VMware - VMware vSphere Essentials Kit

vCenter

VMware vCenter is an advanced server management software that provides a centralized platform for controlling vSphere environments for visibility across hybrid clouds.

What is vCenter?

Gain centralized visibility, simplified and efficient management at scale, and extensibility across the hybrid cloud—all from a single console. VMware vCenter is advanced server management software that provides a centralized platform for controlling your VMware vSphere environments, allowing you to automate and deliver a virtual infrastructure across the hybrid cloud with confidence.

Simple Deployment

Quickly deploy vCenter as a pre-packaged, optimized, and easy-to-maintain virtual appliance. Integration of vSphere Update Manager into vCenter Server Appliance makes patching and upgrading fast and easy. RESTful APIs allow for the easily repeatable deployment of vCenter Server Appliance from a template, speeding up deployment times as well as reducing human error.

Extensibility and Scalability Across Hybrid Cloud

Seamlessly extend your on-premises environment to vSphere-based public clouds, such as VMware Cloud on AWS, no matter which version of vCenter you are running. Large-scale management is now improved: Manage up to 2,000 hosts and 35,000 virtual machines with a single vCenter instance.

Centralized Control and Visibility

Administer your entire vSphere infrastructure from a single location. The HTML 5-based vSphere Client lets you manage the essential functions of vSphere from any browser, offering more responsiveness and usability than ever before. Assign users to custom roles, search vCenter inventory, or provision new virtual machines with the click of a button.

Proactive Optimization

Allocate and optimize resources for maximum efficiency with this server management software. Manage up to 70,000 virtual machines and 5,000 hosts across 15 vCenter instances. Use vSphere HA and DRS clusters to support up to 64 hosts and 8,000 virtual machines. Replicate roles, permissions, and licenses across the infrastructure so you can simultaneously log in, view, and search the inventories of all vCenter Servers. Link multiple vCenter Server Appliances and increase visibility without using costly load balancers.

Improved Management

Use powerful tools to simplify management and extend your control. Use web services APIs to achieve cost-effective and flexible integration with existing systems management products. And use different VMware vCenter versions while allowing cross-vCenter, mixed-version provisioning operations, such as vMotion, Full Clone, and cold migrate.

Plug-in Extensibility

vSphere Client Plug-ins from VMware partners allow IT admins to manage third-party elements in their data center directly from vCenter. This server management software has the largest partner ecosystem in the industry, with the open vSphere Client Plug-in SDK. As a result, vCenter customers can implement back-up, data protection, server management, network management and security management, directly from vCenter.

VMware launched the vSphere Client Plug-in Certification Program in 2016 to ensure a better end-user experience for customers. Certified Plug-ins deliver optimal performance, better security model, client isolation against failures in one plug-in, and enhanced vCenter Server Appliance scalability. Customers will be able to distinguish certified vSphere Client Plug-ins because only certified Plug-ins will carry the "VMware-ready" logo.

Certified vSphere Web Client plug-ins:

- Dell EMC OpenManagement Integration for VMware vCenter
- Huawei Technologies Storage NGC (Flex and HTML 5)
- IBM Storage Enhancements for vSphere
- IBM Spectrum Protect vSphere Web Client
- Infinidat Powertools (HTML 5)
- Lenovo XClarity Integrator for VMware vCenter
- NimbleStorage vSphere Web Client
- StorMagic

Native Elements

Protect the vCenter Server Appliance and related services with native high availability (HA) and a recovery time objective of less than 10 minutes. vSphere provides native active-passive HA capability, certified for vCenter Server Appliance.

Back up your appliance to a set of files while vCenter is still up and running with native backup and restore. Restore by simply pointing a fresh appliance to the backup location and files will be downloaded to the new vCenter Server Appliance. No third-party products required.

Schedule your vCenter Server Appliance backups and control the number of backups retained via the native backup scheduler.