VMware vCenter

Centralized Control and Visibility at Every Level

VMware vCenter Server is the simplest, most efficient way to manage VMware vSphere – whether you have ten VMs or tens of thousands of VMs. It provides unified management of all the hosts and VMs in your datacenter from a single console with an aggregate performance monitoring of clusters, hosts and VMs. VMware vCenter Server gives administrators deep insight into the status and configuration of clusters, hosts, VMs, storage, the guest OS and other critical components of a virtual infrastructure – all from one place.

With VMware vCenter Server, virtualization environments are easier to manage: a single administrator can manage 100 or more workloads, more than doubling typical productivity in managing physical infrastructure.

 

Proactive Management of VMware vSphere

 A dynamic datacenter environment requires proactive management, with standardization and automation to get the most out of VMware vSphere’s flexibility. Connecting business requirements to IT processes with streamlined and standardized workflows helps eliminate costly errors and reduces reliance on manual tasks.

VMware vCenter Servers lets administrators rapidly provision VMs and hosts using standardized templates, and ensures compliance with vSphere host configurations and host and VM patch levels with automated remediation. VMware vCenter Server also gives administrators control over key capabilities such as VMware vMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler, High Availability and Fault Tolerance. A powerful orchestration engine gives administrators the ability to create and easily implement best practice workflows.

With proactive management, VMware vCenter Server allows you to meet business requirements and improve service levels by dynamically provisioning new services, allocating resources and automating high availability.

 

A Scalable and Extensible Management Platform

 As you extend virtualization across the datacenter, you need a management platform that can both scale to fit your organization and plug into your existing architecture. VMware vCenter Server enables efficient management of a large scale enterprise, giving you the ability to manage more than 1,000 hosts and up to 10,000 VMs from a single console.

Additionally, VMware vCenter Server’s open plug-in architecture supports a broad range of additional capabilities from VMware and its partners. More than 300 VMware partners directly integrate with vCenter Server, allowing you to easily extend the platform for more advanced management capability in areas such as capacity management, compliance management, business continuity and storage monitoring. The vCenter Server APIs also allow customers to integrate physical and virtual management tools, using their choice of enterprise management tools to connect to vCenter Server.

Features

The VMware vCenter Server platform is the industry’s most robust virtualization management solution. Advanced capabilities provide the greatest visibility, proactive management and scalability for your virtual environment. vCenter Server is a foundation you can easily extend for end-to-end integration with your physical environment and upon which you can build a private cloud infrastructure.

Read the What’s New in VMware vSphere 4.1 — VMware vCenter whitepaper.

The list below highlights VMware vCenter Server features:

Centralized Control and Deep Visibility into Virtual Infrastructure

  • An improved user interface allows for easier navigation. Access different parts of the vSphere Client from a vCenter Home Page featuring a new dashboard and navigation bar.
  • Inventory search puts the entire vCenter inventory including virtual machines, hosts, datastores, and networks at your fingertips from anywhere within vCenter.
  • New hardware monitoring with CIM SMASH enable alarms when hardware failures of key components such as fans, system board and power supply occur, providing an integrated view of physical and virtual server health.
  • New storage maps and reports convey storage usage, connectivity and configuration. Customizable topology views give you visibility into storage infrastructure and assist in diagnosis and troubleshooting of storage issues.
  • Improved alerts and notifications support new entities, metrics and events such as datastore- and VM-specific alarms. These alarms can trigger new automated workflows to remedy and pre-empt problems. 
  • Improved performance graphs monitor virtual machines, resource pools and server utilization and availability with more detailed statistics and graphs that can be viewed in real time or across a specified time interval.

Proactive Management of VMware vSphere

  • New Host Profiles standardize and simplify how you configure and manage ESX host configurations.  Capture the blueprint of a known, validated configuration including networking, storage and security settings and it to many hosts to simplify setup. Host profile policies can also monitor compliance.
  • Improved energy efficiency with full support for VMware Distributed Power Management, which continuously monitors utilization in a DRS cluster and puts hosts in standby to reduce power consumption when the cluster needs fewer resources.
  • New vCenter Orchestrator is a powerful orchestration engine simplifies management by enabling you to automate over 800 tasks using out of the box workflows or by assembling workflows using an easy drag & drop interface.
  • Improved patch management with a compliance dashboard, baseline groups, a shared patch repository in vCenter Update Manager, which automates scanning and patching of vSphere hosts and virtual machines.
  • New vCenter Server Heartbeat (sold separately) extends availability for vCenter Server, failing over the management server and database over the LAN or WAN to a standby server. vCenter Server Heartbeat has deep awareness of all vCenter Server components and is simple to configure and deploy.
  • Integrated Physical to Virtual (P2V) machine conversion manages multiple simultaneous conversions of physical machines, non-VMware virtual machine formats, and backup images of physical machines into running virtual machines.
  • Guided Consolidation, now a module within vCenter Server, walks you step by step through the consolidation process  including automatic discovery of up to 500 servers, performance analysis, conversion and intelligent placement on the right host.

A Scalable and Extensible Management Platform

  • Improved large-scale management is possible with vCenter Server since it is designed from the ground up to handle the largest IT environments. vCenter Server is now a 64-bit Windows application, providing substantial scalability improvements. A single instance of vCenter Server 4.1 manages up to 1,000 hosts and 10,000 running virtual machines and with Linked Mode you can manage up to 30,000 virtual machines across 10 vCenter Server instances. VMware HA and DRS clusters can support up to 32 hosts and 3,000 VMs.
  • Linked Mode provides a scalable architecture and visibility across multiple vCenter Server instances, with roles, permissions and licenses replicated across the infrastructure so you can simultaneously log in, view and search the inventories of all vCenter Servers.
  • Integration with systems management products web services APIs protect your investments and give you freedom of choice in how you manage your environment.

Distributed Resource Optimization

  • Resource management  for virtual machines. Allocate processor and memory resources to virtual machines running on the same physical servers. Establish minimum, maximum, and proportional resource shares for CPU, memory, disk and network bandwidth. Modify allocations while virtual machines are running. Enable applications to dynamically acquire more resources to accommodate peak performance.
  • Dynamic allocation of resources.   VMware DRS continuously monitors utilization across resource pools and intelligently allocates available resources among virtual machines based on pre-defined rules that reflect business needs and changing priorities. The result is a self-managing, highly optimized and efficient IT environment with built-in load balancing.
  • Energy efficient resource optimization. VMware Distributed Power Management (experimental) continuously monitors resource requirements and power consumption across a DRS cluster. When the cluster needs fewer resources, it consolidates workloads and puts hosts in standby mode to reduce power consumption. When resource requirements of workloads increase, DPM brings powered-down hosts back online to ensure service levels are met.

High Availability

  • Automatic restart of virtual machines with VMware HA. Provide an easy to use and cost-effective failover solution.

Security

  • Fine-grained access control.  Secure the environment with configurable, tiered group definitions and fine-grained permissions.
  • Integration with Microsoft® Active Directory.   Base access controls on existing Microsoft® Active Directory authentication mechanisms.
  • Custom roles and permissions.  Enhance security and flexibility with user-defined roles. VMware vCenter Server users with appropriate privileges can create custom roles such as night shift operator or backup administrator. Restrict access to the entire inventory of virtual machines, resource pools and servers by assigning users to these custom roles.
  • Audit trails.  Maintain a record of significant configuration changes and the administrator who initiated them. Export reports for event tracking.
  • Session management.  Discover and if necessary terminate VMware vCenter Server user sessions.
  • Patch Management. Enforce compliance to patch standards through automated scanning and patching of online VMware ESX hosts and select Microsoft and Linux virtual machines with VMware vCenter Update Manager. Reduce security exposure in the environment through secure patching of offline virtual machines and reduce downtime through automatic snapshots prior to patching and rollback. Integration of VMware vCenter Update Manager with VMware DRS enables zero downtime VMware ESX host patching.