The sixth and final element that must be included as a key design factor in the shared vCenter Server model is service provider management and control. One goal of a trusted multitenant vCenter Server architecture is to simplify management of resources at every level of the infrastructure and to provide the functionality to provision, monitor, troubleshoot, and charge back the resources used by tenants. The management of shared vCenter Server multitenant environments comes with challenges, from reporting and alerting to capacity management and tenant control delegation. vCenter Server helps address these challenges by providing a scalable management solution that is tightly integrated into the infrastructure. In addition, vCenter Server provides a rich, fully developed API stack for adding additional service provider value.

VMware Cloud Providers of infrastructure services in a shared vCenter Server multitenant environment require comprehensive control and complete visibility of the shared infrastructure to provide the availability, data protection, security, and service levels expected by tenants. The ability to control, manage, and monitor resources at all levels of the infrastructure requires a dynamic, efficient, and flexible design that allows the service provider to access and provision compute, storage, and network resources from the VMware software-defined data center components quickly, easily, and with minimal effort.

vCenter Server simplifies resource planning for both cloud and tenant environments by displaying detailed CPU and memory allocation at a range of different levels. A service provider administrator can use information provided at the root, data center, or cluster level to get an overview of CPU and memory resources allocated to infrastructure virtual machines and individual tenants. A tenant can use information provided at the data center, or more granular objects level, to get an overview of CPU and memory resource allocated to the virtual machines and their workloads.

Performance charts in vCenter Server provide a single view of all performance metrics at both the data center, cluster, and individual object levels. Information such as CPU, memory, disk, and network can be seen without navigating through multiple charts. Performance charts include aggregated charts that show high-level summaries of resource distribution, which helps administrators identify top tenants. Thumbnail views of virtual machines, hosts, resource pools, clusters, and data stores allow easy navigation to individual charts.