VMware vCenter module

This topic provides information about TrueSight Capacity Optimization configuration for collecting data directly from VMware environments using one of the following ETL tasks:

Additional information

You cannot run the VMware - vCenter Extractor and VMware - vCenter and ESX Server History Extractor service simultaneously. To import historical data from vCenter and ESX servers you first need to start the VMware - vCenter and ESX Server History Extractor, then stop this service. Once the historical data is imported, start the VMware - vCenter Extractor service which continuously polls and collect data from vCenter servers.

VMware - vCenter Extractor Service: A Service ETL task that continuously polls and collects data from vCenter servers. Once a Service ETL is started, it runs continuously on TrueSight Capacity Optimization. The VMware - vCenter Extractor Service ETL task collects all of the metric required for Capacity-Aware Placement Advice, Cloud Capacity Views, and the vSphere Virtualization view without requiring you to increase the vCenter statistics collection level.
VMware - vCenter and ESX Server History Extractor: An ETL task that imports historical data from vCenter and ESX servers. ETL tasks are started and stopped by the Scheduler (see Editing and managing task schedulers). The VMware - vCenter and ESX Server History Extractor ETL task requires you to increase the vCenter statistics collection level.

Note

BMC recommends that you use the VMware - vCenter Extractor Service ETL for data collection.

Use the VMware - vCenter and ESX Server History Extractor ETL for data recovery.

Supported VMware environments

BMC TrueSight Capacity Optimization supports collecting data from the following VMware environments:

The VMware - vCenter and ESX Server History Extractor supports data collection from VMware ESX Server 3.5.

Configuring TrueSight Capacity Optimization to collect data from a VMware environment

You can configure TrueSight Capacity Optimization to collect data from a VMware environment by performing one of the following procedures:

Available metrics and logging levels

For information about the metrics collected by the VMware ETL modules, see Metrics-collected-by-VMware-ETLs.

For information on the metrics collected at various logging levels (data collection levels) in VMware, see Data collection levels in VMware.

Duplicate entities of vCenter hosts or VMs

Duplicate entities of vCenter hosts or VMs in an entity catalog and private entity catalogs that contain duplicate vCenter entities are automatically identified by the VMware Automated Reconciliation task. You can reconcile and manage duplicate entities and sharing status of private entity catalogs according to your requirements.