Patent ID: 8909602

Claim:
A method of producing a snapshot of an inventory of a virtualized computer system, comprising: identifying items in the inventory, the items including virtual machines, servers on which the virtual machines are running, one or more data centers in which the servers reside, and logical containers, the logical containers including folders that include virtual machines, resource pools that each contains one or more virtual machines, and server clusters that each contains one or more servers; determining hierarchical relationships between the items, wherein the hierarchical relationships between the items comprise hierarchical relationships between items of different categories, wherein the determining hierarchical relationships comprises: querying for object references that each references a different item in the inventory; for each object reference, determining an immediate parent item to the referenced item, wherein for at least one object reference, the referenced item comprises a server cluster in a data center and the immediate parent item of the referenced item comprises the data center; and creating, based on the determined immediate parent items, inventory relational data of the items in the inventory; determining other relationships of the items, including a relationship between a resource pool and a group of virtual machines that is not hierarchical; and storing identifying data for the items, the hierarchical relationships, and the other relationships in a storage device as a snapshot of the inventory.