Thursday, March 26, 2015

vRealize Operations Manager 6.0 - Alerting Overview

With vRealize Operations 6.0, VMware introduced policy based alerting, which provides a much more concise view into infrastructure issues and provides actionable recommendations to relieve the problem. In the previous version, alerts were generated by a single symptom, for instance if Workload was above 90% for any object it would send out an alert. Policy based alerts with multiple symptoms, greatly enhances vRealize Operation Manager's ability to give you information for troubleshooting and remediating issues. An added benefit, this capability has been extended to VMware Partners, they have the ability of adding recommendations for alerts into their solution packs.

What is an alert definition? An alert definition is a template for tracking problems. You start with a base object to monitor, you define the impact by categorizing it and rating how critical it is, and then you choose one or more symptoms that constitute the problem.

There are a few different components that make up an alert definition, they include:
  • Symptoms
  • Recommendations
  • Actions
  • Notifications
Alert definitions come with vRealize Operations Manager out of the box, but you also have the capacity to create your own alert definitions. That includes building your own symptoms, prescribing your own recommendations, and assigning actions. Alert definitions created by IT Operations are specifically made to meet your organizations business requirements and SLAs.

Saturday, March 14, 2015

VSAN 6.0 on VMware Fusion

Naturally, if you like to write about technology, having a home lab gives you an opportunity to review the latest software and compose your opinion on the features and capabilities. On my "bucket list" for a long time has been building a modest home lab, something that provides me the resources to test out several of the VMware products that my customers use on a daily basis.

For my home lab, I purchased a 2012 Mac Pro with 64 GB of memory and 12 processor cores. It has three hard drives on the workstation, which includes a 256 GB Solid State SATA Drive, a 1 TB Hybrid SATA Drive (8 GB NAND Flash and 7200 spindle speed), and a 2 TB SATA 7200 drive. Additionally, I purchased a WD MyCloud Mirror NAS storage device that I am using as my Content Libraries storage and it is also connected to my nested vSphere ESXi hosts as NFS storage.


So far, I am running three vSphere ESXi 6 hosts; each of them has 12 GB of memory and 8 vCPU. My cluster includes a Windows 2012 Active Directory Server, Windows 2012 Management Server, vCenter Server 6.0, vRealize Operations Manager 6.0.1, vRealize Log Insight 2.5, TAM Data Manager, and a vCloud Connector Server and Node to connect to my vCloud Air account.

Sunday, March 8, 2015

vRealize Operations 6.0 Analysis - Capacity Remaining

Like its predecessor; vRealize Operations 6.0 is a much better tool to utilize when looking at the health and capacity of your infrastructure than vCenter Server. It keeps all the metrics, it keeps five-minute intervals, and it keeps them for six months. 

You can customize the retention length of the data by going to the Administration link, clicking on Global Settings on the Navigation Panel, and then adjusting the Time Series Data.


Time Remaining Setting

This is a significant improvement over the performance statistics available in VMware vCenter Server, which shows you metrics for the past hour in 20-second increments, if you start to research information further back in time it reveals less metrics and the data points become more averaged out. For example, the past day has 20-second intervals, the past week shows 30 minute intervals, and the past month shows two-hour intervals in vCenter Server. A two-hour long average can hide a lot of peaks and valleys, it might be good for some general troubleshoot, but it isn't going to help you with the root cause of an application performance issue or the capacity remaining in your environment. It is simply too large an interval, you need a much finer data sampling. 

With vRealize Operations 6.0, you can retroactively go back and tell an application owner if he was having a performance problem at a certain time. It is going to give you a lot more confidence about providing relevant information to your IT business partners.

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Top vBlog 2015


vSphere-Land with sponsor Infinio is running the Top vBlog 2015. This is to recognize and rank contributions in virtualization blogging. Eric Siebert at vSphere-Land devotes a tremendous amount of personal time setting this up for the community. The Top vBlog voting contest helps rank the most popular blogs based on your votes and the outcome determines the ranking that is published on the vLaunchpad website. Last year over 1400 people voted from 60 different countries including Bulgaria, Cape Verde, Kuwait, Malta, Morocco, Oman, Serbia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Yemen.

The people who contribute content to the vibrant virtualization community share their experience, knowledge, and passion to help each other out. There are some sites that act as content curation, which involves finding other people's good material, summarizing it, and sharing it. If you find their contributions valuable, vote for them in this years contest.

The Top vBlog 2015 voting is only running for the next two weeks! So please go out and vote for your favorite blog sites and community contributors.

Top vBlog 2015 Voting
News: Top vBlog 2016 Trending: DRS Advanced Settings