Monday, February 29, 2016

Thoughts & Experience around Expanding vROps Clusters

Expanding your existing vRealize Operations Manager Clusters is an activity which you would definitely come across if you have started to operationalize your vRealize Operations Manager investments in your organizations.

Photo Credit - www.expansionexperts.com

In other words, the more you start using the product, the more you want to do with it. Mostly people size the vROps Nodes and clusters, thinking that they would only monitor their Virtual Infrastructure using the vCenter Server Adapter. However as you find the product useful and learn about the gamut of extensibility options through vROps Management Packs, you quickly start reaching to a point where the original architecture design of your vROps Cluster cannot support you increasing needs. This is the time when you need to re-look at augmenting capacity and performance to your existing vROps Cluster.


I would highly recommend that you look at this VMware KB and the calculators which they provide to understand what could be the right size of your vRealize Operations Manager Cluster.

Once you have figured out the number and size of nodes which you need, the rest of the process is pretty simple. Here are the steps you would need to take:-

1- Build a new node, make sure it exactly matches the size of the other nodes in the cluster. A basic requirement is that all the nodes should be of the same size (CPU, RAM and DISK wise).

2- Understand what version of vROps you are on and how do you build a node which matches the version of your vROps install. The good news is that if you have installed any patches to your existing vROps cluster, then while adding the GA built node to your existing cluster, all those patches would be automatically pushed by the master node to the newly added node.

3- Post building the node, you would browse the same using a web browser and choose the option to expand an existing cluster to ensure that you can add this new node to the existing cluster. The process can take anywhere between 30 minutes to a few hours, depending upon how big your cluster and nodes are.

4- If you are adding more that one node, please ensure you finish adding one node completely and then add the second node. This will keep the master less busy and upgrade more planned and smoother.

5- Lastly, do not forget to use the Re-balance features of vROps to Re-balance the Adapters to begin with. This feature is available under the Administration -> Cluster Management -> Actions. Ensure you do these operations during hours when you will have lesser load on your cluster as these can be heavy operations.


Well with this, I hope you can use some of my experience and plan your vROps cluster expansions in a better and informed manner. 

Stay tuned for more on vROps.


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2 comments:

  1. Also if you need to change the size of your nodes from SM, MED, LGE etc all the required changes to heap sizes etc are made on the next boot of your virtual appliance as part of the boot process.

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    1. Yup... Great point.. I am thinking for a separate article for Scaling up the nodes as it can be trivial sometimes.

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