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!!

Part 3 - Operations Dashboards in vRealize Operations 6.6.

In my last post I gave you an overview of the new user interface of vRealize Operations 6.6 along with some other important enhancements. Do go through that post to get a context of what we are going to discuss here.

With the introduction of Getting Started page within dashboards, one of the categories which is available out of the box is called the "Operations".

Here is how operations shows up on the Getting Started Page:

The Operations category is most suitable for roles within an organization who require a summary of important data points to take quick decisions. This could be a member of a NOC team who wants to quickly identify issues and take actions, or executives who want a quick overview of their environments to keep a track of important KPIs.

Key questions these dashboards help you answer are :

• What does the infrastructure inventory look like?

• What is the alert volume trend in the environment?

• Are virtual machines being served well?

• Are there hot-spots in the datacenter I need to worry about?

• What does the vSAN environment look like and are their optimization opportunities by migrating VMs to vSAN?

Let us look at each of these dashboard and I will provide a summary of what these dashboards can do for you along with a quick view of the dashboard.

Datastore Usage Overview

The Datastore Usage Dashboard is suitable for a NOC environment. The dashboard provides a quick glimpse of all the virtual machines in your environment using a heatmap. Each virtual machine is represented by a box on the heatmap. Using this dashboard, a NOC administrator can quickly identify virtual machines which are generating high IOPS since the boxes representing the virtual machine are sized by the number of IOPS they are generating.

Along with the storage demand, the color of the boxes represents the latency experienced by these virtual machines from the underlying storage. A NOC administrator can take the next steps in his investigation to find the root cause of this latency and resolve it to avoid potential performance issues. 

Host Usage Overview

The Host Usage Dashboard is suitable for a NOC environment. The dashboard provides a quick glimpse of all the ESXi hosts in your environment using a heatmap. Using this dashboard the NOC administrator can easily find resource bottlenecks in your environment created due to high Memory Demand, Memory Consumption or CPU Demand.

Since the hosts in the heatmap are grouped by clusters, you can easily find out if you have clusters with high CPU or Memory Load. It can also help you to identify if you have ESXi hosts with the clusters which are not evenly utilized and hence an admin can trigger activities such as workload balance or enable DRS to ensure that hotspots are eliminated.

Operations Overview

The Operations Overview dashboard provides a high level view of objects which make up you virtual environment. It provides you an aggregate view of virtual machine growth trends across your different datacenters being monitored by vRealize Operations Manager.

The dashboard also provides a list of all your datacenters along with inventory information about how many clusters, hosts and virtual machines you are running in each of your datacenters. By selecting a particular datacenter you can zoom into the areas of availability and performance. The dashboard provides a trend of known issues in each of your datacenters based on the alerts which have triggered in the past.

Along with the overall health of your environment, the dashboard also allows you to zoom in at the Virtual Machine level and list out the top 15 virtual machines in the selected datacenter which might be contending for resources.

Optimize vSAN Deployments

The Optimize vSAN deployments dashboard is an easy way to device a migration strategy to move virtual machines from your existing storage to your newly deployed vSAN storage. The dashboard provides you with an ability to select your non vSAN datastores which might be struggling to serve the virtual machine IO demand. By selecting the VMs on a given datastore, you can easily identify the historical IO demand and latency trends of a given virtual machine.

You can then find a suitable vSAN datastore which has the space and the performance characteristics to serve the demand of this VM. With a simple move operation within vRealize Operations Manager, you can move the virtual machine from the existing non vSAN datastore to the vSAN datastore.

Once the VM is moved, you can continue to watch the utilization patterns to see how the VM is being served by vSAN.

vSAN Operations Overview

The vSAN Operations Overview Dashboard provides an aggregated view of health and performance of your vSAN clusters. While you can get a holistic view of your vSAN environment and what components make up that environment, you can also see the growth trend of virtual machines which are being served by vSAN.

The goal of this dashboard is to help understand the utilization and performance patterns for each of your vSAN clusters by simply selecting one from the provided list. VSAN properties such as Hybrid or All Flash, Dedupe & Compression or a Stretched vSAN cluster can be easily tracked through this dashboard.

Along with the current state, the dashboard also provides you a historic view of performance, utilization, growth trends and events related to vSAN.

In case you are like me, and don't like to READ. You can see the dashboards in action in this video playlist:

⏩See all dashboards in action here.

More to come.. Stay Tuned!!

Do It Yourself - vROps Ninja Sticker

In a recent collaboration with Simon Eady, we created a cool vROps sticker which came out really well post production. The sticker represents a Ninja who can solve world problems through vRealize Operations Manager. 

I might have exaggerated the magnitude and capabilites of Mr. Ninja here 😜, but all it symbolises and relates to is a VMware Expert who can be a Ninja when it comes to solving IT problems. Be it Capacity Mangement, Performance Troubleshooting or day to day Operational Nuiances, A Ninja always raises his sword and is ready to face the situation.  

In the world of Virtualization and Software Defined Datacener, whether it is about apps or infratsructure, vRealize Operations can be the sword of Mr. Ninja.

Hence we call this persona a "vROps Ninja". Here is how Mr. Ninja looks like:

I ordered them from stickermule and they came out really well. This is how the set looks like post production.

While I am giving away all the stickers to people I meet in various VMUGs and the upcoming VMworld in Las Vegas and Barcelona, I have a lot of internal and external requests on how people can create there own Mr. Ninjas 😊😊

With this post, I am essentially sharing the secret sauce.

Here is where you can order them - https://www.stickermule.com/unlock?ref_id=7298480701  (if you order through this link you get a $10 discount.)

I ordered a 3inch x 3inch and it came out as the exact size I wanted. So I would recommend that size to you. You will need a high contrast photo of Mr. Ninja to get the right resolution. Here is the full contrast picture which you can download and use.

So go ahead, create your own Ninjas and use the sword of vRealize Operations Manager to Solve world problems.... 

[UPDATE - November 2018]

We have moved on from the older Ninja Image and created some new variants of Ninja's. Wanted to share the same with you all to chose from.

Here are the versions:

Self Driving Ninja

vROps Armenia Ninja

vROps India Ninja

vROps Singapore Ninja

So go ahead and pick the one you need.


You can get a $10 credit if you order using the following offer from stickermule.

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!!

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 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!!

vRealize Operations 6.3 brings VMware SDDC Health Solution

With vRealize Operations 6.3 out there for close to 3 weeks now, I have seen a number of posts around the new features. What I have not seen being spoken about is this hidden gem called "VMware SDDC Health Solution".

I believe this is the first step towards, monitoring the VMware SDDC Stack using vRealize operations, which goes beyond monitoring performance, utilization or capacity. This solution helps you go deep into the various roles of the management stack for application level monitoring. To begin with, the solution has been rolled out as a Version 1.0.

With this first release, the SDDC Solution will help you monitor the key services of vRealize Operations Manager and vCenter Server. It will provide a fancy out of the the box dashboard which will help you monitor these services and some out of the box, pre-configured alerts which will help you troubleshoot issues when they arise. The hope is that VMware will take this solution with the future releases to other components of the SDDC stack, inclusive of the entire management and automation stack to have a full fledged monitoring solution for the entire SDDC stack out of the box. While it is possible to monitor the entire stack today, but having a solution which can bring everything at one place with minimal effort is GOLD... I believe this is a step in that direction and I am ready to implement the solution for my customers.

Here is the solution brief:

Overview

VMware SDDC Health Solution provides Single pane of glass towards the SDDC Management stack and provides health, efficiency, validation and configuration. VMware SDDC Health Solution Version 1.0 supports the following:

• vCenter health
• vRealize Operations Manager health

Highlights

• SDDC Management Apps Health Overview

• SDDC Application Components Overview

• SDDC Management App Alerts

Description

SDDC Health solution bundles the capability of monitoring various application components of the SDDC management stack. The current version of SDDC Health solution combines the Health aspects from the vRealize Operations Manager and vCenter Server Appliance in to a Single dashboard.

Compatibility

VMware SDDC Health Solution is compatible with:

• VMware vCenter Server 5.5
• VMware vCenter Server 6.0
• VMware vRealize Operations Manager 6.3

Resources

SDDC Health Solution 1.0 Release Notes

VMware SDDC Health Solution 1.0 User Guide

More details - https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/vmware-sddc-health-solution 

The installation and configuration is available on the user guide and is pretty simple to follow. So go ahead and get on the journey of closely monitoring your SDDC environments.

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