Virtualize the pain away with vCenter Server!
August 07, 2017
Virtualize the pain away with vCenter Server!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with VMware 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.
- vCenter server limits investments on individual servers, as well as their cost of maintenance. Virtualize everything that doesn't need to be a physical machine. In doing so, you centralize your capital investment.
- vCenter also enables easy construction / destruction of short lived virtual machines, enabling evaluators to test destructive changes without worry about maintaining a consistent state of a given hardware machine.
- vCenter is a highly technical product, so if you have competent users interacting with the system, you'll be fine. However, if you need easy access for non-technical users, you may need to look at other solutions.
We've been a vCenter shop for quite some time - even before our most recent deployment (which had such a substantial impact.) However, we did briefly consider Microsoft Azure, but because we were so tightly integrated with the vCenter API already, it made little sense to pour a substantial effort into moving off vCenter, when we saw no immediate benefit over vCenter Server.