To perform any of these tasks, you must be a Lab Management administrator. For details on how to create a Lab Management administrator, see How to Create Lab Management Administrators.

Immediately after installing the Performance Center components, the relevant component's configuration tool opens, prompting you for initial configuration settings. If this configuration was skipped, you must configure the settings manually before you can start working with Performance Center.

For details, refer to the Performance Center documentation.

You create projects in Site Administration, and define the limits and other settings for the project in Lab Management, in the Project Settings module. For details, see How to Create a Project.

You manage hosts, host pools, and host locations from the Lab Resources modules. For details, see How to Manage Testing Hosts.

When you plan to perform maintenance tasks on the hosts—such as installing patches, rebooting hosts, and so on—it is recommended to reserve these hosts in timeslots. This way, you can be sure that they are available for maintenance. For details, see How to Reserve Timeslots.

The test runs from all the Lab Management in the system can be viewed and managed in the Test Runs module. For details, see PC Test Runs Module Window.

Before you can install application patches on Performance Center Servers and hosts, you must upload the patches to the system. For details, see How to Upload Patches to ALM.

You manage Performance Center Servers in Lab Management from the PC Servers module. For details, see How to Manage Performance Center Servers.

Integrating diagnostics modules with ALM enables monitoring and analysis of the performance of complex applications under test. For details on setting up the diagnostics modules, see Diagnostics Management.

You track and maintain the health of the system from the System Health module. For details, see System Health Overview.

You use the System Identity Utility, installed on the Performance Center Server, to change the Performance Center system user on the Performance Center Server and hosts. For details, see the Performance Center documentation.

You use the System Identity Utility, installed on the Performance Center Server, to update the Communication Security passphrase on the Performance Center Server and hosts. For details, see the Performance Center documentation.

Initially, you define secure communication settings on each Performance Center host or standalone load generator using the Host Security Setup utility, installed locally on each host or load generator. For details, see the Performance Center documentation.

To update these settings on all the hosts and load generators simultaneously, you can use the Host Security Manager, installed on the Performance Center Server. For details, see the Performance Center documentation.

You manage general Performance Center settings in Lab Management. On the masthead, click and select Performance Center General Settings. For user interface details, see Performance Center General Settings Dialog Box.