Part 6: vRealize Operations 6.0 - Am I missing the Badge Scores?

With the release of vRealize Operations Manager 6.0, a number of new things have been introduced. While I continue to add content around what's new in my series on this new release, I always wanted to share some major changes int he way data is displayed and should be interpreted with the new release.

If you have worked on vCenter Operations Manager 5.x, you would know about the badge scores which you see with each badge which represents a particular Super Metric, see the highlighted scores in the screenshot below from the old version:

Now let's look at the same badges on the home screen of vRealize Operations Manager 6.0.

While the shape of the badges remain the same, you will notice that the scores are GONE. Even if you dig down further into minor badges you will notice that the scores are gone. While the scores are no longer displayed, the badge colours are still driven by the thresholds. Infact, if you move your mouse pointer on one any of the badge, you will see the score popping up. See the screenshot below:-

While, the scores are not available on the badges on the Recommendations (HOME DASHBOARD), if you dig down deeper into badges, you will start seeing this score for specific objects in the inventory. See the screenshot below where, I am checking the Anomalies score for a custom group in the vROps inventory and I can see the scores right on the badges.

I believe the reason for taking out the scores from the Home page is to give more visualization to the screen than calculation. I like it since I can now look at the scores if I need to and only worry about colour changes when they breach the thresholds which I have defined in the policies of my environment.

In the posts to come, I will talk about more such enhancements and changes to ensure that your learning curve of this new release is fast paced :-)

Till then...

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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...

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Reclaiming Waste Capacity using vCOPS - How to Calculate Waste & Usage Accurately!

This article is coming out of a discussion which I had around a month ago with one of my colleague and then with a customer about the Capacity Management feature of vCenter Operations Manager (vCOPS).

If you are new to vCOPS, I would recommend reading my other posts on vCOPS which would make you familiar with this topic:

vCenter Operations Manager - Solving Performance, Capacity and Configuration Problems!!

Right Sizing vCenter Operations Manager vAPP For Efficient Performance !!

I believe this topic is worth writing about as this might help you understand how Capacity IQ which is now rolled up into vCenter Operations Manager (vCOPS), calculates the usage of resources for a Virtual Machine or for that matter any object in the vCenter. The resource usage ultimately helps the tool to monitor the Capacity Utilization over a period of time. This Capacity utilization leads to calculation of 2 minor badges:-

a) Reclaimable Waste, and

b) Density

These two values then roll up into a Main Badge known as "EFFICIENCY". A score of 100 on efficiency means that you are using the virtual infrastructure in the most appropriate way, and as that score starts reducing, you know that either you have virtual machines which are Over Sized or Under Sized which will lead to waste of resources or performance issues due to resource contention.

Below is a screenshot which shows how the efficiency badge and the sub-badges show in the vCenter Operations Dashboard.

At the end of the day, efficiency is the most important piece of information which the Capacity Management feature of vCOPS provides. From the perspective of an IT buyer, it becomes a tool which helps you to ensure that you do not waste any resources in your infrastructure by following primitive methods of resource allocation to servers and applications.

Hence, this allows you to right size your infrastructure as you operate and manage it. 

For example, a new application which needs to be deployed in your infrastructure needs a Windows 2008 R2 VM, with 4 vCPU and 16 GB of RAM as per the application owner. This might be a practice which is being carried forward by the application owner from the world of physical servers. However, with Virtual it is quite possible that the VM will never use the allocated capacity. The challenge is that how can we capture this data and present it back to the application owner.

vCOPS has the answer - Once this machine is created and the server goes into production, vCOPS would start monitoring this virtual machine on a regular basis and would capture data around utilization of CPU & Memory. After a period of 30 to 45 days, vCOPS would understand the capacity utilization patterns of this virtual machine. After this, a report in vCOPS about Reclaimable Waste will easily tell you about all the virtual machines which are over-sized on CPU or Memory. On the basis of this report you can reclaim the resource and save a lot of money for your organization by increasing the efficiency of the hardware. 

While I say this, it is important that you have the correct settings to monitor the utilization capacity and usage patterns of your virtual infrastructure. In a business environment where the servers work between 9 AM to 6 PM, Monday to Friday, it is important that you capture the utilization patterns during this period to calculate the reclaimable waste and density of the Virtual Machine. In such a scenario if you set the monitoring days and time to 24/7, you will end up capturing a lot of skewed data which does not reflect the correct business cycles. This will ultimately result in a very low efficiency and a huge amount of reclaimable waste which might not be TRUE otherwise.

To avoid such problems, follow the settings on the screenshot mentioned below and you should be good to go.

This would ensure that you capture the right data and process it into valid information which will help you manage capacity in your Virtual Infrastructure. It's important that any decision regarding capacity is not taken in a haste. Rather, we should ensure that we customize the settings for monitoring capacity on the basis of our own environment and then let the tool run for a period of 4 weeks to 6 weeks before you start looking into the results and begin to make changes for the betterment of your Virtual Infrastructure.

Hope this will help you learn more about what vCOPS can do for you and how you can do such tasks accurately.

vCenter Operations Manager - Solving Performance, Capacity and Configuration Problems!!

I have been writing about the cloud infrastructure products of VMware all this while. I believe it is important to look at the management side of things as well. No doubt Virtualization makes things easier for an organization and its IT department; however things are good till the time they are small and easy to manage. As the confidence of such organizations increases towards Virtualization, you would notice a VM sprawl, which might someday defeat the purpose of Virtualization & consolidation.

The result of a sprawl leads to unpredictable behavior of the Virtual Infrastructure, Performance bottlenecks, Waste of expensive resources, complex troubleshooting procedures and issues around other day to day admin activities. I believe any administrator of a medium/large virtual infrastructure would agree to the brief description of the pain points which I have listed above. If you categorize these problems broadly they would fall under 3 Major Categories:-

I - Performance Problems - This will include pain points such as:-

§  How is my overall infrastructure performing?

§  How hard my physical ESXi servers are working?

§  Am I looking at a potential problem which might break my infrastructure?

§  Is there a way I can predict issues and solve them before they are noticed by End Users?

§  Which areas do I look at to troubleshoot any existing issues?

§  Is it a storage issue or is it the hypervisor?

&, the list is never ending..........

II - Capacity Problems - Let's have a look at the pain points of capacity:-

§  Do I have enough Physical capacity (CPU, MEMORY, NETWORK and STORAGE) to support my virtual machines?

§  When do I need to buy more hardware?

§  Am I wasting any resources?

§  Have I sized the virtual machines appropriately?

§  How should I answer questions raised by my CXO's about capacity forecasts, buying decisions etc.??

& many more.....

III - Configuration & Compliance Problems - A more critical problem area, let's see some issues here:-

§  I am asked to follow HIPPA, SOX or PCI compliance policies for my servers, am I compliant?

§  My infrastructure is too big? How do I control changes in my Virtual Infrastructure? 

§  Is there a way to maintain common standards?

The more you dig here... the more issues you would find...

Well, the list above is only a sub set of issues which we face while managing the Virtual Infrastructure. As a reader of this article and an administrator you would be able to add 10 more unique issues to this list when you read this article. However, we still have a bigger issue on hand. I call it the BIGGEST issue. Questions are always raised around:-

- There are so many tools in the market who claim that they can help me with such issues. Which one should I chose??

- What should I do with my existing tools? That's a huge investment which I have already made.

- Can I get a Single Pane of Glass to solve all such issues? (The most common one - People are fascinated with a single pane, I don't know why?)

and another long list of questions.........

I hope you are with me so far and not lost into the issues which you are facing in your Virtual infrastructure because now I am going to tell you how you can solve such issues. I must tell you over here that the solution I am going to talk about has been around for a good number of years, however I have taken my own sweet time to start believing in this solution as it has matured over a period of time. Now that I see this solution working for large enterprises, I guess this is a good time that you can look into this for solving issues related to Performance, Capacity, Configuration and Compliance in your virtual infrastructures.

As the headline of my post suggest, I am talking about vCenter Operations Manager a.k.a. vCOPS. As an introduction, I would say that this VMware solution has been stitched together in the recent past, by plucking out best components from various industry standard tools which have been there in the Industry for a long time. Though there are a number of functions available in this solution, I would talk about the major life-savers here:-

Let me explain each one of them in simpler manner:-

Patented Performance Analysis - A set of 9 patented algorithms which look at performance as a behavior and not a threshold. The engine learns the behavior of your infrastructure by monitoring all the performance metrics. It learns the Normal behavior and only alert you if it observes an abnormal behavior which could lead to a potential problem. Overall gives you the HEALTH of the infrastructure and make you take right decisions in real-time. This was acquired as a part of Integrien acquisition back in 2010.

Purpose Built Capacity Planning & Analysis - This is VMware Capacity IQ which is rolled up into this suite. Those who know the power of capacity IQ would know that it is the only tool available today, which can pin-point at things like, oversized & under-sized VMs, wasted resources, time remaining & capacity remaining to provision new workloads and potential RISKS associated to Capacity of your Physical Infrastructure. It will also help you do tasks such as Capacity Trending & Forecasting for better and accurate buying decisions.

Automated Configuration & Compliance - This ability of the Suite is provided by vCenter Configuration Manager which again is around for a while. It was a part of the IONIX product portfolio, however later it was picked up by VMware from EMC to weave it into vCOPS and complete the entire picture. This is one of the strongest solution which I have witnessed for compliance and configuration management and has the capability of working across virtual and physical infrastructure, across OS platforms and across server architectures.

I hope this gives you some insight on VMware vCenter Operations Manager. I know I am leaving you with a few thoughts around what else this solution can do and how it actually does what it promises to. There would be questions around financial implications and licensing models as well. I will leave you with a few links which will help you learn more about vCOPS and at the same time I will come back with a few more articles which will help you use this solution effectively in your infrastructures.

Before I share those links, here is an interesting fact which might impress you, if you are still not impressed by vCenter Operations Manager:-

The latest version of vCOPS called vCOPS 5.6 (launched at VMworld Barcelona), has the capability to work across multiple hypervisor, multiple cloud platforms (private or public) and allows you to build Self-Healing mechanisms using vCenter Orchestrator as the Workflow Orchestration Engine. Except Capacity Management, this solution can extend into your Non-VMware infrastructure for Performance, Compliance & Configuration Management. (Storage, Networks, Other monitoring tools, HP UX, Solaris, Applications - Exchange, Oracle, SQL, Amazon, Azure, XEN, Hyper-V etc)

I sure see a revolution coming our way.. Get your seat belts on & sit tight :-)

Here are the links which you can use to learn more:- 

VMware vCenter Operations Manager Fundamentals [V5.X] - This free eLearning course covers how to install and configure vCenter Operations Manager as well as how to use its many robust features.

Other Technical Resources and Links - Link to demos, videos, documentation etc.

Pricing & Packaging - All you need to know about vCOPS licensing, pricing etc.

Hope this helps... If you liked this article, kindly share with others and let the knowledge spread.......