Automate and Control Server and Desktop Configuration Changes

VMware vCenter Configuration Manager's policy-driven automation detects deep system changes and identifies whether that change is within policy - an expected and acceptable behavior based on industry, regulatory, or your own self-defined best practices - or whether that change has created a compliance violation or security vulnerability.

Gain Configuration Insight and Agility While Avoiding Configuration Drift

VMware vCenter Configuration Manager automates critical IT configuration management and compliance processes. By harnessing the power of automation to collect thousands of asset, security and configuration settings from each vSphere, ESX, Windows, UNIX, and Linux server and workstation, and then storing that data in a centralized repository, you have the solution you need to evolve traditional configuration processes into a powerful, business-aligned system delivering unified configuration insight.

Maintain Continuous Compliance with Out-of-the-Box Templates

IT organizations are facing pressure to meet ever-increasing standards related to governance, risk and compliance—whether those standards come from an industry group, government regulators, a governance board, a set of best practices or even your own organization's policies. VMware vCenter Configuration Manager assures the integrity of your virtualized datacenter and lowers IT audit costs by providing automated compliance assessments against VMware and Microsoft security best practice guides, industry best practices, as well as your own policies.

Configuration Manager includes built-in, out-of-the-box compliance templates and toolkits, which contain policy-driven rules, reports and dashboards that ensure security, regulatory and operational compliance. When a violation is detected, Configuration Manager lets you fix the problem with one simple mouse click - right from the automatically identified violation. And that fix can be applied to just one system, a group of systems or even all systems managed.

Automate Software and Server Provisioning

vCenter Configuration Manager allows you to perform physical and virtual system provisioning via a centralized mechanism. You can deploy vSphere to 'bare metal' and then load operating systems into VM containers or to ‘bare metal’ systems. Configuration Manager also automates software provisioning and ties that into the compliance enforcement process.

With Configuration Manager, you can easily create software packages, push packages to systems and guests, automatically find missing software (e.g., anti-virus), and remediate to install required software to non-compliant systems. Packages support commercial and custom software that can then be published to Configuration Manager's distributed software repository and used across the enterprise by Dev, Test, Production, and various geographically dispersed organizations.

Features

VMware vCenter Configuration Manager ensures enterprise-wide system compliance by collecting, storing, fixing, provisioning and managing configurations for servers and workstations across physical and virtual environments. With this critical data, Configuration Manager increases IT efficiency and lowers costs by eliminating the hassle and expense associated with using multiple tools for managing changes, provisioning, patches, configurations, remediation and compliance.

Gain Configuration Insight and Agility While Avoiding Configuration Drift

• Automated collection, analysis, remediation, and patch lowers IT audit costs by significantly reducing the time and labor associated with time-consuming manual processes
• Consolidate tools to increase IT efficiency, removing the hassles, headaches and time associated with using multiple, separate systems for managing server and software provisioning, changes, patches, configurations and remediations
• Improve visibility through one, centralized view into configuration, security and operational compliance
• Discover, collect and detect changes and identify policy violations for more than 80,000 configuration settings

Maintain Continuous Compliance with Out-of-the-Box Templates

• Ensure continuous compliance with security best practices and hardening guidelines for VMware, Microsoft, and Apple
• Enforce standards and regulatory mandates including the following:
  • Security Regulatory mandates (such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, DISA, ISO 27002, 802-53 and Basel II)
  • Industry standards (such as PCI DSS and NIST
• Add your own enterprise-defined policies
• Remediate by detecting and fixing configuration problems and security vulnerabilities automatically across multiple systems

Automate Software and Server Provisioning

• Manage OS distributions from a centralized repository
• Discover new systems and build/deploy using standard PXE mechanism
• Provision vSphere to "bare metal" systems
• Provision operating systems (Windows, Red Hat EL and SLES) to "bare metal" systems and to virtual machine containers.
• Build and deploy software packages for installation on target Windows servers and workstations
• Push packages to systems and guests
• Connect to compliance policies
• Automatically find systems with missing software (e.g., anti-virus)
• Remediate by installing software to non-compliant systems
• Distributed software repository architecture allows global scale and collaboration across distributed locations and teams such as Dev, Test, and Production

Manage Active Directory Compliance

• Streamline Active Directory management and compliance automation by collecting Active Directory configuration data, objects, and changes made
• Track access control entry (ACE) or other critical security-based changes that may not have been approved or occurred outside designated change windows
• View changes to group membership across Active Directory servers—in one report
• Manage user accounts, enforce organization standards for user accounts and monitor changes

Powerful Enterprise Control and Visibility

• High-level dashboards provide the right level of information needed to make change, configuration and patch management processes more effective
• View details about the changes happening in your IT environment and see and track the impact those changes had on service levels and IT compliance
• Role-based access controls use of reports and operational actions based on Active Directory rights, roles and responsibilities

Automated Application Dependency Mapping

VMware vCenter Application Discovery Manager (formerly EMC Ionix Application Discovery Manager) provides the automated, real-time application discovery and dependency mapping capability you need for effective, dependency-driven change, configuration, incident and problem management across physical and virtual environments.

Map Applications Quickly, Accurately via Agentless Discovery

Through Application Discovery Manager's agentless, continuous dependency mapping - across physical and virtual application infrastructures - you can quickly gain an understanding of your service dependencies with unparalleled accuracy and efficiency. Whether you are moving a data center, virtualizing applications, building a site recovery plan or moving a service to the cloud, an accurate application dependency map is an essential first step.
 

Virtualize Business Critical Applications with Confidence

Application Fingerprints™ uniquely identify common packages and applications. In addition, Application Discovery Manager’s heuristic fingerprinting recognizes common n-tier application interactions and automatically groups and maps these applications, which allows enterprises to quickly classify their applications. A user can also specify a grouping of hosts that make up an application and then discover all instances of that application and related hosts in the environment. Alternatively, deep-packet inspection can discover patterns within the discovery process—such as URLs and database table names—to allow the creation of new fingerprints around these patterns for ongoing discovery of application instances.
 

Eliminate Reliance on Tribal Knowledge

Application Discovery Manager provides a real-time, automated dependency mapping solution that 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. Enterprises can 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."

 

Features

VMware vCenter Application Discovery Manager (formerly EMC Ionix Application Discovery Manager) provides the automated, real-time application discovery and dependency mapping capability you need for effective, dependency-driven change, configuration, incident and problem management across physical and virtual environments. 

Map Applications Quickly and Accurately via Agentless Discovery

• Automated dependency mapping provides unique visibility into the relationships and interdependencies among applications
• Agentless, passive discovery allows continuous discovery of application infrastructure, components, services, hosts, usage, dependencies and connections
• Population or federation to third-party or homegrown CMDBs or CMSs
• Efficient and effective discovery for data center consolidations, virtualization efforts, server rationalization projects and application audits

Virtualize Business Critical Applications with Confidence

• Hybrid discovery across physical and virtual environments
• 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
• Site recovery and disaster recovery for 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 candidates 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.

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ is a value-add component of the VMware vCenter family of management solutions, providing capacity management capabilities for virtualized datacenter or desktop environments. CapacityIQ integrates seamlessly with VMware vCenter Server, ensuring that your virtualized infrastructure capacity is always predictable and efficiently used.

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ balances business demand with IT supply, without compromising performance, availability and security. With CapacityIQ, your IT infrastructure is guaranteed to have sufficient capacity to meet any business service level agreements.

IT organizations can leverage VMware vCenter CapacityIQ in a number of scenarios, including:

• Cost avoidance and justification. Do more with the same or less! Optimize utilization of existing hardware resources or justify any new business purchases.
• Availability and risk mitigation. Plan for potential business and service disruptions proactively by modeling the impact of an outage, failure or disaster.
• Project planning and decision-making. Model the effect of one-time strategic business changes. Quantify the results of workload consolidations, company acquisitions, additional new headcounts or deployment of multi-tiered applications.

Perform “What-If” Impact Analysis to Model Effect of Capacity Changes

Respond quickly to changing market and business requirements by simulating one-time, real-world use cases. Whether your company is acquiring or consolidating businesses, adding new headcount, or deploying multi-tiered applications.

CapacityIQ allows you to model various scenarios to understand and quantify the true business impact. With the right capacity intelligence, you can make informed purchasing, provisioning and planning decisions.

Identify and Reclaim Inefficient, Unused Capacity

Managing or monitoring your VM or workload requires a lot time, resources and discipline— a very tedious and consuming task. As a result, your datacenter environment may not be fully optimized.

With CapacityIQ, you can easily and quickly identify any idle or inactive VMs in your datacenter. By right-sizing or decommissioning these VMs,you can safely free up any unused capacity in order to eliminate waste and reduce costs in your organization.

Forecast Timing of Capacity Shortfalls and Bottlenecks

Your job is to deliver the right capacity at the right time—whenever and however it is needed. In a dynamic environment, this can be very difficult without the right tools.

CapacityIQ continuously profiles, analyzes and tracks your capacity needs at multiple levels: VM, host, cluster and datacenter. Based on historical capacity consumption patterns, CapacityIQ can trend and forecast your current and future capacity needs, ensuring that capacity is always available to meet any service level agreement.

Features

VMware virtualization enables a shared, dynamic environment— with pools of resources and capacity that can shrink or expand on demand. This constantly changing environment provides an opportunity for better, more effective capacity management. In order to bring science to the art of capacity planning for virtualized environments, users need a purpose-built tool that enables automated, continuous capacity intelligence to empower informed decision-making.

Capacity Awareness

• Dashboard with at-a-glance charts and graphs. View and analyze past, present, and future capacity states.  Leverage the dashboard to quickly review dynamic capacity demands and ensure real-time tuning.

Capacity Optimization

• Detailed reports with recommendations. Reclaim excess capacity from idle, oversized, or powered-off VMs. Each capacity report provides detailed supporting data to help with any rightsizing or decommissioning decisions.

Capacity Prediction

• Interactive What-If modeling scenarios. Simulate one-time business events to derive the best-fit outcome. Input company-, situation-, or project-specific data points to quantify potential business impact.