There are a lot of virtualization solutions available today. Their target markets and popularity differ, but for enterprise shops that can afford it, VMware solutions are quite widespread. Zabbix offers built-in support for monitoring VMware. This support includes:
Monitoring vSphere and/or vCenter
Automatically discovering all hypervisors
Automatically discovering all virtual machines
Monitoring VMware does not involve any custom layers—Zabbix accesses the VMware API directly, and the monitoring of such an environment is very easy to set up. For this chapter, you will need access to a VMware instance API, including a username and password. It might be a good idea to try this on a smaller or non-production environment first.