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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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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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(1-17 of 17)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
May 19, 2021
VMware powering OT
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
May 13, 2021
Virtual Environment Management At A Glance
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.
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.
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
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.
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
July 10, 2019
vCenter makes my life much easier.
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).
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.
January 14, 2019
VMware vCenter Server – The Best in Server Virtualization
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.
August 07, 2018
The best way to manage your VMware vSphere Hosts/Environment
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.
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.
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.
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 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.