A managed object is the primary type of object in the vSphere object model. A managed object is a data type available on the server that consists of properties and operations.
Each managed object has properties and provides various services (operations or methods). ExtensibleManagedObject Hierarchy shows the ExtensibleManagedObject hierarchy as an example. See Managed Entities in the Inventory.
Managed objects define the entities in the inventory and also common administrative and management services such as managing performance (PerformanceManager), finding entities that exist in the inventory (SearchIndex), disseminating and controlling licenses (LicenseManager), and configuring alarms to respond to certain events (AlarmManager). See the vSphere API Reference.
A managed object reference (represented by a ManagedObjectReference) identifies a specific managed object on the server, encapsulates the state and methods of that server-side object, and makes the state and methods available to client applications. Clients run methods (operations) on the server by passing the appropriate managed object reference to the server as part of the method invocation.
