Veritas Operations Manager uses designated Control Hosts to discover the information on the virtual machines. You must install the Control Host Add-on on the managed hosts that you want to designate as Control Hosts. Control Host uses the VMware Infrastructure SDK (VI SDK) to access the VirtualCenter and the ESX servers.

Ensure that the Control Hosts can ping the VirtualCenter servers or the ESX servers from which they can discover the information on VMware Infrastructure. Ideally, a Control Host and a VirtualCenter server or an ESX server from which the Control Host wants to discover the information on VMware Infrastructure must be on the same subnet.

When you configure the virtualization discovery in Veritas Operations Manager, you must ensure that you have appropriate privileges to access the VirtualCenter or the ESX servers. Also, you must ensure that you have Browse Datastore privileges on the VirtualCenter or the ESX servers from which you want to discover the VMware Infrastructure information.

The VirtualCenter or the ESX servers contains a Web server, which is an Apache Tomcat server. The web services that are hosted on the Web server communicate with the VMware Infrastructure. After you configure a virtualization discovery, the Control Host uses VI SDK to communicate with the web services that are hosted on the Web server. For this communication, the Control Host uses the HTTPS protocol.

The URL for the VMware SDK web services is as follows:

https://host name of the VirtualCenter or the ESX servers/sdk

After the discovery of VMware Infrastructure, the Control Host reports the discovered data to Management Server. Management Server coalesces the data that it receives from the Control Host and populates the relevant views.