Enterprises are building real-time virtualized IT infrastructures to fundamentally transform the way they deliver services. These new shared infrastructures and service delivery models present significant additional challenges to enterprise IT processes and staff due to increased complexity and management issues.

Unified Management

• Single Pane of Glass – unified management and control across virtual and cloud infrastructures with directory-driven and role-based delegation, visibility and control.
• Global Scalability and High Availability - multi-region management database with synchronization and federation capabilities, multi-forest enterprise directory integration.
• Pervasive Management Classifications – highly configurable and extensible management taxonomies, used pervasively in delegation, scoping and context for self-service, management, monitoring and automation activities.
• Comprehensive Configuration Management – real-time configuration discovery, tracking, assessment and classification, with relationship and dependency mapping, drift, policy and standards auditing and enforcement.
• Monitoring, Event and Incident Management – expanded monitoring and analysis of infrastructure and workloads; correlation of resource utilization and performance information with events and operational activities for proactive policy-based alerting and control.

Operational Visibility, Control and Automation

• Operational Dashboards, Reporting and Visualization – customizable, role-based dashboards with support for mash-ups, threshold and metric-based colorization.
• Intelligence and Analytics - new self-learning analytic capabilities and operating range metrics for workload management automation and improved capacity planning.
• Open, Extensible Management Portal – role-based, customizable, context-aware management, task and automation toolbars.
• Adaptive Automation and Orchestration - context-aware automation methods and workflows that can be triggered by operator actions, monitoring, and/or system events.

Advanced Resource Management and Optimization

• Intelligent Workload Management - business rules and best practices combined with resource availability and qualitative workload policies to assure optimum placement.
• Monitoring and Optimization – correlation of workload and infrastructure performance, utilization and configuration information with enforcement of resource optimization policies.
• Capacity Planning - multi-factor “what-if” scenarios combining business policies and best practices, configuration coherency and workload usage, allocation and reservations.
• Quota Enforcement – automated, policy-based enforcement of resource allocations, reservations and usage limits based on resource type and business classifications.
• Cost Transparency, Chargeback/Showback - any combination of fixed cost, allocation and usage-based chargeback with rate tables based on resource type and business classifications.