This product overview is based on a synthesis of 5 recent reviews covering overall satisfaction with VMware vCenter. A primary function, according to all 5 reviewers, is the centralized management of VMware environments. Reviewers consistently praise its ability to simplify the orchestration and deployment of virtual machines across multiple ESXi nodes and clusters. Resource optimization is another significant advantage, cited by 3 reviewers, leading to improved efficiency and reduced costs through virtualization. Features like Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) and vMotion contribute to minimizing downtime and optimizing resource allocation. Additionally, reviewers highlight its capabilities in virtual resource management and automated management, with 2 of 5 reviewers specifically mentioning each of these aspects. Overall, VMware vCenter is portrayed as a robust solution for managing virtual infrastructure, optimizing resource utilization, and reducing physical hardware footprint.

Pros

Centralized management of VMware environments
Simplified orchestration and deployment of virtual machines
Resource optimization leading to improved efficiency and reduced costs
Virtual resource management
Automated management features

Describe how you use VMware vCenter in your organization. What are the business problems the product addresses and what is the scope of your use case?

From 5 reviews

Summary

This report synthesizes 5 recent reviews to understand how organizations use VMware vCenter and the business problems it addresses. A primary use case, mentioned by all 5 reviewers, is centralized management of VMware environments, simplifying the orchestration and deployment of virtual machines across multiple ESXi nodes and clusters. Resource optimization is another key benefit, highlighted by 3 reviewers, who cite improved efficiency and reduced costs through virtualization and features like Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) and vMotion. These features contribute to minimizing downtime and optimizing resource allocation. The reviewers suggest that VMware vCenter enables them to manage their virtual infrastructure effectively, optimize resource utilization, and reduce physical hardware footprint.

Reviews

55 Reviews

VMware vCenter meets our needs but doesnt wow me

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 30, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use VMware vCenter to manage a VMware cluster hosting virtual machines in a development lab. We were able to downsize the rack space and lower the count of physical machines by virtualizing. Which lowered costs.

Pros

hosts virtual machines
load balances across multiple servers

Cons

I wasn't impressed with VMware's kubernetes (Tanzu grid)
I wish DRS was included in the lower pricing tier

Likelihood to Recommend

VMware vCenter does a fine job and may be worth the money if you have the budget. There are cheaper and even free virtualization platforms available. And it may even be easier to use and more reliable. But it comes at a significant cost.

Verified User

Employee in Engineering (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Expensive to License; Decent to Use

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

January 3, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

20 years of experience

Everything you need to manage multiple ESXi hosts!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 2, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use vCenter for our own Private Cloud Platform. This is the key feature for using Dynamic Resource Scheduling and High Availability. This is de orchestrator for deploying new VMs and distributing them across multiple ESXi nodes and clusters. Managing hundreds or thousands VMs from 1 interface and making sure everything runs as smooth as possible. I could not do my Job properly without it..

Pros

Resource Scheduling
High Availability across multiple nodes
Easy to use and maintain

Cons

With transition to Broadcom the support could be a bit better
Documentation is a bit hard to find with the Broadcom transition
maybe builtin Helpsystem could be enhanced

Likelihood to Recommend

I could not do my job without it. We have a relatively small ESXi cluster (30 hosts) but to manage them all by hand/individually would be a nightmare. Our services are built around it. Even our Backup platform is reliable on vCenter to work properly. I would like to expand our platform sooner rather than later.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

15 years of experience

vCenter is our choice for managing hypervisors

Rating: 8 out of 10

December 31, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Veli-Matti Mäkelä

System Administrator in Information Technology at SeAMK (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

13 years of experience

View profile

VMware vCenter Dramatically Reduces Costs

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 17, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

vCenter Makes It Easy to Manage vSphere.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 5, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use vCenter for our VMware vSphere infrastructure and our Pure Storage FlashArray. We replaced our Microsoft HyperV (2012 R2) VM infrastructure with VMware vSphere, because vCenter allows better visibility, updating, and ease of management for our VMs, and vSphere. It is very easy to upgrade and install new versions of vCenter without disrupting daily business activities.

Pros

The ability to monitor CPU and RAM resources.
Migration of VMs to other ESXi servers when necessary.
Make changes to vDisk space without taking down the VM server.
Creating new VMs from templates.

Cons

VMware Tools is not always installed by vCenter appropriately to the VM servers like it should be when configured in vCenter.
Better management of VM snapshots and error messages when snapshots cannot be removed.
Better feedback or information (like dialog boxes) when some of the processes take a while to complete.

Likelihood to Recommend

The VMware vCenter server is very useful in maintaining the CPU/RAM/datastore resources are balanced when there are multiple ESX/ESXi host servers. It is clear what resources are being used, and it is easy to migrate VMs to different ESX/ESXi hosts. Being able to remotely connect to the VM servers in vCenter when you cannot have other remote connections helps in maintenance and troubleshooting.

Manfred B. Zysk

Network and Systems Administrator in Information Technology at NRS - Northwest River Supplies, Inc. (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

View profile

Improved VM Management

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

November 15, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It was used by a few departments across the organization for management, organization, and load balancing of VMs in our data center. Apart from the IT team, it was used by a few power users of different teams for their VMs. It solved the issue of managing VMs at scale.

Pros

Good UI.
Mostly intuitive to navigate.
Aggregates info from multiple vSphere servers into one.
Allows easy management and snapshot of VMs.

Cons

Updating was not the most intuitive.
The HTML5 version was released and did not have all of the features that the Adobe Flash version did in the past.
Some things were very easy and intuitive while some decisions just didn't make much sense.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you use more than one vSphere deployment, vCenter is awesome for having everything in one console and not having to hop between web servers to manage different VMs that may be on different bare metal. If you work in a data center environment that runs VMWare, you very likely run this software.

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

VMware vCenter Server makes management a breeze

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

June 18, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We currently use it primarily for out IT department, but have a few areas that are given the ability to monitor statistics on their servers. Our development team is given the ability to manage their servers with restrictions. They can console in, reboot, view stats, but can't manage the virtual hardware, such as adding/removing CPU, increasing/decreasing the amount of memory, etc.

Pros

It makes cloning servers extremely easy, which is helpful when you need 20+ servers with the same specs.
Being able to give other users access to VMware vCenter Server without allowing them to see everything, or modify the server hardware is a nice feature. It minimizes calls for things like server reboots from our development team, allowing us to focus on bigger projects.
The various statistics under the monitor tab are nice to have. They assist greatly when troubleshooting and determining if it's an issue with the server, host, or datastore.

Cons

The built in console isn't the best. It's a minor issue, but when a server is offline, you rely heavily on console access. Unless you also have vmware workstation, console access can be a real pain.
The on prem server has to be rebooted more often that one would think. While I'm a firm believer of periodically rebooting servers, this one seems to need reboots weekly.
The recent tasks pane could use a refresh. It can often be troublesome when trying to keep up with specific tasks in progress. There used to be a search option, but I no longer see it after a recent upgrade.

Likelihood to Recommend

Anyone running esxi with multiple hosts and vm's needs to consider VMware vCenter Server. It makes management much easier, and delegation simpler as well. If you only have one or two hosts with a handful of vm's, it might not be worth the investment, although it would definitely be easier to manage.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

vCenter will save your day... Every Day!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

June 10, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

[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.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

VMware vCenter Server makes VM management easy

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 25, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have VMware vCenter Server monitoring all of our VMware ESXi servers. It allows our Admins to administrate all the various ESXi servers using a single portal. It also allows us to monitor everything using email alerts, which is not included in VMware ESXi.

Pros

Cloning and managing VMs
Administration of ESXi servers
Failover

Cons

Email notifications can be annoying, and initial setup doesn't always work
Quite expensive

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Professional in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience