Ten must-have tools for every virtualization admin

VMware vCenter Operations Manager (vCOps) offers powerful vSphere performance and capacity management, and the Foundation Edition is available for free with vSphere. The tool uses time-series analytics to discover normal levels for a given virtual environment. It then performs automated root-cause analysis without requiring user-set thresholds for alerts or templates for configuration management. The goal of the Operations Manager's interface is to distill the numerous statistics within the vSphere environment into a series of easy-to-understand badges (health, risk and efficiency) that reveals the source of any problem within a few clicks. When it released vSphere 5, VMware bundled vCOPs with vCenter CapacityIQ, Configuration Manager, Chargeback Manager and Infrastructure Navigator to form the vCenter Operations Management Suite.