vROps Webinar 2017 - Announcing Part 4 : Optimizing Workload Performance Using Automation

Back from VMworld 2017. Clearly, this has to be the BEST EVER VMworld for VMware and its customers. I am still hungover from all the announcements and amazing solutions we have to offer to our customers.

Well, in all this excitement, I wanted to make sure that we are able to keep our promise of sharing more about vRealize Operations 6.6. In my last episode of the webinar series, I gave you a quick overview of the all new version of vROps. IN this episode, I want to DIVE DEEP into the interesting topic of introducing automation into operations.

While we all know that, automating day to day operations tasks is becoming the choice of an IT organization, it is hard for them to find a solution which can completely understand their business policies and provide them the efficiency they need from automating simple operational tasks.

Based on our research, we found that, one of the most time consuming activity done by an Virtual Infrastructure Administrator is to juggle resources between the changing business requirements and ensure that every VM which is being hosted in their environment is BEING SERVED WELL.

With VMware vRealize Operations 6.6, a new and innovative solution is introduced to cater to this use case. While there are other products in the market which claim to have done this, what we have learned from our customers that Technology applied by those solutions quickly forgets that Automation should also consider business policies.

With Workload Balance as the next topic of our Webinar Series, we will talk about some real world use cases and demonstrate how we can AUTOMATE OPERATIONS keeping in mind the business goals and requirements. I have selected a date post VMworld Barcelona and hopefully it will suit you.

Make sure that you save the invite. Here are the details: 👇👇👇

Session Title	Part 4 - Optimizing Workload Performance using Automation
Date	Tuesday, 19th September 2017
Time	1:00 PM to 2:30 PM Pacific Time
Speakers	Sunny Dua & Simon Eady
Webinar Link	Click here to join the session when it's time
Save Invite	Click here to save invite  👈

See you at the Webinar!!  👋👋👋👋

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!!

Part 1 - What's New with vRealize Operations Manager 6.6.

I am happy to share that VMware has released the vRealize Operations Manager 6.6 version which was anounced through a blog post by Taruna Gandhi a few days back.

While I have been closely following all the releases of vROps for the past couple of years, this release is special to me as I am a part of the engineering group which has worked on making this release possible for the last 6 months.

The goal behind vRealize Operations Manager 6.6 was to improve the time to value and accelerate the user experience by providing out of the box answers to questions which are faced by IT on a day to day basis. Be it the administrators who manage the IT systems and applications, or the Executives, who are responsible for making strategic decisions around Capacity and Growth, this release of vROps caters to all the personas will multiple use cases out of the box.

In my opinion, operations at all levels and across all the areas of IT is ran in two modes. The preferred choice is Proactive, however many times one has to be Reactive as well. Be it Performance, Capacity, Utilization, Availability, Configuration or Compliance, one must have easy ways to answer simple questions while running operations.

For instance, a person responsible for procuring capacity should have simple yet exhaustive statistics which allow them to take the next procurement decision proactively. A System Administrator should have simple yet comprehensive metrics and logs to troubleshoot an issue in a fire-fighting situation. 

If you notice, the requirements above are conflicting and it is always important to strike a balance between TOO SIMPLE and TOO COMPLEX. You sway either ways and the value is lost.

With the above thought process in mind, vROps 6.6 was designed and I am happy to give you a quick preview of What's New with this release!!

Note, this is just the first part, in the coming days, you will see a series of blog posts which will deep dive into individual areas to help you use all the goodness coming with this release. With that, let's dissect the release notes to see what all is coming in:

• Simplified usability and faster time to value capabilities:

• New HTML5 user interface provides an easier and consistent experience. The new UI is clarity based which is a standard used by all the products of VMware. This allows you to seamlessly go from one area of the solution to another whether it is metrics, logs or cost without learning the menus or impacting your user experience.

• Consolidation and simpler grouping of menus leading to enhanced user experience.

• The Getting Started dashboard allows for quick navigation.

• Persona based dashboards provides for answers in one place. Dashboards are separated into categories such as Operations, Capacity and Utilization, Performance Troubleshooting, Workload Balance, and Configuration and Compliance.

• Out of the box integration with vSAN and vRealize Automation provides quick time to value. 

• Added Native vSAN management capabilities:
• Allows for centralized management across stretched clusters.

• Ability for complete vSAN management, which includes administering performance, capacity, logs, and configuration and health.

• 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.

⏯See Workload Balance in action here.

• Additional out-of-the-box compliance capabilities:

• Ability to tackle compliance problems through the new vSphere hardening dashboard

• Extends compliance through PCI & HIPAA compliance for vSphere.

• Ensures business configurations through new cluster, host, and VM configuration dashboards.

• Sizing & Scalability Enhancements:

• You can now scale to 6 Extra Large Nodes in a cluster which can support up to 180,000 Objects and 45,000,000 metrics.
• You can now monitor up to 60 vCenter Servers with a single instance of vROps.
• A large Remote Collector can support up to 15000 objects.
• and many more.....

In the upcoming parts of this series, I will deep dive into each of the above mentioned areas and give you more details on how you can operationalize some of these features to match your day to day operational use cases.

Stay tuned for more!!