Suse's Harvester is a cloud-native hyperconverged infrastructure. It is used to unify infrastructure workloads with Harvester and is designed to help operators consolidate and simplify their virtual machine workloads alongside Kubernetes clusters. Harvester is presented as a next generation of open-source hyperconverged infrastructure solutions designed for modern cloud-native environments. Suse Harvester is open source and free to use.
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VMware vCenter
Score 8.7 out of 10
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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.
It's great for provisioning any kind of virtual servers, but for now, we use it to provision only servers for Rancher managed Kubernetes clusters. But we are considering to provision also virtual servers for all kinds of needs on SUSE Harvester in the near future, as it's getting more and more mature with every release.
VMware vCenter Server is suited for pretty much any environment using virtual servers. It allows a centralized management view of the virtual servers and the physical servers that the virtual servers run on. There are so many things that VMware vCenter Server can do, including large Enterprise options that are cost-prohibitive for most organizations.
First and foremost, it provides a platform for us to virtualize our servers and it does it very well. Having the ability to spin up a new server from a template in a matter of seconds is amazing and saves precious time and resources.
VMware vCenter Server also provides the ability to view performance & statistical data that assists my team in balancing our host environment. Leveraging the vMotion functionality, we can quickly move VMs from one host to another for maintenance purposes, etc...
VMware vCenter Server also make it easy to add / modify hardware configurations within the VMs setup. Adding RAM, hard drive space, processor cores, etc...is as easy as it gets.
VMware vCenter Server makes it easy to backup and restore a VM from the console. You can quickly create a backup of any VM and store it during upgrades, etc...for easy roll backs.
I still am not happy with the web interface. While convenient in that I can access vCenter from anywhere I have a browser connection, It feels slower than the thick client and if I'm doing anything that takes longer than a few minutes, I'll always opt for the thick client.
We are very dependent on this software, it has become a much needed tool to perform the daily tasks that are required to maintain the virtual server environment. VMware has become very pricey over the years, so we are looking for alternatives for cost savings strategy, but nothing has been found to be on par to what we are currently using
I work with vCenter for 10+ years and i love it. I can find my way around and can help building and expanding the platform. It is easy to use and there are a lot good communities for the extra support when needed. Even the Homelab community is of great value.
VMware support has always been fantastic and they have been invaluable in solving tougher issues that have been run into. Most of the time, any oddities encountered are fixed by available updates. This can be deduced by support quickly with logs within vCenter. We have not run into something yet that support was unable to help with. They either have a solution already, or they are able to find one quickly.
Since moving away from the Windows Server hosting the vCenter application and instead using a virtual appliance, it has become much easier to implement and deploy the new versions. We can easily create a snapshot or clone of the vCenter vApp to ensure any problems encountered during the upgrade can be mitigated with a fall back to the old version to prevent unscheduled downtime.
We used ESXi for years and were happy with it. Then we implemented Rancher managed Kubernetes clusters with nodes provisioned on VMware ESXi. Later, when SUSE Harvester came out, we started to provision SUSE Rancher nodes on Harvester. Both VMware ESXi and SUSE Harvester are great products, and I think - we are keeping both, at least for now, when SUSE Harvester is a young project.
vCenter is much more complete as a solution than other products that I have looked at and it works very well for our environment. vCenter is very easy to configure and does not have the unnecessary steps to set up and configure. Also, the different storage vendor support makes it easy to configure and maintain without having to use separate applications or consoles.
