The feature I like is, it offers a central place to manage our virtual machines and hosts. It makes routine administration easier and gives us flexibility to manage resources as our environment changes.

I like that it has a central view of VMware tools usage and consumption, it makes it easier to keep the track of what is being used and prepare the report on usage without having to gather information from different tools manually.

The Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM) directly inside vCenter is easily the best part for me. Coming into AI and ML pipelines from a standard automation background, I expected storage provisioning to be a bit of a bottleneck with lots of back-and-forth tickets. But with vSAN, I can just apply a policy based on what the job needs—like assigning low latency and better striping for fast-access scratch disks when preprocessing training datasets, or lower performance tiers for basic archive logs—right when deploying the VMs or nodes. Not having to worry about physical LUNs or separate external SAN arrays cuts out so much manual infra coordination. It basically turns storage into just another software setting we can handle directly within the familiar VMware UI, which lets us spin up new experimental pipelines and agent test environments much faster.