In vCOps 5.8.x or its earlier versions, policies were primarily focused on capacity management and to what extent badges changed alert levels. vCOps gave the ability to change allocation ratios, including stress level, adding buffers, and all the usual virtualization capacity management settings we would like. Policies could also affect badge thresholds and alerts, but only their basic in functionalities, and in many environments settings for policies was left as default.

However, in vROps 6.0, policies have become the core of what drives vROps. All alerts, metric collections, notifications, badge scores, and capacity management values are driven by the new policy engine and can be applied to a single object or the entire environment. The following bullets shed some more light on the different areas that policies now drive: