vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 - Part4 - High availability

In this post, I will explain the steps to expand an existing vROps installation and enable high availability.

Before making a design/ architecture decision on enabling high availability for vROps I strongly recommend you to go through the below VMware vROps documentation links and understand the functional/ technical implications of it.

1. About vRealize Operations Manager High Availability
2. High Availability Considerations
3. About vRealize Operations Manager Cluster Nodes

Expand an existing installation

Deploy a new vROps appliance. Once the deployment is complete, open the management IP of the appliance in a web browser. This time select expand an existing installation. 

Click next.

Provide a name for this new node.

Select the node type as "Data".

Provide the IP address or FQDN of the master node and click validate.

Accept the certificate and click next.

Provide admin password and click next.

Note: If you don't know the admin password you can request the vROps admin to provide a shared pass-phrase and can use it.

Click finish.

After this step, you will be redirected automatically to the admin page.

As you can see in the above screenshot, installation is in progress and is waiting to finish the cluster expansion. It may take a few minutes. Once it is complete you can see a button to "Finish adding new node(s)".

Click "Finish adding new node(s)" and click ok.

This will take a few minutes.

Now, you can see that the new data node is online and running. Next step is to enable high availability.  

Enable High Availability

To configure high availability, click "Enable".

Cluster Restart Required: The cluster needs to be restarted in order to configure HA. This may require up to 20 minutes during which vRealize Operations Manager will not be available.

To ensure complete protection the two nodes (Master and Replica) should not share hardware.

Click Ok.

Click "Yes" to continue HA configuration.

This will take a few minutes. The cluster will be taken offline for enabling HA.

After a few minutes, the cluster is back online and HA is enabled. And as you can see in the below screenshot one node is "Master" and the other one is "Master Replica".

vROps also has dashboards that provide you details on the health status of the complete vROps environment, cluster statistics and performance details of vROps itself, etc. Sample screenshot of the "Self Health" dashboard is shown below.  

Hope it was useful. Cheers!

Related posts:

vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 - Part3
vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 - Part2
vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 - Part1

vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 - Part3 - Rightsizing

In this article, I will briefly explain a performance optimization feature in vROps. This feature will help the user/ customer to easily find out a list of oversized and undersized VMs. vROps will provide recommendations on allocating the right amount of resources to the VM. 

Rightsizing

As you can see in the screenshot above, there are 29 VMs that are oversized. And vROps is providing recommendations on the amount of CPU and memory reduction that can be done to optimize performance. Oversizing always have a negative impact on the performance and it is recommended to allocate the right amount of resources to a VM for optimal performance. Let's take an example of one of the VM. 

You can see that the recommendation by vROps is to reduce 8 vCPUs and 15 GB of memory. This recommendation is based on the analytics and forecasting capabilities of vROps. You can click on the VM name and it will show more details regarding the selected VM.

vROps also provides a way to resize the VMs directly from the console. You can select the VMs that you would like to resize, and click "RESIZE VM(S)".

NOTE: The workloads may be interrupted as it may require restart during resizing. 

VMware guidance: CPU Ready time and Co-Stop values per core greater than 5% and 3% respectively could be a performance concern. 

Hope it was useful. Cheers!

Related posts:

Real-time VMware VM resource monitoring using PowerShell

vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 - Part2

vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 - Part1

Real time VMware VM resource monitoring using PowerShell

This post is about monitoring resource usage of a list of virtual machines hosted on VMware ESXi clusters using PowerCLI. Output format is given below which gets refreshed automatically every few seconds.

Prerequisites:

• VMware.PowerCLI module should be installed on the node from which you are running the script
• You can verify using: Get-Module -Name VMware.PowerCLI -ListAvailable
• If not installed, you can find the latest version from the PSGallery: Find-Module -Name VMware.PowerCLI
• Install the module: Install-Module -Name VMware.PowerCLI

Note:

• I am using PowerCLI Version 11.0.0.10380590

Latest version of the project and code available at: github.com/vineethac/vmware_vm_monitor

Sample screenshot of output:

Notes:

VMware guidance: CPU Ready time and Co-Stop values per core greater than 5% and 3% respectively could  be a performance concern.

Hope this will be useful for resource monitoring as well as right sizing of VMs. Cheers!

References:

• http://docs.hol.vmware.com/HOL-2012/HOL-INF-04_EN/HOL-INF-04-m1/lessons/Part_1_of_4__Performance_101_-_vSphere_Performance_Basics_-_CPU__C__.html
• http://virtualization.solutions/2018/02/04/performance-monitoring-cpu/