What is vCenter Operations Manager?

vCenter Operations Manager is a product from VMware that comes bundled with every edition of vSphere. It is used to collect performance data from objects (such as VMs, disk drives, clusters, and datacenters) in a vSphere environment. vCenter Operations Manager stores and analyzes the data for the following purposes:

• performance analytics and health monitoring.
• graphical representations of current and historical states of your vSphere environment.
• displaying information about changes in your virtual environment hierarchy, for example how a VM moved from one to another ESXi hosts affects the performance of the objects involved.
• combining key metrics into single scores for environmental health and efficiency.

This product is deployed as a vApp (in Open Virtualization Format) and includes two virtual machines. Customers that have vSphere licensing are able to download the vApp from the VMware website and install this product into the Foundation mode without the need for a license key. There are three additional editions with extra features which can be purchased: Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise.

The two virtual machines in the vApp are:

• User Interface VM – provides the user interface for vCenter Operations Manager.
• Analytics VM – provides the data collection and processing for vCenter Operations Manager.