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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
This book will enable you to deliver on the operational disciplines of Performance, Health, Capacity, Configuration, and Compliance by making the best use of solutions provided by vRealize Operations. Starting with architecture, design, and sizing, we will ensure your implementation of vRealize Operations is a success.
We will dive into the utilization of a solution to manage your vSphere infrastructure.
Then, we will employ out-of-the-box Dashboards and the very powerful Views and Reporting functionality of vRealize Operations to create your custom dashboards and address your reporting requirements.
Next, we go through the Alerting framework and how Symptoms, Recommendations, and Actions are used to achieve efficient operations. Later you will master the topic of Capacity Planning, where we look at how important it is to craft appropriate policies to match your requirements, and we’ll consider attitude toward capacity risk, which will aid you to build future project requirements into your capacity plans.
Finally, we will look at extending the solution to manage Storage, Applications, and other IT infrastructures using Management Packs from Solution Exchange, as well as how the solution can be enhanced with the integration of Log Insight.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Table of Contents
VMware vRealize Operations Essentials
VMware vRealize Operations Essentials
Copyright © 2015 Packt Publishing
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First published: December 2015
Production reference: 1211215
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Credits
Author
Matthew Steiner
Reviewers
James Bowling
Rebecca Fitzhugh
Brian Ragazzi
Commissioning Editor
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Content Development Editor
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Cover Work
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Foreword
Automators – the future kingmakers
Scale.
The future is always about scale—bigger, faster, and stronger.
As we sit here in a time when, once again, both application and infrastructure architectures are shifting, a trend emerges, and this time it is automation. IT has always been about building bigger; something I continually talk to customers about is how they need to look backwards to look forwards. Look at what you were doing 5 years ago in IT; it is very different from now. Now, you are doing more: managing more machines, supporting more applications, embracing more technologies, developing more business models, and simply put—more. Look 5 years ahead from now and there is even more.
However, you only have one pair of hands. So the answer is automation. Each growth phase in architecture drives you to abstract yourself up one layer and find ways of simplifying to stay ahead. Skills that used to be valuable, such as racking servers and plugging them in (where I started!), become commoditized. Now, building and managing individual VMs is also becoming an activity that is undifferentiated as architectures move to microservices and scale-out decoupled layers instead of the classic tightly coupled stacks.
The future kingmakers are those who can build those layers, automate them to within an inch of their lives and communicate through APIs.
The future belongs to those that can say to applications' teams, "I've got an API for that."
As someone who has picked up this book, you have already realized that, and are taking the right steps and are building your own future.
Enjoy.
Joe Baguley
VP & Chief Technology Officer
VMware EMEA
About the Author
Matthew Steiner is an experienced presales consultant with a career stretching back over 25 years in the IT industry, the last 16 years of which have been spent providing presales support for technology vendors.
He started his career as a PC engineer in the North East of England and then spent 7 years providing technical support and working on IT projects for The Royal Bank of Scotland.
In 2000, he moved into presales, first with Compaq and then HP and IBM, working with both x86 and UNIX architectures before moving into the software industry with VMware. He is currently a Lead Systems Engineer (SE) at VMware and has spent the last 3 years as a Cloud Management Platform Specialist SE. His focus is on vRealize Operations for which he is the presales lead in the UK.
Apart from the 'day job', providing technical sales support, Matthew is a regular contributor and speaker at events and conferences such as VMworld and local VMware User Groups (VMUGs), and is VMware's technical sponsor for the Scottish VMUG.
This is Matthew's first book, although he has also authored two Hands on Labs for VMware as well as white papers and other training materials throughout his career. He also maintains a blog at SEinTheCloud.wordpress.com, where he writes about his experiences as a presales consultant and the technologies he is working with.
Thank you to Jayne for putting up with me spending many evenings and weekends writing, and thank you to our cats, Lizzie and Smithy, for distracting me at times and standing on my keyboard!
Also, thank you to all my colleagues who helped me with ideas and support, particularly Peter Von Oven, who initially inspired me to write, and has mentored me through the process. Thanks also to the VMware OneCloud and Hands on Labs teams, without those environments I could not have written this book.
About the Reviewers
Rebecca Fitzhugh is an independent VMware consultant and VMware Certified Instructor whose primary focus is on architecting vSphere, vRealize, and Horizon infrastructures. She is a VMware vExpert and has obtained multiple levels of certification (VCP/VCAP), acquiring nearly 10 years of experience. Prior to becoming an instructor and consultant, Rebecca served 5 years in the United States Marine Corps where she assisted in the build-out and administration of multiple enterprise networks residing on virtual infrastructure. Her book, vSphere Virtual Machine Management, was published by Packt Publishing. You can follow her on Twitter at @rebeccafitzhugh.
Brian Ragazzi has been in the IT industry for more than 15 years, with experience of a wide variety of hardware, application delivery, data center virtualization, application development, cloud advisory services, and software engineering. He holds several certifications from Citrix, EMC, Microsoft, and VMware.
Brian has reviewed and contributed to VMware vRealize Orchestrator Cookbook as well as numerous white papers and solution guides.
He is a Cloud Solutions Consulting engineer at EMC, currently working with the EMC Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution, and specializes in Software Defined Data Center, IT automation, and day-2 operations.
Brian can be found online at http://brianragazzi.com or on Twitter @BrianPRagazzi.
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Preface
At VMware, we often talk about our clients' experiences with our technologies as journeys that they undertake.
The original journey was all about Virtualization; people started with virtualization first in their IT Department trying this magical new technology, before using it in Testing and Development and then in Production. The final step of their journey was to virtualize everything, including the most critical applications on which their business runs.
Now we are on a new journey, this time, to the Cloud. There are many different definitions of 'Cloud', but they share some common characteristics, such as:
Regardless of whether you are operating a private, public, or a hybrid cloud, you can expect to see these characteristics in place.
The technology that delivers on these cloud promises is a Cloud Management Platform (CMP), and VMware's CMP has three elements:
This book is about the vRealize Operations part of VMware's CMP and will take you on a journey to understand how vRealize Operations can be used to deliver the operational disciplines demanded of today's cloud administrators.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Introduction to vRealize Operations Manager, introduces the reader to vRealize Operations, providing an overview of its capabilities and architecture. Packaging and licensing will also be looked at in this chapter.
Chapter 2, Install, Configure, and Administer vRealize Operations Manager, starts by describing the planning, sizing, and design steps to be undertaken before deploying vRealize Operations Manager. We then go through the process of installing and configuring the solution and look at some of the administrative tasks and requirements.
Chapter 3, Dashboards, Badges, and Widgets, goes through the various elements in the vRealize Operations UI. We will look at the badges that are integral to the dashboards and then the out-of-the-box dashboards themselves. Finally, we will look at custom dashboards and the widgets that they are composed of.
Chapter 4, Views and Reports, examines the reporting capability of vRealize Operations. First, we will look at Views, including how to use the workspace to create your own custom views. Next, we will cover how these views can be combined to create reports that can be exported for external consumption.
Chapter 5, Alerts, Symptoms, Recommendations, and Actions, looks at the alerting framework within vRealize Operations and how content is provided in the form of alerts, symptoms, recommendations, and actions. We will also see how you can create custom alerting content yourself.
Chapter 6, Capacity Planning and Capacity Projects, examines the operational discipline of capacity planning. First, we will look at the capacity models that you can adopt. Next, we will look at capacity badges and dashboards, and finally, at how you can use the Capacity Projects feature to add future workloads to your capacity plans.
Chapter 7, vRealize Operations Manager Solutions, shows how you can extend the capabilities of vRealize Operations by adding Management Packs to manage other parts of your infrastructure. We will look at what is in Management Packs and how they are installed and used. Finally in this chapter, we will look at how you can keep your vRealize Operations solution up to date.
Chapter 8, vRealize Infrastructure Navigator, looks at how you can add visibility of application dependencies to your vRealize Operations implementation. We will go through the installation and configuration of the solution, see how it integrates with vRealize Operations, and how you can group interconnected VMs together.
Chapter 9, vRealize Log Insight Integration, examines how you can add further capability by implementing and integrating vRealize Log Insight. After looking at how you size and plan its deployment, we will show you how the solution is implemented and how it can be easily extended with Content Packs. We will also look at how Log Insight agents can capture additional logs from sources such as Windows Events.
Chapter 10, End Point Operations, covers how you can manage your Operating Systems and Applications through the installation of End Point Operations agents. We will look at the architecture and deployment of End Point Operations and the additional content that it provides.
What you need for this book
General knowledge of operating, managing, and troubleshooting the vSphere platform is essential in order to get the most out of this book. If you are a vSphere administrator, vRealize Operations will be a valuable tool to help you in your day-to-day job and this book will show you how.
The book has a lot of practical exercises in it, taking you through installation and configuration of the various components in the vRealize Operations solution. A home lab or test/development environment would be a good place to start; however, you will find that deploying the solution against a real environment with real workloads running will offer you the best experience.
You will need the following VMware software to work through all the exercises and examples in the book:
You can download 60 day evaluations of all this software from my.vmware.com.
Who this book is for
If you are a vSphere Administrator and are looking to deploy and use the vRealize Operations solution, this book is the ideal place to start. It will take you through implementing and using the entire solution, including vRealize Operations Manager, vRealize Log Insight, vRealize Infrastructure Navigator, and End Point Operations.
The exercises will also introduce you to customizing the solution to meet your own needs; you will soon be building your own dashboards and creating your own content using the alerting framework.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Enter the FQDN, Username, and Password for your vRealize Operations instance. Click on Test Connection to ensure the details are entered correctly."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "To access the dashboards, navigate to Home and, in the Dashboard List, select vSphere Dashboards."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
Reader feedback
Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of.
To send us general feedback, simply e-mail <[email protected]>, and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.
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Downloading the color images of this book
We also provide you with a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. The color images will help you better understand the changes in the output. You can download this file from https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/VMwarevRealizeOperationsEssentials_ColorImages.pdf.
Errata
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Questions
If you have a problem with any aspect of this book, you can contact us at <[email protected]>, and we will do our best to address the problem.
Chapter 1. Introduction to vRealize Operations Manager
This first chapter introduces the reader to vRealize Operations Manager, starting with an overview of the solution, and how it fits into the rest of the VMware vRealize family of products.
The topics to be covered in this chapter include:
A look at vRealize Operations Manager
vRealize Operations Manager is the core component ofvRealize Operations, which itself is a suite of integrated products that provide intelligent operational capabilities for IT departments. The solution has been built, not just to monitor and manage vSphere, but also various pieces of infrastructure, such as storage, other hypervisors, operating systems, and applications.
The components that make up vRealize Operations are:
Other solutions within the vRealize family of products that integrate tightly with vRealize Operations are:
The main focus of this book is the vRealize Operations Manager component of vRealize Operations. However, we will look at vRealize Log Insight integration in Chapter 9, vRealize Log Insight Integration and at End Point Operations in Chapter 10, End Point Operations.
Integrations with the other components of the vRealize portfolio, or with other hardware such as EMC, Dell, or Hitachi storage arrays, are provided by Management Packs. Management Packs and VMware's Solution Exchange will be covered in Chapter 7, vRealize Operations Manager Solutions.
Operational disciplines addressed by vRealize Operations
As the name of the solution suggests, vRealize Operations is an operational management solution. It has been designed to address the operational disciplines of Performance, Capacity, Configuration, andCompliance.
Each of these can be thought of as being related and acting in concert with each other. Together they define the level of availability achieved by the infrastructure being managed, and whether the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in place between the business and the IT department are being met.
For example, if there is insufficient capacity in a cluster, the performance of VMs in that cluster may deteriorate, and the service or application that these VMs support may become unavailable.
vRealize Operations uses a variety of features such as content, alerts, symptoms, management packs, and reporting to provide the required visibility and control of the infrastructure, and deliver on these operational disciplines. Let's look at them in more detail.
Performance
vRealize Operations Manager monitors the performance of managed systems, and provides the system administrators with a set of very intuitive dashboards that provide them quick visualization of problems and issues that may arise. When the performance of the systems is not as expected, the solution helps with troubleshooting by directing the administrator quickly to the root cause of the problem. This is all underpinned with analytics and content.
Analytics
Every five minutes, vRealize Operations collects and stores the metric and property data about every resource it manages. The data is kept for six months at full granularity and is used by the Analytics engine to allow the system to understand normal behavior.
Note
The frequency of data collection and retention is tunable from the default 5 minute data collection and 6 months data retention periods. However, care must be taken when changing these as they can affect, quite significantly, the sizing requirements of the vRealize Operations nodes.
Every night, a set of analytics algorithms are run against every metric's historical dataset, to determine the expected behavior of each metric for the upcoming 24 hours. This expected behavior for a metric is called a Dynamic Threshold (DT). As metrics are collected and stored, they are compared against the DT to determine whether the object is exhibiting normal behavior. This is described in more detail in Figure 1.1.
The analytics are designed to look for different patterns of behavior, such as hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly.
It will obviously take some time for vRealize Operations to learn all the expected behavior, as it needs to observe at least three data points to start seeing a trend, and many more to predict the trend with greater confidence. For example, a metric exhibiting a weekly cadence of behavior requires at least three weeks of data for a weekly trend to be detected.
Figure 1.1
The preceding simplified example shows how a DT and metric may be measured and tracked. The grey shading is the DT, and the diagram shows that during the early morning it is expecting this metric's value to be 0-10%, then 50-60% during the work day, and then back down to 0-10% for the evening. There is a short peak just before midnight, which is possibly a batch or a backup job. The black line is the observed metric and we can see that normal behavior has occurred; so in this case, there is no alerting to be done as the metric is operating normally.
If an observed metric deviates outside of the DT range, it is classed as an Anomaly and highlighted in yellow in the Metric Selectors and the associated Metric Graphsin the vRealize Operations dashboards.
The number of anomalies observed over time is also recorded for every object, and vRealize Operations uses these derived metrics to determine whether the number of anomalies being observed is significant and if it is required that an alert is generated.
Performance or availability problems are generally caused by something different happening with the resources within an environment, and this "something different" causes associated metrics to breach their DTs. This means that the majority of alerts that are performance or metric related will only be generated when abnormal behavior occurs. This dramatically reduces the number of alerts that IT operations receive and increases the quality of those alerts.
Content
The content baked into vRealize Operations is how the solution creates the intelligent and meaningful alerts. There is a lot of content provided by the solution and much more content will be added with the installation of Management Packs. Custom content can also be created very easily and will be described in Chapter 5, Alerts, Symptoms, Recommendations, and Actions.
An example of one of the out of the box content alerts and how it is constructed is as follows:
Dynamic thresholds and hard thresholds
Alerting based on metrics, which are outside the range of the calculated DTs, can be considered fairly generic and caused by "things happening differently". They tend to be used to troubleshoot and alert on unexpected behavior.
As well as triggering alerts based on unexpected behavior, much of the content in vRealize Operations Manager is based on specific behavior and documented best practices. For instance, storage latency would generally be considered performance impacting by a storage administrator, when it reaches 20-30ms.
Content within vRealize Operations Manager can also includeHard Thresholds (HTs), such as a figure of 20-30ms for storage latency, which can trigger alerts regardless of the state of the DT for the given metrics.
Content and alerts will be covered in much more depth in Chapter 5, Alerts, Symptoms, Recommendations, and Actions.
Capacity
Capacity management is one of the most important disciplines in IT Operations. Unfortunately, as virtualization has matured, traditional capacity management techniques have tended not to keep up with the technology. My experience of working with clients with mature virtualized environments and outdated capacity management practices is that they find themselves with a lot of underutilized infrastructure, resulting in a lot of wasted resources.
vRealize Operations Manager has a very rich capacity engine, which will help with this, illustrating capacity utilization in two main ways:
Capacity models
Every object or resource in vRealize Operations can have a capacity model configured against it. This describes the metric(s) used to determine the capacity and the other factors, or constraints to be considered, such as vSphere HA. The models themselves are not configurable, however, how they are applied generally is configurable, and is managed within the policies section of vRealize Operations.
Note
Many of the VMware and third-party Management Packs have capacity models associated with the resources they are managing. The documentation for these Management Packs usually provides the administrator detail on how the capacity of a given object type is calculated.
The policies governing the capacity management in vRealize Operations are very granular and controllable. This allows the administrator to define what combination of demand or allocation capacity policies are applied against specific resources or groups of resources. This will be covered in detail in Chapter 6, Capacity Planning and Capacity Projects.
Capacity projects
As well as understanding the current capacity and the time remaining, many organizations will have ongoing projects that are going to add planned workload or additional hardware to their infrastructure. A new feature, Capacity Projects, introduced in vRealize Operations 6.0, allows the administrator to define these forecasted changes in the workload or resources, and assign a date against them.
The effect on capacity and the time remaining can then be visualized and any capacity shortfalls identified. The projects can be subsequently committed and they will then be reflected in the real-time capacity reporting.
For example, if an infrastructure has the capacity for a further 50 average sized VMs, but a project is planned to implement 20 average sized VMs, the capacity dashboards, badges, and reports will all change to reflect that there is now only capacity for 30 average sized VMs.
Configuration and compliance
The final operational disciplines being addressed are configuration and compliance. Misconfiguration of systems is the root cause of a large proportion of system outages; so ensuring that all your systems are configured the way you want them to be is one of the key weapons in ensuring up-time.
As well as ensuring up-time, there may be legal and regulatory reasons, such as PCI-DSS, for the systems to be configured in a certain way. Alternatively, there may be security or hardening standards that an organization's security department determines are essential, to ensure that the integrity of the systems is maintained. Both of these would be classed as compliance requirements.
For in-depth configuration and compliance, vCenter Configuration Manager is provided as part of vRealize Operations Advanced and Enterprise editions. However, the use of vCenter Configuration Manager is not covered in this book.
With the release of vRealize Operations 6.0, some configuration and compliance capabilities have been introduced into the vRealize Operations Manager platform. As well as collecting metrics, vRealize Operations now collects properties from the ESXi hosts and the VM containers.
These properties can be used to assess the configuration posture of the ESXi hosts and the VM containers, using the Alerts, Symptoms, Recommendations, and Actions framework.
Content has been created that reflects the vSphere Hardening Guidelines, which means that, out of the box, vRealize Operations can now report on how compliant the ESXi hosts and the VM containers are against these guidelines. The reporting is available through the alerts, views, and reports functionality, and also via the Compliance badge in the vRealize Operations dashboards.
vSphere Hardening Guidelines will be covered in Chapter 5, Alerts, Symptoms, Recommendations, and Actions.
Architecture, scalability, and resilience
Like most solutions from VMware, vRealize Operations Manager is delivered as a virtual appliance based on SUSE Linux.
Note
vRealize Operations Manager can also be installed on Windows or Linux. However, that needs special consideration, so is outside the scope of this book.
Appliance nodes and components
The basic building block of vRealize Operations is the virtual appliance node. The solution can be scaled from a single node to a maximum of 16 nodes, to support larger scale deployments or high availability (HA). Remote collector nodes can also be additionally installed to collect the metric data from remote datacenters with limited bandwidth connectivity.
Regardless of the role of a node, the same OVF is used to deploy the virtual appliance, and, as of vRealize Operations Manager 6.0, there is no longer the requirement to host remote collectors on Linux or Windows.
To a great extent, this has made the design, implementation, and management of vRealize Operations very straightforward, relative to the complexity and capabilities the solution provides.
The preceding diagram shows the different roles the nodes can take. Although they are all installed using the same virtual appliance OVA file and contain the same code, the nodes will only run the services required to fulfill their role. The roles are as follows:
The components running within the nodes are as follows:
Architecture
Once a vRealize Operations cluster is established, solutions
