Tuesday, September 22, 2015

vRealize Operations 6.1 Host Memory Consumed Model

vRealize Operations 6.1 introduces a memory consumed model for hosts and clusters, which models consumption from a guest point of view. Previously, vRealize Operations used a memory demand model based on active memory usage from a vSphere perspective. If you have greedy applications like JVMs, Oracle, or SQL server running; the application reports a much higher memory usage than the actual active memory that ESX perceives. This is because these types of applications claim all available memory at the VM level as usage (hence greedy).

This new memory consumed model through me for a loop at first, when I looked at memory workload for my host, I couldn't figure out why the host demand was so much higher than host usage and virtual machine demand. Then speaking with members from our vRealize Operations development and technical marketing team, they educated me on the change to a memory consumed model and that it was labeled under Memory, as show in the image below.

Monday, September 21, 2015

vRealize Operations 6.1 Cluster Capacity Distribution Dashboard

New in vRealize Operations 6.1 is the Workload Placement Engine (WPE); which provides several innovations including initial workload placement through the vRealize Operations REST APIs, workload rebalance, and intelligent operation moves. In a future post, I will write about these capabilities more extensively, but today I wanted to focus on creating a visual dashboard that provides an overview of the capacity distribution.

To start, we are going to launch vRealize Operations and click on the Content icon in the Navigation panel. With Dashboards highlight, we are going to click on the green + icon to create a new dashboard.



For our new dashboard, we are going to provide our dashboard a name, in my example I am going to call the dashboard Cluster Capacity Distribution and we are going to select No for Is default. You will notice in vRealize Operations 6.1, gone are the options for Column count and Layout, in this release layouts are much more dynamic, which we will see shortly.

Monday, September 14, 2015

ManageIQ Cloud Providers

For IT leaders and architects, the ability to match business requirements with technology capabilities has become a fundamental skill for executing strategic initiatives. The move from traditional IT to hosted solution provider is a substantial opportunity for any IT department to add value to the business it serves by offering a choice of infrastructure solutions. ManageIQ is a single pane of glass that helps you manage your on-premises and public cloud resources. 

In a previous post, we walked through the process of setting up infrastructure providers for vSphere and Red Hat, providing us the capability of managing a multi-hypervisor datacenter. A provider is a hosting instance with software to manage multiple virtual machines. ManageIQ can manage vSphere, Hyper-V, Red Hat, OpenStack, and Amazon EC2 environments. Today, we are going to focus on the process of setting up Amazon EC2 as our cloud provider in ManageIQ, which will give us the ability to build virtual machines on various platforms depending on the use case and business requirements.

To start, we are going to select Clouds and use the Providers taskbar to add a new cloud provider. Click on the Configuration drop-down and select + Add a New Cloud Provider. Additionally, you use the Providers taskbar to initiate the refresh of any existing cloud provider.



For the Basic Information, we are going to give our new provider a name, select the type of Amazon EC2, and choose a region. You also need to provided your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key from Amazon Web Services.

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