Managing the Private Cloud with VMware vCenter

VMware provides a set of management and automation solutions that work together with VMware vSphere 5 to:

• Standardize and automate key tasks, processes and policies in the datacenter.
• Manage service levels by reducing risk and streamlining problem management.
• Optimize the infrastructure to get the most out of capital IT investments.

VMware vSphere and vCenter provide solutions for creating standardized and repeatable processes, managing capacity and performance, controlling configuration changes, protecting business-critical applications against outages and self-service provisioning for development and testing environments. Users of other virtualization platform vendors must rely on third-party products to get the same breadth of virtualization management functionality.

• Standardize and Automate IT: Use templates, profiles and simple scripts to standardize operations with VMware vCenter Server and the vSphere PowerCLI. Create repeatable processes from hundreds of pre-configured workflow steps in vCenter Orchestrator.
• Manage Service Levels: Ensure business owners that performance SLAs will be met as you manage and ensure the performance of multi-tier applications with VMware vCenter AppSpeed. 
• Optimize the Infrastructure: Plan ahead with intelligent forecasting and minimize waste by reclaiming unused resources with VMware vCenter CapacityIQ, and get an accurate view of costs for virtualized workloads with VMware vCenter Chargeback. Optimize how VMs use the infrastructure with VMware vSphere Thin Provisioning, Distributed Virtual Switch, Dynamic Resource Scheduler, and other key capabilities in VMware vSphere.
• Self-Service for Cloud Infrastructure: Deliver on-demand access to end users through easy-to-use web portals, providing self-service access to virtualization with VMware vCloud Director. Test/dev users can start from scratch or from a custom-built library of applications—after creating an application, developers can store their work in a catalog to share the software development lifecycle.  
• Automated Operations Management: vCenter Operations Manager is designed to dramatically simplify and automate operations management using patented analytics to provide the intelligence and visibility needed to proactively ensure service levels in dynamic virtual and cloud environments.

All of these solutions work in conjunction with VMware vCenter Server to help you monitor all VM activity in the virtual datacenter. No other virtualization platform vendor delivers this breadth of virtualization management capabilities.