Home > Storage > PowerMax and VMAX > Storage Admin > Dell PowerMax and VMware vSphere Configuration Guide > Introduction
Managing and monitoring the PowerMax storage system that provides a VMware environment with persistent medium to store virtual machine data is a critical task for any VMware system administrator. Dell has numerous options to offer the administrator from virtual appliances running on vSphere to specific PowerMax system management context commands created just for VMware.
Dell offers two primary complementary methods of managing and monitoring PowerMax storage arrays:
In addition, there are a number of integrations that can be used when managing the PowerMax. Many customers will wish to automate tasks related to VMware and the array. This can be accomplished with the vRealize Orchestrator plug-in for PowerMax, or through Ansible playbooks. Log management is another critical component for the administrator. The PowerMax has a plug-in to VMware’s Log Insight product which can serve this purpose. Some of these integrations will be covered in this chapter.
The following sections will describe the best ways to deploy and use these management applications in a VMware environment.