The Server Manager builds a topology of the managed VMware entities. The topology objects represent the managed VMware elements in the network, their relationships, and their connections.

VMware topology objects include:

  • Hypervisor—VMwareESX server; used to run multiple virtual machines.

  • VirtualCenter—VMware element management system.

  • VirtualMachine—VMware virtual machine.

  • VMDataCenter—A logical grouping of ESX servers. VMware VirtualCenter main folder; used for partitioning logical and physical elements.

  • VirtualDataCenterNetwork—Represents a network zone in which virtual machines may move from server to server without loss of network connectivity. VirtualDataCenterNetwork is related to the ESX servers and VirtualSwitches that are part of its domain.

  • VMwareCluster—VMware cluster is a group of ESXs hosted by computers. Cluster enables the VMware High Availability (HA) and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) solutions.

  • VMwareDatastore—VMwareDatastore is a logical container that holds virtual machine files and other files necessary for virtual machine operation, which can be a VMFS volume, a directory on network-attached storage, or a local filesystem path. The monitoring and root-cause analysis of a VMware Datastore connectivity involves monitoring of the Host Bus Adapter (HBA), ScsiLun, and ScsiPath, because a failure on any one of them affects the ESX host to Datastore connectivity.

  • VMwareDataStoreCluster—A VMware Datastore Cluster is an aggregation of datastores. The Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) feature of VMware vSphere 5.0 allows the aggregation of datastores into a datastore cluster. The VMware Datastore cluster is represented by the class VMwareDatastoreCluster in the ESM topology.

  • VirtualInterface—Software abstraction of a NIC for a virtual machine.

  • vSwitch—Represents the functionality of a hypervisor which connects virtual interfaces (and their virtual machines) to a physical NIC on a server.

  • HostBusAdapter—It is a physical board that is inserted into a host computer to initiate all communication between the ESX host and the external storage devices.

  • ScsiLun—It is a SCSI logical unit. A SCSI logical unit is a host device that an ESX server or virtual machine can use for I/O operations. An ESX server creates SCSI logical unit objects to represent devices in the host configuration.

  • ScsiPath—It is a storage entity that represents a topological path from an HBA to SCSI Lun.

  • DataPathRedundancyGroup—It is a redundancy group of Scsi data paths.