Effective management of virtual infrastructures is essential to reliability, security and availability. Virtual machines are only as available and secure as the hosts on which they execute, the storage on which they reside and the networks they are connected to. A performance problem or an out of space condition on a datastore, a misconfigured network connection, or un-patched host can severely impact the ability of your virtual machines to perform as required in your enterprise. Not only does EVM manage virtual machines but also the infrastructure they run on.

Key features of EVM management capabilities for virtual infrastructure:

• Continuous discovery, tracking and analysis of hosts, clusters, and datastores. EVM tracks and maintains accurate inventory and configuration information as well as the relationships among hosts, clusters, datastores, management systems such as Virtual Center, and virtual machines related to the host. EVM comprehensive configuration information includes events, performance, configuration changes, patch levels, access, logs, accounts, groups, installed packages, services, firewalls, host CPU and memory, configured virtual machine memory and CPU, registered and unregistered virtual machines, and file types such as snapshot, memory, and provisioned disks. EVM also tracks changes to workloads, registered Virtual Machines including snapshot activity, as well as migrations and Vmotions.
• Control of host configurations - Policy-based management of virtual infrastructures includes, settings, patches, services, firewalls, networks, VLANS, portgroups, datastore and host placement of virtual machines, as well as identification and removal of orphan VMs.
• Host comparison and drift analysis is available to compare configurations of multiple hosts or compare a host or cluster to itself at different points in time. Configurations can be checked against standard configurations with easy identification and reporting of any deviation from standard or gold configurations. Alerts can be triggered based on changes, events, host log messages, performance thresholds, workload changes and more.
• Identify Performance and Availability Issues - Powerful visualization capabilities include reports, analytics, change alerts and virtual timelines to enable the quick identification and context of performance and availability problems. Automatic change detection (drift), alerting and policy enforcement can ensure systems stay configured correctly and securely.
• Access Multiple Virtual Centers - Federated management across the virtual infrastructure including monitoring and operations activities can be performed from EVM across shared sessions. This enables delegated administration and operations while dramatically reducing the number of concurrent sessions to management systems such as Virtual Center.
• Capacity and utilization are tracked for hosts, clusters and datastores enabling alerting, reporting and executive dashboards with views of capacity, CPU usage, memory usage, disk I/O, network I/O, CPU Ready States, number of running virtual machines, number of running hosts, used space, and used space by file type including disk, snapshot, and memory. Trending and alerting enables effective capacity planning and prevents outages by ensuring enough capacity is available.
• Current and future bottleneck identification helps optimize hosts and clusters, projecting your future needs, and showing where resources are under-allocated or over allocated (waste). EVM supports best fit placement of virtual machines on provisioning or registration and also provides what-if planning tools to determine how many more virtual machines can be added to hosts and clusters and where the best place to put them is based on performance and policies.