Installation & Configuration Step by Step

YouTube
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Product Details

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 Integrations

VMware vCenter Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux, Mac
Mobile ApplicationNo

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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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(337)

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!

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

(1-25 of 50)
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Manfred B. Zysk | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use vCenter for our VMware vSphere infrastructure and our Pure Storage FlashArray. We replaced our Microsoft HyperV (2012 R2) VM infrastructure with VMware vSphere, because vCenter allows better visibility, updating, and ease of management for our VMs, and vSphere. It is very easy to upgrade and install new versions of vCenter without disrupting daily business activities.
  • 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.
The VMware vCenter server is very useful in maintaining the CPU/RAM/datastore resources are balanced when there are multiple ESX/ESXi host servers. It is clear what resources are being used, and it is easy to migrate VMs to different ESX/ESXi hosts. Being able to remotely connect to the VM servers in vCenter when you cannot have other remote connections helps in maintenance and troubleshooting.
November 15, 2021

Improved VM Management

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It was used by a few departments across the organization for management, organization, and load balancing of VMs in our data center. Apart from the IT team, it was used by a few power users of different teams for their VMs. It solved the issue of managing VMs at scale.
  • 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.
If you use more than one vSphere deployment, vCenter is awesome for having everything in one console and not having to hop between web servers to manage different VMs that may be on different bare metal. If you work in a data center environment that runs VMWare, you very likely run this software.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use it primarily for out IT department, but have a few areas that are given the ability to monitor statistics on their servers. Our development team is given the ability to manage their servers with restrictions. They can console in, reboot, view stats, but can't manage the virtual hardware, such as adding/removing CPU, increasing/decreasing the amount of memory, etc.
  • 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.
Anyone running esxi with multiple hosts and vm's needs to consider VMware vCenter Server. It makes management much easier, and delegation simpler as well. If you only have one or two hosts with a handful of vm's, it might not be worth the investment, although it would definitely be easier to manage.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
[VMware vCenter Server] is used by the entire Organization. It is the most valuable tool to manage, update and perform administrative tasks on daily basis.
We are using Linux appliance version of vCenter 6.5 and this appliance proved to be exceptional stable and secure.
  • 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
Any Enterprise customer with a large amount of VMs (Servers) should utilize [VMware vCenter Server] for simplicity and true convenience.
Smaller deployments or Small Business clients with a few VMs (Single Host Scenario) might not benefit from this application.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have VMware vCenter Server monitoring all of our VMware ESXi servers. It allows our Admins to administrate all the various ESXi servers using a single portal. It also allows us to monitor everything using email alerts, which is not included in VMware ESXi.
  • Cloning and managing VMs
  • Administration of ESXi servers
  • Failover
  • Email notifications can be annoying, and initial setup doesn't always work
  • Quite expensive
VMware vCenter Server is suited for pretty much any environment using virtual servers. It allows a centralized management view of the virtual servers and the physical servers that the virtual servers run on. There are so many things that VMware vCenter Server can do, including large Enterprise options that are cost-prohibitive for most organizations.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
[VMware vCenter Server] is being used across the entire organization. We have several different teams that use it to manage servers they are responsible for. My Team uses it to manage servers, storage, and networking for all virtual servers in our organization. We manage 4 vCenters in total across 2 datacenters.
  • 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
If you have a virtual infrastructure with more than 2 or 3 virtual hosts, [VMware vCenter Server] is almost a necessity. Without [VMware vCenter Server] you will lose the [ability] to move virtual machines seamlessly to other hosts. vCenter will also cut down on the time needed to manage hosts and the infrastructure as a whole.
May 19, 2021

VMware powering OT

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I work with vCenter Server as part of the operational technology team, our critical operational systems are hosted on a dedicated operational VMware cluster separate from the IT infrastructure. vCenter server manages our cluster, resources, and VSAN storage, it also manages the redundancy, providing vmotion and failover allowing us to relocate both virtual machine compute and storage resources within the cluster.
  • 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
We are using VMware in a non-conventional manner, where the hosts are in different buildings on the same site, linked by a redundant network ring. It is performing very well in that scenario, so can only imagine it is just as good in a more conventional deployment. Our system is also in the OT space, not the IT space, and we are relying on it for critical systems, I don't see anywhere it would not be applicable.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
VMware vCenter is being used across the whole organization, each business unit (BU) would be responsible for their vCenter server. The division I work with has 3 locations, with each facility having its own vCenter. The business requires VMware vCenter to run its hosts with virtual servers running necessary business related tasks.
  • Flexible
  • Reliable
  • Easy to navigate
  • Be sure you have the latest release, otherwise, you will have to [rely] upon Java to connect
If you already have a VMware environment, then you must have a vCenter. I can only speak on behalf of smaller business environments; each facility has 2 hosts with 1 vCenter. A facility doesn't have more than 16 virtual servers running. You can certainly run more hosts with more servers. I can't say for sure how large a vCenter can handle how many hosts / VMs. I suppose it's up to how much you can afford with hardware.
I believe VMware has a bigger market share than Microsoft. Again, I can only speak on using VMware, I have no experience with Microsoft virtual environments.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have three high available vCenter[s] and related vCenter servers. One for server virtualization, one for virtual desktop environment, and one for our test and dev environment. With these three vCenter[s] we can easily administrate, manage, and monitor more that 400 VM's for servers, virtual desktop[s], but also virtual appliances, etc. A lot of manufacturer[s] deliver their system in prepared OVA to easily install them in a vCenter to add new capabilities to your company.
  • 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.
vCenter Server is only needed if you need certain features like live migration or if you have a certain amount of VM's, appliances, etc. You can easily handle a lot of numbers of storage with it. For smaller companies, I assume it is too expensive. But with different level[s] of licenses you can gain a different set of features. But it is clearly more enterprise grad[e] than SMB.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
As primarily an MSP and also in our own data centres, VMware vCenter is critical to any medium / large operation. If you need the upmost uptime and you have multiple sites, esxi hosts and many VM’s then you probably want vCenter. VMotion, fault tolerance, drs are just some of the critical features we make use of everyday to ensure our customers keep online.
  • VMotion
  • Fault tolerance
  • Multi host / multi site management
  • Provisioning and automation
  • Mobile app! (But there are 3rd party alternatives)
Any mid size deployment and larger of VMware can benefit from vCenter. If you have multiple hosts, multiple sites then you want vCenter. Single point of operation for all hosts and clusters across your data Center or remote sites. If you only have 1-2 hosts and don’t require VMotion, or some of the more enterprise features you can probably skip.
Adam Friedli | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
vCenter Server is used for the internal infrastructure. It is also used at numerous clients with only two or so using Hyper-V instead. It is a very scalable and easy to use platform for virtualization. Maintaining the infrastructure is also easy to deal with. It's been a fantastic tool to help clients go from a physical environment to a virtual one, and we haven't had anyone regret the decision.
  • High Availability. It's simple to get an HA cluster set up and to maintain it. The failovers happen seamlessly and have definitely helped clients throughout various issues.
  • Resource Management. vCenter is very good at managing resources and balancing load to keep everything running well.
  • Support. Any time VMware support has been consulted, the experience has been fantastic. Support is always one of the most important aspects of a product, and VMware doesn't disappoint.
  • Licensing. I understand that a company is motivated to do what is best for its business, but some of the licensing model changes have come off as greedy. A more recent one was specifically designed to combat the usage of extremely high core count server CPU's coming out now. Getting hosts in a dual socket configuration used to be the sweet spot for value, but this change will most likely upset that option.
I feel that vCenter Server is a great option no matter the size of the company. They have a wide range of license levels, and the ones with less features can work well for a smaller company. Not everyone needs all of the dynamic load balancing options, for example. But, it can't be overstated how useful it is to have multiple physical servers in a virtual environment instead. If someone only has one or two server, maybe virtualization in general is not a good fit. But if the savings on power and maintaining physical machines makes sense, going virtual should definitely be looked into. VMware has been a leader in the field for years, and the quality of their product shows why this is.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use vCenter server to manage our on-premises VMWare VSphere environment. We currently have two instances of vCenter installed at our university - one for managing our main vSphere clusters, and a separate one at a remote campus for managing the vSphere cluster in our DR data center. Users are typically from within the technology services department.
  • vCenter is, in my opinion, the only way to go for managing vSphere clusters - it centralizes management for all of the ESX hosts as well as all of the VMs themselves.
  • vCenter is extremely good at consolidating all of the information you need to know about your ESX hosts and your VMs in to one easily referable location.
  • vCenter makes it easy to allocate all of the compute and storage resources in your vSphere clusters in the most efficient way possible.
  • The vSphere web client is sub-par. The interface is slow and difficult to navigate. The old standalone client was/is better to use, but for some functionality, you are forced to use the web client.
vCenter is well suited to managing large enterprise deployments of ESX/vSphere. For smaller, less automated installations, it's probably overkill, but I can't imagine trying to manage an enterprise deployment of vSphere without it. More specifically - if you have large, integrated vSphere environments (multiple clusters or data centers, SAN storage, many hosts, etc.) it's a great tool. If you don't have those things, you can probably get along without it.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our entire infrastructure is virtualized, and we standardized on VMware vCenter Server for our hypervisors. We don't have a massive amount of hosts in our environment (only 6), but it is still enough that managing them without VMware vCenter Server would be a pain. We use the VMware vCenter server to manage all our hosts, and it makes it very easy to do so from a single console.
  • Easy to manage multiple ESXi servers and VMs
  • GUI is easy to use and relatively intuitive
  • HTML5 console is a massive improvement over flash, but it is still a bit slow on response time.
  • Some administrative pages are challenging to find and use.
VMware vCenter Server is a fantastic management tool for ESXi servers. If you have more than one server and need to manage them together, a VMware vCenter Server is virtually a must. Anyone with an Enterprise license should automatically get WMware vCenter Server to utilize all features of the license fully. WMware vCenter Server is required for these licenses, so it should be automatically included in the cost instead of being a separate license.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
VMware vCenter is the heart and soul of our virtualized infrastructure. This simple but expansive management tool allows us to manage our infrastructure throughout the full lifecycle (deploy, maintain, decommission). It provides powerful clustering features which allow for load balancing across compute, memory, and storage. Robust alerting capabilities allow administrators to move from a reactive approach to proactive.
  • Manage large sets of complex infrastructure components
  • Stay up to date with latest security patches through integrated vsphere update manager
  • Management of multiple vCenter instances can be challenging at times
  • HTML5 client is missing a lot of features from the flash client
Powerful feature set with a simple deployment model. Administrators will be in heaven with the number of available monitoring and alerting points. Programmable API allows unlocks unlimited automation potential.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
vCenter serves as the core of all our data center operations in multiple locations throughout the Pacific Northwest and northern Canada. It facilitates a standardized platform across our enterprise for managing data center operations and server infrastructure. Utilizing VMware vSphere Content Libraries, we are able to synchronize templates across data centers, allowing for the simplification of template management and having a common management platform enables our IT teams to easily move from one environment to another for a variety of daily tasks and server infrastructure management.
  • VM resource management. It is very simple to manage a VM’s compute and storage resource allocations, expanding and even removing excess resources when necessary.
  • VMware’s platform enables a highly available infrastructure environment with even minimal hardware resources. Setting up host infrastructure and storage clusters is simple and easy to manage.
  • In recent years, VMware’s vSphere environment, at which vCenter Server is the center, has become so feature-rich that quality control has suffered quite a bit. While many features are extremely nice to have, the core components of the software (snapshots, changed block tracking, and other various features) have become ‘buggy’ at release, causing pause before updating to the latest and greatest. vSphere 6.7 has been around for about 2 years as of this writing and we have only just adopted it due to many of the initial bugs that were apparent for integrated services, such a Veeam, that have become critical components of our infrastructure. It would be great if VMware would spend more time on quality control before releasing major feature releases in the future.
  • As with many large companies, the VMware support organization is tough to navigate unless you have a critical, hard-down outage of some sort.
In my opinion, vCenter Server is well suited for mid-to-large sized environments where more than a just a few VMs are necessary. Any time that compute resources can utilize a base cluster of 2-3 physical hosts, vCenter Server can offer a great management platform to keep everything in order and enable a highly available infrastructure.

It is not necessary for a remote office, or very small environments where a single host, or where there is a lack of need for a shared storage platform. In these instances, either a single ESXi host is sufficient, or even cloud bases services and SaaS offerings where possible, will be all that is needed.
Rick Lupton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Tom Erdman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
March 27, 2019

VMware vCenter

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
March 22, 2019

Virtual World Indeed

Jewemars Christian Riano | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Joe Spradlin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Ben Liebowitz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Victor Arana | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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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