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vCenter makes my life much easier.
July 10, 2019

vCenter makes my life much easier.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with VMware vCenter Server

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).
  • vCenter makes backups much easier because the backup API is present.
  • The backup API in vCenter makes a limited DR available at a reasonable cost.
  • The HA option makes host server maintenance so much easier.
We considered Microsoft Hyper-V very briefly. At the time we considered Hyper-V you still needed to purchase an extra management product to get features similar to vCenter; and even then, it didn't seem fully baked, yet. The situation may, and probably has changed, with later versions of Hyper-V, but we like, and are comfortable, with vCenter.
Veeam Backup & Replication, Microsoft Office 365, SAP HANA
If you are going to manage more than one vSphere host, I believe it to be a necessity. Yes, there is an associated cost. I believe it is about $500 for the basic license (or used to be about that much). vCenter Server enables you to get the most from your server investment. Depending upon your license, you gain features such as automated or manual distributed resources, moving VMs from one server to another to allow for maintenance, automated failover if a host goes down, distributed switching and storage vMotion.