vCenter Application Discovery Manager (ADM) 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 application 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. Key capabilities include:

• Fast and low-impact deployment through unique agentless technology
• Guaranteed visibility into all application interactions across both physical and virtual machines via network-based approach
• Discovery of unknown, unwanted and unexpected application behaviors

vCenter 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 helps identify critical application behavior compliance issues:

• 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 minimize guesswork and understand the potential impact of a change before the change is made.
• Identify security and compliance issues based on unexpected application behaviors, application zoning issues, and application interdependency violations.

With version 6.1, vCenter ADM is now available for VM delivery and deployment as a virtual appliance, giving greater flexibility without the need for installing physical appliance collectors. Both new and existing customers can use this latest delivery capability. All new vCenter ADM deployments will only be delivered and deployed on VMs.

Existing customers who have deployed ADM with physical appliances can continue to update their physical deployments with newer update versions. They will need to select the physical appliance update option from the download portal. Existing customers can also expand their current physical appliance deployments with additional virtual VM collectors when expanding discovery coverage in their data centers. vCenter ADM VM components are compatible with existing ADM physical appliance deployments as long as they are all using the same version of ADM. Download additional release notes.

vCenter ADM discovers and maps P-P, P-V, V-V environments for applications, services, components and dependencies using a combination of passive and active agentless discovery methodologies.

vCenter ADM takes advantage of non-intrusive monitoring port technology and passively observes and statistically samples the bi-directional communications across the data center. Passive Discovery works by performing deep packet analysis of network packets that are collected through passive monitoring on vSwitches, listening to VM traffic (or traffic from physical switches that are mirroring traffic and sending it to the physical NIC of the ESX system that hosts ADM). Each observed packet is parsed using customizable and highly efficient deep packet parsers, called Fingerprints, which uniquely identify both packaged and custom developed in-house applications. This requires only a relatively small statistical sample of traffic to understand the application structure and behavior.

Active Discovery uses standard remote access protocols (WMI, SSH, Telnet, SNMP, VI-SDK) with credentials to extract deep configuration details from servers and other devices and is an agent-less approach. ADM will periodically re-query the servers for changes based on the configured Active Discovery policy. Each of the discovery methods can work independently of each other. The most detailed and up-to-date discovery is achieved when combining the two methods together.

vCenter ADM 6.1 updates are available in two forms: as a VM-based deployment or as a software update for an existing ADM physical appliance (for existing customers). We have provided an ADM 6.1 version solely for those physical appliance deployments.

You can access updates at in our Downloads Center. You can select virtual or physical appliance delivery as appropriate to your situation.