VMware vCenter Server

Overview:

VMware vCenter™ Server 4 provides a scalable and extensible platform for proactive virtualization management, delivering deep visibility into virtual infrastructure. VMware vCenter Server centrally manages VMware vSphere™ 4 environments and simplifies daily tasks, dramatically improving administrative control over the environment.

Benefits

• Analyze and remediate issues quickly with deep visibility in to VMware vSphere and its underlying infrastructure.
• Improve IT responsiveness by proactively managing your VMware vSphere environment with rapid provisioning, automated load balancing of virtual machine workloads, and out-of-box workflows for automation.
• Scale to meet the needs of the most demanding enterprise environments with support for up to 10,000 virtual machines.

Centralized Control and Visibility at Every Level of Virtual Infrastructure

VMware vCenter Server is the simplest, most efficient way to manage VMware vSphere – whether you have ten VMs or tens of thousands of VMs. It provides unified management of all the hosts and VMs in your datacenter from a single console with an aggregate performance monitoring of clusters, hosts and VMs. VMware vCenter Server gives administrators deep insight into the status and configuration of clusters, hosts, VMs, storage, the guest OS and other critical components of a virtual infrastructure – all from one place.

With VMware vCenter Server, virtualization environments are easier to manage: a single administrator can manage 100 or more workloads, more than doubling typical productivity in managing physical infrastructure.

Proactive Management of VMware vSphere

A dynamic datacenter environment requires proactive management, with standardization and automation to get the most out of VMware vSphere’s flexibility. Connecting business requirements to IT processes with streamlined and standardized workflows helps eliminate costly errors and reduces reliance on manual tasks.

VMware vCenter Servers lets administrators rapidly provision VMs and hosts using standardized templates, and ensures compliance with vSphere host configurations and host and VM patch levels with automated remediation. VMware vCenter Server also gives administrators control over key capabilities such as VMware VMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler, High Availability and Fault Tolerance. A powerful orchestration engine gives administrators the ability to create and easily implement best practice workflows.

With proactive management, VMware vCenter Server allows you to meet business requirements and improve service levels by dynamically provisioning new services, allocating resources and automating high availability.

A Scalable and Extensible Management Platform

As you extend virtualization across the datacenter, you need a management platform that can both scale to fit your organization and plug into your existing architecture. VMware vCenter Server enables efficient management of a large scale enterprise, giving you the ability to manage more than 1,000 hosts and up to 10,000 VMs from a single console.

Additionally, VMware vCenter Server’s open plug-in architecture supports a broad range of additional capabilities from VMware and its partners. More than 200 VMware partners directly integrate with vCenter Server, allowing you to easily extend the platform for more advanced management capability in areas such as capacity management, compliance management, business continuity and storage monitoring. The vCenter Server APIs also allow customers to integrate physical and virtual management tools, using their choice of enterprise management tools to connect to vCenter Server.

VMware Center Server is available in two editions to help you centrally manage your VMware vSphere environment:

VMware vCenter Server Standard
Provides large scale management of VMware vSphere deployments for rapid provisioning, monitoring, orchestration, and control of virtual machines.

VMware vCenter Server Foundation
Provides powerful management tools for smaller environments (up to 3 vSphere hosts) looking to rapidly provision, monitor, and control virtual machines.

Using VMware vCenter Server:

VMware vCenter Server is the universal hub for managing your VMware vSphere environment. VMware vCenter Server provides unified management of all hosts and virtual machines in a datacenter from a single console. VMware vCenter Server allows administrators to improve control, simplify day-to-day tasks and reduce the complexity and cost of managing an IT environment.

How is VMware vCenter Server Used in the Enterprise?

VMware vCenter Server provides a scalable, extensible virtualization management platform. With VMware vCenter Server, IT organizations get:

• Centralized management.
  VMware vCenter Server allows IT organizations to organize, rapidly provision and configure the entire IT environment through a single interface, resulting in lower operating costs. Thorough and consistent performance monitoring of all critical components—including CPU, memory, storage and networking—provide the detail administrators need.
• Operational automation.
  Task scheduling and alerting improves responsiveness to business needs and prioritizes actions requiring the most urgent attention.
• Secure access control.
  Robust permissioning mechanisms and integration with Microsoft® Active Directory guarantee authorized access to an environment and its virtual machines. Responsibilities can be delegated to tiers of system administrators.
• Availability and resource management.
  From VMware vCenter Server, administrators can configure and manage VMware VMotion™, StorageVMotion, VMware High Availability (HA) and VMware Fault Tolerance (FT).
• Higher levels of security.
  Enforce compliance with patch standards automatically through VMware vCenter Update Manager, allowing organizations to protect their virtual infrastructure from vulnerabilities.
• Automated energy efficiency.
  Enterprises can minimize power consumption with VMware Distributed Power Management (hich enables an “energy efficient” datacenter.

How Does VMware vCenter Server Work?

The VMware vCenter Server platform includes several key components that work together to give enterprises a scalable virtualization management hub. Management servers provide central management points for hosts and virtual machines, with inventory and performance information stored in a database. A VMware vCenter agent provides connectivity between the host and management server.

Administrators can access VMware vCenter Server from the VMware vSphere Client from any Windows PC, or use the vCenter Web Access portal for remote access from any Web browser.

Roles and permissions are replicated across management servers, giving administrators the ability to manage multiple instances of VMware vCenter Server from one console, and a search engine makes it possible to quickly find virtual machines, hosts or any other inventory objects located anywhere in the enterprise.

Key Features of VMware vCenter Server:

Centralized Control and Deep Visibility in to Every Level of the Virtual Infrastructure

• Real-time monitoring of dynamic virtual elements.
  VMware vCenter Server has deep awareness of all virtual elements and related physical components, including server hardware, shared storage and networking, with event and alarm triggers that make it easier to monitor the environment, diagnose and troubleshoot issues. Administrators can visualize the relationships between physical servers, virtual machines, networks and storage with dynamic topology maps that verify correct configuration of VMware vSphere. VMware vCenter Server monitors performance and availability of virtual machines and other virtual elements, such as resource pools with detailed statistics and graphs that can be viewed in real time.
• Customizable alarm triggers.
  VMware vCenter Server can generate automated notifications and alerts, and can trigger automated workflows to remedy and pre-empt problems.
• Simplified navigation and inventory search.
  Use a global search function to access the entire inventory of multiple instances of VMware vCenter Server, including virtual machines, hosts, datastores and networks, anywhere from within VMware vCenter Server. An improved user interface allows for easier navigation.
• An improved user interface allows for easier navigation. Access different parts of the vSphere Client from a vCenter Home Page featuring a new dashboard and navigation bar.
• Inventory search puts the entire vCenter inventory including virtual machines, hosts, datastores, and networks at your fingertips from anywhere within vCenter.
• New hardware monitoring with CIM SMASH enable alarms when hardware failures of key components such as fans, system board and power supply occur, providing an integrated view of physical and virtual server health.
• New storage maps and reports convey storage usage, connectivity and configuration. Customizable topology views give you visibility into storage infrastructure and assist in diagnosis and troubleshooting of storage issues.
• Improved alerts and notifications support new entities, metrics and events such as datastore- and VM-specific alarms. These alarms can trigger new automated workflows to remedy and pre-empt problems.
• Improved performance graphs monitor virtual machines, resource pools and server utilization and availability with more detailed statistics and graphs that can be viewed in real time or across a specified time interval.

Proactive Management of VMware vSphere

• Rapid provisioning and simplified patch management.
  Create new virtual machines or hosts in minutes using a wizard or template to minimize errors and downtime with configuration standards. Easily patch virtual machines and hosts using VMware vCenter Update Manager, and standardize and validate host configuration using the host profiles feature.
• Dynamic resource allocation to ensure SLAs.
  VMware vCenter Server continuously monitors utilization across resource pools with VMware Distributed Resources Scheduler (DRS), which intelligently migrates virtual machines across hosts without causing downtime or affecting service-level agreements (SLAs).The result is a self-managing, highly optimized and efficient IT environment with built-in load balancing. When excess capacity is not needed by virtual machines in a resource pool, VMware DPM places hosts in standby to reduce power consumption without affecting SLAs.
• Workflow automation.
  VMware vCenter Server includes VMware vCenter Orchestrator, a powerful orchestration engine that simplifies management by enabling administrators to automate over 800 tasks using out-of-the-box workflows or by assembling workflows using an easy drag-and-drop interface.
• VMware vCenter Server availability.
  A service management console displays the health of the VMware vCenter components, allowing administrators to quickly identify and correct problems in the management infrastructure. VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat (licensed separately), provides additional availability with deep awareness of all VMware vCenter Server components, failing over the management server and database over the LAN or WAN to a standby server
• New Host Profiles standardize and simplify how you configure and manage ESX host configurations.  Capture the blueprint of a known, validated configuration including networking, storage and security settings and it to many hosts to simplify setup. Host profile policies can also monitor compliance.
• Improved energy efficiency with full support for VMware Distributed Power Management, which continuously monitors utilization in a DRS cluster and puts hosts in standby to reduce power consumption when the cluster needs fewer resources.
• New vCenter Orchestrator is a powerful orchestration engine simplifies management by enabling you to automate over 800 tasks using out of the box workflows or by assembling workflows using an easy drag & drop interface.
• Improved patch management with a compliance dashboard, baseline groups, a shared patch repository in vCenter Update Manager, which automates scanning and patching of vSphere hosts and virtual machines.
• New vCenter Server Heartbeat (sold separately) extends availability for vCenter Server, failing over the management server and database over the LAN or WAN to a standby server. vCenter Server Heartbeat has deep awareness of all vCenter Server components and is simple to configure and deploy.
• Integrated Physical to Virtual (P2V) machine conversion manages multiple simultaneous conversions of physical machines, non-VMware virtual machine formats, and backup images of physical machines into running virtual machines.
• Guided Consolidation, now a module within vCenter Server, walks you step by step through the consolidation process  including automatic discovery of up to 500 servers, performance analysis, conversion and intelligent placement on the right host.

Scalability and Extensibility

• Large-scale management. VMware vCenter Server is designed from the ground up to handle the largest IT environments. A single instance of vCenter Server 4.0 manages up to 300 hosts and 3000 virtual machines and with Linked Mode you can manage up to 1,000 hosts and 10,000 virtual machines across 10 VMware vCenter Server instances from a single console.
• Open architecture. The VMware vCenter APIs and a .NET Extension allow integration between VMware vCenter Server and other tools, and support customized plug-ins to the VMware vSphere Client, protecting your investments and giving you freedom of choice in how you manage your environment.
• Improved large-scale management is possible with vCenter Server since it is designed from the ground up to handle the largest IT environments. A single instance of vCenter Server 4.0 manages up to 300 hosts and 3000 virtual machines and with Linked Mode you can manage up to 1,000 hosts and 10,000 virtual machines across 10 vCenter Server instances. VMware HA and DRS clusters can support up to 32 hosts.
• Linked Mode provides a scalable architecture and visibility across multiple vCenter Server instances, with roles, permissions and licenses replicated across the infrastructure so you can simultaneously log in, view and search the inventories of all vCenter Servers.
• Integration with systems management products web services APIs protect your investments and give you freedom of choice in how you manage your environment.

Distributed Resource Optimization

• Resource management  for virtual machines. Allocate processor and memory resources to virtual machines running on the same physical servers. Establish minimum, maximum, and proportional resource shares for CPU, memory, disk and network bandwidth. Modify allocations while virtual machines are running. Enable applications to dynamically acquire more resources to accommodate peak performance.
• Dynamic allocation of resources. VMware DRS continuously monitors utilization across resource pools and intelligently allocates available resources among virtual machines based on pre-defined rules that reflect business needs and changing priorities. The result is a self-managing, highly optimized and efficient IT environment with built-in load balancing.
• Energy efficient resource optimization. VMware Distributed Power Management (experimental) continuously monitors resource requirements and power consumption across a DRS cluster. When the cluster needs fewer resources, it consolidates workloads and puts hosts in standby mode to reduce power consumption. When resource requirements of workloads increase, DPM brings powered-down hosts back online to ensure service levels are met.

High Availability

• Automatic restart of virtual machines with VMware HA. Provide an easy to use and cost-effective failover solution.

Security

• Fine-grained access control.  Secure the environment with configurable, tiered group definitions and fine-grained permissions.
• Integration with Microsoft® Active Directory.   Base access controls on existing Microsoft® Active Directory authentication mechanisms.
• Custom roles and permissions.  Enhance security and flexibility with user-defined roles. VMware vCenter Server users with appropriate privileges can create custom roles such as night shift operator or backup administrator. Restrict access to the entire inventory of virtual machines, resource pools and servers by assigning users to these custom roles.
• Aud+it trails.  Maintain a record of significant configuration changes and the administrator who initiated them. Export reports for event tracking.
• Session management.  Discover and if necessary terminate VMware vCenter Server user sessions.
• Patch Management. Enforce compliance to patch standards through automated scanning and patching of online VMware ESX hosts and select Microsoft and Linux virtual machines with VMware vCenter Update Manager. Reduce security exposure in the environment through secure patching of offline virtual machines and reduce downtime through automatic snapshots prior to patching and rollback. Integration of VMware vCenter Update Manager with VMware DRS enables zero downtime VMware ESX host patching.

Documentation:

VMware vCenter Server Data Sheet (.PDF)

What's New in VMware vCenter Server (.PDF)