vRealize Operations Manager 6.5 is out. Operationalize with Confidence!

VMware just announced the release of vRealize Operations Manager 6.5. With its cadence of delivering a new version every few months with valuable features, VMware allows customers to quickly use the tool as a means to ease out operations of the Software Defined Datacenter. 

We all know that operations is not easy. It is as complex as human brain. Every individual dealing with day to day operations has different views on how they want to present and interpret data. While some are big fans of vROps Dashboards, others believe in the approach of notifications which can alarm them on predictive and actual failures in the software defined datacenter. I use the term SDDC, because I believe the architecture supports both on-premise and off-premise environments. In other words, while your SOPs could differ in operating Private & Public clouds, the operations framework moreover remains the same. Yes, you might be dealing with a complete different set of objects and metrics when you are running on Amazon, however the generic human behavior towards operating SDDC remains unchanged.

While, I should be sitting with the AWESOME developers of the product and the Product Managers to celebrate this release, I am here in India working with a customer along with my buddy Iwan "e1" Rahabok to operationalize their Software Defined Datacenter. I am not complaining though, since I get to learn the most when I get requirements from a customer and we get into a heated discussion around operations management. The outcomes can be quite satisfying at the end of the day!!

So without further a do lets see what this release has to offer:


What's New?

vRealize Operations Manager 6.5 focuses on enhancing product scalability limits and troubleshooting capabilities.

• Additional monitoring capabilities
• Adds ability to increase memory and increase the scope of monitoring within the same environment.
• Enables you to monitor larger environments with the same footprint through platform optimization.
• XL size node enables you to monitor more objects and it processes more metrics.

• Automatic upgrade of Endpoint Operations Agents:
• The new Endpoint Operations Agent upgrade bundle allows you to automatically upgrade the agent through the vRealize Operations Manager user interface.

• Enhanced troubleshooting capabilities:
• Quickly correlates logs and metrics in context for any monitored object using Log Insight within vRealize Operations Manager.
• Creates custom metric groups that enables you to focus on most relevant metrics

• Improved collaboration:
• Simplifies export and import of custom groups and eases dashboard sharing between different vRealize Operations Manager installations.
• Understands Private Cloud costs and Public Cloud spends by accessing vRealize Business for Cloud from within vRealize Operations Manager.

General improvements

• Removes scale limitations from Predictive DRS (pDRS).Predictive DRS enables vRealize Operations to provide long-term forecast metrics to augment the short-term placement criteria of the vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS).

• Default values for the following global settings have changed:
  • For Deleted Objects, it has changed from 360 hours to 168 hours
  • For Action History, it has changed from from 90 days to 30 days
  • For Symptoms/Alerts, it has changed from 90 days to 45 days
  These default settings are effective only for new vRealize Operations 6.5 installations.

• Allows you to disable coloring in scoreboard widget.

• The update process has been optimized. The update process might be up to 40% faster, depending on the size of the environment and the number of objects being monitored.

Here are some useful links to get you going:

Download Link

vRealize Operations Manager 6.5 VMware product page

vRealize Operations Manager 6.5 Release Notes

vRealize Operations Manager 6.5 Publications

vROps is EASY!!!

While that sounds like a whacky title.. You will only believe when you see the video I am about to share... Full credit of this video goes to Matt Bradford who blogs at http://www.vmspot.com/ . He has clearly knocked it out of the park to show you how easy it is to make vRealize Operations Dashboards and how broad is the spectrum of the product as compared to "SO CALLED COMPETITION". Not saying that competition is bad, but in operations it is all about choice.

Choice to see what you want to see.. Choice to Slice and Dice data, Choice to present data so that it makes sense to the super nerd and the layman.. That is the power of vROps and it custom dash-boarding capabilities.

So if you are the one who thinks vROps is difficult, it is showing too many things, I don't know what to look at and all that JAZZ!!

Go see this...

If someone said operations is simple!! They are fooling you.. It is more complex than any other process or technology out there.. You know WHY? Because it involves human.. While we know a lot about Human Behavior, no science has cracked the code yet... So when you are dealing with People, Process and Perceptions you need something which can help you put your thought process on a canvas.. Guess what?? vROps can do that!! 

So go figure....

Thanks Matt for making this video.. you made my day!!

Vembu releases a free edition of Vembu BDR Suite. Give it a go!!

While I am still going through the process of settling down in my new role and a new life, I do wanted to write this quick article to thank Vembu Technologies who have come out to sponsor vXpress as one of the premium sponsors.

While I have been evaluating their softwares in my lab environment, they have recently released a free edition of Vembu BDR Suite which allows you to backup and recover unlimited number of vSphere and Hyper-V virtual machines and of-course the physical servers as well. Yes you read it right.. It is completely FREE. The difference between the paid and free version can be found here and you will be happy to know that the basic features such as - Agentless VMware Backup, Full VM Backup, Disk Exclusion, SAN and Hot Add modes and app aware backup processing is all included in the free version for unlimited number of VMs.

I believe its a great pick for small scale customers who want to test the waters and have a backup strategy defined for their IT. They will also have a choice to buy a licensed edition and just license the product for the paid edition which gives them enterprise class features. The entire suite is pretty comprehensive and I would probably go through the features as  I review the product further. 

Here are the top 5 reasons why Vembu wants you to use the free edition:

• Vembu BDR Suite Free Edition is suitable for both virtual environments like VMware, Hyper-V and also for physical servers, workstations, thus catering to all types of data centers.

• It is free forever. Post the trial period, a customer can continue to use the free version without any licenses involved.

• The free version does not have major restrictions and can perform full image backup and recovery of both physical and virtual machines, granular recovery of files, folders and applications and much more.

• Vembu’s own filesystem, VembuHIVE brings in-built compression, version control, encryption and error correction for efficient storage management.

• One can backup unlimited VMs and physical servers and thus the free edition is suitable for both production and testing environments.

So go ahead and give it a try...

Enabling SDDC Health Solution for VSAN monitoring.

A few days back, I wrote about the release of VMware SDDC health Solution 2.0 which enabled you to monitor all the key components of your Software Defined Datacenter. If you go though the documentation of this release, you will see that the pre-requisite to monitor VSAN through this management pack requires you to install and configure the VMware vRealize® Operations Management Pack for vSAN™. This can be downloaded from the following link.
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Once you have the SDDC Health Solution and the VSAN management pack configured, you would need to enable the VSAN monitoring for VSAN to show as a child of SDDC solution on vROps UI. This option is not enabled out of the box since you may or may not have VSAN in your SDDC environments.

To enable this option follow the steps below:

Reference Link - VMware SDDC Health Solution 2.0 User Guide

Enable VMware vSAN Health Monitoring

VMware vSAN health monitoring under SDDC Health Management solution is disabled by default. You can manually enable the instance to receive VMware vSAN alerts and turn on the collection for VMware vSAN to collect data.

Note vRealize Operations Management Pack for vSAN is only supported on vRealize Operations Manager 6.4 and later.

Prerequisites

Verify that vRealize Operations Management Pack for vSAN is installed to monitor VMware vSAN health using SDDC Health Management Solution.

Procedure

1- Log in to the vRealize Operations Manager CLI using the root user and change the VSAN property to true in the sddchealth.properties file.

2- Edit the sddchealth.properties in the vi editor and set the value to true.

# vi $ALIVE_BASE/user/plugins/inbound/SDDCHealthAdapter3/conf/sddchealth.properties

3- Stop and restart the collection for SDDC Health adapter. 

Once you are done, you will start seeing the VSAN icon under the SDDC Management Health Overview Dashboard.

Will share as I explore this further in monitoring the entire gamut of SDDC solution with the aim of getting them under a "Single Pane of Glass" :-)

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