As virtualized IT infrastructures grow and evolve, the administration and operations requirements change significantly.

Virtualization impacts roles and responsibilities in very significant ways. As IT organizations have quickly learned, new ways are needed to enable users and IT staff to have the right access and control that is appropriate for their job and responsibilities – no more and no less. Virtualization also introduces new capabilities and activities that need to be managed that never existed in physical environments – such as pausing a VM, manipulating snapshots or cloning. In these high speed, dynamic, and complex virtual environments, it is important that access controls keep up with the rate of change and do not require manual intervention or delays in entitlement.

The ManageIQ EVM Suite™ provides the ability to delegate administration and operations on a very fine grained level. This allows different roles in the IT organization to have access to the virtual infrastructure necessary for their responsibilities. Custom roles can be defined and patent-pending SmartState™ technology enables the use of SmartTags™ to control the visibility and control each role has over VMs and the virtual infrastructure.

A broad set of delegated administration and operations capabilities are provided including:

• Role-based Delegation - Ability to define roles and limit management scope based on location, function, application, zone, lifecycle, VM content, and any user defined criteria. Control role-based, self-service provisioning of virtual machines by assigning tags and retirement dates.
• Contextual Awareness - Ability to define a taxonomy and arbitrary classifications enabling business-specific tagging to be used for automated access control.
• Enterprise Support - Support for roles and delegated administration over multiple datacenters, multiple management systems (e.g. Virtual Center). Integration with Enterprise Directories such as Active Directory or Tivoli Directory Server for authentication and role definition.
• Comprehensive Operations and Support Tools - Collect and process capacity and utilization data into charts to identify bottlenecks and view usage trends for virtual machines, hosts, clusters, and datastores. Show tightly integrated, powerful timelines to understand what activities are taking place for a given time period for management systems, hosts, clusters, and virtual machines.