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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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Pricing
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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(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!
- 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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April 24, 2020
A Flexible Virtualization Platform That Fits the Needs of Small to Enterprise Businesses
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.
- Clients who have switched to vCenter Server have not been disappointed. This has helped their viewpoint of the company and services.
- It has also helped maintain a recurring schedule of hardware upkeep as business es need to expand. This is the case with any managed hardware, but keeping everything virtual makes this simpler to deal with.
Hyper-V is not a bad product by any means, and it does have the benefit of not costing money for the software itself since it comes with the OS. That being said, it did start quite far behind VMware in features when it first came to market. Microsoft has been catching up, and many features that make VMware a no-brainer decision over Hyper-V have been getting added. As of right now, I still prefer VMware over Hyper-V. But, Microsoft is constantly improving Hyper-V, so they are another option to keep in mind.
January 31, 2020
VMware vCenter Server - A must for any VMware shop
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.
- The administration of virtual infrastructure is easy.
- VMware vCenter Server integrates with many other tools for reporting and monitoring.
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
- Easy access to all infrastructure components saves time and reduces spend on 3rd party management tools.
- Robust monitoring allows us to take a proactive approach and fix issues before they impact the business.
November 12, 2019
VMware vCenter Server Review
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.
- This is unknown to me at my current position/level, though I would say that it has been a stable platform that has been manageable with a core skill set by a variety of teams within our organization without a constant need for training regimens.
VMware vCenter Server is a much more simplified, in my opinion, platform for managing a virtual infrastructure stack. There are a number of features that are available at the Enterprise and Enterprise+ tiers of service that other hypervisor environments do not excel at, or do not even offer, such as data store clustering and storage balancing (DRS).
July 24, 2019
Virtualization Management at it's best
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
- Overall environment view provides quick stats for management
- Pricing has increased over the years of usage, but we have become heavily reliant on this tool
- This software has provided critcal functionality needed during data center outages
- Maintenance and patching is much easier with the builtin Upgrade Manager feature
- Hyper-V and Citrix Hypervisor (formerly XenServer)
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
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
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.
- Web Console view
- Migration
- Snapshots
- Power Control
- Host maintenance mode
- Datastore uplaods
- Distributed Virtual Switch configurations
- LDAP
- Web Client browser extensions
- Certificates
No