Tribute to the FIFA World Cup 2014 through vCenter Operations Manager!

The title of this article might sound weird, but yes, nothing is impossible with vCenter Operations Manager. This time I am not here to share my experience with vCOps, but a great innovation which is Amazing to look at and Simple to implement. 

Here is what I am talking about.. A Dashboard on vCenter Operations Manager which shows the FIFA World Cup Fixtures :-)

This is not a GIMMICK.. It is for REAL...

The credit for this dashboard goes to my VMware Colleague - Lior Kamrat. He was the one who came up with the idea of creating this funky dashboard and he blogged about it on his blog http://imallvirtual.com/

His idea was so popular that he also blogged about the same on the VMware Management Blog.

So if you want to know how to create that COOL Dashboard using vCOps, head to those links and you will be surprised to see how simple it is to use this powerful tool to do creative things. :-)

Kudos to LIOR for thinking out of the box.. Follow him on Twitter for more goodness on vCOps. 

In the end I would say... GO BRAZIL GO.... 

Share and Spread the FUN :-)

Part 11 - Creating Policies & Configuring Badges in vCenter Operations Manager!

It's been over a month since I wrote about vCOps. With this article I wanted to start sharing some of the content which I am creating as a video series around configuration of policies in vCenter Operations Manager. 

This article and the upcoming articles will all be a part of the Back to Basics series on vCenter Operations Manager which I started in March this year. 

Here are the links to the first Ten Parts :-

• Part 1 - Optimizing vCenter Operations Manager Deployment

• Part 2 - vCOps Installation - Creating an IP Pool!

• Part 3 - Deploying vCenter Operations Manager vApp!

• Part 4 - Configuring vCenter Operations Manager Post Deployment!

• Part 5 - Licensing vCenter Operations Manager!

• Part 6 - Configuring vCenter Operations Manager Custom User Interface!

• Part 7 - Changing/Disabling the vCOps User Interface Timeout Values!

• Part 8 - Setting up vCOps Data Retention Policy

• Part 9 - User Authentication in vCenter Operations Manager!

• Part 10 - vCOps Custom UI - Configuring User Authentication & Permissions!

In this part I will discuss the Basic Function of policies and configuring badge thresholds. From here I will take you to capacity and time remaining calculations and then the rest of the configuration options in vCenter Operations Manager. Here is the video:-

Creating Policies & Configuring Badges in vCenter Operations Manage

Stay tuned for some more stuff video stuff on vCenter Operations Manager. Till then...

Share & Spread the Knowledge!!

vCenter Heartbeat End of Availability

For those of you who have used vCenter Heartbeat to protect your vCenter instances, please be aware that VMware has announced the end of its availability as of today, June 2 2014.

Don’t worry though if you’re using it today; the current iteration will be supported through late 2018.

What does that mean? Are we getting away from protecting vCenter? Not by a long shot. We have big plans in this space. vCenter has become a very critical component of the infrastructure and we’re looking at lots of different means by which you can protect it.

What can you do first? Make sure you’re running it in a virtual machine! That gives you all the proactive benefits of downtime avoidance with DRS and Storage DRS, and the reactive benefits of automated restart with HA clusters.

As always make sure you have reliable backups (and test your restores!) of vCenter and its database.

Take a look at the official announcement of the end-of-availability and read the details about support and the FAQ, and feel free to ask us at VMware about maximizing your vCenter availability.