Microsoft System Center vs. VMware vCenter

Microsoft System Center

Microsoft System Center

72 Reviews and Ratings

VMware vCenter

VMware vCenter

351 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Microsoft System Center	Score 9.0 out of 10	N/A	Microsoft System Center Suite is a family of IT management software for network monitoring, updating and patching, endpoint protection with anti-malware, data protection and backup, ITIL- structured IT service management, remote administration and more. It is available in two editions: standard and datacenter. Datacenter provides unlimited virtualization for high density private clouds, while standard is for lightly or non-virtualized private cloud workloads.	$1,323
VMware vCenter	Score 8.7 out of 10	N/A	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.	$6,044 per year

Pricing

Microsoft System Center

VMware vCenter

Editions & Modules

Standard Edition: $1323
Datacenter Edition: $3607

Basic: 6,044
per year
Production: 6,244
per year

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Microsoft System Center	VMware vCenter
Free Trial
No	No
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Microsoft System Center	VMware vCenter
Considered Both Products	Microsoft System Center Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center None. We are a Microsoft business, and this is THE tool for imaging, packaging, remote support, and antivirus management. Microsoft's tool is the best for managing its software, systems, and antivirus clients. I will say that Microsoft Intune, the cloud platform, can be used … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center The versatility of the suite of application provided by the Microsoft experience center was way above the other competitors , it helped gained leverage over the other products in the market . That why we made the decision of choosing Microsoft system center as a infrastructure … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center We use Azure, we have lisences, so we have no needs any other cost. And also, we want to save backup data in Azure. Veritas ask additional cost reagurally and have to rebuild bakcup environment. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center Because Datadog was too small, we decided quickly to use Microsoft System Center. We use a lot of other Microsoft products so that discussion was quickly set internally. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center We have used Ghost from Symantec (licensed), FOG and Clonezilla which are freeware products. All three products had their pros and cons. The two freeware products were functional but did lack some polish, and Ghost was a good product for imaging of desktop computers. All did … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center We previously used a mix of FOG and Clonezilla to image machines. The biggest issues with these products is that changing one piece of the image required you to rebuild the entire image itself. These pieces of software also did not allow you to manage applications and Windows … Incentivized Helpful? AC Andry Campos Soporte Técnico Chose Microsoft System Center SysAid, Acronis Advanced Backup (formerly Cyber Backup Cloud) and SmartDeploy Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center We are using Microsoft products for a long time, so the overall confidence played a part in the decision, the feature set and licensing cost was also very high when compared with above products, so we decided to use System Center for our environment, so far it has solved many … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center Microsoft Access Incentivized Helpful? AH Amy Howard Computer and Network Spec Chose Microsoft System Center Microsoft System Center has more options. Microsoft System Center has the ability to image PCs as well as remotely connect to PCs, and software installation and patching where Symantec Ghost Solution Suite didn't handle all of these options as well. We haven't looked at many … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center Much better UI for system center. Also, Tivoli was discontinued, so it was an easy decision. Altiris was acquired by Symantec but was unreliable and painful. It's UI was unresponsive and generally outdated. It wouldn't clean up old packages and would hog GB of disk space, … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center I would say Microsoft System Center and Oracle were about the same. Oracle seemed to be a little more user-friendly, but for the most part, they are both comparable. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center Because it rocks and it just works. With the other software, you would have to do a lot of monkey work to make it work. Incentivized Helpful? Mark Fitzgerald Adjunct Professor Chose Microsoft System Center I have used ZENworks, Altiris, and Landesk. They are all good products in their own right and have many strengths. The pricing, bundling SCCM with our Microsoft site license, really helps create an ROI that puts SCCM over the top. Pricing aside it is a tool designed by … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center I have not chosen this software directly because I found myself in an environment that already used this product, a purely Microsoft environment. Therefore the choice that has been made has proved very effective and above all suited to our needs, and for this reason, no … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center I have not had any experience with another system that you would image computers other than manually imaging them locally with an image. Incentivized Helpful? Tuan Pham Infrastructure Administrator Chose Microsoft System Center Everything we have is on a Microsoft operating system, so it makes sense to use it. Incentivized Helpful? Brandon Pelinka Senior Systems Engineer Chose Microsoft System Center It's better than others because Microsoft knows its own OS better than anyone. It has a very rich feature set and allows companies to hit many areas of need with one tool. You can have IT staff get multiple tasks done just by logging in and they don't even have to leave their … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center We built our POC of the private cloud with vRealize Suite and Microsoft System Center. We are VMware shop so we thought the vrealize will be solution for us but we found pretty fast the vrealize suite is very limited and very expensive compare to Microsoft. With System Center … Incentivized Helpful?	VMware vCenter Verified User Anonymous Chose VMware vCenter In my experience, Red Hat Virtualization was cumbersome. I think VMware vCenter is definitely a better product. Red Hat discontinued their Virtualization product but still offers other virtualization platforms that I haven't tested. In my opinion, Proxmox isn't as polished but … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose VMware vCenter We initially used Citrix XenServer and made the switch to VMware vCenter due to it being less expensive at the time. That was some 15yrs ago and is no longer the case as Broadcom has changed the licensing scheme for their products which greatly increased the costs. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose VMware vCenter Not really a competition. Proxmox and Hyper-V both lacks the manageability and easy to use access for multiple nodes and clusters. Also Hyper-V has the ability to use Multiple nodes but it does not compare to the level of VMware vCenter Server. All the integrations possible … Incentivized Helpful? Veli-Matti Mäkelä System Administrator Chose VMware vCenter VMware as a product was most advanced hypervisor when we made the decision for our datacenter. Over the years VMware vCenter has kept it's edge and we have seen no reason to change to any other product as we have gained experience over the years. We do still continue to … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose VMware vCenter I was not involved in the evaluation, but my understanding from colleagues was that the years of experience in VMware vs. Hyper-V were very evident. VMware vCenter was simply a much more mature product. Incentivized Helpful? Manfred B. Zysk Network and Systems Administrator Chose VMware vCenter 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose VMware vCenter Citrix Xen Server.... Great Hypervisor but very limited in terms of functionality MS Hyper-V... [VMware vCenter Server] is better for almost everything and appliance form makes a clear winner for security and ease of deployment Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose VMware vCenter VMware vCenter Server's biggest competitor is Microsoft's Hyper-V Server. We prefer VMware vCenter Server because the hypervisor is much less resource intensive. It also gives us a different environment so that a specific Microsoft bug wouldn't take down all of our VMs if the … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose VMware vCenter [VMware vCenter Server] is the true leader in this space. The functionality and ability to offload tasks to other teams makes this a no brainer. The granularity in permission allows [VMware vCenter Server] to be secure and isolate teams to only the objects they are allowed to … Incentivized Helpful? AR Adam Radics Production Data Systems Superintendent Chose VMware vCenter There was not much competition, VMware has been in the market the longest and other systems are still catching up. VMware is proven, trusted, and has a good support base, the other main differentiator is VSAN for storage, reducing the need for physical SAN(s) which can become a … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose VMware vCenter VMware runs in the cloud. I do not have the experience with cloud based VMware to comment. Incentivized Helpful? Adam Friedli Support Analyst Level 2 Chose VMware vCenter Hyper-V is not a bad product by any means, and it does have the benefit of not costing money for the software itself since it comes with the OS. That being said, it did start quite far behind VMware in features when it first came to market. Microsoft has been catching up, and … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose VMware vCenter vCenter beats the daylights out of Microsoft Hyper-V. Actions that take multiple clicks with Microsoft can be achieved in a single click with vCenter. It’s less expensive and easier to deploy and maintain. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose VMware vCenter 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Rick Lupton Systems Programmer Analyst Chose VMware vCenter Citrix XenCenter used an isolated client that directly connects to the hosts instead of using a management agent. This causes a number of issues if the host is not optimally configured. Microsoft Hyper-V has been behind VMware in feature set for many years, but is starting to … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose VMware vCenter 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose VMware vCenter We only selected vCenter as there wasn't really any alternatives. Incentivized Helpful? Jewemars Christian Riano System Administrator Chose VMware vCenter Based on the Gartner leader board, VMware is a pioneer in terms of virtualization, it is also API based which is easy to integrate on other systems via REST API's, the technology itself is powerful and it's corresponding other added value features that makes administering … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose VMware vCenter VMware is much easier to use, much easier to configure, and does not rely on having another OS layer like windows to run off of. This was they key for us because whenever we had to update windows we would have to migrate everything off just to apply some simple updates. VCenter … Incentivized Helpful? Ben Liebowitz Server and Storage Engineer Chose VMware vCenter Our desktop team uses Citrix XenApp for remote connectivity of our employees. However, this environment runs on our VMware vSphere hosts which are managed by VMware vCenter Server. :) XenApp was never considered to replace VMware vCenter Server or our vSphere hosts. Incentivized Helpful? Muhammad Mulla Systems Administrator, Core Infrastructure & Microsoft Systems Chose VMware vCenter VMware vcenter server is way ahead of the competition in terms of features and thought that has gone into the product. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose VMware vCenter Proxmox VE is also a very powerful tool and is free, but vCenter has really hit the nail on the head as far as simplicity and ease of use, as well as, reliability. Incentivized Helpful? Greg Goss SQL Database and Business Intelligence Manager Chose VMware vCenter When we were selecting a hypervisor a few years ago, VMware was the clear leader at the time. Now the gap has lessened but I still like the feature set and feel of VMware. VMware is also moving in a direction I generally like, so I don't have any reason to replace what we've … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose VMware vCenter There are similar products in the market, both commercial as well as open source. We only tried open source products such as Ovirt and ProxMox, however they did not possess the range of features of this product. In addition, the majority of such options do not provide an easy … Incentivized Helpful? Victor Arana IT Manager Chose VMware vCenter I've selected VMware vCenter Server among the other Virtual Server solutions because it reduces the amount of time and effort to run and set up maintenance tasks, create hosts and back them up. Replication is so easy when you have a second vCenter Server linked remotely that … Incentivized Helpful?

Best Alternatives
	Microsoft System Center	VMware vCenter
Small Businesses	No answers on this topic	NinjaOne Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	No answers on this topic	NinjaOne Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises	No answers on this topic	No answers on this topic
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Microsoft System Center	VMware vCenter
Likelihood to Recommend	9.0 (0 ratings)	8.5 (0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	- (0 ratings)	9.0 (0 ratings)
Usability	9.0 (0 ratings)	7.7 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	8.0 (0 ratings)	9.0 (0 ratings)
Implementation Rating	- (0 ratings)	9.0 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Microsoft System Center	VMware vCenter
Likelihood to Recommend	We used a product before that was designed to prevent users making changes and saving files to the desktop computer. This required a renewal of the license. By using SCCM in our environment we were able to discontinue using that product because SCCM allows us to completely restore a machine back to the original configuration. We have taught our users to save their individual work on either a network drive or a cloud drive. By doing this, if we do a re-image of their machine they have lost no data, and it makes for a faster resolution. In some instances having a computer in our SCCM environment it can become cumbersome when creating new users for very specific purposes. It can be done by creating new organizational units and applying new policies but when in a pinch it can be frustrating. For the most part we have tried to make "new" purpose images and groups to at least accommodate a quick install. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Pros	Provides our users the ability to deploy and manage our own datacenter based on defined software with understandable solutions for storage, compute, networking and security. We are able to update at once all the computers from all departments without having to install the OS on every computer. It allows us to have everything in one place for database management and datacenter inspection as well. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	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 Joe Spradlin IT Manager Read full review
Cons	Needs web based storefront for requesting new software Needs ability to manage the packaging work flow better Sometimes is slow to download and there is no indication the entire catalog is being loaded, resulting in confused users not being able to find common software in the available list. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	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 Greg Goss SQL Database and Business Intelligence Manager Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	No answers on this topic	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 Rick Lupton Systems Programmer Analyst Read full review
Usability	No matter our issues with the software, its ability to centrally manage systems, patch, image, and remote help users has far exceeded our timeliness to help staff. Its ability to keep current, enable us to keep the network secure, and standardize our end-user experience has saved us many hours, dollars, and time every day. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Support Rating	If I had to dislike something about the system it would be how much it changes once you upgrade. This could be more of a problem of mine since I get used to one way and don't like it when it changes so much. I am enjoying the newest update, but it is a mess when you are actually going through the upgrades. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	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 Adam Friedli Support Analyst Level 2 Read full review
Implementation Rating	No answers on this topic	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 Rick Lupton Systems Programmer Analyst Read full review
Alternatives Considered	None. We are a Microsoft business, and this is THE tool for imaging, packaging, remote support, and antivirus management. Microsoft's tool is the best for managing its software, systems, and antivirus clients. I will say that Microsoft Intune, the cloud platform, can be used for those with heavy 365 usage, but for us, that does not meet our current company needs. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	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 Manfred B. Zysk Network and Systems Administrator Read full review
Return on Investment	We have been able to automate our patch management, firmware and other security concerns. We have a standardized "image" ensuring our setup is consistent across the enterprise. This alone has saved us in time to support and time to understand how to use our desktops. Incentivized Mark Fitzgerald Adjunct Professor Read full review	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 AR Adam Radics Production Data Systems Superintendent Read full review
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