VMware vCenter Application Discovery Manager
Automated Application Dependency Mapping

Overview:

VMware vCenter Application Discovery Manager (formerly EMC Ionix Application Discovery Manager) provides the automated, real-time application discovery and dependency mapping capability you need to accelerate data center moves, precisely plan infrastructure consolidations, and confidently virtualize your business critical applications.

Key Benefits

• Get and keep a fast and accurate data center view – across virtual and physical
• Precise visibility into all application interactions via network-based approach
• Eye-opening discovery of unknown, unwanted, and unexpected application behaviors and dependencies
• Before you make a change, understand all infrastructure and application relationships
• Quick deployment and low-impact through unique agentless technology

Passive, agentless dynamic discovery and mapping

What is vCenter Application Discovery Manager?

Application Discovery Manager is an enterprise datacenter management solution that utilizes agentless, continuous dependency mapping—across physical & virtual application infrastructures—so you can quickly gain an understanding of your service dependencies with unparalleled accuracy and efficiency. Whether you are moving a datacenter, virtualizing applications, building a site recovery plan, or moving a service to the cloud, an accurate application dependency map is an essential first step.

How Is vCenter Application Discovery Manager Used?

Application Discovery Manager's real-time, automated dependency mapping allows enterprises to drive quick and accurate application virtualization and datacenter blueprinting projects. It eliminates reliance on "tribal knowledge" and guesswork, helps IT teams avoid change-induced service outages, degradations, and failures, and populates third-party or homegrown CMDBs or CMSs.

Accurately map dependencies before virtualizing applications to fully understand existing dependencies and behaviors.

Quickly blueprint applications for datacenter consolidations, moves, and DR plans to precisely plan infrastructure changes.

Eliminate reliance on tribal knowledge to eliminate guesswork and understand the potential impact of a change before the change is made .

Populate CMDBs to add accurate application dependency relationships and keep discovery data current.

How Does vCenter Application Discovery Manager Work?

Application Discovery Manager is the only application dependency mapping solution that provides real-time, agentless discovery via application flow analysis to continuously and passively track application dependencies, demand, usage, and change events.

Agentless Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping
The agentless, top-down, auto-discovery process creates a realtime, interactive model of the entire application infrastructure in a fraction of the time and cost it would take to achieve the same results using manual methods or intrusive, agent-based technologies.

Accuracy and Speed Through vSwitch or Physical Switch Application Traffic Analysis
Passive discovery identifies applications and discovers relationships by observing network traffic either through a span or mirror port on a physical network switch or on an ESX Server vSwitch. Application Discovery Manager augments passive discovery with active discovery, which uses common network and system protocols to remotely query servers in the managed network and obtain supplementary data about network hosts. This hybrid approach allows Application Discovery Manager to automatically discover and map physical servers, VMs on ESX Servers, services, applications, databases, J2EE components, application servers, and composite n-tier applications.

Application Dependency Maps
Leveraging these capabilities, Application Discovery Manager automatically builds an interactive application dependency map as well as an application relationship and configuration model— within just a few hours. Both the dependency map and model are reconciled across diverse data sources and maintained in Application Discovery Manager's repository. The application relationship and configuration model is then continuously updated with dependency, configuration, and usage changes.

Key Features:

Application Discovery Manager's automated, real-time application discovery and dependency mapping enables effective, dependency-driven change, configuration, incident, and problem management across physical and virtual environments.

Map Applications Quickly, Accurately via Agentless Discovery

• Automated dependency mapping for unique visibility into the relationships and interdependencies among applications.
• Agentless, passive, continuous discovery of application infrastructure, components, services, hosts, usage, dependencies, and connections.
• Population/federation to existing CMDB and CMS systems.
• Efficient and effective discovery drives datacenter consolidations, virtualization efforts, server rationalization projects, and application audits

Discover Applications Out-of-the-Box

• Uniquely identify hundreds of common packages and applications out-of-the-box
• Network-based approach – via vSwitch or physical switch span – guarantees visibility and discovers unknown and unexpected dependencies
• Application fingerprinting and patterns identify common application components and protocols out of the box and establish a complete map of your application services.
• Ensure site recovery and disaster recovery plans accurately include all application components.

Eliminate Reliance on Tribal Knowledge

• Map before you make a change to eliminate guesswork
• Catch production applications that have dangling connections to dev/test environments
• Identify consolidation candidate based on utilization-based analytics that identify most-used and least-used connections and servers
• Target specific high-impact server with active discovery and discovery analytics via agentless protocols – using credentials to analyze deeper system infrastructure, installed software, configuration details, and dependencies.

Report on Changes, Compare Configurations

• Detect, log, and report on software and hardware configuration changes and compare configurations server to server.
• External database reporting capabilities provide the ability to create customized reports based on the data in Application Discovery Manager's repository.
• Operations teams can quickly determine what changed and track down the truth behind the all-too-common statement: "I didn't change anything."
• Time-based analysis identifies connections and dependencies based on time-of-day and history

Scale Across Enterprise and Distributed Datacenters

• Scalability for broad deployment across 1000's of servers.
• Span across multiple datacenters with distributed collection.
• Deploy as virtual or physical appliance
• Aggregate to provide a unified perspective.

How to Buy:

VMware vCenter Application Discovery Manager Instance - SNS is Required. This is the base instance or the vCenter Application Discovery Manager product. It will be delivered via two VMs. One will be an aggregator that brings together all the data and does the reporting. The other will be a collector that can be be cloned and and used as needed.

VMware vCenter Application Discovery Manager Server (one unit) - SNS is Required. All servers any type. This enables a server to be managed by vCenter Application Discovery Manager. This can be purchased with an initial vCenter Application Discovery Manager instance or as an add on to an existing vCenter Application Discovery Manager instance.

Application Discovery Manager permits you to scale across multiple data centers to provide a global, holistic view of the application environment—a critical solution when applications span multiple datacenters.

Even within a single data center environment requiring distributed collection, multiple collectors can be deployed and aggregated to provide a unified perspective. Application Discovery Manager does this using a combination of collector appliances – physical or virtual - that discover and feed host and dependency data to an aggregator appliance – also physical or virtual, providing unparalleled scalability and flexibility in deployments.

Application Discovery Manager consists of two primary models:

Application Discovery Manager Aggregator

• Aggregates distributed collectors
• Integrated data federation and reporting across collectors

Application Discovery Manager Collector

• Deployed to monitor distributed data centers
• Enables scaling in single data centers

Support:

VMware Production Support & Subscription

Technical Support, 24 Hour Sev 1 Support -- 7 days a week.

Focused, 24-Hour Support For Production Environments

• Global, 24x7 support for Severity 1 issues
• Fast response times for critical issues
• Unlimited number of support requests
• Remote Support
• Online access to documentation and technical resources, knowledge base, discussion forums
• Product updates and upgrades

Overview

VMware Production Support is designed with your production environments in mind. Our global support centers are staffed around the clock to provide you access to our industry-leading expertise in virtualization and years of experience supporting virtual infrastructure products in real-world customer environments. We are committed to delivering enterprise-class, worldwide support with a single objective in mind: your success.

VMware Basic Support & Subscription Service

Technical Support, 12 Hours/Day, per published Business Hours, Mon. thru Fri.

Weekday Support for Test, Dev and Non-Critical Deployments

• Global, 12x5 access to support
• Unlimited number of support requests
• Remote Support
• Online access to documentation and technical resources, knowledge base, discussion forums
• Product updates and upgrades

Overview

VMware Basic Support is designed for non-critical applications and platforms that require support during normal business hours. Our global support centers have been strategically placed to provide you with fast and efficient access to the support center in your region. Each center is staffed with engineers that can provide industry-leading expertise in virtualization and years of experience supporting virtual infrastructure products in real-world customer environments. We are committed to delivering enterprise-class, worldwide support with a single objective in mind: your success.

Feature	Production Support	Basic Support
Hours of Operation	24 Hrs/Day 7 Days/Wk 365 Days/Yr 1	12 Hrs/Day Mon–Fri 1
Length of Service	1 or 3 Years	1 or 3 Years
Product Updates	Yes	Yes
Product Upgrades	Yes	Yes
Products Supported	All Products (excluding VMware Fusion and Player)	All Products (excluding VMware Fusion and Player)
Method of Access	Telephone/ Web	Telephone/ Web
Response Method	Telephone/ Email	Telephone/ Email
Remote Support	Yes	Yes
Access to VMware Web site	Yes	Yes
Access to VMware Discussion Forums and Knowledge Base	Yes	Yes
Max Number of Support Admins per Contract	6	4
Number of Support Requests	Unlimited	Unlimited
Target Response Times Critical (Severity 1 Major (Severity 2) Minor (Severity 3) Cosmetic (Severity 4)	30 minutes or less: 24x7 4 business hours 8 business hours 12 business hours	4 business hours 8 business hours 12 business hours 12 business hours
Business Hours North America and Latin America Alaska, Hawaii South America (NASA) Europe, Middle East, Africa (EMEA Asia, Pacific Rim, Japan (APJ) Australia/New Zealand	Monday - Friday 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (local time zone) 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (PST/PDT) 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (EST/EDT) 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. (GMT/GMT+1) 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. (Singapore Time) 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. (Sydney AET)	Monday - Friday 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (local time zone) 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (PST/PDT) 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (EST/EDT) 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. (GMT/GMT+1) 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. (Singapore Time) 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. (Sydney AET)

1Hours of operation for Gemstone are Monday - Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (PST/PDT) globally. 1Hours of operation for VMware Go Pro and vCenter Protect products are 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. (CST/CDT), except holidays. 1Hours of operation for VMware IT Business Management and IT Financial Management are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (EST/EDT/GMT) except holidays. 1Hours of operation for Socialcast are 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (PST/PDT).

Documentation:

Download the VMware vCenter Application Discovery Manager Datasheet (PDF).