vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 - Part2 - Configure vCenter adapter and dashboards overview

In this post, I will explain how to configure the vCenter adapter and will also walk through some of the native dashboards.

Configuring vCenter adapter

• Login to vROps.
• Click the Administration tab.
• Select the vCenter Adapter. 
• Click the gears icon.

• Provide necessary details.

• Test connection.

• Click save settings and close.
• Once the above steps are done, in a few seconds you can see "Adapter Status" as Data receiving and "Collection State" as Collecting.  

Note: After configuring the vCenter adapter you should actually wait for few days for all the data to get collected and populated.

Dashboards

This is the place where most of the System administrators/ Operations Engineers spend their time for understanding/ evaluating the operational aspects of their virtual infrastructure, capacity planning, troubleshooting various issues, performance optimizations, etc.  vROps has many pre-canned dashboards that you get out-of-the-box. Below screenshot shows how to select/ navigate multiple dashboards that are available in vROps.

Now, I will just briefly explain some of my favorite dashboards. 

Operations Overview

This dashboard provides data center summary. It provides info about the total number of clusters, hosts, total VMs, running VMs, datastores, etc. This dashboard also has widgets showing details about the top VMs experiencing CPU contention, memory contention, and disk latency.

Utilization Overview

This dashboard provides a summary of the environment based on the selection. In this case, I selected a cluster. It shows the total (CPU/ memory/ storage) capacity of the selected environment, usable capacity, used capacity, remaining capacity, etc. This will be very useful for capacity planning of resources.  

Cluster Utilization

This dashboard shows the CPU, memory, disk IOPS and network usage trends at the cluster level.

Datastore Utilization

This dashboard provides detailed info on datastore usage trends and heatmap based on datastore capacity/ utilization.

Heavy Hitter VMs

This dashboard provides cluster-level CPU, memory, IOPS and network throughput. It also gives a list of VMs which has generated the highest CPU demand, memory demand, highest IOPS and network throughput. This is very useful for identifying the VMs that has the highest resource consumption. 

Hope it was useful. Cheers!

Related posts:

vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 - Part1

vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 - Part1 - Installation

For evaluation, you can download a trial version of vROps 7.5.

Installation

• Log in to VCSA.
• Select an ESXi host and Deploy OVF Template.
• Browse and select the vROps 7.5 OVA file.
• Provide a name and select a location.
• Select a host and click next.

Now, if you are using a Chrome browser and if you haven't opened your VCSA with FQDN name, you might face the below error, "Transfer failed: The OVF descriptor is not available".

A workaround for the above issue is to open and login VCSA with FQDN using Firefox browser.

• Perform the above same steps and this time you will not get the above error.

• Accept the license agreements.
• Select a deployment configuration.

• Select storage.

• Select a destination network.
• Provide time zone and network details (You can leave network properties blank if you have a DHCP server configured in the destination network selected in the above step). Click next and finish.
• Once the OVF template deployment is completed you can power on the VM.
• Open the console to view installation progress. It will take a few minutes.

• Once the installation is complete you will get the console screen as below. To proceed to the next stage of the installation process open the IP in a web browser.

• You will get the below options. As it is a fresh installation I prefer to go with Express Installation as it is the fastest way to deploy it with minimal inputs.

• Click next on the getting started page.
• Set the admin account password, click next and finish.

• Accept EULA.
• Enter a product key or you can continue in evaluation mode.
• Click next and finish.

Hope it was useful. Cheers!

Related posts

vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 - Part2 - Configure vCenter adapter and dashboards overview

vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 - Part3 - Rightsizing

vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 - Part4 - High availability

vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 - Part5 - Alerting

vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 - Part6 - Adding new symptoms and alert definitions

vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 - Part7 - vSAN monitoring and troubleshooting

vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 - Part8 - Super Metrics

References

vROps 7.5 reference architecture

vROps documentation

VMware PowerCLI 101 - Part3 - Basic VM operations

Previous posts of this blog series talked about how to install PowerCLI, connecting to ESXi host and basics of working with the vCenter server. In this article, we will go through basic VM operations.

Get basic VM details:
Get-VM -Name <name of the virtual machine>

To view all properties of a VM object:
Get-VM -Name <name of the virtual machine> | Get-Member

To start a VM:
Get-VM -Name <name of the virtual machine> | Start-VM

To restart a VM:
Get-VM -Name <name of the virtual machine> | Restart-VMGuest

To shut down a VM:
Get-VM -Name <name of the virtual machine> | Shutdown-VMGuest

To delete a VM permanently:
Get-VM -Name <name of the virtual machine> | Remove-VM -DeletePermanently

Let's have a look into the "ExtensionData" property of a virtual machine.

Status related details of a VM:
(Get-VM -Name <name of the virtual machine>).ExtensionData | select GuestHeartbeatStatus,OverallStatus,ConfigStatus

CPU, Memory config details of a VM:
(Get-VM -Name <name of the virtual machine>).ExtensionData.Config.Hardware

CPU, Memory hot add/ remove features:

Layout details of a VM:
(Get-VM -Name <name of the virtual machine>).ExtensionData.LayoutEx.File | sort Key | ft

VM tools status and other guest details:
(Get-VM -Name <name of the virtual machine>).ExtensionData.Guest

Network related info of a VM:

(Get-VM -Name <name of the virtual machine>).ExtensionData.Guest.Net

Hope this was useful. Cheers!