Tribute to the FIFA World Cup 2014 through vCenter Operations Manager!

The title of this article might sound weird, but yes, nothing is impossible with vCenter Operations Manager. This time I am not here to share my experience with vCOps, but a great innovation which is Amazing to look at and Simple to implement. 

Here is what I am talking about.. A Dashboard on vCenter Operations Manager which shows the FIFA World Cup Fixtures :-)

This is not a GIMMICK.. It is for REAL...

The credit for this dashboard goes to my VMware Colleague - Lior Kamrat. He was the one who came up with the idea of creating this funky dashboard and he blogged about it on his blog http://imallvirtual.com/

His idea was so popular that he also blogged about the same on the VMware Management Blog.

So if you want to know how to create that COOL Dashboard using vCOps, head to those links and you will be surprised to see how simple it is to use this powerful tool to do creative things. :-)

Kudos to LIOR for thinking out of the box.. Follow him on Twitter for more goodness on vCOps. 

In the end I would say... GO BRAZIL GO.... 

Share and Spread the FUN :-)

Part 11 - Creating Policies & Configuring Badges in vCenter Operations Manager!

It's been over a month since I wrote about vCOps. With this article I wanted to start sharing some of the content which I am creating as a video series around configuration of policies in vCenter Operations Manager. 

This article and the upcoming articles will all be a part of the Back to Basics series on vCenter Operations Manager which I started in March this year. 

Here are the links to the first Ten Parts :-

• Part 1 - Optimizing vCenter Operations Manager Deployment

• Part 2 - vCOps Installation - Creating an IP Pool!

• Part 3 - Deploying vCenter Operations Manager vApp!

• Part 4 - Configuring vCenter Operations Manager Post Deployment!

• Part 5 - Licensing vCenter Operations Manager!

• Part 6 - Configuring vCenter Operations Manager Custom User Interface!

• Part 7 - Changing/Disabling the vCOps User Interface Timeout Values!

• Part 8 - Setting up vCOps Data Retention Policy

• Part 9 - User Authentication in vCenter Operations Manager!

• Part 10 - vCOps Custom UI - Configuring User Authentication & Permissions!

In this part I will discuss the Basic Function of policies and configuring badge thresholds. From here I will take you to capacity and time remaining calculations and then the rest of the configuration options in vCenter Operations Manager. Here is the video:-

Creating Policies & Configuring Badges in vCenter Operations Manage

Stay tuned for some more stuff video stuff on vCenter Operations Manager. Till then...

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vCenter Heartbeat End of Availability

For those of you who have used vCenter Heartbeat to protect your vCenter instances, please be aware that VMware has announced the end of its availability as of today, June 2 2014.

Don’t worry though if you’re using it today; the current iteration will be supported through late 2018.

What does that mean? Are we getting away from protecting vCenter? Not by a long shot. We have big plans in this space. vCenter has become a very critical component of the infrastructure and we’re looking at lots of different means by which you can protect it.

What can you do first? Make sure you’re running it in a virtual machine! That gives you all the proactive benefits of downtime avoidance with DRS and Storage DRS, and the reactive benefits of automated restart with HA clusters.

As always make sure you have reliable backups (and test your restores!) of vCenter and its database.

Take a look at the official announcement of the end-of-availability and read the details about support and the FAQ, and feel free to ask us at VMware about maximizing your vCenter availability.

Sections you must have in your vSphere Architecture Design - VCDX way!

Today I completed my VCDX Architecture Design document which I need to submit to VMware Education in a week. The idea about writing this blog post came to my mind while I was staring at the content section of my Architecture Document. I think it would be great to share a snapshot of the high level contents with all my readers as this would solve multiple purposes:-

>> One, it will help the VCDX aspirants to ensure that they have a ready reckoner which can guide them while creating their Architecture Design Document. 

>> Two, it will help me to get a feedback from peers on what I could be missing in my Architecture Design which they think could be a success criteria.

>> Lastly, VCDX or NO VCDX, it is generally good to have a design document with all these categories to ensure that you cover every nook and corner while creating your vSphere Architecture for your organization or your clients.

So without further a-do here is a screenshot which says it all. 

Their are multiple sections under the main sections which I have listed here, but yeah, these in my opinion are critical to a Design Document.

The debate is open now, so please participate and let me know if you agree, disagree or you want to add more to the list which you think might be a game changer.

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Part 1 - vCOps Extensions - Managing Operations Beyond Virtual Infrastructure

This is a season of Multi-Part Series on vXpress, especially around vCenter Operations Manager and Architecting vSphere. Sometimes this can mean that you need to wait for the next post in the series & I apologize for that. Since blogging is not a part of my Job, it becomes difficult sometimes to get all the content out at once. I write when I get to write which in the past few days has been difficult with lots happening in bother personal & professional life..

Anyways enough about me, lets talk about some COOL stuff which you can do with vCenter Operations Manager. With all my posts on vCOps, you must have noticed that all this while I was concentrating on using vCOps to manage the VMware Virtual Infrastructure. However with this exclusive series on vCOps Extensions, I would just focus and talk about the various plugins which are available to extend the vCenter Operations Manager Analytics engine to beyond your virtual infrastructure & to each nook and corner of your datacenter equipment. 

It is important to know that you need to be on Advanced/Enterprise edition of vCenter Operations Manager to use the capability of extending vCOps beyond the Virtual Infrastructure. 

Use Cases Beyond Virtual Infrastructure

Before I get into the the meat of this post, I wanted to share a use case which I was told about when I was first introduced to vCenter Operations Manager. In this case vCOps Custom Dashboard were used by a bank to fetch data from their EPBAX (Business Telephone Systems) into vCOps and then create custom dashboards for monitoring the call patterns which were coming into their call center. They could easily get call patterns and if their were abnormal call patterns in a particular queue, they would know it with the Anomalies feature of vCOps.

This would help to proactively know about the issues which their telephone lines, websites, internet banking systems etc might have or will have. This would also help them forecast the call patterns and workforce needs to handle them. I don't think their could be a better example of how creative you can get with vCenter operations manager.

Available Integrations

It is quite obvious that  their are a number of default integrations which are available today through adapters which can be easily installed and configured on your existing vCOps deployment and start bringing in the metrics from the third party resources such as storage arrays, networking equipment, applications etc. All such adapters are available on the VMware Solution Exchange Page for Cloud Operations Management.

As I write this post, there are 48 such management packs available which can be used for different purposes. There are more than 100 documents which can help you with the implementation of these management packs.

What's Next

With this series I will try and showcase some of the possible integrations which we can do with all I have in my PS Lab out here in India. I will post my experience with these integrations as and when I execute in the parts to come.

Soon coming out with the next part which is going to talk about monitoring the storage infrastructure with vCenter Operations Manager.

Stay tuned for more...

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