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.
On the Widget List, we are going to drag over the Object List and the Capacity Utilization widgets. After you have dragged these widgets to the dashboard; you can move the widgets around the dashboard, expand and contract the widgets, and move them next to each other to create two and three column dashboards. You have much more flexibility than you did previously for creating your dashboard design.
We are going to edit the Object List by click on the pencil and input the following information:
- Widget Title
- Refresh Content: Off
- Widget Refresh Interval: 300 seconds
- Mode: Children
- Auto Select First Row: On
- Select Object Types and Cluster Compute Resources
- Click Additional Column
Clicking the Additional Column slide out tray allows us to select specific metrics we want to monitor for our cluster environment. For my cluster list, under Object Types I highlight Cluster Compute Resources and then select the following metrics on the Metric Picker screen:
- Provisioned CPUs
- CPU Workload
- CPU Contention
- Memory Provisioned
- Memory Ballon
- Memory Swap-in Rate
- Total Disk Space Provisioned
- Disk Read Latency
- Disk Write Latency
The total amount of metrics you can have on a single Object List widget is ten. After you have selected the metrics, click save and select Widget Interactions.
Widget interactions are the configured relationships between widgets in a dashboard where one widget provides information to a receiving widget. When you are using a widget in the dashboard, you select data on one widget to limit the data that appears in another widget, allowing you to focus on a small subset of data. We are going to select the Cluster List we created to feed our Capacity Utilization widget.
To finish we are going to click Save.
Now we can see the Cluster Capacity Distribution Dashboard in the list.
I am going to navigate back to the Home screen and click on my new dashboard, since I don't need some of the default columns that come with the Object List; I am going to drop down the column menu and remove the adapter type, object type, policy, collection state, and collection status.
This provides more real-estate on the Cluster List widget and I can see all the metrics information on a single screen.
The Capacity Utilization widget provides a holistic view of host systems, resource pool, virtual machine, and datastore utilization. This feature helps you understand the systems that are under utilized, optimal, and over utilized. The resources on the left are under utilized, which provides you an opportunity to right-size the infrastructure components to reclaim capacity that isn't being fully used. The resources on the right are under stress, the infrastructure components could use additional resources because of high demand. In the following picture, we want resources as close to the red line as possible to have optimal performance.
If you hover over any of the objects, vRealize Operations will give you information on the virtual machine and the recommended size. We can see in the example below; my Active Directory server is configured with 4 GB of memory but could be configured with 600 MB.
We can use the Rebalance Container and Set CPU Count and Memory for VM under Actions to optimize our environments; and help us get to datacenter nirvana.
