vCenter Configuration Manager Reviews

We have some customers in our company, and we deliver the virtual infrastructure throughout the vCenter portal. We get them some resource pools, and they manage the resource pools. In some cases, if you want to have, for example, a resource manager portal, you can use the Cloud Director. But in most cases, we use the vCenter as a resource pool manager. We also use Vcops for operations management, insight manager, and VMware vRealize Log Insight.

vCenter has some good user experience, and the initial setup is straightforward. 

It would be better to integrate this infrastructure with native cloud environments, but we can't do it. We are trying to improve our experience by converting our infrastructure through virtualization on native cloud environments and workloads. It's the most important thing for us. I think that it should be tightly coupled with native cloud environments.

I have been using vCenter Configuration Manager for nearly eight years.

We are not using these products on a very large scale. For example, we use it for 100 servers and not for 1,000 servers. We are using them in a few clusters based on their CPU types. On this scale, we are satisfied with the products. But we don't know if we want to ramp up to larger scales. We don't know if that is suitable or not.

The initial setup was straightforward. It didn't take a long time to deploy this solution.

We used the engineers and assistants. We are training them, and they are doing some VMware courses with some consultants that are experts in these environments. We have an expert consultant that trains the people that work in our environments.

Their licensing costs are high. But I think for the scale that we are using, it's suitable. If you use it on a larger scale with many servers, you have to pay a lot of money for them. I think it's suitable for organizations that don't need expert people that want more money each year or each month because it's a straightforward solution. We prefer to pay for these products that are integrated and straightforward.

We tested OpenStack, but I think it's for more complex environments, and we should pay more money to experts who can maintain this infrastructure.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give vCenter Configuration Manager an eight.

We use the tool as a centralized configuration and management tool for large ESXi clusters. Additionally, it offers plugins for storage management. For instance, there's a plugin for NetApp storage that integrates with it. Consequently, you can now manage storage directly from within the product. It has compliance and monitoring features as well. 

My experience managing virtual environments using vCenter Configuration Manager has been quite smooth. Over time, I've observed that there's been a significant local competency built around the product, especially in India, where ESXi and VMware dominate the market. It's evident that vCenter Configuration Center is the preferred management tool in this context, and it's relatively easy to find expertise in the market.

The tool has automation capabilities that extend to overall IT infrastructure automation. This functionality is not limited to a specific area but can encompass various aspects of IT operations, including storage configuration.

The licensing model has shifted from socket-based to core-based licensing, resulting in increased customer costs. Moreover, if a customer utilizes software like VMware, which integrates seamlessly with ESXi, it becomes even more challenging to consider replacing ESXi. Hence, many customers, particularly in India, are actively exploring alternatives.

In terms of scalability, our experience has been quite positive. The solution is highly scalable and capable of supporting up to 64 nodes in an ESXi cluster.

Most partners in India are skilled in VMware, and we're one of them. We have good expertise in VMware. We rarely need to contact them for tech support, but when we do, their support is good, and we haven't had any complaints.

Positive

I rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten. The product has increased its cost by at least two to three times its previous cost. 

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten. 

We used the solution to manage the virtual infrastructure in my previous company.

vCenter Configuration Manager is an easy-to-use solution with good performance and cost management.

Users need to pay a licensing fee for the solution, which could be cheaper.

I have some servers running on a disaster recovery site, and I need some tools to migrate those servers to my primary data center.

I have been using vCenter Configuration Manager for six years.

I rate vCenter Configuration Manager a nine out of ten for stability.

vCenter Configuration Manager is a scalable solution.

The solution's initial setup was straightforward, and we deployed it in one working day.

Overall, I rate vCenter Configuration Manager ten out of ten.

We use vCenter Configuration Manager primarily for managing virtual machines on our servers.

The product's price could be lesser.

We have been using vCenter Configuration Manager for eight years. At present, we are using the latest version.

It is a stable product.

We have 300 vCenter Configuration Manager users in our organization.

The product's initial setup process is very simple. It takes two days to complete. We require three executives from the IT department to deploy and maintain it.

We take help from a third-party vendor to provide technical support to the users while deploying individual machines on the server.

The product generates a good return on investment for us.

It is an expensive product. We have a permanent license for it. We pay for upgrades.

I recommend vCenter Configuration Manager to others and rate it a nine out of ten.

We use vCenter Configuration Manager for different types of servers, such as production, web, and applications servers.

vCenter Configuration Manager is a mature solution with high quality.

vCenter Configuration Manager could improve by having more integration.

I have been using vCenter Configuration Manager for approximately 13 years.

vCenter Configuration Manager is stable.

I have found vCenter Configuration Manager to be scalable.

We have five system administrators using this solution in my organization. We use the solution often.

We have over 500 VMs.

We have used many different solutions from many vendors.

vCenter Configuration Manager was simple to install.

We have five people that are supporting this solution.

The price of the solution is too expensive for us and we are looking to move to another solution.

I would recommend this solution to others, it has worked very well for me.

I rate vCenter Configuration Manager a ten out of ten.

My primary use case is for this solution is for server administrator management. This solution is deployed on-premises. 

This is the best solution for management for the server administrator. VMware has been on the market for many years, so they have a lot of solutions. For on-premises, VMware is the best available solution. 

I expect VMware to move to cloud technology soon, so I have no changes to suggest. 

My company has been using this solution for over ten years. 

This solution is stable. Compared to Hyper-V, this solution is a completely stable and independent hypervisor solution. Windows always has a bug, security issues, everything. So Hypervisor tops Hyper-V. 

There are about 500 to 1,000 people in our organization using vCenter. Our environment contains around 200 servers. 

We rarely contact support, but when we do we usually contact the 24-hour support. 

I haven't explored anything regarding installation, but I assume it's a straightforward process. 

I implemented through an in-house team. We have a team of seven people who are VMware certified engineers to manage the servers. 

This product is not cheap. I have a yearly license for vCenter and the license is not cheap. 

I rate vCenter a ten out of ten and recommend it to anyone who is looking into implementing it. However, if you have less than 10 servers, you don't need to go for the vCenter, you can just use the Hyper-V. It depends on the company staff. 

Everything is going to the cloud, so I think this version 6.5 will be the last on-premises version. 

I use the solution in my company for all kinds of configurations, ranging from basic to advanced. With the tool, you can also add all upgrade plans with some customers' migration plans. I did three projects in Canada during the current year involving migration from VMware to Nutanix. I have done many things related to VMware and Nutanix.

Based on my experience working with VMware products for a long time, I can say that vCenter Configuration Manager is a good and stable solution. The flexibility offered by the product is its valuable feature.

The only challenge my company faces with the solution in relation to the customers is something that is directly related to the tool's pricing. If we compare vCenter Configuration Manager with Nutanix, the latter has a clearer strategy in regard to pricing and licensing. With VMware's recent changes, customers are confused about the tool. The challenges related to the tool are not technical in nature, as they are more about sales for me.

From an improvement perspective, if VMware offers one interface like Nutanix to operate all its tools, then it will be a perfect product.

I have been using vCenter Configuration Manager since 2012. My company has a partnership with VMware.

The product is stable, specifically VMware vCenter Server 7.0. I don't know if VMware vCenter Server 8.0 is stable or not because the only thing I did with it was an upgrade for one of my company's customers. With the integration of vCenter Configuration Manager with VMware vSphere Lifecycle Manager, some customers can use the update or patch quickly. If customers find any instability in the tool, they can check the patching or get an update directly from the VMware vSphere Lifecycle Manager.

It is not an easily scalable tool, but it is possible if you have a new platform or want to expand a platform. You need to reconfigure everything and reinstall the tool from the beginning. If you want to use a different sizing, you can change it directly from the actual one, but you need to plan it beforehand. Imagine you have only vCenter Configuration Manager for three servers, and you didn't know that in the future, you may have more physical servers. When you add more physical servers to your environment, you need to resize your vCenter Configuration Manager to follow the huge added workload. In the aforementioned case, you need to prepare your vCenter, but I don't see such configurations being complex, though some customers have not done it before and may find it complex.

Using the scalability features of the product is easy.

I have never contacted the support team of VMware. I don't have any idea about how the product can improve its efficiency and performance. I don't know if the product is supportive of operating in Canada since it is divided into two parts, namely French and English. I don't know if the product of support in French for the residents in Quebec.

For vCenter Configuration Manager, if I want to search for something suddenly, VMware has a very big online community where you can find all the answers related to the product along with the experiences of other people who are involved in some special kind of configurations related to the product. I found the answer to my queries through the online community for VMware NSX.

Compared to the other tools I have used before vCenter Configuration Manager, I can say that they don't offer the same architecture as vCenter because, if a user considers the objective of the solution, then it can be said that its purpose is to manage all the resources from one interface. I think that to see what improvements are required in vCenter Configuration Manager, you need to compare it with Nutanix, as it is a tool that improves the efficiency of monitoring, management, and operation platforms. From one tool, you get to use multiple functionalities, and it allows you to upgrade, monitor, and do health checks. The aforementioned details state the reason why VMware wants to merge all its products. If VMware merges all its products, then the administrator can use the tool with just one interface, which is technically helpful, especially if you do the handover of the product after the completion of a project since it is not easy to explain different products and hand over different products.

I have taken care of the product's easy and complex setup phases with many customers not only in Canada but across the globe.

I rate the product's setup phase a ten on a scale of one to ten, where ten means the easiest setup.

My team has faced challenges during the implementation process in the past, but not anymore.

For monitoring purposes, I use VMware Aria Operations and VMware vROps.

I use the product to migrate from physical to virtual servers. I use the product from scratch. I start from zero and ensure that our company's customers get all the configurations they want. Sometimes, I do some operations in my company's customers' environment and in the production part, which is a different operation involving expansion, upgrades, or new reconfigurations. My use of the tool depends on the use case of our company's customers.

I haven't used the product's automation capabilities to improve my company's administrative tasks. There are some other tools in my company that are used for automation. Even for the scripting part, vCenter Configuration Manager was not used. With vCenter Configuration Manager, I had only used the scripting part once for one migration, but it wasn't a high-level script.

Speaking about the product's ability to save resources and time, I can say that in some projects, the use of resources was really high use and was not used correctly. After my company installed the VMware solution at our customers' locations, they saw that there was a big difference between their physical environment and virtual environment.

VMware has changed its strategy with Broadcom related to different products. VMware has now merged everything into one product with the help of VMware Cloud Foundation, which I think is the best idea for the moment, especially considering how it has many tools, interfaces, and different tools to manage VMware. With time, the customers might start to feel a bit confused about how to manage the tools and how to be certified by VMware. The customers may have a lot of questions related to the tool in their minds. I think the strategy of merging everything into VMware Cloud Foundation will be good for VMware since everything can be merged into one interface.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. The market share of VMware is huge. It is not even necessary to prove the capabilities attached to the product. The only reason that VMware needs to prove itself in the market is because some of the customers have started to use solutions like Proxmox, Nutanix, and other such products. The challenge for VMware is to prove to the customers that it is the leader in all kinds of solutions it offers.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

Its purpose is to manage virtualization environments.

vCenter alone is enough for me because vCenter is a cluster environment and cluster solution for virtualization environments. So, vCenter is enough.

There is room for improvement in operating and managing cluster environments and maintenance. And hardware environment visibility.

I have used this solution for ten years. 

It is a stable product. 

It is scalable enough for our company.

The customer service and support are good. The recommendations given by support are good.

Neutral

I used Hyper-V. We opted for vCenter because of its scalability, competency, and trust in VMware software.

The initial setup is easy. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten.