vCenter Configuration Manager (vCM) is a proven solution delivering Configuration Intelligence for IT. Hundreds of organizations, including 13 of the world's 25 largest companies, rely on vCM to effectively and efficiently manage the complexity of today's physical and virtualised IT environments.

vCenter Configuration Manager works across heterogeneous enterprises including Windows, UNIX, Linux and Mac OS X platforms. vCenter Configuration Manager delivers the following benefits:

Ensure Effective and Intelligent Operations

vCenter Configuration Manager provides enterprise visibility to help you control your IT infrastructure, virtual sprawl, and understand planned and unplanned changes. SCM helps customers automate mundane tasks to achieve IT automation, which reduces manual errors and improves operational efficiency. By using Server Configuration Manager customers can increase application availability to improve service levels. Organszations using vCM realise an increase in servers per admin ratio and dramatically reduce the cost of managing servers.

Manage and Measure Compliance

vCM provides unparalled visibility into physical and virtual environments

vCenter Configuration Manager is known for being first in the industry delivering a continuous compliance solution for organizations. In addition to being the first, vCM is also considered the best solution in the market today for achieving continuous compliance by our customers. vCM delivers out-of-the-box compliance toolkits provided by the Center for Policy and Compliance (CP&C).

vCM delivers an automated, continuous enterprise compliance posture, which helps IT meet corporate and internal IT policies in addition to regulatory standards. When compliance violations are detected, they surface up to the compliance dashboard, providing administrators "one click fix" capability.

Control Configuration Change

Gartner research reveals that 80% of all application downtime is caused by change (planned and unplanned). To improve application availability, it is critical for IT to have visibility into changes as they happen within the IT infrastructure. vCenter Configuration Manager provides visibility into configuration changes across the enterprise and identifies the change as planned or unplanned change. By detecting unauthorized changes (e.g. change startup behavior of anti-virus program) and providing remediation to fix unauthorised changes,vCM delivers an easy way to enforce IT security and compliance policy. Built-in integration with a majority of Service Desk and Change Management processes helps IT close the change management loop from RFC, to approval, execution, and verification.

Automate Security Assessment & Remediation

According to a Gartner estimate, roughly 99% of all successful external attacks exploit known vulnerabilities or avoidable system configuration errors. vCenter Configuration Manager enforces security from inside out by continuously assessing the security posture of systems and by enforcing security policies. When a threat is detected, SCM helps you assess the impact of the threat across the enterprise, so you can prioritise most critical servers and applications. vCM enables IT staff to identify and quickly remediate security vulnerabilities.

Accelerate and Verify Patching

vCenter Configuration Manager helps organisations assess the patch deployments and prioritise the patching process across the enterprise. By automating the patch deployment, organisations can reduce cost and errors due to manual tasks. vCM continuously monitors and verifies patch compliance across all machines in the enterprise and measures the effectiveness of patches. vCM integrates with Security Advisor to ensure that customers are up to date on deploying security patches as soon as they are released.

Embed the Audit Process into IT Operations

In a dynamically changing IT environment, audits need to be repeatable and IT needs to demonstrate compliance on a continual basis. Snapshot or check-list based approaches may work for a static IT environment, but a dynamic environment requires continuous compliance. vCM collects fine grained data about server configuration and stores this information in a CMDB. This information is extremely useful during an audit, as IT can deliver not only requested information, but also the context around the data. vCM collected data serves as the authoritative database for IT audits.

vCM Architecture

vCenter Configuration Manager leverages a proven architecture that delivers several distinct advantages:

• Scalability
  • Minimal impact on server or network
• CMDB
  • Infrastructure visibility
  • Rich, audit quality configuration data
  • Federated and extensible
• Centralised Controls, Distributed Access
  • Role based views

vCM has a highly scalable architecture based on a manager-agent architectural pattern

vCM agents are delivered as managed code that is extremely lightweight and consume the least possible amount of CPU resources. Several architectural innovations are present in vCM that minimize the impact on servers and network. vCM provides a browser based user interface that is very intuitive, minimizing the learning curve.