Patent ID: 8225313

Claim:
A method for virtual infrastructure management, comprising: discovering, using one or more processing units, a plurality of heterogeneous virtual environment servers, each virtual environment server comprising one or more components, the one or more components comprising one or more virtual machines, and being associated with one or more vendor-specific management operations for managing the virtual environment server, at least two of the heterogeneous virtual environment servers being associated with different vendor-specific virtual environment solutions each for implementing the associated virtual environment server and having different implementations of at least one of the associated one or more vendor-specific management operations for managing the virtual environment server; generating, using one or more processing units, for each of the plurality of heterogeneous virtual environment servers, one or more virtual environment objects that model the virtual environment server and are operable to abstract the one or more vendor-specific management operations of the virtual environment server to a nonnalized set of management operations, a first normalized management operation comprising instantiation of a new virtual machine on the virtual environment server; and facilitating, using one or more processing units, management for each of the plurality of heterogeneous virtual environment servers using the virtual environment objects that model the plurality of heterogeneous virtual environment servers, using the normalized set of management operations, facilitating management for each of the plurality of heterogeneous virtual environment servers comprising using the first normalized management operation to instantiate the new virtual machine on the virtual environment server.