TrustRadius Insights for VMware vCenter are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
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.
We use VMware vCenter to manage a VMware cluster hosting virtual machines in a development lab. We were able to downsize the rack space and lower the count of physical machines by virtualizing. Which lowered costs.
Pros
hosts virtual machines
load balances across multiple servers
Cons
I wasn't impressed with VMware's kubernetes (Tanzu grid)
I wish DRS was included in the lower pricing tier
Likelihood to Recommend
VMware vCenter does a fine job and may be worth the money if you have the budget. There are cheaper and even free virtualization platforms available. And it may even be easier to use and more reliable. But it comes at a significant cost.
We use VMware vCenter as in two clusters as our VDI solution and another cluster as our server virtualization solution. The VDI part provides virtual machines to our students and employees and is managed in conjunction with Horizon. The server virtualization portion hosts our server infrastructure.
Pros
Server virtualization
Host management (Updates, patches, etc.)
Cons
Technical Support
Overall UI
Likelihood to Recommend
For hosting your VDI infrastructure it was well suited for use along with VMware Horizon, but since the products were sold off to separate companies, that's not the case any longer.
VU
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (201-500 employees)
We use vCenter for our own Private Cloud Platform. This is the key feature for using Dynamic Resource Scheduling and High Availability. This is de orchestrator for deploying new VMs and distributing them across multiple ESXi nodes and clusters. Managing hundreds or thousands VMs from 1 interface and making sure everything runs as smooth as possible. I could not do my Job properly without it..
Pros
Resource Scheduling
High Availability across multiple nodes
Easy to use and maintain
Cons
With transition to Broadcom the support could be a bit better
Documentation is a bit hard to find with the Broadcom transition
maybe builtin Helpsystem could be enhanced
Likelihood to Recommend
I could not do my job without it. We have a relatively small ESXi cluster (30 hosts) but to manage them all by hand/individually would be a nightmare. Our services are built around it. Even our Backup platform is reliable on vCenter to work properly. I would like to expand our platform sooner rather than later.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (201-500 employees)
We use vCenter to manage our VMware ESXi hypervisors in our onpremise datacenter. The product helps to centrally manage our whole virtualization environment. We also use automation to reduce workload for our IT-admins. Features like vMotion help reduce downtime. Additionally, we leverage VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) to optimize resource allocation across our clusters. This ensures that our workloads are always running efficiently and helps prevent any potential performance bottlenecks.
Pros
Central management of VMware environment
Automated management
Cons
The builtin MFA is limited to two options
Integration with Third-Party Tools
Likelihood to Recommend
The product is well suited for larger environments where availability of IT-services is critical. After implementing the product it will help larger enviroments to maintain the whole VMware-enviroment. For cost reasons product is not so well suited for smaller environments. The complexity of implementation might also keep smaller organizations away from the product.
We use VMware vCenter to host all 500+ of our on-prem virtual machines. It dramatically improves efficiency vs. hosting physical servers as we did 15+ years ago. We now run our entire primary datacenter on 21 hosts vs. 500+ physical servers that we ran previously.
Pros
Managing virtual resources
Seamlessly migrating VMs to hosts as needed
Seamless patching and upgrade process
Cons
Several confusing menu options
PtoV tools have not been kept up to date
Error messages could be more descriptive
Likelihood to Recommend
VMware vCenter is great if you have a large number of servers. It reduces the number of physical servers you need to run dramatically, improving both CPU and memory efficiencies. If you add a SAN to the mix you also get storage efficiency. It is not very useful if you have only a small handful of servers.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)
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.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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.
Pros
Good UI.
Mostly intuitive to navigate.
Aggregates info from multiple vSphere servers into one.
Allows easy management and snapshot of VMs.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (201-500 employees)
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.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)
<div>[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.</div>We are using Linux appliance version of vCenter 6.5 and this appliance proved to be exceptional stable and secure.
Pros
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
Cons
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
Likelihood to Recommend
<div>Any Enterprise customer with a large amount of VMs (Servers) should utilize [VMware vCenter Server] for simplicity and true convenience.</div><div>Smaller deployments or Small Business clients with a few VMs (Single Host Scenario) might not benefit from this application.
</div>
VU
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (51-200 employees)
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.
Pros
Cloning and managing VMs
Administration of ESXi servers
Failover
Cons
Email notifications can be annoying, and initial setup doesn't always work
Quite expensive
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (51-200 employees)
