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Features
The VMware vCenter Server platform is the industry’s most robust virtualization management solution. Advanced capabilities provide the greatest visibility, proactive management and scalability for your virtual environment. vCenter Server is a foundation you can easily extend for end-to-end integration with your physical environment and upon which you can build a private cloud infrastructure.
Read the What's New in VMware vCenter Server 5 whitepaper.
The list below highlights VMware vCenter Server features:
Deployment Options
- vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA)—Quickly deploy vCenter Server and manage vSphere using a Linux-based virtual appliance.
Centralized Control and Deep Visibility into Virtual Infrastructure
- vSphere Web Client enables managing the essential functions of vSphere from any browser anywhere in the world.
- Inventory search puts the entire vCenter inventory including virtual machines, hosts, datastores, and networks at your fingertips from anywhere within vCenter.
- Hardware monitoring with CIM SMASH enables alarms when hardware failures of key components such as fans, system board and power supplies occur, providing an integrated view of physical and virtual server health.
- 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
- Host Profiles standardize and simplify how you configure and manage ESXi host configurations. Capture the blueprint of a known, validated configuration - including networking, storage and security settings - and deploy it to many hosts, simplifying setup. Host profile policies can also monitor compliance.
- View the VMware Host Profiles Youtube Video
- Read the eWeek article: VMware vSphere Host Profiles Feature Eases Configuration, Compliance Chores
- 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 that simplifies management by enabling you to automate over 800 tasks using out of the box workflows or by assembling workflows using an easy drag-and-drop interface.
- Improved patch management with a compliance dashboard, baseline groups, a shared patch repository in vSphere Update Manager, which automates scanning and patching of vSphere hosts.
- New version of 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.
A Scalable and Extensible Management Platform
- Improved large-scale management is possible with vCenter Server since it is designed from the ground up to handle the largest IT environments. vCenter Server is a 64-bit Windows application, providing substantial scalability improvements. A single instance of vCenter Server manages up to 1,000 hosts and 10,000 running virtual machines, and with Linked Mode you can manage up to 30,000 virtual machines across 10 vCenter Server instances. VMware HA and DRS clusters can support up to 32 hosts and 3,000 VMs.
- 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.
- View the VMware vCenter Linked Mode Video
- 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. vSphere 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. vSphere Distributed Power Management 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 vSphere 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.
- Audit 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 ESXi hosts and select Microsoft and Linux virtual machines with VMware vSphere 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 vSphere Update Manager with vSphere DRS enables zero downtime VMware ESXi host patching.
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