Patent ID: 8560671

Claim:
A process for analyzing virtual machines in a storage network environment for compliance with a resource capacity policy comprising: collecting, without use of a host agent operating on the virtual machines, component configuration and connectivity information from components in the network environment; deriving access paths defining end-to-end access relationships between an application on a virtual machine and storage data objects associated with the virtual machine in the network environment, wherein an access path includes a sequence of components enabling information flow between an application residing on a virtual machine and a data object, wherein deriving access paths comprises mapping network component configuration and connectivity information to nodes and edges of a graph and determining whether information can flow between nodes in the graph, wherein a node in the graph represents a component in the storage network environment, and an edge represents information flow capability between two components, wherein the information flow capability is determined by a physical communication link between the two components and the logical state configurations of the two components; computing access path resource consumption and determining a respective rank classification of a virtual machine on the respective access path based on a level of storage service supported by the virtual machine; and identifying virtual machines with resource consumptions and respective rank classifications that violate the resource capacity policy.