Challenges

Administrators need real-time, comprehensive visibility of the resources supporting IT services. Today, those critical services increasingly rely on virtualized IT infrastructures. The multiple layers of abstraction associated with clusters, resource pools, and hosts, and the dynamic resource relocation of DRS and HA make it vastly more difficult to discover, assess, and classify those resources.

Effective management of virtual environments still requires quantitative information at the physical level about hosts, storage locations, and network elements, their capacity and configuration. But it also requires qualitative information about virtual machines, their operating systems, applications, patches, and accounts, and about their relationships to other resources, change and operational history, and about the utilization and performance of the environment.

Since administrators can't accurately collect and maintain this information, they're left to try and cobble together legacy solutions and manual approaches to gather the needed data. Managers must select between two bad choices - go without the data needed to manage the environment, and risk delivering decreased service levels, or drive up administrative overhead and costs.

EVM Insight Benefits

• Continuous visibility and deep insight gives a clear picture of what is driving both growth and change in the virtual infrastructure
• Low latency, detailed configuration information correlated with operational, change, and configuration data enable improved problem management and reduced MTTR
• Supports capacity planning and resource optimization through the capture of utilization and performance metrics to dynamically calculate capacity
• Manages VM lifecycles and controls VM Sprawl with continuous discovery, assessment, classification, and tracking
• Enables distributed operations and delegated administration through role- based access controls driven by highly granular resource classification and integration with external LDAP directories
• Enterprise class reporting for the virtual infrastructure with over a hundred out-of-the-box reports and a wizard driven report writer

Key Features

EVM Insight delivers critical capabilities that enable organizations to better understand their virtual environment. Comprehensive and up-to-date information about virtual assets provides the foundation for effective configuration management.

• Comprehensive Real-Time Discovery – captures and automatically maintains in-depth, configuration information using patent-pending SmartState™ technology. Detailed configuration information is captured for clusters, resource pools, hosts, virtual machines, virtual appliances, VirtualCenter instances, storage and network elements, operating systems, applications, patches, and accounts.
• Identification and Tracking - assigns unique identifiers to virtual resources for reliable tracking and recording of operation and configuration events across infrastructures and lifecycles using patent-pending Virtual BlackBox™ technology. Real-time event and configuration data correlation enables point-of-origin, relationship, and genealogy mapping.
• Capacity Planning and Resource Management - captures infrastructure utilization and performance metrics and dynamically calculates capacity. This information is uniquely correlated with extensive configuration and operational data, providing a comprehensive view of the virtual infrastructure. This configuration information includes classifications, applications, patches, virtual hardware, drift, baselining, VM events, relationship and dependency mapping, and infrastructure changes.
• Visualization and Reporting - delivers a rich set of reports, graphs, and analytics about the virtual infrastructure with customizable role-based views and comprehensive relationship mapping, including genealogy, virtual services, host affinity, and snapshot trees. A unique Virtual Timeline™ supports user-friendly time-based presentation of infrastructure events, including configuration events such as discovery, operations events such as start and stop, and policy events. Patent-pending Virtual Thumbnails™ create an iconized, visual representation of information associated with virtual machine guests and hosts, including their status and level of compliance with policies.
• Baselining, Comparison and Drift Analysis - enables the identification and articulation of fine-grained differences between configuration versions, deviations over time, genealogical changes, and ad hoc comparisons. These powerful capabilities enhance impact and problem analysis, release management, and standards compliance in virtual environments.