See you at VMworld!!

Hope your bags are packed and you are heading towards Vegas for VMworld 2017. This year like every year if bigger and better and I am extrememly excited to be part of this game changing time in the industry. 

Just in-case you are unable to attend this year, make sure you mark your calendar for the Live General Sessions. Here is the link with more details..

If you are at the show then do not forget to catch up. I would love to have a chat with you if you are challenged in running operations and looking for solutions. One way to catch up would be through breakout sessions. This year, I am privileged to present a session with a customer and a old buddy Sudharsan S. from Cognizant about this exciting concept of running measured operations. The founder of the program is my close buddy Iwan Rahabok and you can learn more about the program on his blog. Or you can be in this room at VMworld to attend LIVE

Add this session to your schedule by clicking here.

In another session (Group Discussion), I will talk about how we help customers run production operations with vRealize Suite. This is a JAM session where we would welcome all the feedback you might have from your experiences of using the VMware vRealize Intelligent Ops Solutions. So if you have feedback for us which we can use to help create our next gen products, this is the session for you.

Add this session to your schedule by clicking here.

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For our TAM (Technical Account Managed) customers, I will be available in the TAM Central in VMVillage presenting on a couple of topics. These are exclusive events for TAM customers and you need to speak to your TAM to attend these. The first one will be with Iwan. This is a 2 hour deep dive workshop which will talk about Architecting Operations in this new ERA. The learning's from this session would be applicable to your work as soon as you are back to office from VMworld :-)

Another TAM customer session would be on a topic which I cannot disclose on my blog. But if you are a TAM customer and looking for solutions to manage large scale, globally distributed cloud environments, then this is the session for you.

Session Name : Can't tell you here :-)

Location - Mandalay Bay, Level 3, Palm A

Time - Tuesday, 29th August - 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM

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I will be podcasting as well with Yadin from Druva Inc. whom I recently worked with on a very cool project of creating a vTrailMap. This map can help you immensely with your jouney to the cloud :-) More details can be found by meeting Yadin in the exhibition area. You can find him on twitter. Here is his tweet about the vTrailMap

Here is the Podcast Timing. Make sure to Tune in :-)

When	Wed Aug 30, 2017 12pm – 12:30pm Pacific Time
Where	VMware Village - Podcasting Booth (map)

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I am happy to share that me and Iwan would be presenting at the Extreme Performance Bootcamp at VMworld organized by Mark A. We will be talking about how to measure performance of your vSphere Environments using vRealize Operations Manager. We will also touch upon how you can troubleshoot your vSphere Environments effectively. Here are the session details.

Saturday August 26, 2017
8:00am to 5:00pm
(registration opens at 6:30am)

Location:

Mandalay Bay, South Convention Centre
3rd Floor Jasmine Rooms

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Just in case if we do not meet, do make sure you get your #vROpsNinja Stickers from the VMware Intelligent Operations Booths in the Exhibition Area. We have a bunch of them reserved for you :-)

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Finally I will be participating in the #VMworld Hackathon this year with a dream team. John Dias (the voice behind the product videos of vRealize Operations Manager 6.6) will be one of them.

Hackathon starts on Monday 8:00 PM at Luxor and runs late. More details here - https://blogs.vmware.com/code/2017/07/28/vmworld-hackathon-back/ 

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Demystifying vRealize Operations Data Collection

Around 3 years ago I wrote an article explaining the data collection process of vRealize Operations Manager. In that article, I wrote about the path followed by the data from source to destination. Fast forward 3 years and I still get questions about vROps data collection process and granularity.

People have different notions about this, so let me share the secret sauce:

vRealize Operations Manager Out of the Box, is configured to collect data every 5 (FIVE) minutes form the source. The collector wakes up every 5 minutes and gets last 15 samples of 20 seconds interval from the source.

15 Data Points X 20 Seconds = 300 Seconds ( 5 minute collection cycle)

Once the 20 samples are in, we go ahead and average them out to come up with the value which is saved in the FSDB (File System Database) of vROps. In parallel, operations such as threshold checking, computed metric calculation etc. take place.

As we all know you can further transform this data in views and super metrics by using functions such as Min, Max, Standard Deviation etc. All these functions run on the data saved in FSDB which is the 5 minute data point explained above.

These transformations are NOT ran on the 20 seconds samples. The 20 seconds samples infact are used to do calculations of the 5 minutes data points and are dropped as soon as that calculation is done. This reduces the storage requirement drastically.

Also, it is possible to change this default collection cycle from 5 minutes down to 1 minute, however it is not recommended to do that unless you understand the overall impact on Compute and Storage for increased collection and processinh.

Hope this helps!!

vRealize Operations Manager 6.6.1 Released

VMware just announced the release of vRealize Operations Manager 6.6.1. This is a maintenance release which has the minor bug fixes which were reported with vRealize Operations 6.6. If you are looking to upgrade to vRops 6.6. I would highly recommedn to move to 6.6.1 so that you can benefit from these minor bug fixes.

As per the release notes, here are the lists of issues which have been taken care off with this maintenance release:

• The Total Reclamation Opportunity widget in the Capacity Overview dashboard now displays the correct Reclaimable Capacity metric value.

• The VM percentage metric values for the idle, wait, system, iowait, and swapwait metrics have been corrected.

• Issues with View rendering where resource and aggregation filtering options have both been set, has been resolved.

• Issues with report generation for reports created in earlier versions has been resolved.

• Improved Cluster resilience in case of packet drop spikes in the network.

• Intermittent End Point Operations adapter install/upgrade failures has been fixed.

• The vSAN World object shows the correct number of VMs using vSAN datastore.

• vRealize Operations user interface displays correct information when custom attribute is updated directly in vCenter Server.

• Imported vIDM user preserves all assigned groups.

• Users can enter FQDN as part of the vIDM redirect URL.

• Endless analytics restarts caused by a empty file is fixed.

• Only vSAN enabled host are counted in the vSAN World object.

• The issue with empty Cassandra file has been resolved.

• Intermittent REST authentication issues has been fixed.

• vSphere tags are no longer cleared if tag query fails.

• Negative values for some of the metrics of the vSAN adapter are corrected.

Here is the link to download this release.

Share & Spread the Knowledge!!

Part 10 - VM Mobility gets a whole new meaning with Workload Balance in vROps 6.6

Hope you are enjoying the vROps 6.6 Whats's New Series. I took a little break from writing, but I am back with some more goodness around vROps 6.6. One of the key features which was shipped out in this realese is called the Workload Balance.

In my first post of this What's New Series, I wrote in brief about Fully Automated Workload Balance. Here is a quick recap of what I highlighted about this feature.

• 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.

In the upcoming vROps Webinar Series, I will go deep into this topic to explain how vROps Workload Balance can help you proactively avoid performance problem by using the Mobility Aspects of a VM with time trusted technologies such as vMotion and Storage vMotion.

Apart from being proactive on moving virtual machines across clusters, Workload Balance also helps you track the configuration of DRS which plays a big role in moving virtual machines within the cluster.

With Custom Datacenters (a construct of vRealize Operations Manager), you can create your mini datacenters of your favorite clusters with like properties and move virtual machines between these clusters to avoid any performance bottlenecks and effectively utilize the capacity.

Watch out for the announcement for the next webinar episode where we will see all this goodness in action.

In the mean-time, see this video from Matt Bradford who works as a Technical Account Manager at VMware and also runs a wonderful blog named vmspot.com 

Matt explains both Workload Balance and Predictive DRS with some great examples. See him in action below:

Share & Spread the Knowledge!!