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vCenter Operations Management Suite

vCenter Operations Management Suite is also part of the management stack and is included as a component in the Advanced and Enterprise editions of the vCloud Suite. VMware has comprehensively reorganized this in recent months, so that the set of tools included in the various editions no longer corresponds to that with which most users are familiar.

The most prominent new addition to the Advanced and Enterprise editions of the management suite is the aforementioned Hyperic, which monitors hardware resources, operating systems, and applications. Hyperic implemented performance monitoring first for applications.

vCenter Operations Management Suite, which is also available in the Foundation and Standard versions is part of not only the vCloud suite, but also vSphere with Operations Management.

All in all, the suite contains all the tools needed to manage dynamic infrastructure; in addition to the described observation and monitoring tools, it also includes tools for checking compliance and for capacity management, including the detection of performance bottlenecks. Specifically, the suite contains vCenter Operations Manager tools, vCenter Configuration Manager, vFabric Hyperic, vCenter Infrastructure Navigator, and vCenter Chargeback Manager. However, the aforementioned performance monitoring at the application level is only possible after the integration of vFabric Hyperic 5.6.

Infrastructure Navigator

vCenter Operations Manager provides extensive reporting and analysis functions by way of the vCenter Configuration Manager, which integrates all the parent company's Ionix tools into the management suite. The vCenter Infrastructure Navigator, responsible for a graphical representation of the virtual infrastructure, and the vCenter Chargeback Manager, which is used for an individual calculation of the resources used, still remain.

The addition of Hyperic to the Advanced and Enterprise versions is, like the loss of the former Enterprise Plus version, part of the restructuring of the vCenter Operations Suite carried out in the last few months, wherein the former advanced functions apparently made their way down to the "next smaller" version.

For this reason, the Advanced Edition is equivalent to what was formerly the Enterprise Edition, the Standard Version to the former Advanced Edition, and the Foundation version to the old Standard version. Users of all vSphere versions with an active support contract (vSphere with Operations) can freely download the new versions. Both lower versions only contain the vCenter Operations Manager which essentially serves log analysis and monitoring.

vCenter Site Recovery Manager

The vCenter Site Recovery Manager is VMware's disaster recovery solution that allows VMs to be transferred between data centers. The software can help recover virtual infrastructures after a failure or migrate applications to another data center.

The Site Recovery Manager also supports automatic failover to other sites and even restores all environments with the help of specific recovery plans. It also works with storage or host-based replication. VMware only introduced the latter with vSphere 5. In the current vSphere version 5.1, host-based replication can be used directly from the vCenter manager without Site Recovery. This means that from vSphere 5.1 onward, the base system offers a simple disaster recovery option.