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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Recover Deleted Custom Dashboards from vCenter Operations Manager

Some time back, I wrote an article highlighting the custom dashboards which are available out of the box with the release of vCenter Operations Manager 5.7. I have been asked questions about, how these dashboards can be recovered in case someone deletes them accidentally. 

In reality these dashboards are a bunch of XML files which get imported as dashboards, when you install the vCOps vAPP for the first time. A shell script is behind this import which executed the script post installation and start importing these out of the box dashboard in your vCenter Operations Manager instance.

Hence, if comes a scenario where you end up deleting these dashboards, you would need to find that shell script and run it all over again to import the dashboards back into your vCOps instance. Now that we know the science behind these dashboards, let's have a look as to where this shell script is located. 

I am using WinScp to login to the UI VM and browse through to the /usr/lib/vmware-vcops/user/conf/dashboards directory as shown in the screenshot. Here you will find the shell script "import-dashboards.sh"  and most importantly all the xml exports of the dashboards which can be imported back into vCOps individually as well.

If you wish to import all the dashboards, you would need to execute that shell script using either a ssh client such as putty or by taking a console connection to the UI VM. If you run this script it will import all the dashboards listed in the screenshot above and if any of those dashboard is already existing then you will have duplicate instances of same dashboards which in my opinion is not cool.

Hence if you want to recover only a subset of the listed dashboards, then either edit the shell script (if you are good with scripting) else just grab the xml file you want to import and use the IMPORT DASHBOARD option in the custom UI.

With this I will close this article and  get on with a 360 Degree Capacity Dashboard I am working on. Will share that for sure ;-)

Till then...

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Right Sizing vCenter Operations Manager vApp For Efficient Performance !!

Out of a recent engagement on vCenter Operations Manager, the most important discussion point which came out was the sizing of vCOPS vAPP. There were other discussions as well which are interesting and I would write and share about those facts, however I thought this should be a good start towards understanding what vCOPS can do for you and how the solution should be sized for best results.

If you are new to vCOPS and need to understand the basics about vCOPS, you should refer to one of my previous article about vCOPS - vCenter Operations Manager - Solving Performance, Capacity and Configuration Problems!!

After going through that post you would know that vCOPS is available as a packaged vAPP which consists of two Virtual Machines. These machines are called:-

Analytics Virtual Machine and UI Virtual Machine

The diagram below shows the architecture of this vAPP:-

In this article I will not explain each of these components as it is clearly defined in a free VMware MyLearn training on the following link - VMware vCenter Operations Manager Fundamentals [V5.X]. I would highly recommend this training to anyone who wants to learn about vCOPS to understand the basics of this solution.

Now, coming back to sizing these virtual machines. 

Analytics VM - On a high level you need to understand that the Analytics VM is the one which does most of the work and also gets all the data in form of Raw Metrics. All the algorithms regarding the Performance Analytics run in this virtual machine and the same are stored in separate database which are hosted on this virtual machine.

UI (User-Interface) VM - This is where the Capacity IQ is hosted along with the Admin User-Interface, vSphere User-Interface and the Custom User-Interface. The Capacity related data is stored in a database which is a part of this virtual machine.

Now, the question which rises out from here is that how do we size these virtual machines in terms of CPU & Memory resources and how much storage should be assigned to these Virtual Machines to ensure that all the components of this application are able to run successfully and also perform all the tasks which you expect them to.

Since we know that vCOPS extends its offering to vSphere and Non vSphere environments, we need to look at sizing requirements from both perspectives:-

a) Based on the number of VMs – Works well for a vSphere-centric Environment.

b) Based on the number of Metrics – Works well when adding non vSphere adapters

Let's look at the numbers for a vSphere Environment for CPU, RAM & Storage

In case you are using a collector to collect metrics data from Non-vSphere environment, then you would need to calculate and add CPU, Memory & Disk resources on the basis of the recommended numbers below:-

I hope this will help you to size your vCOPS vAPP appropriately at the time of deployment. Right sizing will ensure that you do not face any issues with this application while it's monitoring the performance, showcasing capacity and ensuring standard configurations and compliance in your vSphere & Non-vSphere environment.