Thursday, July 30, 2015

ManageIQ Chargeback

Built into ManageIQ is a chargeback solution; and while it isn't a feature rich business management solution like VMware ITBM or Apptio, for an organization that is looking to provide some basic financial transparency of their infrastructure utilization, it isn't a bad tool. 

For me, tiering your infrastructure service capabilities and providing cost transparency for technology capabilities is the foundation to IT hosting. Sure, automation is great for reducing delivery times and providing consistency, which reduces OPEX; but I think marrying the infrastructure technology capability to the business requirement with policy based management provides much more tangible savings. It ensures that mission critical applications have the infrastructure resources for performance, stability, and availability to meet LOB expectations, while less critical applications maximize infrastructure savings with lower tier components.

Over my career, a significant amount of business I have worked with select a one size fits all approach to technology solution to meet all their business needs.  

After deploying and configuring ManageIQ, you will want to setup the cost rates that you want to use in chargeback and then create a custom report to run on a reoccurring basis.

To start, from the Cloud Intelligence dashboard we are going to click on the Chargeback tab.

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

vRealize Operations - Stress, Capacity Remaining, and Time Remaining


Stress measures the amount of workload for a specific object over a period of time. The objects that can be measured include CPU, memory, network I/O, datastore I/O, and vSphere configuration limits. Stress only measures demand, whereas with Capacity Remaining can measure demand and allocation. The default period of time is 30 days, which can be configured in vRealize Operations 6 policy wizard. 

Stress is selected by default for Peak Consideration in the Capacity and Time Remaining elements; vRealize Operations uses the stress elements to account for peaks in capacity usage.

The default setting for the stress line is 70%, vRealize Operations Manager calculates the amount of object demand that goes over the stress line during the 30 day time sampling. 

Below is the calculation for the measured amount of stress volume:

  • Total Stress Zone Volume
    • 720 hours (30 days) * (100% total capacity - 70% stress line) = 21,600 Stress Zone volume for the past 30 days
  • Measure Object Stress Volume
    • Amount of hours object is over the stress line * (100% total capacity - 70% stress line) = Measured Object Stress Volume for the past 30 days
  • Measured Object Stress Volume / Total Stress Zone Volume = %Stress
In the example below, we can see that my Stress percentage is 20.63% on labesx04.home.virtlab.com.

Thursday, July 9, 2015

ManageIQ with vSphere: Providers

In a previous post, I went through the basic configuration of setting up a ManageIQ deployment. Since that time, I have configured my ManageIQ lab environment to administer my vSphere environment, Amazon EC2 account, and a RHEV environment. Today, I am going to walk you through the process of adding Providers to ManageIQ and working your infrastructure resources.


To start, I am going to add my VMware vCenter server, which will inventory my clusters, hosts, virtual machines, resource pools and datastores. I add in all the basic information including:

  • Name
  • Type
  • Host Name or IP address
  • Zone

I then enter the credentials to connect to the vCenter server and click Validate. After it has been validated, click the Add button.

Monday, July 6, 2015

VMworld 2015 Session Recommendations



The last couple of years, I carved away the VMworld content catalog to 50 sessions I recommend to my customers. This year, there are 658 session available at VMworld 2015, which is an overwhelming amount of sessions! My recommendations are from past experience of seeing the presenters at VMworld, VMUGs, and interacting with them at work. Moreover, I try to make sure I have all our major product lines included, and a mix of technical and business tracks.

Going along with the VMworld 2015 theme. You can be ready. Ready for VMworld 2015 and the brave new model of IT.

Ready for Any.

50 Recommended Sessions:

MGT6525 - Automation for Service/Catalog Item Provisioning and Management with Naomi Sullivan
Presenter:  Naomi Sullivan

Group Discussions are a good way to join together with peers, guided by a VMware expert, and discuss a VMware key topic as selected by the group. Come to this session prepared to dive-in, engage, and share best practices

EUC5052 - Beyond the Marketing: Horizon 6 Technical Deep Dive
Presenters: Ray Heffer and Jim Yanik

Horizon 6 continues to evolve with new features and functions that increase the breadth of use cases and enhance the end user experience. This session will provide a technical look at each feature and how it works. We will provide examples of how these features are used in real-world use cases. We will cover topics including vGPU, Virtual SAN, Virtual Volumes and end use experience enhancements driven by client and agent functionality. This session will focus on the new features and functionalities of the latest versions of Horizon 6.

Thursday, July 2, 2015

vRealize Operations 6 Trending

This week I was working with a customer; they were interested in looking at trending for host and cluster memory resources. But, when we started looking at the default views it was taking into account two memory spikes that were 1000%. Now, having memory spikes at 1000% isn't good to start with, but for capacity trending purposes it was making it difficult to gain perspective on the overall trend of resources.

To remedy the problem, you can change the roll-up interval to flatten the line and gain a better understanding of the overall trend.

Now, because I am not taxing my lab environment, it isn't going to be as dramatic as it was for this particular customer. For my host labesx04.home.virtlab.com, I am going to select the Details tab, which provides me with a list of Views. I am going to scroll down until I see Host Memory Usage and Demand (%) Trend View. When I click on the name of the View, it is going to display in the panel below.



Next, I am going to click on the clock icon and change my roll up interval to 1 Day.
News: Top vBlog 2016 Trending: DRS Advanced Settings