vCenter Server vs vSphere: Which is a better fit?

Chris: My name is Chris, I'm a lead system engineer at a higher education institution, and I give vCenter Server a five out of five rating. Before arriving at vCenter Server I have used and evaluated products like Hyper-V, Oracle VM, and KVM, and they do not have the same feature parody that vCenter Server has, so we have moved away from software like those in favor of vCenter Server. We chose vCenter Server over some of the other software titles because of their feature set. They're best in class in virtualization management, things like snapshotting options, V motion, storage V motion, and it gets us into a larger ecosystem with other VMware software titles that allow you to do a lot more management. But vCenter Server is kind of that platform that you got to build on, and it has the features that we need, and does them the best. The integration and onboarding of vCenter Server was I would say one of the most user-friendly. It is not a whole lot to get started, they make the implementation of vCenter and connectivity with your vSphere hosts straightforward, the installation process is pretty straightforward, and to make it so that others can help manage VMs in vCenter Server, not only is the user interface really friendly and easy to use, but it has API integrations where you can then plug in outside third party software to help you manage and do things like backups and replication. You can use their APIs to write your own code, if that's something your group wants to do. And yeah, just the accessibility of the software, programmatically or in a user-friendly way, is a really straightforward process to get started and implemented. If you were thinking about implementing vCenter Server, my recommendation is to look at the features that you get with vCenter Server. You will notice that they simply have best in class features. Look at how the different methods of implementing things like data stores, data store clusters, the features for dynamic resource scheduling, and their networking features that allow you to do a lot of creative things that will fit your environment. And my recommendation is just compare that with other vendors and see how they do it, and I think you'll notice that vCenter just gives you that flexibility, and their product is able to actually do what they say it will do, and they will give you, at least I believe they'll give you a pretty lengthy trial, if you just want to implement it in your environment, see it, use it and work with it, and I think going that route, you'll see right away the benefits of how they do virtualization management over some of the competitors. So that would be my recommendation.

Evan: Hi, my name is Evan. I'm a cloud engineer. I'm reviewing VMware vSphere, I would rate it a five out of five. And for more reviews like this click below. So before VMware vSphere, we used a lot of Redhat OpenStack, and OpenStack was a lot more difficult to manage because professional support isn't widely available. Whereas, VMware support is just a phone call away. So we chose VMware vSphere for its wide community support. The licensing cost was good when we purchased multiple products from VMware. There's a great monitoring capability. There's just the ability to see your entire environment from a single pane of glass. And it was cost-effective for us. It was very easy to get started with VMware vSphere. There's a number of labs available directly from VMware, so if you don't really understand the product there's a lot of hands-on labs that will teach you the product. So I found it very easy. If I were to recommend VMware vSphere to someone looking to purchase the product, I would say that they should consider all of the available products from VMware, other than just vSphere. There's a number of monitoring, logging and visibility applications that you can purchase. It could be expensive to purchase VMware vSphere on its own but if you look at the total package, you might see that there's a tremendous amount of value.