VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator is an application awareness plug-in to vCenter Server, and provides continuous dependency mapping of applications. Infrastructure Navigator offers application context to the virtual infrastructure administrators to monitor and manage the virtual infrastructure inventory objects and actions. Administrators can use Infrastructure Navigator to understand the impact of change on the virtual environment in their application infrastructure. Infrastructure Navigator helps virtual infrastructure administrators perform the following tasks:
- Make accurate first-level triage to help either eliminate the problem or associate the problem with the virtual infrastructure when business service users report problems.
- Assess change impact. Manage and communicate virtual infrastructure issues for critical applications.
- Understand the application and business impact of changes to the virtual infrastructure on applications.
What's New in this Release
Infrastructure Navigator 1.1 offers following new features.
- VMware vCloud Director (VCD) compatibility
You can deploy Infrastructure Navigator on a vCenter Server managed by VMware vCloud Director and benefit from application discovery and mapping in a vCloud environment.
- Discovery and display of external entities
Infrastructure Navigator discovers dependencies of virtual machines on services running on machines that are not managed by the same vCenter Server, such as physical machines or virtual machines on another vCenter Server. You can get a view of intra-application dependencies, even if not all application tiers are deployed on virtual machines within a single vCenter Server.
- Aging process of dependencies
To provide only the relevant dependencies among the virtual machines and among services, Infrastructure Navigator removes non-frequently used dependencies after a selected period of inactivity. The inactivity period is non-configurable and is set to 3 days.
- Discovery of unknown services
Infrastructure Navigator discovers services whose type is unknown and presents basic information, such as their process name and listening port number. This improves the ability to assess the criticality of a particular virtual machine in change impact scenarios.
- Creation of user defined service
You can create service definitions based on service attributes like listening port number and process name. This increases the number of service types recognized and presented by Infrastructure Navigator.
- Discovery of new services
Infrastructure Navigator discovers VMware services, such as Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Server, VMware View Server, VMware vCloud Director Server, and VMware vShield Manager Server.
Infrastructure Navigator displays notification messages when any general system error or any credentials error occurs. The notification messages appear at the virtual machine level and at the vCenter entity level on the Navigator tab.
- Multiple levels of application dependencies
You can expand dependencies to view multiple levels of dependencies on a single dependency map. This increases the usability around understanding the intra-dependencies of multi-tier applications.
