vCenter or bust
February 08, 2016
vCenter or bust
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with VMware vCenter Server
VMware vCenter Server is being used by IT and dev to control environments and get reporting on the overall status of the environment. We are not using any of the add-on features, such as Orchestrator or SRM. It is extremely functional and easy to use - between the enterprise and features in 6.0 - it is leaps and bounds ahead of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), XenCenter, etc.
- Ease of management of the actual VCenter server. Deploying and upgrading has become trivial since the release of VCA.
- Built-in ESXi monitoring and pre-determined alarms keep us ahead of issues- especially with integration into the HP onboard sensors.
- There are several failsafe features built-in - example: when moving ports to a distributed switch, if connectivity fails, it moves them back automatically.
- Very expensive - especially considering that with standard and above it is not optional. I think they should bundle it in with some ESXi levels.
- The lack of a good mobile web UI is disappointing.
- Leverages flash... support for various browsers for the client integration tools after flash/browser upgrades is spotty.
- Vcenter makes uptime for environments and some workloads much easier. Fault tolerance, vmotion and s-vmotion make host maintenance very simple.
- We can spin up entire environments in hours and not days.
I've used Xen, KVM, Hyper-V, OracleVM and few others - most in money making production environments. All of them have their own management toolsets which offer the same core functionality as ESXi with vCenter; however pass that core set of functionality, vCenter really stands up on its own - if only for ease of use.
Creating DRS rules, host clusters, storage clusters and some basic automation tasks are all significantly easier than with any other toolset - as well just seeing overall virtual environment health.
Creating DRS rules, host clusters, storage clusters and some basic automation tasks are all significantly easier than with any other toolset - as well just seeing overall virtual environment health.