VMware Promo Codes ( VMware Coupon Codes) 2025

VMware Coupon Codes

About VMware

VCenter Server
The most essential component beyond the vSphere hypervisor is arguably vCenter Server. vCenter Server is a management tool you can use to manage all of your vSphere servers and their virtualized workloads through a single pane of glass. In some ways, vCenter Server is comparable to Microsoft VMM.

vCenter Server provides visibility into your virtualization infrastructure through something called the Inventory Service. This service makes it possible to see hosts, VMs, virtual networks and data stores that exist throughout your organization.

Another useful service provided by vCenter is single sign-on (SSO). vCenter SSO makes it possible to log in once and access the entire vCenter environment. This is especially helpful in extremely large deployments (and VMware environments can grow to be quite large), as it's possible to accommodate 30,000 VMs by linking together 10 vCenter instances.

the vSphere Client is normally used for managing the VMs that exist on a vSphere server. vCenter includes a Web client that allows you to manage your virtual datacenter through a Web browser.

Incidentally, if you plan to use the vCenter Web Client, the SSO service must be enabled and the vSphere Web client and the vCenter Server must be registered to a common vCenter SSO server. The Inventory Service is also required in order for the vCenter Web client to work.

vCenter can also be used to monitor your physical hardware. Not only can the software alert you to things like server failures, but it can alert you to less-extreme problems before they turn into bigger problems. For instance, it's possible to use vCenter hardware monitoring to detect and report server fan failures. Doing so allows you to take corrective action before other, more expensive server components begin to fail as a result of overheating.

Another major function of vCenter Server is securing the virtualization infrastructure. Once upon a time, administrators had access to all IT resources across the entire organization. Today this is no longer the case in most midsize and large organizations. Administrative responsibilities are separated in a way that prevents any one single administrator from having total control. vCenter Server allows for the creation of various administrative roles, and can assign fine-grained permissions to each role based on the role's responsibilities. It's also worth noting that vCenter Server provides full integration with Microsoft Active Directory, so role assignments can be based on existing Active Directory user accounts.

Patch Management
One of the most important maintenance chores in any IT shop is patch management. Although most vendors build some sort of automated patch-management solution into their wares, corporate environments typically require patches to be thoroughly tested, centrally managed and deployed in a controlled manner.

vCenter Server provides patch-management capabilities for the server virtualization infrastructure. The software not only patches vSphere servers, it can also patch specific versions of Windows and Linux OSes that are running as guest OSes. vCenter Server is even designed to automatically snapshot VMs prior to applying patches so as to facilitate rollback in the event that a patch causes a problem.

Although patch-management capabilities are built into vCenter Server, VMware also provides patch-management services through a product called vCenter Protect. vCenter Protect is available in Standard and Advanced editions. vCenter Protect is designed to offer a higher degree of flexibility for patch management than what's natively available in vCenter Server. Whereas vCenter Server is natively capable of patching vSphere servers and the OSes of VMs that are running certain versions of Windows or Linux, vCenter Protect supports patch management for Windows applications in addition to patching the OS. Furthermore, vCenter Protect supports patching both physical and virtual servers and offers agented or agent-less operations.

vCenter Protect Advanced offers the same capabilities as the Standard edition, but also offers antivirus protection and scripted operations. Another useful feature found in vCenter Protect Advanced is a power management function that allows you to schedule the shut down and startup of VMs. For example, this feature could be used to power down nonessential VMs after business hours or over the weekend, and bring those VMs back online when they're needed again.

VCenter Operations Management Suite
vCenter Operations Management Suite is a collection of tools that are designed to assist with the management and monitoring of large vCenter deployments. As you know, server virtualization is something of a delicate balancing act. On one hand, organizations need to achieve a high level of VM density so as to make the most of their server hardware investment. On the other hand, if system resource consumption isn't carefully managed, virtual server performance can become a serious issue.

Despite the importance of monitoring VM resource usage, it's unrealistic to expect to be able to manually monitor resource usage for large numbers of VMs. This is where vCenter Operations Management Suite comes into play.

vCenter Operations Management Suite is designed to collect performance and capacity information on your behalf and then turn that information into a useful set of recommendations. For example, the software is able to perform capacity analytics that can identify over-provisioned vSphere hosts. Once these hosts have been identified, the software allows you to use built-in tools to experiment with various what-if scenarios so you can analyze the effects of moving VMs to different hosts before actually doing it. In addition, the vCenter Operations Management Suite provides a series of real-time dashboards that allow you to assess VM health and performance.

vSphere Data Protection
Backup and recovery capabilities are important in any IT shop, but server virtualization compounds the difficulty of such operations. As such, VMware offers a tool called vSphere Data Protection Advanced that can help organizations manage backups within their virtual datacenter.

vSphere Data Protection Advanced was designed specifically for the task of backing up VMware VMs. That has led many organizations to consider vSphere Data Protection as their backup solution of choice. It's worth noting, however, that there are numerous third-party backup tools that are capable of backing up VMware VMs.