Operate VMware Cloud on AWS using vRealize Operations

VMware Cloud on AWS is one of the most talked about innovations and partnerships between VMware and AWS Cloud. With VMware’s SDDC stack fully deployed on AWS, we are delivering on the promise to VMware customers to get the economies of the public cloud without re-writing your existing applications.  While talking to most of the customers who are leveraging VMware Cloud on AWS today, the biggest value which they often speak about beyond the benefit of “zero app re-platforming” is about the seamless integration of a public cloud platform like AWS into their existing processes and toolsets.

Almost all of these customers were leveraging vRealize Operations to manage their on-premises SDDC, and find it extremely simple to add their VMware Cloud on AWS vCenter into vRealize Operations and extend the current set of monitoring, troubleshooting, optimization, and remediation processes to VMware Cloud on AWS.  This provides such customers a view of their hybrid environment within minutes and with zero impact on their people or processes.  With this post, I will show you how simple it is to bring in a VMware Cloud on AWS deployments into your existing on-premises vRealize Operations Cluster.

Before we get into the how, let us quickly look into a couple of architectural options you have while connecting your VMware Cloud on AWS vCenter to your on-premises vRealize Operations.  I will also provide you architectural options if you want to deploy vRealize Operations on VMware Cloud on AWS.

Architecture Option 1 – vRealize Operations On-Premises
Architecture Option 2 – vRealize Operations Running on VMware Cloud on AWS
Architecture Option 3 – vRealize Operations Federation with VMware Cloud on AWS

• Provide a summary of performance, capacity, and configuration to Senior Executives and Virtual Infrastructure Administrators across all your vSphere environments.

• Provide a unified view of events triggered across the virtual environments into a single pane for making it easier for NOC or Helpdesk to initiate action.

• Ability to create a data warehouse where a user-selected set of metrics can be stored for data archiving and report use cases.

• Ability to provide summarized views of health and configuration of your SDDC stack.  This includes core applications such as VMware vCenter Server, VMware NSX, and VMware vSAN.

• The solution also covers the management applications such as vRealize Operations Manager, vRealize Log Insight, vRealize Automation, vRealize Business, and VMware Site Recovery Manager.

With this option, the assumption is that you have a large part of your infrastructure on-premises including vCenter, ESXi hosts and other hardware and applications which you are monitoring with vRealize Operations. At the same time, you have on-boarded to VMware Cloud on AWS and have recently provisioned a couple of SDDCs therein and as a result of which you have some vCenter footprint in VMware Cloud on AWS.

In this model, you can extend the existing operational capabilities of vRealize Operations to the VMware Cloud on AWS vCenter, by simply connecting the vCenter as an end-point inside vRealize Operations. You create an adapter instance both for vCenter Server and vSAN to collect data from vCenter and bring that into vRealize Operations Manager. You can do this by either directly connecting the vCenter or leveraging a remote collector which can be deployed inside a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC to ensure that the data can be compressed and encrypted.

The existing vRealize Operations cluster would need to be scaled out to incorporate the new VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC sites which you plan to monitor. In order to get the appropriate sizing, you can leverage the vRealize Operations Online Sizer Tool.

The diagrams below show both the options discussed above:

vRealize Operations on-premises collecting data from VMware Cloud on AWS and native AWS directly

vRealize Operations on-premises collecting data from VMware Cloud on AWS and native AWS with remote collectors

This second option applies to organizations which have moved a large part of their environment into VMware Cloud on AWS. In such a scenario, they can deploy or migrate their vRealize Operations instance in VMware Cloud on AWS directly. The power of VMware Cloud on AWS is that it leverages the world’s most reliable and highly adopted hypervisor, vSphere.  Hence it is trivial to deploy a vRealize Operations cluster there. Once deployed, organizations can collect data from other VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs using remote collectors. At the same time, for collecting data from an SDDC located on-premises or native AWS, one can deploy remote collectors to send over data into the centralized analytics cluster deployed in VMware Cloud on AWS.

The diagram below illustrates how this architecture would look like:

vRealize Operations in VMware Cloud collecting data from VMware Cloud on AWS, native AWS and on-premises SDDCs with remote collectors

In this third option, you can leverage the federation capabilities of vRealize Operations to federate the data from both on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS deployed vRealize Operations clusters into a centralized vRealize Operations federation instance for a centralized visibility use case. Some of the powerful use cases of federation are:

Here is an architectural diagram which can be leveraged to deploy a federation solution between on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS hosted vRealize Operations:

vRealize Operations Federation Deployment between On-Premises and VMware Cloud on AWS hosted vRealize Operations clusters

The above examples will help you decide the best architecture to deliver all Self-Driving Operations with vRealize Operations Manager as you expand into the public cloud with VMware Cloud on AWS.  Maintain your operations people and processes without disruption while you quickly expand into the world of hybrid cloud.  For more technical information on vRealize Operations, visit vrealize.vmware.com for videos, walk-through demonstrations and more.

Note - This post also appeared on VMware Official Blog where I blog as a guest blogger - https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2019/05/vmware-cloud-on-aws-with-vrealize-operations.html

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