What is Fast... A recent interview with David Davis!

Working from the VMware headquarters definitely has more benefits than getting great Indian Food and rubbing shoulders with the Whose Who of the Virtualization and Cloud Industry :-)

On a busy Monday afternoon, I was told that +David Davis with his team from +ActualTech Media - is at the HQ and they are speaking with the Cloud Management Business folks about VMware's vRealize product line. David as we all know is a great inspiration and a mentor for many who want to learn about VMware and the technologies in the surrounding eco-system. Just like others, I have followed him very closely and have always appreciated the work he has done for the vCommunity. We spoke at length about the work I am doing related to vRealize Operations Manager, Blogging, Webinar series etc. Later we decided to do a recorded interview which might help the viewers of Actual Tech Media and vXpress to have a quick look at where we are going!!

While I have interviewed with him before, along with +Iwan Rahabok during VMworld 2016, that interview never got published due to technical difficulties. Iwan was missed during this interview, but I had him covered I guess :-)

Here is the recording of the interview. It's just 15 minutes and I am sure it would be worth!!

Using End Point Operations agent with vRealize Operations Manager

End Point Operations as a feature of vRealize Operations Manager is an area where I get a lot of questions. During a workshop with a customer today, I was asked about a number of things which rang a bell in my head. I spent some time with the customer to de-mystify a lot of apprehensions around EPOps and the conversation ended into a meaningful action plan.

The phenomenon of agreement in the IT world (especially operations) is rare and hence I think that it would be worth to share the findings with others who might be looking for similar answers. With the slow departure of Hyperic and End Point Operations becoming mainstream, it is important that customers who have use cases for monitoring beyond the hypervisor layer (which vROps does for you OOTB) have a clear visibility into where End Point Operations stands.

It is important to understand that Operations Management as a process is not limited to a tool or feature. If you walk-in into any medium or small sized customer environments, you will find a number of tools solving point problems. I am not saying that vROps can solve all the problems of the world, but I do see customers inclining towards tools consolidation and considering vROps as the mainstream platform which can help them reduce all the complexity while covering the most number of use cases they would have around Operations Management.

While I can go on and on about Operations, the scope of this post revolves around End Point Operations. The use cases are pretty specific, however they can go DEEP and WIDE as we are moving from the hypervisor layer and into the zone of Operating System, Middleware and Applications. If you have been into IT operations, you would quickly realize the complexity you need to deal with once you look at all of this data in silos using multiple tools. Hence, if a tool can provide capabilities for joining all the dots to give you a complete picture right from the physical hardware, up-to the response times of a transaction one is running on a OLTP platform ALL IN ONE PLACE, it is a easy sell.

The statement I just made is also known as the "HUNKY DORY WORLD". Only if it was this simple, many of us would not have a job :-)

End-Point operations in its current form, and time to come is eventually trying to solve this problem. Post the integration of EPOps solution within the vROps platform, the unified view is no longer a distant dream. Having said that, I have to be brutally honest in saying that this UNIFIED VIEW needs a great amount of expertise to ensure that it is build right. With the evolution of EPOps, I am glad to share that there are a number of solutions which VMware has been able to build and deliver and with this pace of delivery, I am sure there are a number of them on the roadmap (only if I was allowed to share the roadmap without an NDA ;-) ).

I must call out that the list I am about to share are the one's which are made by VMware. Blue Medora, a very close partner of VMware, has delivered a number of management packs and plugins with un-matched quality and they are worth exploring as well.

Here is the list of available vROps plugins for end point operations manager. These will help you monitor the applications and related services.

I would highly recommend that these should be tried in a Test/Dev environments to see if they meet your use cases and then deployed in Production. You can use the links to download the plugins and the related documentation for more details:-

RabbitMQ  - https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/rabbitmq-solution-for-vrealize-operations-manager 

JBoss EAP - https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/jboss-eap-solution-for-vrealize-operations-manager 

Apache Tomcat - https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/apache-tomcat-solution-for-vrealize-operations-manager--2 

Microsoft Exchange - https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/microsoft-exchange-solution-for-vrealize-operations-manager 

PostgreSQL - https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/postgresql-solution-for-vrealize-operations-manager--2 

Pivotal tc server - https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/pivotal-tc-server-solution-for-vrealize-operations-manager 

Active Directory - https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/active-directory-solution-for-vrealize-operations-manager 

Microsoft IIS - https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/microsoft-iis-solution-for-vrealize-operations-manager 

Microsoft SQL - https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/microsoft-sql-solution-for-vrealize-operations-manager--2

Some best practices around installing management packs & EP Ops:-

• Ensure that you test them in a Dev environment. This includes, the metrics, the relationships, the new alerts and dashboards which are added by the pack OOTB.

• Once you have the POC done and content finalized, install the pack in Production.

• Disable all the OOTB Alerts and enable what you need. Customise them to meet specific use cases. It is always a good practice to disable all the alerts and clone the OOTB alerts (whichever you need). This will not impact the alerts you chose to keep during major product upgrades.

• Export any unwanted dashboards introduced by the management pack (for a backup) and delete them. This will help avoid clutter.

• You might want to be selective with your approach with deploying EP Ops as per the sizing done for your vROps deployment. If you plan to go beyond the capability of your vROps cluster, please expand it by using the Sizing calculator.

With this I will close this article. Hopefully the information above would tickle your brain to see how you can deliver the unified view which you always wished for.

Share your thoughts in the comments section and as always, Share the Post.. You never know who needs it!!

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...