Effective configuration 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 unpatched host can severely impact the ability of your virtual machines to perform as required in your enterprise. EVM comprehensively manages virtual machines together with the infrastructure they run on.

Key features of EVM configuration management capabilities for virtual infrastructure include:

• Continuous Discovery, Tracking and Analysis of Virtual Infrastructure- EVM monitors and correlates events, performance, utilization, and configuration changes. EVM tracks and maintains accurate inventory and configuration information as well as the relationships among VMs, hosts, clusters, datastores, and virtual platform management systems such as Virtual Center.
• Virtual Infrastructure Management - 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 orphaned VMs.
• Host Management and Compliance -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 non-compliance, changes, events, host log messages, performance thresholds, workload changes and more.
• Performance and Availability Management - 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.
• Enterprise Support and Scale - 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 Management, Optimization, and Waste - 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.
• Predictive Analytics and Resource Planning - Current and future bottleneck identification helps optimize hosts and clusters, project your future needs, and show 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.