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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

(1-2 of 2)
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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.
  • Overall environment view provides quick stats for management
  • Pricing has increased over the years of usage, but we have become heavily reliant on this tool
  • This software has provided critcal functionality needed during data center outages
  • Maintenance and patching is much easier with the builtin Upgrade Manager feature
Citrix XenCenter used an isolated client that directly connects to the hosts instead of using a management agent. This causes a number of issues if the host is not optimally configured. Microsoft Hyper-V has been behind VMware in feature set for many years, but is starting to catch up. The key feature that is missing is a comparable vCenter product. They do have a Virtual Machine Manger module for Systems Center, but licensing is more complicated than VMware and not all features are matched.
75
VMware vCenter Server is used by all IT staff and department staff who need console level access to a virtual server. This includes Systems Administrators, Programmers, Business Administrators, Administrative Assistants, and Application Support staff. Access to the system is based on defined roles; application administrators have access to the group of servers that host their software, department 'owned' servers are granted permissions for specific users when the initial deployment is started or when a supervisor notifies of staff changes.
5
VMWare has an excellent training and certification program that provides all information needed to deploy, administer, and maintain the hosts and related infrastructure needed to run the virtual environment. Occasionally Network engineers or Storage Administrators will need access to the system to interconnect other devices, the VMware Administrators closely monitor this access to ensure that no configurations are changed that could cause harm to the system.
  • Monitor VMware
  • Manage VMware
  • Maintain Cluster Stability
  • Manage virtual network switch
  • Grant console access to servers as needed
  • We have been able to allow virtual console access to 'off network' systems that would otherwise require a KVM module in the physical data-center
  • We have been able to provide temporary additional resources when demand is high without purchasing additional hardware
  • We have been able to shutdown a data center without loss of services due to automatic fail over capabilities between hosts
  • We have been able to create automatic snapshot backups on servers and restore to a separate clone for testing or restores
  • Long distance off site fail over
  • Enhanced VDI
  • Container deployment
  • Testing software
We are very dependent on this software, it has become a much needed tool to perform the daily tasks that are required to maintain the virtual server environment. VMware has become very pricey over the years, so we are looking for alternatives for cost savings strategy, but nothing has been found to be on par to what we are currently using.
No
  • Product Features
  • Product Reputation
  • Prior Experience with the Product
  • Vendor Reputation
VMware vCenter is essential to the functions we perform for maintaining a healthy virtual environment. It allows management, delegation, maintenance, automation, security, disaster recovery, deployment templates, and many other tasks. We have been using VMware since vSphere version 3 and the product has continued to improve over time. Although the transition from Windows based servers/client was difficult, it has given a great level of autonomy and interoperability.
I would like to get more accurate subscription pricing before we commit to this product. VMware has tiered pricing plans, but it is not always clear what you get at each level. We now have some features that we don't need and are missing some features that we do need. An integrated package would be better than pay per piece.
  • Implemented in-house
No
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled
As long as we are able to perform upgrades without disruption to other services, our customers are not even aware that an upgrade is taking place. This is what we like to see, the seamless process that causes no disruptions. In the past, we had to build a new environment running the new version, then manually migrate the VMs over to the newer version. Now, it is just as simple as migrating VMs to another host, running the upgrade and then migrating them back.
  • Locked snapshots
  • Misconfigured network ports
  • Locked cd-image mounts
  • VMFS needed to be upgraded
Since moving away from the Windows Server hosting the vCenter application and instead using a virtual appliance, it has become much easier to implement and deploy the new versions. We can easily create a snapshot or clone of the vCenter vApp to ensure any problems encountered during the upgrade can be mitigated with a fall back to the old version to prevent unscheduled downtime.
We try to stay up to date on all of our products to be sure we are not exploited by any security vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, we got to the 'bleeding edge' on a new version of vSphere that was not completely compatible with our hardware (even though it was not mentioned in the documentation). VMware Support went directly to the developer of this package and created a custom patch to resolve our issue before releasing it to the general public.
VMware Support Engineers are great, but their first tier employees are often not able to provide support to specific issues that don't meet the criteria of support articles or their troubleshooting scripts. Many times we have had to request that our support request be escalated by contacting our account rep instead of getting the support we need on the first call.
  • Web Console view
  • Migration
  • Snapshots
  • Power Control
  • Host maintenance mode
  • Datastore uplaods
  • Distributed Virtual Switch configurations
  • LDAP
  • Web Client browser extensions
  • Certificates
No
VMware vCenter Server does a great job with maintaining your virtual environment. It has great role based features to delegate various administrative tasks to multiple users. It is an excellent 'all in one' dashboard for viewing all aspects of your vSphere infrastructure. All alerts to software and hardware issues are easy to trace from this interface.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
VMWare vCenter Server would be a good fit for most companies. It can save money, allow you to reuse existing physical servers, and make the most out of your hardware.
  • We have been able to expand to include 12 locations in 5 different cities.
11
IT helpdesk and engineers
4
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