6.0.1

vSphere Managed Inventory Objects
In vSphere, the inventory is a collection of virtual and physical objects on which you can place permissions,
monitor tasks and events, and set alarms. You can group most inventory objects by using folders to more
easily manage them.
All inventory objects, with the exception of hosts, can be renamed to represent their purposes. For example,
they can be named after company departments or locations or functions. vCenter Server monitors and
manages the following components of your virtual and physical infrastructure:
Data Centers
Unlike a folder, which is used to organize a specic object type, a data center
is an aggregation of all the dierent types of objects needed to do work in
virtual infrastructure: hosts, virtual machines, networks, and datastores.
Within a data center there are four separate hierarchies.
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Virtual machines (and templates)
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Hosts (and clusters)
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Networks
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Datastores
The data center denes the namespace for networks and datastores. The
names for these objects must be unique within a data center. For example,
you cannot have two datastores with the same name within a single data
center, but you can have two datastores with the same name in two dierent
data centers. Virtual machines, templates, and clusters need not be unique
within the data center, but must be unique within their folder.
Objects with the same name in two dierent data centers are not necessarily
the same object. Because of this, moving objects between data centers can
create unpredictable results. For example, a network named networkA in
data_centerA might not be the same network as a network named networkA
in data_centerB. Moving a virtual machine connected to networkA from
data_centerA to data_centerB results in the virtual machine changing the
network it is connected to.
Managed objects also cannot exceed 214 bytes (UTF-8 encoded).
Clusters
A collection of ESXi hosts and associated virtual machines intended to work
together as a unit. When you add a host to a cluster, the host’s resources
become part of the cluster’s resources. The cluster manages the resources of
all hosts.
If you enable VMware EVC on a cluster, you can ensure that migrations with
vMotion do not fail because of CPU compatibility errors. If you enable
vSphere DRS on a cluster, the resources of the hosts in the cluster are merged
to allow resource balancing for the hosts in the cluster. If you enable vSphere
HA on a cluster, the resources of the cluster are managed as a pool of
capacity to allow rapid recovery from host hardware failures.
Datastores
A virtual representation of underlying physical storage resources in the data
center. A datastore is the storage location for virtual machine les. These
physical storage resources can come from the local SCSI disk of the ESXi
host, the Fibre Channel SAN disk arrays, the iSCSI SAN disk arrays, or
Network Aached Storage (NAS) arrays. Datastores hide the idiosyncrasies
of the underlying physical storage and present a uniform model for the
storage resources required by virtual machines.
vCenter Server and Host Management
18 VMware, Inc.