vROps Webinar 2016 - Part 12 : What's New with vROps 6.4

Time to publish the recording for the 12th episode of the vROps Webinar Series. This time we did a what’s new with vRealize Operations 6.4 and the changes made to vRealize Operations 6.4as you will see there has been a lot packed into this recent release!

It has been an awesome 12 months working with Simon on this project and I am very glad to say we will be back next year (we will skip January and will return in February).

Happy Holidays from the team of vROps Webinar Series!

See you in 2017 with vROps Webinar Series 2017 with a brand new shiny logo!

Enjoy the recording for this session:

Share & Spread the Knowledge!!

vROps Webinar 2016 - Announcing Part 12 : What's New with vROps 6.4

It's the time of the month when I would like to invite you to join the next episode of our year long vROps Webinar Series. As we move towards the closure of a fantastic year, we would like to take a zoom out view at the vRealize Operations Manager solution with a What's New Episode. We did a What's new with vRealize Operations 6.3 a couple of months back, however looking at some awesome changes made to vRealize Operations 6.4 it absolutely makes sense to go over the new goodies.

With this we will also come to a close of vROps Webinar Series 2016. Simon and myself have discussed about the runway of this series and I am excited to say that we will continue to produce more content going into the next year with vRealize Operations Webinar Series 2017. We believe that operations is ever evolving and hence the content associated to it would always continue to evolve. Hence, it only makes sense that continue to learn and share.

So without further a do, save the date in your calendars and join use for the next and final episode of vRealize Operations Webinar Series 2016.

Day & Date          : Monday, 19^th Dec 2016

Time                     : 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM  (PST)

Event                    : vROps Webinar 2016

Topic                    : Part 12 : What's New with vROps 6.4

Speakers               : Simon Eady / Sunny Dua

WebEx Link          : Join WebEx meeting 

NOTE – Don’t forget to mark your calendars by saving the Date!! Feel free to forward the invite to anyone who might be interested. It’s open to all!!

Sharing & Spread the Knowledge!!

VMware releases the SDDC Management Health Solution 2.0

Back in the month of September, I wrote about the VMware SDDC Health Solution which would help you deploy a unified management pack within vROps to monitor the health of your SDDC Management Stack. During that first release, the product was limited to monitor vCenter and vRealize Operations Manager. I did mention that it was a big step and if VMware could continue to invest on adding the rest of the solutions of the management stack into this unified management pack, it would help provide a Single Pane to SDDC customers to monitor the health and performance of there SDDC Management Stack which is huge.

The engineering team at VMware just took this to the next level by releasing the version 2.0 of this management pack today.

In its new Avatar, the management pack would now support the following components of the Software Defined Data-center.

• VMware vCenter 
• VMware vRealize Operations Manager 
• VMware vRealize Automation 
• VMware vSAN 
• VMware vRealize LogInsight
• VMware vRealize Business for Cloud
• VMware NSX for vSphere

The management pack now supports 5 additional components and it covers mostly everything you would use in a SDDC Management Stack. While I have used this and was involved in Beta I am ready to install the GA build in my environment and play with it. Here is the overview of the solution from solution exchange.

Reference - https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/vmware-sddc-management-health-solution

Overview

VMware SDDC Health Solution provides Single pane of glass towards the SDDC Management stack and provides health (availability & product effectiveness) and configuration.

It provides validations against

- vSphere Hardening Guide

- NSX Hardening Guide

Highlights

• SDDC Health Management : Overview
• SDDC Health Management : Historical Trend
• Health & Configuration based alerts

Description

SDDC Health solution bundles the capability of monitoring various application components of the SDDC management stack. The intent of the Solution is to provide Single Pane of Glass to isolate the health problems in the applications running on the SDDC management plane.

New SDDC Management Dashboard which includes the following:

• SDDC Health Management : Health Overview
• SDDC Health Management : Historical Trend
• SDDC Health Management Apps : Infrastructure View
• SDDC Health Management Apps : Service View
• Health based alerts
• Config based alerts
• Top Recommendations 

Go get it!!

Good Bye VMware.. See you at the Headquarters!

A quick note to let everyone know about a major change in my professional and our (family) personal lives. Time to say goodbye to my years of working closely and directly with VMware customers.

Out of the 13 years of my professional career, I have spent close to 9 years of working on VMware technology. During this time I have worked in various roles. I started as a Technical Support Engineer and slowly transformed into a Solution Architect. Having worked on more than 60 complex engagements, I might have not seen it all, but I can say that I have worked with some very smart customers, partners and colleagues who have made this journey amazing. I am most thankful to everyone who has helped me learn and grow during this time and I am looking forward carry on the fun in the next phase of my career. The thanksgiving tradition would not be complete without mentioning the amazing support from my family who bear with my tantrums and toddler like behavior at times ☻☻☻

While most of the readers of vXpress know me as an expert on vRealize Operations Manager, the reality is that I chose to write about my experiences around ops manager more than anything else since Operations is always considered as a low priority requirement in most designs and deployments I have come across. You can buy the best hardware and software to run enterprise IT, however if you do not have a solid operations plan and people backing that plan, chances of success are quite weak. Putting operations first has been my goal as the acid test of a technology happens on DAY 2 and not Day 1 in almost every case.

While day to day operations is one piece of the puzzle, the other important aspect in a virtual world has been capacity management. I think while the cost of capacity is going down and you can buy in abundance even if you do not require it, the pain point to solve is management of all that capacity and the underlying constructs (physical hardware or software) it brings along with it. Even if you manage to look at capacity in a single frame, you will certainly leave behind the other important aspects which are related to capacity such as Configuration, Performance and Availability. I think while there are products out there to solve individual problems, we always need something which can cover almost all the use cases associated to these four pillars.

With the above in mind, the other important aspect is integration. It could be integration with the solution sets an enterprise is currently vested in (some people call it legacy) and integration points to any future solutions to be used. Sometimes, it could be integration with the same solution stack available from the same software vendor, for instance integration of vRealize Operations Manager with the other products in the vRealize Suite, vCloud Suite, NSX, VSAN and other technology partner products and solutions.

If you pause and think about the above problem statement, you would quickly realize that this is a Problem which would be ongoing. A solution to such a dynamic problem has to be ahead of its game to be relevant to this ever changing landscape, rather than playing a catch up.

I have a single word to summarize what I mentioned above, and the word is "OPPORTUNITY"

With this opportunity in mind, I have taken up a role in VMware's Cloud Management Business Unit at the head quarters in Palo Alto and I will be starting on the 7th of December 2016. I will join the team as a Senior Member of the Technical Staff and the role will allow me to work very closely with the entire eco-system of people within and outside of the organization working to solve the problem I described before. I will be primarily working on defining the real world use cases and challenges faced by customers beyond Day 1 of embarking on their Virtualization / SDDC / Cloud journeys and provide solutions to these problems. The end goal of the role would be to incorporate these Use Cases and Solutions into the VMware Cloud Management Product line and continuously work on enhancing the experience of both Enterprise IT and Line of Business of our customers.

I have lived some amount of this role in the past two (2) years as an Ambassador to the office of the CTO at VMware and now I get to do this as a full time job. I am very excited about the opportunity and I look forward to share my experiences through vXpress as I have been doing for the past few years now. Thanks once again to everyone who have helped me learn and grow. As always, I need all your best wishes for the Next Innings of my career. If you are at VMware HQ, make sure to swing by and meet. I can be reached on duas@vmware.com.

Let the work begin!!

vROps Webinar Series 2016 - Part 11 - Getting more out of vROps with PowerCLI

Time to publish the recording for the 11th episode of the vROps Webinar Series. This time we were joined by Vinith Menon who spoke about getting more from your vROps builds with PowerCLI. Vinith demonstrated the many useful ways of leveraging PowerCLI to manage your vROps environments and also communicate with the vROps API.

Huge thanks to Vinith Menon for presenting this excellent session.

So without further ado, here is the recording for this session:

#vROps Webinar Series – Part 11 – Getting more out of #vROps with PowerCLI

Another month has gone and Christmas is now looming large! It has been extremely busy but we still want to continue with the momentum of webinar series getting to the business end of the year. This time around we will talk about getting more out of vRealize Operations Manager using PowerCLI.

This session we will be joined by Vinith Menon who will show us all kinds of PowerCLI goodness.

So without further a do, save the date in your calendars and join use for the next episode of vRealize Operations Webinar Series 2016.

Day & Date : Friday, 25th November 2016
Time : 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM (SGT)
Event : vROps Webinar 2016
Topic : Part 10 : A Deep Dive into vROps and PowerCLI
Speakers : Simon Eady / Sunny Dua / Vinith Menon

Due to last minute constraints we are using Xtravirt’s Webex so a big thank you to them for stepping in and help us
WebEx Link : Join WebEx Meeting

NOTE – Don’t forget to mark your calendars by saving the Date!! Feel free to forward the invite to anyone who might be interested. It’s open to all!!

Sharing & Spread the Knowledge!!

vROps Webinar Series 2016 - Part 10 - A Deep Dive into vROps API

Time to publish the recording for the 10th episode of vROps Webinar Series. This time around we spoke about vRealize Operations Manager Resful API and how to use it. Post 20 minutes of slide-ware, I jumped into the lab and thanks to the demo god, we demonstrated a number of use cases and browsed through the documentation to make it easier for you to consume and use the same.

So without further ado, here is the recording for this session:

Note : It is recommended that you watch the video in HD quality for a great experience.

vROps Webinar 2016 - Announcing Part 10 : A Deep Dive into vROps API

The month has been extremely busy but we still want to continue with the momentum of webinar series getting to the business end of the year. This time around we will talk about vRealize Operations Manager API. API is your friend if you are trying to automate things which you would normally do on GUI. While GUI is a favorite of most, the geeks prefer the API since that helps them to programatically initiate tasks and go out for a coffee. By the time they are back from the LONG coffee break, the work is done :-)

This session would help you understand the API framework of vROps and as always we would jump into the lab to run a couple of scenarios which we would want to access through API and Geek Out!!

So without further a do, save the date in your calendars and join use for the next episode of vRealize Operations Webinar Series 2016.

Day & Date          : Friday, 28^th October 2016

Time                     : 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM  (SGT)

Event                    : vROps Webinar 2016

Topic                     : Part 10 : A Deep Dive into vROps API

Speakers               : Simon Eady / Sunny Dua

WebEx Link          : Join WebEx Meeting

NOTE - Don't forget to mark your calendars by saving the Date!! Feel free to forward the invite to anyone who might be interested. It's open to all!!


Sharing & Spread the Knowledge!!

Did You Know #5:Customizing Summary Pages on vRealize Operations Manager!

With this article of the Did You Know series, I wanted to share a GEM of a feature using which can enhance your user experience and user interface of vRealize Operations Manager. If you have used vRealize Operations Manager, you will notice that the product has summary pages for each object type. For instance if you are on vSphere World Object, you would see a Summary Page which looks like this:

In-fact, if you click on any other object types such as vCenter, Datacenter, Clusters, Hosts etc. you would see a similar summary page showing the Health, Risk & Efficiency of the Object Type which you have selected. The Health, Risk & Efficiency badges on this page are colored based on the Alerts triggered on the Object type which you have selected on the navigation pane in the left.

While this view is useful to summarize the alert status, this might not be the default page which you want to see when you select an object type. If that is the case, vRealize Operations Manager provides you the option to change this default summary page to the dashboard of your choice (I have seen this feature on vROps 6.2 and 6.3). In my opinion this is a super cool feature as now yo can create your own summary pages using vROps Custom Dashboards and then use them as default summary pages (only applicable to license editions where you can create custom dashboards)

Here is how you do it:

Create a custom dashboard for the object type which you want to chose as the summary page beforehand.

1- Login to vRealize Operations Manager using Administrative Privileges. (preferably admin account).

2- Click on Content -> Dashboards -> Blue Wheel Icon -> Manage Summary Dashboards

3- Click on the drop-down to select the Adapter Type under which you want to select an Object Type for which you want to change the summary page.

4- In my case I want to change the Home Page for the vSphere World and hence I will select the vCenter Adapter, which will list all the object types under that adapter.

5- We will select the vSphere World from this list and click on the gauge shaped icon to Assign a Dashboard for this Object Type.

6- Once I click on that icon, I will get a list of all the dashboards I have in my vROps instance. I will go ahead and select the dashboard which I wish to chose, in this case I will select the Workload Utilization dashboard and click on OK to save the changes.

6- Let's go back to vSphere World and see how the summary page looks like after this change. Click on Environment -> vSphere Hosts and Clusters -> vSphere World.

You can now see a completely different home page than what you usually see. 

This will help you enhance your instances of vROps with you self customized dashboards and help you jazz up your deployment with personalized views at each object level..

Hope this helps with day to day data-center operations using vRealize Operations Manager.

Stay tuned for more goodies!!

Did You Know #4 - Restricting Virtual Machine Collection on vROps!!

Welcome back to the part 4 of the did you know series on vRealize Operations Manager. This series is all about small nuggets on vRealize Operations Manager, which can help you with day to day IT operations in your Software Defined Datacenter.

With this article, I wanted to make you aware of a setting which allows you to filter out virtual machine objects from collection in vRealize Operations Manager. While this was always possible by using a collection user with limited rights on objects in vCenter, this feature is natively available with vROps 6.1 and beyond.

With this option, you can limit the number of virtual machines from collection on a vCenter Adapter. In my case, I used this option to disable collection of Virtual Machine Object completely. This would mean that I would only collect data from the remaining objects which is vCenter Server Object, Datacenter Object, ESXi Hosts, Datastores etc. So basically everything except the VM objects. The use cases for this deployment model are following:-

I- Infrastructure Monitoring - In this case the IAAS provider just wants to leverage vROps for monitoring the underlying infrastructure and have no responsibility of monitoring the VMs

II- Centralized Dash-boarding & Reporting for large scale deployment - Another use case is to have a centralized vROps with reporting and dash-boarding capabilities, especially large scale deployments. In cases where an organization has multiple sites across the globe, they might not want a centralized vROps instance to avoid traffic flowing across the globe. While they would want to monitor individual sites with a full fledged vROps deployment, they might want to collect infrastructure level data into a centralized vROps for reporting purposes.

Please Note: It is recommended that you DO NOT disable VM Object collection without understanding the full impact of this change. While this will give you scalability, it will not bring VM Data which might be used for calculating metrics at Host or Cluster level. Please use this only for specific uses cases and preferably in a development environment to understand the full impact, before rolling out in production.

I am sure there would be other uses cases which could be solved with this feature. Here is where you can set it up:

In case of an EXISTING deployment:

1- Login to vROps with administrative privileges (preferably admin account) 

2- Click on Administration -> Solutions

3- Click on the VMware vSphere 

4- Select the Adapter Instance where you want to change under the "VMware vSphere Solution Details" and click on the wheel shaped Configure Icon.

5- Expand the advanced settings of the adapter. Here you will see an option of "Maximum Number of Virtual Machines Collected"  with a default value of "2000000000". This is the virtual machine count you can collect with this adapter instance.

6- To disable VM collection completely, change this value to "0" (ZERO)

7- Click on Save Settings to save the new setting.

In case of a NEW deployment:

The steps to be followed in case of a new deployment will be exactly the same. You would define this number at the time of configuring the adapter instance for the first time.

Hope this helps with day to day data-center operations using vRealize Operations Manager.

Stay tuned for more goodies!

Did You Know #3 - Using Wait Cycles for Time Based Alerts in vROps!

In this part of the "Did You Know" series, I will provide you a tip, using which you can create time based alerts in vROps. I am happy to share that this was an output of a brainstorming session with a customer and at the end of the discussion the customer himself proposed this solution and I was immediately testing the idea in my lab with successful results.

The use case for the time based alert in our situation was to create an alert which would trigger if a virtual machine is running on a snapshot for more than 24 hours and if the snapshot space on that virtual machine is more than 0 GB.

The challenge with this requirement is around the time factor. Different workloads can have different impact of running on snapshots. For instance a web server running on a snapshot might not be impacted much from a performance standpoint, however an Oracle database VM running on a virtual disk snapshot would definitely not be a happy camper at the time it's running database transactions. Just to be clear, we are discussing vSphere snapshots here and not any other snapshot technologies. With vROps, there is no metric today which tracks the snapshot on the basis of time. While there are metrics which define the age of the snapshot, using these metrics for alerts become impossible, as for each snapshot a new directory is created, under which a snapshot drive is created and it increments in size. As soon as you delete this snapshot and take a new one on vCenter, vROps creates a new directory for this new snapshot and hence it is difficult to track hundreds of directories which keep changing, specially in an environment where snapshots are heavily used.

In order to overcome this situation, we will create a new alert. If you are new to Alerts in vROps, I would highly recommend that you watch this episode of my yearly long Webinar Series to get well equipped about vROps Alerts and Symptoms.

We will start by creating a new symptom & an alert definition:


1- Login to vROps with credentials having rights to create new Alerts/Symptoms (admin credential would be nice).

2- Click on Content -> Symptom Definitions. You will be under the metric/property symptom definitions category by default.

3- Click on the + sign to add a new Symptom.

4- Here is how you will define the new symptom. Refer to the screenshot for more details:

• Base Object Type : Virtual Machine
• Metric Name : Disk Space|Snapshot|Virtual Machine Used (GB)

5- Double click on this metric to add it to the right pane where we will describe this symptom.

6- Here is how will you provide the details:

• Static Threshold
• Symptom Definition Name : Virtual Machine is running on a snapshot for more than 24 hours
• Critical
• Condition : When Metric is > 0 (This is the size of the snapshot)
• Advanced : Wait Cycle - 288 (Each cycle is 5 minutes, hence the total minutes we will check for this condition is 1440 minutes which is 24 hours)
• Advanced : Cancel Cycle - 1 (Once the condition is false, the alert will be cancelled in 5 minutes)

7-  Click on Save to save this symptom. Once done we will create a new alert using this symptom.

8- Click on Content -> Alert Definitions. Click on the + sign to add a new Alert and provide the following details:

"1. Name & Description"

Name - Virtual Machine is running on a snapshot for more than 24 hours
Description - This alert will trigger when a virtual machine is running on a snapshot for more than 24 hours.



"2. Base Object Type"

Virtual Machine





"3. Alert Impact"

"4. Add Symptom Definitions"

Symptom Name : Virtual Machine is running on a snapshot for more than 24 hours

"5. Add Recommendations"

Add any recommendations from the available list or create your own.

9- Click on Save. This will create a new alert definition and this alert will be enabled on the default policy by default.


Please note that the Wait Cycle will start counting as soon as you create this alert definition, hence this alert will take atleast 24 hours to trigger. If you have VMs with snapshots (more than 24 hours old) in your environment, don't expect the alert to trigger immediately. The countdown to 24 hours will begin when you enable the alert in the policy.

You can see that we used a Time Based symptom to solve a key problem which emerges and could lead to a number of issues in a virtual environment. Hope this will give you ideas on  how you can create more time based alerts using metric based symptoms.

Hope this helps with day to day datacenter operations using vRealize Operations Manager.

Stay tuned for more goodies!

Did You Know #2 - Leveraging vROps Remote Collectors for Local Adapters!

In this part of the "Did You Know" series, I will talk about a small architectural tip which will not only help you enhance the performance of your vRealize Operations Manager cluster, it will also save you from up-sizing the cluster from let's say, medium to large nodes and at the end of the day save a ton of CPU & Memory in the process.

Did you know that vRealize Operations Manager uses Remote Collectors for collecting data from a Remote Datacenter and send it over to the centralized vROps cluster. The diagram below shows the actual purpose for which a remote collector was introduced in vRealize Operations Manager:

In the above example, we have a vROps Cluster in Site A. This cluster consists of 2 or more nodes which have a local collector module on them. This collector module collects the data from the local data sources, which are also known as adapter instances. Some examples of an adapter instances would be vCenter Adapter, NSX Adapter, MPSD (management pack for Storage Devices) etc.

The Nodes of the cluster here have multiple roles to play. They not only collect the data from the data sources, they also have to crunch this data using the analytics engine, calculate dynamic thresholds, run the capacity engine and host all the data through the CASA and Web UI. 

On the other hand in Site B, we have a remote collector group with 2 or more remote collectors (in a HA mode). Their role is to collect the data from the Site B data sources using the Collector framework on each node and send that data over to the centralized cluster in Site A. The Remote Collectors are small form factor of the vROps appliances which are stateless and the only role thy have is to collect data. Here are a few facts which make them great for playing the role of a collector from a sizing standpoint.

The come in 2 form factors ***: 

SMALL: 2 vCPU / 4 GB RAM. A small RC can collect 1500 Objects (an object can be a VM, Datastore, ESXi Host, LUN, etc) and upto 600,000 metrics. (1 VM usually creates around 250 metrics).

LARGE: 4 vCPU / 16 GB RAM. A small RC can collect 12000 Objects and up-to 3,500,000 metrics.

We all know that the main cluster nodes of vROps can also do collection and as per the sizing guidelines, a medium node can collect up to 7000 Objects, while a large cluster node which is 16 vCPU / 48 GB of ram can also collect up to 12000 Objects.

***Reference VMware KB - https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2130551

SIZING SCENARIO:

Now imagine a scenario, where you have a 4 Medium Node cluster with 4 node in Site A. You have a vCenter Adapter instance which has more than 7000 Objects (5000 VMs, 2000 Datastores, 200 ESXI Hosts etc). In such a situation, in order to collect data from this vCenter Adapter instance, you would have to up size your cluster node to a large node. Since vROps cluster nodes have to be symmetrical, you would have to up-size all your cluster nodes to LARGE NODES. In this situation you would have to invest on 32 vCPU (8 per cluster node to reach 16 vCPUs) and 64 GB of RAM (16 per node to reach 48 GB per cluster node). This in most cases is a huge change since you would have to ensure you have enough resources in the under lying cluster. In some cases you might also go beyond the NUMA boundary which we all know has some performance impact from a CPU standpoint.

With all these concerns in place, it would an excellent opportunity to leverage the Remote Collectors in the local Site A as well. While the name says REMOTE, it is not necessary that remote collectors are deployed only on remote sites. They can also be utilized in a local site to collect data from adapter instances which can be large in size. Taken our example into consideration, we would just need 2 Remote Collectors ( 2 for high availability, in case one fails) to collect from the Site A vCenter. These 2 appliances will only cost as 8 vCPUs and 32 GB of RAM in total). This will reduce the resource requirements by more than half and also ensure that your cluster nodes have no pressure on collector and hence all that CPU and RAM can be utilized by the other roles on the vROps nodes which will eventually give better performance.

So here would be the new architecture with Remote Collectors Everywhere!!!

With this model, we have better performance, more scale and less hardware requirement for deploying large vROps Deployments. Another important thing to note is that you can always migrate from Design 1 to Design 2 or from Design 2 to Design 1 without any downtime or data loss. Hence if you are on the way to scale the environments being monitored by vROps, this tech tip would be very useful for you.

Hope this helps with day to day datacenter operations using vRealize Operations Manager.

Stay tuned for more goodies!

Did You Know #1 - Controlling Alerts Storms During Maintenance with vROps!

Welcome to a new series of "Did You Know" Facts about vRealize Operations Manager! With this series, I will help unearth the Best Kept Secrets of vRealize Operations Manager. 

This could be across, features, functionalities, use cases, integrations, APIs or any tips or tricks which can help make day to day operations of Software Defined Datacenter easier and fun with vRealize Operations Manager!

In this first part of the series, we will look at a generic activity of maintenance which is applicable to every datacenter. In most environments activities like patching, power cycle, upgrades, hardware replacements etc are conducted during change windows. While all these activities are important, it is also important that you use the Maintenance Schedules or Maintenance options on vRealize Operations manager to disable any activity on objects which are under any kind of maintenance. This will help you ensure that you do not trigger any FALSE alerts which you might have configured on that object type.

For instance, if you have an alert which would trigger when a virtual machine is powered off, you should ensure that you put virtual machines in maintenance if you are planning to shut them down due to a scheduled downtime for activities such as patching, migrations, hardware version upgrades etc.

To do this follow the steps mentioned below. Do note that you should be on vROps 6.x or above to make use of these steps:

The GUI way:

1- Login to vRealize Operations Manager instance using credentials with permission to perform maintenance activities. Use admin if you do not have a strict Role Based Access Control (RBAC)

2- Click on Administration -> Inventory Explorer

3- On the top right corner of this page, search for the Object which you want to put in maintenance, in my case I want to upgrade my SQL server from SQL 2008 to SQL 2012, hence I will search for this VM.

4- Once I see the Virtual Machine in the List, I just need to select the same and click on the Maintenance Icon:

5- You will see pop-up which you can use to enter the details of maintenance window on this object. You have the option of either entering the maintenance in minutes or an end date.

That's it. This will ensure that the concerned object is in maintenance and I will not get any alerts for the same when I reboot.

In case you choose the first option to end the maintenance manually, please ensure that you do the same, as soon as you are done with the change you were implementing. You would need to come back to inventory explorer, search for the Virtual Machine, select the Virtual Machine name, and click on End Maintenance as shown below:

The API way:

For the cool kids out there, you can also do this programatically by using the vRealize Operations Manager API. Here are the API details, along with JSON and XML sample requests which can be used to build a script or a workflow and you can put one or multiple Objects into maintenance easily. You can use the API calls to end the maintenance as well.

To access the API documentation, you will need to access the following URL:

https://<your-vrops-ip-or-fqdn?>/suite-api/docs/rest/index.html

Hope this helps with day to day datacenter operations using vRealize Operations Manager.

Stay tuned for more goodies!

vROps Webinar Series - Part 9 - What's New with vRealize Operations 6.3

Here is the recording for the episode 9  vRealize Operations Manager Webinar Series 2016. During this episode we discussed about the new features and functionalities of vRealize Operations Manager 6.3. With this release of the product, we can clearly see that VMware is clearly working on enhancing the user experience and the user interface with some great new features and UI changes.

I would encourage you to watch this session to understand the full potential of the product and how you can use the new features to meet your requirements and ease out operations in your Virtual / Cloud environments.

Special thanks to Simon Eady and Iwan Rahabok for delivering this as a team.

So without further ado, here is the recording for this session:

Note : It is recommended that you watch the video in HD quality for a great experience.

vROps Webinar 2016 - Announcing Part 9 : What's New with vRealize Operations Manager 6.3

It's the time of the month when I would like to invite you to join the next episode of our year long vROps Webinar Series. As we move towards winters, we would like to take a zoom out view at the vRealize Operations Manager solution with a What's New Episode. For the past 8 months, we have gone pretty deep into most of the product features and I believe it is time when we review the product in it's current form and shape. In my opinion, this could not be done better than sharing about the new features & functionalities available in the latest version of vRealize Operations Manager.

While throughout the journey of this series we have discussed various versions of the product, this time around our focus would be on vRealize Operations 6.3.

There are a number of blog articles available which talk about the new features available in the product, however with this episode we will look into the new features in action through a Live Demo as always. I think it is important to see the new features in action to understand the use cases associated with those new features.

So without further a do, save the date in your calendars and join use for the next episode of vRealize Operations Webinar Series 2016.

Day & Date          : Thursday, 29^th September 2016

Time                     : 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM  (SGT)

Event                    : vROps Webinar 2016

Topic                     : Part 9 : What's New with vRealize Operations Manager 6.3

Speakers               : Simon Eady / Sunny Dua

WebEx Link          : Join WebEx Meeting

NOTE - Don't forget to mark your calendars by saving the Date!! Feel free to forward the invite to anyone who might be interested. It's open to all!!


Sharing & Spread the Knowledge!!