To get the CA combination to discover our VMware VMs, we had to use the command line to point the management system in their directions. To connect to the VirtualCenter host machine, we had to configure some text files manually for CA's distributed intelligence analysis engine, which uniformly retrieves information from all managed devices.

We did notice that NSM/ASM was a bit sporadic about rediscovering VMware VMs. For example, a cold reboot of a VMware instance was not displayed in the CA GUI. Other times, we needed to stop and start some of the NSM/ASM services on the VirtualCenter host machine in order for the NSM/ASM services to collect the data from it.

According to CA tech support, we needed to setup an SNMP trap on the VirtualCenter host machine so that NSM would rediscover VMware VMs after we'd shut them down and restarted them. But even after we set the SNMP trap, when we were checking out performance monitoring, there would be a similar problem where we had to stop the performance agent on the VirtualCenter-based machine and start it again. The use of SNMP in this case could also open up the installation to known security issues surrounding SNMP and community naming strings.

The overall VM discovery and connection process was similar for the Hyper-V VMs, except we had to apply a support patch first, and then install the Hyper-V agent.

With the arduous installation process behind us, we were able to view quite a bit of information about the virtual machines.