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VMware vCenter Server Review
November 12, 2019

VMware vCenter Server Review

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with VMware vCenter Server

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.
  • This is unknown to me at my current position/level, though I would say that it has been a stable platform that has been manageable with a core skill set by a variety of teams within our organization without a constant need for training regimens.
VMware vCenter Server is a much more simplified, in my opinion, platform for managing a virtual infrastructure stack. There are a number of features that are available at the Enterprise and Enterprise+ tiers of service that other hypervisor environments do not excel at, or do not even offer, such as data store clustering and storage balancing (DRS).
Support for VMware is difficult to navigate when you don’t have a common issue. Too often the VMware support techs are reading from a script and hand you canned responses that do not seem to pertain to the issue at hand. This is not at all uncommon these days, which is unfortunate, but its also understandable when you’re the size of a company like VMware is and when you consider the costs of such a support organization and how outsourcing support is the common solution.

Do you think VMware vCenter delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with VMware vCenter's feature set?

Yes

Did VMware vCenter live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of VMware vCenter go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy VMware vCenter again?

Yes

In my opinion, vCenter Server is well suited for mid-to-large sized environments where more than a just a few VMs are necessary. Any time that compute resources can utilize a base cluster of 2-3 physical hosts, vCenter Server can offer a great management platform to keep everything in order and enable a highly available infrastructure.

It is not necessary for a remote office, or very small environments where a single host, or where there is a lack of need for a shared storage platform. In these instances, either a single ESXi host is sufficient, or even cloud bases services and SaaS offerings where possible, will be all that is needed.