VMware 4817V62 Administration Guide - Page 19

Chapter 1 vSphere Components Solutions and Applications You use the Solutions and Applications panel to access vCenter Server extensions installed in your vCenter Server System. For example, you can access the VMware vCenter Guided Consolidation extension and the VMware vCenter Update Manager from this panel. NOTE This panel appears only if you purchased and installed VMware vSphere extensions that are sold separately from the VMware vCenter Server product. Managed Components Managed components are objects in your virtual and physical infrastructure on which you can place permissions, monitor tasks and events, and set alarms. You can group most managed components by using folders to more easily manage them. All managed components, with the exception of hosts, can be renamed to represent their purposes. For example, they can be named after company departments or locations or functions. vCenter Server monitors and manages the following components of your virtual and physical infrastructure: Clusters Datacenters A collection of ESX/ESXi hosts and associated virtual machines intended to work together as a unit. When you add a host to a cluster, the host's resources become part of the cluster's resources. The cluster manages the resources of all hosts. If you enable VMware DRS on a cluster, the resources of the hosts in the cluster are merged to allow resource balancing for the hosts in the cluster. If you enable VMware HA on a cluster, the resources of the cluster are managed as a pool of capacity to allow rapid recovery from host hardware failures.See the Resource Management Guide. Unlike a folder, which is used to organize a specific object type, a datacenter is an aggregation of all the different types of objects needed to do work in virtual infrastructure: hosts, virtual machines, networks, and datastores. Within a datacenter there are four separate hierarchies. n Virtual machines (and templates) n Hosts (and clusters) n Networks n Datastores The datacenter is the unit of virtualization (the namespace) of networks and datastores. Within a datacenter, you cannot have two objects (for example, two hosts) with the same name but you can have two objects with the same name in different datacenters. Virtual machine names need not be unique within the datacenter, but must be unique within each virtual machine folder. If two virtual machines connect to networkA, they are connected to the same network. Rules are different across datacenters. Theoretically, the same physical network can appear in two datacenters and be called two different names. Or networkA might have one meaning in datacenterA and a different meaning in datacenterB. Moving objects between datacenters can create problems or, at least, unpredictable results. VMware, Inc. 19