Planning for hosts

IBM Storage Insights supports the monitoring of ESXi hosts and their virtual machines that are managed by vCenter Servers.

Overview

ESXi host is a true hypervisor product that can host multiple virtual machines that run independently of each other by sharing hardware resources. The vCenter Server is the management application that is the central entry point for the management and monitoring of the ESXi hosts for a data center.

For more information about ESXi or vCenter Server, see http://www.vmware.com.

The storage systems and platforms that are supported on VMware are shown in Table 1.
Table 1. Supported platforms and storage systems for VMware
Supported platform Supported storage systems Supported function
All releases of vCenter Server 8 All storage systems supported by IBM Storage Insights
  • Monitoring
  • LUN correlation
All releases of vCenter Server 7
All releases of vCenter Server 6

For full function, the ESXi host must be up and running. If ESXi host is not present in a given environment, only a limited picture is presented to the user and some virtual machines might not be recognized.

The hierarchical mapping of storage allocated to the virtual machine is available for the virtual machines on the ESXi host.

Benefits

IBM Storage Insights can help you predict and prevent storage problems before they impact your business. Following are some key benefits of using IBM Storage Insights to monitor your vCenter Servers and their managed ESXi hosts:
  • View detailed information about capacity, storage usage, and performance.
  • Monitor health, status, and availability.
  • Use alerts and alert policies to be notified of conditions and potential problems.
  • Use advanced analytics to provision, optimize, and reclaim storage.
  • Create and share reports about inventory, capacity, performance, and storage consumption.

What's next

You can add ESXi hosts for monitoring, alerting, and reporting.

For instructions on how to add hosts for monitoring, see Adding vCenter Servers.