Infrastructure Navigator is supported on vCenter Server 5.0 (build 455964 or later) with the vSphere Web Client (build 423753 or later). The supported ESX versions include ESX/ESXi 3.5 (build 425420), ESX/ESXi 4.0 (build 398348), ESX/ESXi 4.1 (build 433742), and all builds of ESXi 5.x.
This section describes the key features for the Infrastructure Navigator 1.1 release.
Infrastructure Navigator 1.1 offers following new features.
VMware vCloud Director (VCD) compatibility
You can deploy Infrastructure Navigator on a vCenter Server managed by VMware vCloud Director and benefit from application discovery and mapping in a vCloud environment.
Discovery and display of external entities
Infrastructure Navigator discovers dependencies of virtual machines on services running on machines that are not managed by the same vCenter Server, such as physical machines or virtual machines on another vCenter Server. You can get a view of intra-application dependencies, even if not all application tiers are deployed on virtual machines within a single vCenter Server.
Aging process of dependencies
To provide only the relevant dependencies among the virtual machines and among services, Infrastructure Navigator removes non-frequently used dependencies after a selected period of inactivity. The inactivity period
is non-configurable and is set to 3 days.
Discovery of unknown services
Infrastructure Navigator discovers services whose type is unknown and presents basic information, such as their process name and listening port number. This improves the ability to assess the criticality of a particular virtual machine in change impact scenarios.
Creation of user defined service
You can create service definitions based on service attributes like listening port number and process name. This increases the number of service types recognized and presented by Infrastructure Navigator.
Discovery of new services
Infrastructure Navigator discovers VMware services, such as Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Server, VMware View Server, VMware vCloud Director Server, and VMware vShield Manager Server.
Notification Messages
Infrastructure Navigator displays notification messages when any general system error or any credentials error occurs. The notification messages appear at the virtual machine level and at the vCenter entity level on the Navigator tab.
Multiple levels of application dependencies
You can expand dependencies to view multiple levels of dependencies on a single dependency map. This increases the usability around understanding the intra-dependencies of multi-tier applications.
The following issues are known to occur in vCenter Infrastructure Navigator 1.1 release. Known issues not previously documented are marked with the * symbol.
The character "&" is not accepted as part of the Username text box in the Infrastructure Navigator administration page.
If failover occurs in HA and FT environments, it is difficult to predict whether Infrastructure Navigator can still monitor the virtual machines that have failed over.
Some configurations of Infrastructure Navigator might be present on the ESX hosts and virtual machines that were previously discovered by Infrastructure Navigator but were removed before performing the uninstall process of Infrastructure Navigator.
Discovery fails on Linux virtual machines where the temporary directory is a symlink and the virtual machine is installed with VMware Tools version 3.5. You can fix this issue by either updating VMware Tools to a more recent version or by not having the temporary directory symlink.
If you deploy a new version of Infrastructure Navigator with a new version of online help, the new version of online help might not be updated in the vSphere Web Client.
At the vCenter Server entity level, the Navigator portlet on the Summary tab and the Navigator tab itself might take anywhere between one second to one minute to display information depending on the number of virtual machines and applications running in your environment.
After the uninstall process of Infrastructure Navigator is completed, the uninstall message stating that the uninstall process is complete does not appear unless you manually refresh the vSphere Web Client.
In a Linked Mode environment, you must log in as a domain user to view the Infrastructure Navigator dependency maps.
In a Linked Mode environment, if you disable the Infrastructure Navigator plug-in in any of the vCenter Server instances, the functionality of Infrastructure Navigator gets disabled on all the visible vCenter Server instances.
In a Linked Mode environment, if any of the vCenter Server instances, including the ones where Infrastructure Navigator is not being deployed, has non-running inventory services, Infrastructure Navigator does not display maps and tables for the discovered virtual machines. A pop-up appears that states that the information cannot be retrieved from the Infrastructure Navigator.
In a Linked Mode environment with multiple Infrastructure Navigator instances on more than one vCenter Server, the license rows of Infrastructure Navigator in the licensing screen of the vSphere Client appear with the same name, and you cannot distinguish which row belongs to which vCenter Server. This might be relevant if you need different licenses for the different vCenter Server instances.
If the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC) service is removed or disabled on a virtual machine, Infrastructure Navigator does not discover any services running on that virtual machine. In addition, the vSphere Web Client displays an Access failed. Unable to run 'wmic' command on the guest operating system message.
Infrastructure Navigator carries out the discovery process appropriately only if the free disk space available on each of the discovered virtual machines is greater than 5MB. Infrastructure Navigator displays an error message indicating insufficient space, and the discovery process on that specific virtual machine is stopped until the required free disk space is available.*
Infrastructure Navigator does not discover all the versions of a specific service. See Infrastructure Navigator User's Guide for a detailed list of supported services and their supported versions.*
When the vShield Manager 5.0 appliance is discovered, the Infrastructure Navigator user interface does not display the used ports of the discovered service.*
IPv6 address format is not supported by Infrastructure Navigator.*
When you click Show More Dependencies button in the dependency map, a group of virtual machines is expanded and added to the dependency map. However, you cannot collapse the same group of virtual machines by clicking the same button. You need to hide the virtual machines one after the other.*
Infrastructure Navigator takes approximately 40 seconds to display the dependency map of a virtual machine with more than 300 dependencies.*
Sometimes the host name of the Infrastructure Navigator appliance might not persist across reboots and is reset to localhost.localdomain.*
In a dependency map, when you click the expand or collapse icon to view the list of services within a virtual machine, the layout of dependency map might change. The virtual machine that you have just clicked might move to a different location within the dependency map.*
If the host name of the vCenter Server does not have a DNS name, Infrastructure Navigator displays an error message when it exposes data to the vCenter Server inventory service.*
After the successful upgrade of Infrastructure Navigator virtual appliance, the latest appliance version is not updated on the Summary tab of the vSphere Client and vSphere Web Client. The Administration page and the Plug-in Management page in the vSphere Web Client display the correct version. Also, the System tab of the Infrastructure Navigator Web Console displays the correct version.*
If an external machine has DNS lookup defined, but does not have reverse DNS lookup defined, the dependency map and dependency tab in the vSphere Web Client does not display the external DNS name, but instead displays the external IP address.*
Info Panel categorizes all processes with a unique key, process identification (PID), for each entry, but PID is not shown in the Info Panel. As a result, you can see same process name associated with different port or one process name is associated with a list of ports.*
The length of the DNS name of the external virtual machines might vary from one environment to another.*