Manage, Automate and Optimize your IT Infrastructure
Achieve the highest levels of efficiency, automation, simplicity and security in managing a virtualized IT environment of any size with VMware VirtualCenter. VirtualCenter lets you rapidly provision virtual machines and monitor performance of physical servers and virtual machines. VirtualCenter intelligently optimizes resources, ensures high availability to all applications in virtual machines and makes your IT environment more responsive with virtualization-based distributed services such as VMware DRS, VMware High Availability (HA) and VMware VMotion.

Put Efficiency and Control at Your Fingertips
Provision, monitor and manage your virtualized IT environment through a single interface:

• Analyze physical servers in your environment, plan for consolidation of good virtualization candidates and convert physical machines to virtual machines.
• Simplify the provisioning of new virtual machines with wizard-driven processes and templates that allow the deployment of new virtual machines—instantly.
• Operational automation through task scheduling and alerting improves responsiveness to business needs and prioritizes actions needing the most urgent attention.
• Automate routine management tasks with task scheduling and alerting.
• Monitor performance and utilization of physical servers and the virtual machines they are running with detailed reporting of CPU, memory and I/O performance.
• Limit access to authorized personnel using tiers of customizable roles, fine-grained permissions and integration with Microsoft Active Directory.
• Integrate with 3rd party systems management products through the VMware Infrastructure SDK.
  

Ensure Higher Service Levels for Applications
VirtualCenter is part of a feature-rich suite that includes a unique set of virtualization-based capabilities that make your virtual environment more responsive, available and serviceable than a physical IT environment.

• Optimize resources with VMware DRS, which dynamically balances capacity and ensures service levels.
• Migrate live virtual machines across entirely separate physical servers with VMware VMotion and conduct non-disruptive maintenance of IT environments.
• Enable cost-effective application availability independent of hardware and operating systems using VMware HA.

The VMware VirtualCenter agent is included in VMware Infrastructure Foundation, Standard, and Enterprise editions. VirtualCenter Server (previously known as VirtualCenter Management Server) is licensed separately.

What is VMware VirtualCenter Server?
VMware VirtualCenter Server is the central management service for configuring, provisioning and managing distributed virtual IT environments.

Typically, environments comprising VMware ESX hosts that form one logical datacenter require only one instance of VirtualCenter Server.

Overview
VMware VirtualCenter Server brings together multiple VMware ESX hosts and combines their physical resources for the most efficient utilization. Running as a service on Microsoft® Windows 2000, Microsoft® Windows XP Professional and Microsoft® Windows Server 2003, VMware VirtualCenter Server stores and organizes data about physical hosts and virtual machines. Distributed virtualization services such as VMware VMotion, HA, DRS and VCB then utilize this information to deliver the optimally utilized, efficient and highly available datacenter.

VMware VirtualCenter Server has four key interfaces:

• VMware VirtualCenter management agent on each physical VMware ESX host
• VMware Infrastructure API which interfaces with VMware VirtualCenter Clients as well as third party solutions
  
• Database interface to store information such as host configurations, virtual machine configurations, resources and virtual machine inventory, performance statistics, events, alarms, user permissions and roles.
  
• Active Directory interface to obtain user access control information
  

How to Buy
VMware VirtualCenter Server is a separately licensed product required for a distributed virtual infrastructure. One instance of the VMware VirtualCenter Server is required for each aggregated datacenter environment to manage.

• If you have an environment of many physical VMware ESX servers to be managed by a single instance of VMware VirtualCenter Server, you’ll need one license of VCS, plus licenses for VMware Infrastructure Starter/Standard/Enterprise for each physical server
  
• If you have two separate datacenters that do not share resources, you’ll need two instances of VMware VirtualCenter Server, in addition to VI3 Starter, Standard and Enterprise licenses for each physical server.
  

For every instance of VMware VirtualCenter Server, you will also need a database license for the database it will run on.