Manager Service

The vCloud Automation Center service (commonly called the Manager Service) is a Windows .NET service that coordinates communication between DEMs, agents including guest agents (over SOAP), the IaaS database, AD (or LDAP), and SMTP. The Manager Service communicates with the repository to queue external workflows in the SQL database that will be later picked up by either a DEM worker or a proxy agent or a guest agent.

Some of the key functionalities of Manager Services are listed here:

• Triggers inventory/state/performance data collection for the managed compute resource.
• Processes data collection response ONLY for proxy agent-based hypervisor.
• The master workflows (machine transition states from requested to destroy) are handled by Manager Service. For details on the life cycle states, refer the following diagram:
  

Tip

The grayed-out states give extensibility hooks.

A Virtual Machine Observer (VMO) task is another important task performed by Manager Service. This task is scheduled to be executed every 60 minutes to check whether any machine has expired or reached the archive state and initiates the required operations. Earlier, in the vRA 6.2 version, a VMO task was executed every 10 seconds. Since it's a resource-intensive action, it has been added as a configuration parameter in the manager service config file (ProcessLeaseWorkflowTimerCallbackIntervalMiliSeconds).

For additional details, please refer to http://pubs.vmware.com/vra-62/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vra.system.administration.doc%2FGUID-5FBB7C73-2AAD-4106-9C0D-DE7B416A4716.html.