We use VMware vCenter as in two clusters as our VDI solution and another cluster as our server virtualization solution. The VDI part provides virtual machines to our students and employees and is managed in conjunction with Horizon. The server virtualization portion hosts our server infrastructure.
Pros
Server virtualization
Host management (Updates, patches, etc.)
Cons
Technical Support
Overall UI
Likelihood to Recommend
For hosting your VDI infrastructure it was well suited for use along with VMware Horizon, but since the products were sold off to separate companies, that's not the case any longer.
VU
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (Higher Education company, 201-500 employees)
We use vCenter to manage our VMware ESXi hypervisors in our onpremise datacenter. The product helps to centrally manage our whole virtualization environment. We also use automation to reduce workload for our IT-admins. Features like vMotion help reduce downtime. Additionally, we leverage VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) to optimize resource allocation across our clusters. This ensures that our workloads are always running efficiently and helps prevent any potential performance bottlenecks.
Pros
Central management of VMware environment
Automated management
Cons
The builtin MFA is limited to two options
Integration with Third-Party Tools
Likelihood to Recommend
The product is well suited for larger environments where availability of IT-services is critical. After implementing the product it will help larger enviroments to maintain the whole VMware-enviroment. For cost reasons product is not so well suited for smaller environments. The complexity of implementation might also keep smaller organizations away from the product.
We use VMware vCenter to host all 500+ of our on-prem virtual machines. It dramatically improves efficiency vs. hosting physical servers as we did 15+ years ago. We now run our entire primary datacenter on 21 hosts vs. 500+ physical servers that we ran previously.
Pros
Managing virtual resources
Seamlessly migrating VMs to hosts as needed
Seamless patching and upgrade process
Cons
Several confusing menu options
PtoV tools have not been kept up to date
Error messages could be more descriptive
Likelihood to Recommend
VMware vCenter is great if you have a large number of servers. It reduces the number of physical servers you need to run dramatically, improving both CPU and memory efficiencies. If you add a SAN to the mix you also get storage efficiency. It is not very useful if you have only a small handful of servers.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (Libraries company, 5001-10,000 employees)
[VMware vCenter Server] is used by the entire Organization. It is the most valuable
tool to manage, update and perform administrative tasks on daily basis.
We are using Linux appliance version of vCenter 6.5 and this appliance proved to be exceptional stable and secure.
Pros
Snapshots! vCenter does it exceptionally well.
Single Portal to Manage, Allocate resources or to Migrate VMs or workloads
Creating New VMs and Templates
Network and Storage Management
Cons
Update Manager needs improvement
User Permissions are not clear to define
Intermittent issues with AD connectivity
Version 6.5 and 6.7 are lucking Full HTML 5 client experience
Likelihood to Recommend
Any Enterprise customer with a large amount of VMs (Servers) should utilize [VMware vCenter Server] for simplicity and true convenience.
Smaller deployments or Small Business clients with a few VMs (Single Host Scenario) might not benefit from this application.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (E-Learning company, 51-200 employees)
VMware vCenter Server is used to manage our enterprise production VMware host clusters. We have approximately 50 hosts each hosting around 40 VM guests running production applications supporting campus wide functions. Since the clusters are in a distributed environment with fail over capabilities enabled, vCenter is essential for managing these migrations and disaster recovery strategies. Without this software, all functions would have to be performed manually on each host with a great deal more downtime than currently experienced between migrations.
Pros
VMware environment client accesss
VMware host adminstration
VMware Cluster management
VMware alerts management
Cons
Transition from Windows Application to Web Client has been difficult
vCenter fail over needs improvement
Linked vCenters cause slow down when network links are down
Snapshot remediation needs more automation for cleanup processing
Likelihood to Recommend
vCenter is well suited to any enterprise environment needing to run enough VM guest servers to need more than one host or when needing fail over and disaster recovery capabilities. vCenter might be overkill in testing or education environments where the advanced features are not needed. Since vCenter requires either per host CPU licensing or VM subscription model pricing, this has to be a consideration as well. There are other free tools for managing VMware; however, they are no match for the great functionality of vCenter.
We use vCenter Server to manage our entire VMware footprint, which also happens to be 98% of our infrastructure. It makes centrally managing several hosts and numerous servers a breeze, and makes HA and uptime seem simple.
Pros
High Availability is built into it. As long as you have enough hosts to provide resources, you're not likely to experience a full outage that can be blamed on VMware.
The ability to spin up, delete and clone servers, all within minutes, defines current data centers.
The central pane of glass for all of your servers allows one Systems Administrator to handle hundreds of virtual machines efficiently.
Cons
Everything labeled VMware comes with a price, and vCenter is no different. Some orgs just can't justify the expense.
Gaining insight into problems without a third party application or VMware add-on to assist can be difficult.
Cleaner, simpler integration with PowerCLI would go a long way to making it a better overall product.
Likelihood to Recommend
vCenter is the de facto standard for managing your enterprise virtual machine footprint. That being said, it does come with an enterprise price tag.
Our department uses vCenter to provide VMs within the unit to host our infrastructure and critical applications. It solves issues in terms of cost, rack space, energy costs, and the list goes on. In addition, our university as a whole uses vCenter to supply VMs for security initiatives and run critical applications with their VMware environment as well.
Pros
Ease of use in creating new virtual machines
Easily update ESXi hosts and VMware tools across the environment
Works will with storage plugins, and other metric plugins that are useful for our department.
Cons
Easier upgrade paths to the newest versions
More integration with other sister products (SRM, vSphere Replication, etc.)
Likelihood to Recommend
vCenter is a critical component when managing multiple hosts to initiate DRS and HA. In addition vCenter is the command center to also implement other helpful products for disaster recovery like SRM and vSphere Replication.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Information Technology (Higher Education company, 10,001+ employees)
We use vCenter to house our 30+ VMs spread across 9 different hosts. It addresses many different problems for us. It gives us great failover, flexibility, and allows us to maximize the potential of our hardware.
Pros
vMotion is incredible to allow us to migrate to new clusters/hosts while minimizing downtime.
The simple, easy to use centralized management capabilities of the new web interface makes it easy to get up and going, as well as managing and making changes anytime you need to.
It's very versatile and allows us to spin up, test, and deploy new types of VMs easily and efficiently.
Cons
I would like to see it be as simple to add the vCenter Server to a Windows Domain as it is a Windows desktop OS.
Likelihood to Recommend
Any environment that requires utilization of multiple servers across multiple hosts and wants minimum downtime through the use of high availability and fail over alongside simple, centralized management will benefit from vCenter Server.
VU
Verified User
Technician in Information Technology (Higher Education company, 51-200 employees)
We currently use VMware vCenter to manage our 250 virtualized servers. We have eliminated all but a couple physical servers. vCenter has allowed us to reduce costs across the board, from power consumption to datacenter space. We have also benefited from having one tool to manage all of our servers, instead of having to use multiple web portals and rdp connections.
Pros
It integrates with our storage products and easily helps us both deploy and adjust our disk usage on the fly. You can easily see now only the space available, but also which servers are using what storage at any given time through one relatively simple interface.
vCenter vmotion works well to migrate servers between hypervisors. This comes in handy both when balancing resource usage, but also when a hypervisor needs some maintenance or repairs. We can easily and quickly vacate a hypervisor and get work done with no downtime on the servers.
vCenter's server console runs smoothly with minimal resources. This allows us to have access to, sometimes, many servers simultaneously without tasking the client resources.
VMware vCenter allows us to quickly and easily add memory and other virtual hardware to servers very quickly to fix performance issues.
Cons
Not all applications fully support virtualization. vCenter isn't aware of those applications at all, so you need to be careful to configure your settings so that servers that don't like being moved aren't moved during production times. You don't want a SQL server getting migrated during your work day.
vCenter has moved away from the desktop client in the newer versions in favor of the web version. The desktop, in my opinion, is superior. They have begun making some features web only, so they have been very passive aggressive in trying to slowly move people over to the web client.
We have had issues where granular permissions created problems. The error logs as a general error and doesn't recognized that a task failed because of permissions, you need to review and figure that out. It would be nicer if a permissions problem referenced that in the event log to simplify troubleshooting.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are doing more than a few servers virtualized, vCenter is the way to go. It allows you to manage a lot of servers and resources pretty easily and cleanly. You will need some training or hire a good consultant to help with the initial setup. If you are only planning on virtualizing a small group of servers, it will be a lot of effort to get configured on set up with little chance to realize a real ROI.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (Higher Education company, 501-1000 employees)
We use vCenter server to manage our on-premises VMWare VSphere environment. We currently have two instances of vCenter installed at our university - one for managing our main vSphere clusters, and a separate one at a remote campus for managing the vSphere cluster in our DR data center. Users are typically from within the technology services department.
Pros
vCenter is, in my opinion, the only way to go for managing vSphere clusters - it centralizes management for all of the ESX hosts as well as all of the VMs themselves.
vCenter is extremely good at consolidating all of the information you need to know about your ESX hosts and your VMs in to one easily referable location.
vCenter makes it easy to allocate all of the compute and storage resources in your vSphere clusters in the most efficient way possible.
Cons
The vSphere web client is sub-par. The interface is slow and difficult to navigate. The old standalone client was/is better to use, but for some functionality, you are forced to use the web client.
Likelihood to Recommend
vCenter is well suited to managing large enterprise deployments of ESX/vSphere. For smaller, less automated installations, it's probably overkill, but I can't imagine trying to manage an enterprise deployment of vSphere without it. More specifically - if you have large, integrated vSphere environments (multiple clusters or data centers, SAN storage, many hosts, etc.) it's a great tool. If you don't have those things, you can probably get along without it.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (Higher Education company, 1001-5000 employees)
