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: