Part 1 - What's New with vRealize Operations Manager 6.6.

I am happy to share that VMware has released the vRealize Operations Manager 6.6 version which was anounced through a blog post by Taruna Gandhi a few days back.

While I have been closely following all the releases of vROps for the past couple of years, this release is special to me as I am a part of the engineering group which has worked on making this release possible for the last 6 months.

The goal behind vRealize Operations Manager 6.6 was to improve the time to value and accelerate the user experience by providing out of the box answers to questions which are faced by IT on a day to day basis. Be it the administrators who manage the IT systems and applications, or the Executives, who are responsible for making strategic decisions around Capacity and Growth, this release of vROps caters to all the personas will multiple use cases out of the box.

In my opinion, operations at all levels and across all the areas of IT is ran in two modes. The preferred choice is Proactive, however many times one has to be Reactive as well. Be it Performance, Capacity, Utilization, Availability, Configuration or Compliance, one must have easy ways to answer simple questions while running operations.

For instance, a person responsible for procuring capacity should have simple yet exhaustive statistics which allow them to take the next procurement decision proactively. A System Administrator should have simple yet comprehensive metrics and logs to troubleshoot an issue in a fire-fighting situation. 

If you notice, the requirements above are conflicting and it is always important to strike a balance between TOO SIMPLE and TOO COMPLEX. You sway either ways and the value is lost.

With the above thought process in mind, vROps 6.6 was designed and I am happy to give you a quick preview of What's New with this release!!

Note, this is just the first part, in the coming days, you will see a series of blog posts which will deep dive into individual areas to help you use all the goodness coming with this release. With that, let's dissect the release notes to see what all is coming in:

• Simplified usability and faster time to value capabilities:

• 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 enhanced user experience.

• The Getting Started dashboard allows for quick navigation.

• Persona based dashboards provides for 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 and vRealize Automation provides quick time to value. 

• Added Native vSAN management capabilities:
• Allows for centralized management across stretched clusters.

• Ability for complete vSAN management, which includes administering performance, capacity, logs, and configuration and health.

• Fully Automated Workload Balancing:

• Ensures performance across the datacenter's with fully automated workload balancing, across clusters and across data stores.

• Ensures DRS Configurations and provides the option to set DRS automation level for individual objects.

• Predictive DRS takes action to preempt resource contention.

• Utilizes operations analytics to optimize initial placement of workloads through vRealize Automation.

⏯See Workload Balance in action here.

• Additional out-of-the-box compliance capabilities:

• Ability to tackle compliance problems through the new vSphere hardening dashboard

• Extends compliance through PCI & HIPAA compliance for vSphere.

• Ensures business configurations through new cluster, host, and VM configuration dashboards.

• Sizing & Scalability Enhancements:

• You can now scale to 6 Extra Large Nodes in a cluster which can support up to 180,000 Objects and 45,000,000 metrics.
• You can now monitor up to 60 vCenter Servers with a single instance of vROps.
• A large Remote Collector can support up to 15000 objects.
• and many more.....

In the upcoming parts of this series, I will deep dive into each of the above mentioned areas and give you more details on how you can operationalize some of these features to match your day to day operational use cases.

Stay tuned for more!!