Operational management

User administrative roles are highly evolved. There are four basic roles for each provisioning group: administrator, user, group manager and support personnel roles. VRM uses Active Directory for users' credential for authentication and authorization purposes so that users can get appropriate access to the VRM Web console. Each user role allows those users to undertake certain administratively defined roles. The enterprise administrator for VRM can assign users to each role.

VM instance control was comparatively weak across platforms. The only commands available to use with the VM are start and stop via the VRM Web console. And stop doesn't seem to shutdown the machine completely, it just turns it off, like pushing the power button when something is running, Other management applications tested know how to trigger an orderly guest shutdown.

Also, if you don't use the VRM interface to turn on or turn off the virtual machines, it doesn't seem to recognize any state change. Other options like changing the memory, amount of allocated CPUs or other setup options for VM guests are not available and must be done within the native management environment. Although, there is a connect-via-RDP option available, we were unable to get this process to work properly.

VRM lacks alarms and event triggers, but there were logs and reports we could view. The views included capacity usage, inventory, top 10 resources, VM status and audit logs. We could filter by different criteria such as host, user and machine name. Some of the views included nice graphs which were useful to get a quick idea about what is going on.