Infrascale vs. VMware vCenter

Well suited for a company that has an extensive virtual environment setup. Definitely a good choice for companies that require an in-depth disaster recovery system, especially when the infrastructure is hosted in house. This system is expensive on a monthly basis, so I would not recommend this to small businesses as there are less expensive alternatives out there.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Backing Up At The Virtualization-Level of a server environment
• Email notifications built-in, allowing you to know when backups have failed - or if there's a firmware update available for the box
• Backup Replication to off-site hosted appliance
• Customer service is ALWAYS immediately responsive. Never have to wait more than an hour to hear back once a ticket is submitted

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The interface can use a serious update. It's understandable, but not modern.
• I don't like the fact that it forced an upgrade to VMware. That's not something that can be done by every company very easily.
• The restore process can be more intuitive.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

It is one of the best cloud back up data protection software and software platforms on the entire market for MSPs. There are not many other solutions that offer this level of customization and execution in the data protection and disaster recovery arena better than Infrascale. I highly recommend it for any MSP.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It is the cheapest way to truly protect data and has an amazing support team behind the product. You get what you pay for.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Infrascale Platform is the most modern backup service/device we've utilized. EaseUs and Ghost were just software that would run within a Windows environment (at the time) and backup to a device that we kept on-site. EaseUs would fail quite often with Incremental backups - so I would spend a lot of time re-running full backups to ensure we didn't experience data loss in the event of a crash. Ghost was used when I was first hired at this district - so I didn't have much hands-on experience with it. But I know it was a bundled offering with Anti-Virus back when we utilized it ('07-'09ish).

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Reduced backup costs.
• HIPAA compliant. Allowed us to gain business in the medical field.
• CIP compliant. Gained business in the financial field.

Incentivized

• Significantly reduced the number of standalone control system servers on site
• Allowed scaling up of existing systems and migrating other systems onto new infrastructure without additional hardware outlay
• The initial licensing and hardware purchase cost was high, however will pay off by the reduction in hardware costs required for planned systems

Incentivized