A VM Library feature that could be used to deploy subsequent images and work out some VM vetting processed -- things like production proofs -- are not yet part of the CA offering.

Operational management

We found ASM's Administrative and User Roles capabilities to be quite advanced. ASM does not rely on Active Directory so we had to create our own roles and users manually. (Although, it was possible to use Active Directory with security management part of NSM.) There are two default roles provided, admin (who can do anything) and viewer (who can just look).

If you don't like the ones offered, you can roll your own roles and the options are limitless. In each instance where we built our own custom role, we were able to specify exactly what roles were permitted to carry out which VM management tasks and have access to which VMs.

The monitoring and alerting functionality requires that a specific performance agent be installed on the host machine running VMware's VirtualCenter, but there is no additional agent needed for Hyper-V. The setup is quite complicated, but once we tackled that with the help of tech support, we could monitor many performance metrics such as VM disk and memory size, reads per second and network connections per second. We could also configure how often the information is updated in the CA GUI.