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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
In the modern IT world, the criticality of managing the health, efficiency, and compliance of virtualized environments is more important than ever. With vRealize Operations Manager 6.6, you can make a difference to your business by being reactive rather than proactive.
Mastering vRealize Operations Manager helps you streamline your processes and customize the environment to suit your needs. You will gain visibility across all devices in the network and retain full control. With easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions and support images, you will quickly master the ability to manipulate your data and display it in a way that best suits you and your business or technical requirements.
This book not only covers designing, installing, and upgrading vRealize Operations 6.6, but also gives you a deep understanding of its building blocks: badges, alerts, super metrics, views, dashboards, management packs, and plugins. With the new vRealize Operations 6.6 troubleshooting capabilities, capacity planning, intelligent workload placement, and additional monitoring capabilities, this book is aimed at ensuring you get the knowledge to manage your virtualized environment as effectively as possible.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Analyze and optimize your IT environment by gaining a practical understanding of vRealize Operations 6.6
Mastering vRealize Operations Manager Second Edition
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Commissioning Editor: Vijin BorichaAcquisition Editor: Heramb BhavsarContent Development Editor: Sharon RajTechnical Editor: Prashant ChaudhariCopy Editor: Safis EditingProject Coordinator: Virginia DiasProofreader: Safis EditingIndexer: Priyanka DhadkeGraphics: Tom ScariaProduction Coordinator: Nilesh Mohite
First published: May 2015 Second edition: March 2018
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ISBN 978-1-78847-487-0
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Contributors
About the authors
Spas Kaloferov has been a technology professional since 2004 and holds over 30 industry certifications. His experience is focused around the Microsoft and VMware portfolios. He studied in Germany and now lives in Sofia, Bulgaria. Spas joined the VMware family in 2014, and he is currently part of a team delivering high-level training across the VMware Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) product stack.
Scott Norris has 12 years of professional IT experience. Currently, he works for VMware as a Consulting Architect. Scott specializes in multiple VMware technologies, such as ESXi, vCenter, vRA 6 and 7, vCD, vCOps (vROps ), vRO, SRM, and Application Services. He is a VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX-DCA and VCDX-CMA #201).
For the past 10 years, Scott has worked on VMware products and technologies, supporting small environments from a single server to large federal government environments with hundreds of hosts.
Christopher Slater is a VMware Principal Solutions Architect and a member of the Office of the CTO - Global Field. He specializes in designing and implementing VMware technologies for the Software-Defined Data Center. His technical experience includes design, development and implementation of virtual infrastructure, Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and DevOps solutions.
Chris also holds a double VCDX in Virtualization and Cloud Management and Automation. He is also the co-author of Mastering vRealize Operations Manager 6 by Packt Publishing.
About the reviewer
Mathias Meyenburg is an accomplished business unit manager, solution architect, and senior consultant with more than 15 years of experience in the IT industry.
From a system administrator to large-scale data center operations and administration, his career has evolved through constantly updating and expanding his know-how as well as acquiring advancing certifications, CCNA, MCP, and VCP to name a few.
In 2016, he was recruited by vleet GmbH as a solution architect and senior consultant for server and desktop virtualization specializing in vSphere, vROPS, NSX, and vSAN.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Mastering vRealize Operations Manager Second Edition
Packt Upsell
Why subscribe?
PacktPub.com
Contributors
About the authors
About the reviewer
Packt is searching for authors like you
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Download the color images
Conventions used
Get in touch
Reviews
Going Ahead with vRealize Operations
ROI with vRealize Operations
What can vRealize Operations do?
vRealize Operations key component architecture
The Watchdog service
The user interface
The Collector
The GemFire
The GemFire locator
The Controller
Analytics
Persistence
Cassandra DB
Central (repl) DB
Alerts /HIS (Data) DB
HSQL DB
FSDB
vRealize Operations node types
The master and master replica nodes
The data node
The remote collector node
Multi-node deployment, HA, and scalability
GemFire clustering
GemFire sharding
Adding, removing, and balancing nodes
High Availability in vRealize Operations 6.6
How does HA and data duplication work?
Summary
Which vRealize Operations Deployment Model Fits Your Needs
Design considerations
To HA or not to HA?
Do I need remote collectors and collector groups?
Does size matter?
What about the number of users?
Deployment examples
Seems too complex? Need help?
Summary
Initial Setup and Configuration
Meeting the requirements
Sizing requirements
Networking requirements
Installation steps, formats, and types
Installation steps
Installation formats
Installation types
Installation and upgrade
Installing a new vRealize Operations instance
Deploying the vRealize Operations virtual appliance
Configuring a new vRealize Operations instance
Expanding the existing installation
Adding a node to the vRealize Operations cluster
Enabling High Availability
Enabling HA
Finalizing the new installation
Configuring user access control
Configuring your first solution
Upgrading vRealize Operations
Upgrading from vRealize Operations 6.2.x or later
Summary
Extending vRealize Operations with Management Packs and Plugins
Collecting additional data
Defining a vRealize Operations solution
Overview of popular solutions
Service Discovery solution
Log Insight solution
vSphere NSX solution
Storage Devices solution
vCloud Air solution
Installing solutions
Importing data with a REST API
Summary
Badges
What are vRealize Operations badges?
Understanding the Health badge
The Workload badge
The Anomalies badge
The Fault badge
The Health badge summary
Understanding the Risk badge
The Capacity Remaining badge
The Time Remaining badge
The Stress badge
The Compliance badge
The Risk badge summary
Understanding the Efficiency badge
The Reclaimable Capacity badge
Idle VMs
Powered off Virtual Machines
Oversized virtual machines
The Density badge
The Efficiency badge summary
Summary
Getting a Handle on Alerting and Notifications
What are symptoms, recommendations, and actions?
What are symptoms?
What are alerts?
What are recommendations?
What are actions?
Creating symptoms, recommendations, and alerts
Creating symptoms
Creating recommendations
Creating alerts
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
What are policies?
Alert notifications
Configuring alert notifications
Pushing alerts into your ITSM solution
Using REST
Using Webhooks
Using ITSM plugins
Summary
Capacity Management Made Easy
Resource capacity
Overview and concepts
Resource capacity models
Allocation-based and demand-based models
Memory consumed model
Preparing for capacity planning
Monitoring capacity
Capacity management for vRealize Operations policies
Defining the correct capacity management policies for your environment
Resource containers
Scenario 1 – CPU and memory-enabled only
Scenario 2 - CPU, memory, disk I/O, and disk space enabled only
Observed versus configured metrics
Policy recommendations for containers
Demand versus allocation
Demand and allocation calculations and recommendations
CPU demand
CPU allocation
Memory demand
Memory allocation
Setting overcommitment
CPU overcommitment
Memory overcommitment
Disk space overcommitment
Accounting for peaks
High Availability and buffers (usable capacity)
High Availability
Buffers
Projects
Improvements to demand or capacity trending
Pipeline management
Planned versus committed projects
Custom Datacenter
Creating a Custom Datacenter
Profiles
Creating custom profiles
Summary
Aligning vRealize Operations with Business Outcomes
What is business-oriented reporting?
Tags, application groups, and custom groups
Using tags
Using application groups
Using custom groups and types
Putting it all together
Summary
Super Metrics Made Super Easy
What are super metrics and when do I use them?
What's new with super metrics?
Metric terminology and definitions
Objects
Metrics
Attribute types
Super metric types
Rollup
Generic resource
Specific resource/pass-through
Building your own super metrics
Defining a new super metric
Validating the new super metric
Associating super metrics with objects
Using operators in super metrics
Comparing super metrics to views
Views
Super metrics
Summary
Creating Custom Views
What's new in views and reports in vRealize Operations 6.6?
Views in vRealize Operations
Defining and building views
Name and description
View types (presentation)
List
List summary
Trend
Distribution
Text and images
Subjects
Data
Visibility
Availability
Further Analysis
Blacklist
Deleting a view
Reports in vRealize Operations
Creating reports
Scheduling reports
Summary
Creating Custom Dashboards
About dashboards
Designing dashboards
Widgets
Types of widgets
Widget configuration options
Creating custom dashboards
Creating an interactive dashboard
The Object List
The Metric Picker
The Heatmap
The Scoreboard
Metric Configuration Files (XML)
Summary
Using vRealize Operations to Monitor Applications
What is Endpoint Operations Management?
What is new in vRealize Operations 6.6?
Endpoint Operations Management key components
Managing the Endpoint Operations Management Agent
Installing the Agent
Manually installing the Agent on a Linux Endpoint
Manually installing the agent on a Windows Endpoint
Automated agent installation using vRealize Automation
Reinstalling the agent
Reinstalling the agent on a Linux Endpoint
Reinstalling the Agent on a Windows Endpoint
Viewing and collecting metrics
Other Endpoint Operations Management monitoring functionalities
Adding monitoring objects
Using remote check
Using multiprocess
Summary
Leveraging vRealize Operations for vSphere and vRealize Automation Workload Placement
What is Intelligent Workload Placement?
The Workload Balance dashboard
Rebalancing workloads with vRealize Operations and DRS
Creating a custom data center
Setting DRS automation
Rebalancing clusters
Automated rebalancing
Scheduling a rebalance action
Using rebalance alerts
Predictive DRS with vRealize Operations
vRealize Automation Workload Placement with vRealize Operations
Integrating vRealize Automation with vRealize Operations
Summary
Using vRealize Operations for Infrastructure Compliance
Integrated compliance
The compliance badge
vSphere Hardening compliance
Enabling vSphere hardening compliance
Monitoring compliance
Compliance Alerts
The Getting Started dashboard
PCI and HIPAA compliance
Enabling the HIPAA compliance pack
Summary
Troubleshooting vRealize Operations
Self-monitoring dashboards
Troubleshooting vRealize Operations components
Services
The Apache2 service
The Watchdog service
The Collector service
The Controller service
Databases
Cassandra DB
Central (Repl DB)
Alerts/HIS (Data) DB
FSDB
Platform-cli
Summary
Other Books You May Enjoy
Leave a review - let other readers know what you think
Preface
When I was initially approached to write this book, the first and most obvious question was why should I do this? However, upon reflection, I thought of my personal experiences with the product and considered the real-world difference it made during times where we needed to troubleshoot performance problems or report on capacity trends. We also considered those customers with whom we had either demonstrated or run knowledge transfer sessions of vRealize Operations, and how only after a few hours, the energy in the room changed as people begin to grasp the power and concept of how vRealize Operations can benefit them on a daily basis.
The second reason is based on the observation that in some environments that had the product deployed, many of the concepts, terminology, and settings were not well-understood. As a result, customers were not getting the maximum value from their investment simply because they weren't familiar enough with the product. The product has extensive and great documentation; however, most product documentation is generally very thin on the why; such as, why should I enable some containers for capacity management and not others? Through this book, I attempt to fill this gap and hopefully show the positive impact this product can bring to an environment.
Who this book is for
Mastering vRealize Operations aims to help readers gain a deep understanding of VMware vRealize Operations and learn how to apply the product to everyday operations management use cases in the best way. This book aims to move beyond the standard product documentation and explain both why and how vRealize Operations should be deployed, configured, and used in your own environment.
Although this book is aimed at mastering vRealize Operations, expert knowledge of vRealize Operations is not a required. The various chapters vary in the requirement of skill level and expertise, as well as in the useful theory versus practical step-by-step content. We expect this book to be useful for the following people:
Systems administrators responsible for the day-to-day smooth running of a virtualized enterprise IT environment
Infrastructure architects and engineers responsible for designing and building solutions that improve the reliability and maintainability of virtualized environments
Current-day customers who want to know how to get the most out of vRealize Operations, such as what the badges actually mean and how capacity management policies should be configured for a typical production environment
Anyone who is keen to know more about vRealize Operations for specific reference look-ups, from badges to capacity planning and the new API
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Going Ahead with vRealize Operations, begins by taking you through the key vRealize Operations 6.6 components architecture. We will cover some of the main services and databases and their purposes. We will then discuss the different vRealize Operations node types. We will also discuss what High Availability is and how it works in vRealize Operations 6.6.
Chapter 2, Which vRealize Operations Deployment Model Fits Your Needs, discusses how things such as High Availability, Remote Collectors and Remote Collector Groups, number of users, and deployment size can affect how we design a vRealize Operations deployment. Finally, we will take a look at the most popular deployment examples.
Chapter 3, Initial Setup and Configuration, takes you through all the steps of installing, expanding, and upgrading an existing installation of vRealize Operations.
Chapter 4, Extending vRealize Operations with Management Packs and Plugins, discusses what a vRealize Operations solution is. We will also take a look at some of the most popular solutions and how to install them. Finally, we will talk about how we can import data into vRealize Operations using a REST API.
Chapter 5, Badges, describes what vRealize Operations badges are, what they represent, and how they are calculated.
Chapter 6, Getting a Handle on Alerting and Notifications, talks about vRealize Operations Symptoms, Recommendations, and Actions, and how to create them. We will also discuss what Alert notifications are and how we can push Alerts to external systems.
Chapter 7, Capacity Management Made Easy, explains the different resource capacity models that we can use in vRealize Operations. We will also discuss what capacity management policies are and how to correctly define them.
Chapter 8, Aligning vRealize Operations with Business Outcomes, discusses what Business-Oriented Reporting is. We will also look at how this can be achieved in vRealize Operations using Tags, Application Groups, and Custom Object Groups.
Chapter 9, Super Metrics Made Super Easy, describes what vRealize Operations Super Metrics are. We will look at different metric types, terminology, and definitions. Finally, we will build our own Super Metrics and compare them to Views.
Chapter 10, Creating Custom Views, explains what vRealize Operations Views and Reports are and how to create and use them.
Chapter 11, Creating Custom Dashboards, discusses what vRealize Operations Dashboards and Widgets are and how to use them together to display information. We will create our own custom dashboards using some of the most popular widgets.
Chapter 12, Using vRealize Operations to Monitor Applications, shows what Endpoint Operations Management is, what the Endpoint Operations Management Agent is used for, and how to install and reinstall it. Finally, we will take a look at some of the monitoring functionalities the Agent provides.
Chapter 13, Leveraging vRealize Operations for vSphere and vRealize Automation Workload Placement, discusses what vRealize Operations Intelligent Workload Placement is and how we can use vRealize Operations to rebalance workloads in our environment. We will also look at how Intelligent Workload Placement can be used to optimize vRealize Automation workload placement.
Chapter 14, Using vRealize Operations for Infrastructure Compliance, explains how we can use vRealize Operations to monitor configuration compliance in our environment to comply with industry-standard compliance standards such as PCI and HIPAA.
Chapter 15, Troubleshooting vRealize Operations, discusses how we can use vRealize Operations for troubleshooting. In particular, we will take a look at the Self-Monitoring Dashboards, which come out of the box. We will then discuss some of the key vRealize Operations components and how to troubleshoot them.
To get the most out of this book
To get the most out of Mastering vRealize Operations Manager, you should have a basic understanding of X86 virtualization, network, storage, VMware vSphere, and of course, vRealize Operations (or its previous version, vCenter Operations Manager). Although vRealize Operations 6.6 is no longer as vSphere-centric as its previous versions, most of the examples and the step-by-step guides in this book are based on vSphere objects and concepts.
A useful way to reinforce the content in this book is to follow some of the step-by-step guides and theory in your own vRealize Operations environment, be it either at work or in your own lab. For those without access to either, or wanting access to a structured practical lab component, we highly recommend that they check out the VMware Hands-on Labs (HOL) at labs.hol.vmware.com. The catalogs are updated often and always contain at least a few comprehensive labs on vRealize Operations with step-by-step online instructions.
Download the color images
We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it from https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/MasteringvRealizeOperationsManagerSecondEdition_ColorImages.pdf.
Conventions used
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Remote collector nodes only communicate over GemFire using ports 10000-10010"
A block of code is set as follows:
{ "description" : " My REST imported recommendation (USR)", "others" : [ ], "otherAttributes" : { }}
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
${this, metric=sys|osUptime_latest}<=300)
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Once all the correct information is entered, click on Finish, and the OVA Template will now deploy the first vRealize Operations node."
Get in touch
Feedback from our readers is always welcome.
General feedback: Email [email protected] and mention the book title in the subject of your message. If you have questions about any aspect of this book, please email us at [email protected].
Errata: Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you have found a mistake in this book, we would be grateful if you would report this to us. Please visit www.packtpub.com/submit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the Errata Submission Form link, and entering the details.
Piracy: If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the Internet, we would be grateful if you would provide us with the location address or website name. Please contact us at [email protected] with a link to the material.
If you are interested in becoming an author: If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, please visit authors.packtpub.com.
Reviews
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For more information about Packt, please visit packtpub.com.
Going Ahead with vRealize Operations
vRealize Operations Manager 6.6 is a solution from VMware to help customers monitor, troubleshoot, and manage the health, capacity, and compliance of their virtual environment.
Throughout this book, I may occasionally refer to vRealize Operations as vROps. vROps is not an official VMware acronym or name for the vRealize Operations product.
The vRealize Operations 6.6 release offers a combined experience with VMware vRealize Business for Cloud and VMware vRealize Log Insight, delivering a complete intelligent operations solution that is designed to help customers plan, manage, and scale their Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC)and multi-cloud environments to meet business needs.
As we said, vRealize Operations is, first of all, a monitoring solution. But what does monitoring mean? In a traditional sense, monitoring can be defined as observing the current, real-time behavior of any system to make sure that it runs as expected, or well within the defined boundaries. It helps answer questions that are faced by IT on a day-to-day basis. Be it the IT or cloud administrators who manage the IT systems and infrastructure, the application owners monitoring their critical application stacks, or the executives who are responsible for making strategic decisions around capacity and growth, the latest release of vRealize Operations caters to all the personas with multiple use cases out of the box. For future reference, in this book, we will combine all of these personas, or anybody else using vRealize Operations, under the name virtual infrastructure admins, or vAdmins.
By that definition, vRealize Operations is not a monitoring solution. It does not monitor and gather data in real time as, for example, a typical performance monitoring tool would gather real-time resource (CPU, memory, disk I/O, and so on) utilization information from a system. Although we may refer to it as a monitoring solution throughout the book, make sure to differentiate it from a typical real-time monitoring solution. vRealize Operations is more of a historical analytics and forensics tool that uses predictive analytics and dynamic thresholding to show vAdmins not only what is currently (again, not actual real time, as we will see later in the book) wrong in their environment, but what will go wrong in the future.
Moreover, the predictive analysis engine feature also allows vAdmins to run capacity plans on their environments, ensuring that there are always enough resources to run mission-critical workloads without stress. VMware provides out-of-the-box dashboards and reports to quickly view key predictive analysis features, as well as health and performance metrics.
vRealize Operations is a great tool for vAdmins to gather historical analytics and forensics data from their VMware environments, and do predictive analytics based on that data. But its greatness doesn’t stop there. The need for vAdmins to be able to gain visibility into other environments and applications gave birth to the vRealize Operations adapters and management packs to enable communication to those monitored endpoints.
Some of these management packs further extend the monitoring capabilities of vRealize Operations into the VMware product ecosystem.
For example, the Management Pack™ for vRealize Automation™ extends the operational management capabilities of the vRealize Operations platform to provide tenant-aware operational visibility of the infrastructure supporting private clouds to cloud provider administrators.
With the vRealize Operations Management Pack for vSAN™ installed, you can make vSAN operational in a production environment. You use dashboards provided with the solution to evaluate, manage, and optimize the performance of vSAN objects and vSAN-enabled objects in your vCenter Server system.
Other management packs extend into third-party products and hardware vendors.
The Oracle Enterprise Manager Management Pack for vRealize Operations allows the VMware admin to see Oracle metrics side by side with the VMware metrics, allowing for quick diagnosis of the root problem.
There are a number of management packs available to the vAdmin to help gain this visibility, and ensure there are no hardware failures of the underlying hardware infrastructure. These management packs range from EMC and Trend Micro to Dell, NetApp (from Blue Medora ), and Hewlett-Packard.
A compatibility guide and a list of recent updates in the management packs can be found at https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/pdf/vi_vrops_guide.pdf.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
Return on investment
(
ROI
) with vRealize Operations
What vRealize Operations can do
Key component architecture
Node types and their purpose
High availability
(
HA
) and scalability
ROI with vRealize Operations
There is a lot of promise in the Internet of Things (IoT) as a means to create business value, but there is also a lot of hype. In fact, an unclear business benefit is one of the top barriers to IoT efforts overall.
Why do we make business investments?
The short answer is, we make business investments because, after all, this is the cost of doing business. This is the cost you have to pay to be able to stay in business.
How do we stay in business?
By making smart decisions guided by intelligent and reliable information. The main drivers that affect the ability to stay in business are the following:
Reducing costs
Improving price-to-performance ratios
Lowering risk, or in other words, increasing the change to avoid failures that can lead to catastrophic costs for the business
As IT leaders continue to struggle with translating value into business terms, they need a simple language with relevant and reliable metrics to not only be able to stay in business, but also to grow the business by increasing business revenue growth and enhancing products, services, and experiences for customers. And for those who are looking for new market and product horizons, this will help you transform your business and stay competitive, or even become a market leader.
What tools do we need to stay in business?
In the IT world, it really helps to achieve those business goals by helping out your IT by giving the infrastructure and application teams the tools that will enable them to perform:
Application-aware monitoring
: Accelerate time to value, and troubleshoot smarter with native integrations, unified visibility from applications to infrastructure health, and actionable insights combining metrics and logs.
Automated and proactive workload management
: Simplify and streamline operations with the fully automated management of infrastructure and applications performance, while retaining full control. Automatically balance workloads, avoid contention and enable proactive detection and automatic remediation of issues and anomalies before end users are impacted.
Capacity planning and optimization
: Optimize cost and resource usage through capacity management, reclamation, and right-sizing, improve planning and forecasting, and enforce IT and configuration standards.
The VMware vRealize Operations product portfolio provides the necessary functionality to satisfy the above use cases. It delivers a complete intelligent operations solution that is designed to help customers plan, manage, and scale their SDDC and multi-cloud environments to meet business needs.
VMware commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study, and examine the potential ROI enterprises may realize when deploying intelligent operations solution. Working with four VMware customers, Forrester identified and quantified the key benefits of investing in this intelligent operations solution, including the following:
A 20% improvement in operational efficiency
Over 10% savings in hardware costs
A 75% reduction in unplanned downtime
The TEI study demonstrates quantifiable ROI of 119%, a payback period of 3 months, and $1.4M NPV over 3 years.
If you would like to estimate the potential 3-year cost savings and benefits of deploying and using the tools included in this intelligent operations solution, use the vRealize Intelligent Operations Estimator Tool at https://tools.totaleconomicimpact.com/go/vmware/vrops/.
What can vRealize Operations do?
vRealize Operations collects data from objects in your environment. Each piece of data collected is called a metric observation, or value. Metrics can be grouped together in a vRealize Operations view.
Views are resource-type-specific, self-contained, reusable displays of information.
You have to define the resource type (or types) that you want to use as the "subjects" for the view. This is necessary so that you can select metrics that are specific to a resource type.
A view configuration is entirely independent of other views or settings. A view will display exactly the same everywhere it is used.
Due to their self-contained nature, and thanks to extensive integration points provided throughout vRealize Operations, views can be reused extensively. You can create valuable vRealize Operations views, and reuse them for every table or chart.
You can configure views to show transformation, trend, and forecast calculations:
The transformation type determines how the values are aggregated.
The trend option shows how the values tend to change, based on the historical raw data. The trend calculations depend on the transformation type and roll-up interval.
The forecast option shows what the future values can be, based on the trend calculations of the historical data.
vRealize Operations provides several types of views. Each type of view helps you to interpret metrics, properties, policies of various monitored objects including alerts, symptoms, and so on, from a different perspective.
Views can be added to dashboards via the view widget. Dashboards present a visual overview of the performance and state of objects in your virtual infrastructure. You use dashboards to determine the nature and time frame of existing and potential issues with your environment.
Views are also the building blocks for reports. A report captures details related to current or predicted resource needs.
Used separately, or in reports, or dashboards, views can increase ROI in multiple ways.
Standalone views let you package up multiple key performance metrics into one view, removing the repetitive task of digging through metric menus. They are available for both parent and children resources, enabling you to quickly get key information for resources up and down the stack.
When used in reports, views increase your vRealize Operations ROI by combining vital configuration and performance information across your stack in a simple and reusable package. Report execution and delivery can also be automated, saving you even more time!
When used in dashboards, views allow you to define your resource KPIs in one place (the view), then reuse it elsewhere (reports and dashboards).
vRealize Operations has come a long way in recent years, but the more interesting and exciting features have come in the latest releases of the product. Here is a short overview of the new and enhanced features in the latest release of vRealize Operations, 6.6.
vRealize Operations offers simplified usability and faster time-to-value capabilities, as follows:
A new HTML5 user interface provides an easier and consistent experience. The new UI is clarity-based, which is a standard used by all the products of VMware. This allows you to seamlessly go from one area of the solution to another, whether it is metrics, logs, or cost, without learning the menus or impacting your user experience.
Consolidation and simpler grouping of menus, leading to the enhanced user experience.
The
Getting Started
dashboard allows for quick navigation.
Persona-based dashboards provide answers in one place. Dashboards are separated into categories such as
Operations
,
Capacity
and Utilization
,
Performance Troubleshooting
,
Workload Balance
, and
Configuration and Compliance
.
Out-of-the-box integration with vSAN, vRealize Log Insight, vRealize Business for Cloud, and vRealize Automation provides quick time to value:
It is optimized for SDDC management:
Native vSAN management capabilities allow for centralized management across vSAN stretched clusters
Ability for complete vSAN management, which includes administering performance, capacity, logs, and configuration and health
Deploy vSAN with confidence with complete visibility down to disk level
Operationalize vSAN with performance and capacity monitoring, including deduplication and compression benefits:
The Service Discovery Management Pack discovers all the services running in each VM and then builds a relationship or dependencies between services from different VMs, based on the network communication. The management pack can create dynamic applications based on the network communication between the services:
It has intelligent workload placement featuring fully automated workload balancing:
Ensures performance across data centers with fully automated workload balancing, across clusters and across data stores (with storage vMotion)
Ensures DRS configurations, and provides the option to set DRS automation level for individual objects
Predictive DRS takes action to pre-empt resource contention
Utilizes operations analytics to optimize initial placement of workloads through vRealize Automation:
It has log integration:
Full integration in-context within vRealize Operations for faster troubleshooting:
Direct launch of the
Log Insight
dashboard
Direct launch into
Log Insight Interactive Analytics
mode
Object auto-initiated log management
vRealize Operations alerts auto-initiated log management:
It enables cost management:
Optimize public cloud spending with more visibility:
Cost visibility
: Costing analysis for all services on AWS and Azure
Usage visibility
: VM level usage visibility into public clouds
Enhanced planning by correlating capacity and costs:
Fine-grained cost analysis for private cloud
Makes capacity optimization quantifiable
Procurement planning
It has the following additional out-of-the-box compliance and hardening capabilities:
Ability to tackle compliance problems through the new vSphere hardening dashboard
Extends compliance through PCI and HIPAA compliance for vSphere
Ensures business configurations through new cluster, host, and VM configuration dashboards:
It has sizing and scalability enhancements:
You can now scale to six extra large nodes in a cluster, which can support up to 180,000 objects, and 45 million metrics
You can now monitor up to 60 vCenter servers with a single instance of vRealize Operations
A large remote Collector can support up to 15,000 objects
vRealize Operations key component architecture
In vRealize Operations 6.0, a new platform design was introduced to meet some of the required goals that VMware envisaged for the product. These included the following:
The ability to treat all solutions equally, and to be able to offer management of performance, capacity, configuration, and compliance to both VMware and third-party solutions
Provide a single platform that can scale to tens of thousands of objects and millions of metrics by scaling out with little reconfiguration or redesign required
Support a monitoring solution that can be highly available, and support the loss of a node without impacting the ability to store or query information
With that new common platform, the design came a completely new architecture.
The following diagram shows the major components of the vRealize Operations 6.6 architecture:
The components of the vRealize Operations 6.6 architecture are as follows:
Watchdog
The user interface
Collector
GemFire
GemFire Locator
Controller
Analytics
Persistence
The Watchdog service
Watchdog is a vRealize Operations service that maintains the necessary daemons/services and attempts to restart them as necessary should there be a failure. The vcops-watchdog is a Python script that runs every five minutes by means of the cops-watchdog-daemon with the purpose of monitoring the various vRealize Operations services, including the Cluster and Slice Administrator (CaSA).
The Watchdog service performs the following checks:
PID file of the service
Service status
The user interface
In vRealize Operations 6.6, the UI is broken into two components the Product UI, and the Admin UI. The Product UI is present on all nodes, with the exception of nodes that are deployed as remote collectors.
The Admin UI is a web application hosted by Pivotal tc Server (Java application Apache web server), and is responsible for making HTTP REST calls to the admin API for node administration tasks. The CaSA is responsible for cluster administrative actions, such as the following:
Enabling/disabling the vRealize Operations cluster
Enabling/disabling cluster nodes
Performing software updates
Browsing log files
The Admin UI is purposely designed to be separate from the Product UI and to always be available for administration and troubleshooting-type tasks. A small database caches data from the Product UI that provides the last known state information to the Admin UI in the event that the Product UI and analytics are unavailable.
The Product UI is the main vRealize Operations graphical user interface. Like the Admin UI, the Product UI is based on Pivotal tc Server, and can make HTTP REST calls to the CaSA for administrative tasks; however, the primary purpose of the Product UI is to make GemFire calls to the Controller API to access data and create views, such as dashboards and reports.
The Apache2 HTTPD also provides the backend platform for another Tomcat instances. The Suite API is a public-facing API that can be used for automating/scripting common tasks. It is also used internally by vRealize Operations for carrying out numerous administrative tasks. The End Point Operations Management Adapter, HTTP Post Adapter, and Telemetry are also run by this Tomcat instance.
As shown in the following diagram, the Product UI is simply accessed via HTTPS on TCP 443. Apache then provides a reverse proxy back to the Product UI running in tc Server using the Apache APJ protocol:
The Collector
The Collector process is responsible for pulling in inventory and metric data from the configured sources. As shown in the following diagram, the Collector uses adapters to collect data from various sources, and then contacts the GemFire locator for connection information to one or more Controller cache servers. The Collector service then connects to one or more Controller API GemFire cache servers, and sends the collected data.
It is important to note that although an instance of an adapter can only be running on one node at a time, it does not imply that the collected data is being sent to the Controller on that node.
The Collector will send a heartbeat to the Controller every 30 seconds. This is sent via the HeartbeatThread thread process running on the Collector. It has a maximum of 25 data collection threads. Vice versa, the Controller node, vice versa, runs a HeartbeatServer thread process which processes heartbeats from Collectors. The CollectorStatusChecker thread process is a DistributedTask which uses data from HeartbeatServers to decides whether the Collector is up or down.
By default, the Collector will wait for 30 minutes for adapters to synchronize.
The vSphere adapter provides the Collector process with the configuration information needed to pull in vCenter inventory and metric data. It consists of configuration files and a JAR file. A separate adapter instance is configured for each vCenter Server.
The Python adapter provides the Collector process with the configuration information needed to send remediation commands back to a vCenter Server (power on/off VM, vMotion VM, reconfigure VM, and so on).
The End Point OperationsManagement adapter is installed and listening by default on each vRealize Operations node. To receive data from operating systems, the agent must be installed and configured on each guest OS to be monitored.
The Horizon adapter provides the Collector process with the configuration information needed to pull in the Horizon View inventory and metric data. A separate adapter instance is configured for each Horizon View pod, and only one adapter instance is supported per vRealize Operations node with a limit of 10,000 Horizon objects:
The GemFire
VMware vFabric® GemFire® is an in-memory, low-latency data grid, running in the same JVM as the Controller and Analytics, that scales as needed when nodes are added to the cluster. It allows the caching, processing, and retrieval of metrics, and is functionally dependent on the GemFire Locator.
The GemFire locator
The vFabric GemFire locator runs on the master and master replica nodes. The data nodes and remote Collectors run GemFire as a client process.
The Controller
The Controller is a sub-process of the Analytics process, and is responsible for coordinating activity between the cluster members. It manages the storage and retrieval of the inventory of objects within the system. The queries are performed leveraging the GemFire MapReduce function that allows for selective querying. This allows for efficient data querying, as data queries are only performed on select nodes rather than all nodes.
The Controller will monitor the Collector status every minute. It also monitors how long a deleted resource is available in the inventory, and how long a non-existing resource is stored in the database.
Analytics
Analytics is the heart of vRealize Operations, as it is essentially the runtime layer for data analysis. The role of the Analytics process is to track the individual states of every metric, and then use various forms of correlation to determine if there are problems.
At a high level, the Analytics layer is responsible for the following tasks:
Metric calculations
Dynamic thresholds
Alerts and alarms
Metric storage and retrieval from the Persistence layer
Root cause analysis
Historic Inventory Server
(
HIS
) version metadata calculations and relationship data
Analytics components work with the new GemFire-based cache, Controller, and Persistence layers. The Analytics process is also responsible for generating SMTP and SNMP alerts on the master and master-replica nodes.
