To monitor VMware, just a single template is all we need. Well, that's not entirely true; the other two templates for hypervisors and virtual machines must be present, too, but besides that, Zabbix can automatically discover all hypervisors and virtual machines, just like we did in the beginning of this chapter.

We looked in detail at the default templates: how they work and interact and what each provides. The main template discovered everything, and then created hosts and linked in hypervisor and virtual machine templates as needed.

In the end, we looked at lower-level details, including how data is passed through the VMware cache, how often that happens, and how we can tune all of that.

In the next chapter, we'll discuss a new Zabbix process: Zabbix proxy. Zabbix proxies are remote data collectors that are really great. Similar to agents, they can operate in passive or active mode, and they support almost everything Zabbix server supports, including monitoring Zabbix agents, SNMP devices, VMware, and much more. We'll set up both active and passive proxies, and discuss the best way to handle a proxy becoming unavailable.