Monday, November 30, 2015

vRealize Operations 6.1 Compliance

vRealize Operations 6.1 is packaged with it's own compliance engine, the compliance engine helps you monitor the security best practices of your vSphere virtual machines and hosts, which is essential in keeping your IT auditors happy! vRealize Operations utilizes the vSphere 5.5 Security Hardening Guide, hopefully we will have it updated to the latest version in an upcoming release, but it is still invaluable for providing insight into the security posture of your virtual infrastructure.

To start, we need to enable the alert definition in our base policy. The ESXi Host is violating vSphere 5.5 Hardening Guide and Virtual Machine is violating vSphere 5.5 Hardening Guide alert definitions aren't enabled by default. I am going to enable both alert definitions in my vSphere Solution's Default Policy, all child policies I have created underneath this base policy will inherit the setting. If you aren't familiar with vRealize Operations policies, I wrote a blog post covering the creation and modification of policies called vRealize Operations 6.1 Policies.

When editing the base policy, you are going to jump to step 6 Alert/Symptom Definitions and filter on hardening. This will display both of the alert definitions, you will notice that the State is local disabled.


Thursday, November 12, 2015

vRealize Operations 6.1 Rebalance

If you read my post from last week about vRealize Operations 6.1 Policies, one of the policy options I discussed was workload automation.  Workload automation in vRealize Operations Manager 6.1 allows you to balance your infrastructure environment, the Action can be done at the datacenter or cluster level to balance workloads across your clusters and hosts. 

The Workload Automation policy allows you to balance out the workloads conservatively or aggressively, depending on your infrastructure requirements; and you can decide if you want more or less consolidation for host efficiency.


I thought I would step through the process of performing a workload rebalance at the datacenter level. And because it is fairly straight forward, this should be a short post!

Friday, November 6, 2015

vRealize Operations 6.1 Policies

Policies are ways we can apply different metrics, filters, buffers, and thresholds to a specific object in the vRealize Operations inventory. This gives us a much finer layer of control of how we monitor our data. Mission critical applications, such as customer facing applications and financial systems are vital to the smooth operation of a company's business. These applications are core to the company's mission, and system downtime translates to financial losses to the organization. While other applications, like general-purpose printing, software media libraries, and infrastructure monitoring tools don't require the same service level capabilities as mission critical applications. 

This is where vRealize Operations Policies come into play! It gives us the ability to provide policy controls for specific service levels for various application workloads.

To start we are going to click on the Administration Link and then Policies.


When you open up the Active Policies, it shows all the policies that have associated objects assigned. Initially, there will only be the vSphere Solution's Default policy, which shows the priority rating of D. As you add additional policies, it will show the priority ranking. In the image below, we recognize the Gold SLA is priority 1, Silver SLA is priority 2, Bronze SLA is priority 3, Production is priority 4, and Development is Priority 5. If an object is a member of multiple policies, it uses these rankings to break the tie. As we will see shortly, my Gold SLA is nested in the Production policy, because of the priority ranking 1 all objects assigned to the Gold SLA policy will use this policy.
News: Top vBlog 2016 Trending: DRS Advanced Settings