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

The scientific method of troubleshooting

The aim of this article is to provide a brief guidance for IT administrators, System Engineers and whoever interested on a systematic and established approach to troubleshoot problems.

1. Define the problem
   
   To identify the problem ask the below questions.
   1. What is the expected behavior ?
   2. What is the current or actual behavior ?
   3. What is the criteria for success ?
   4. Time frame when the problem started or identified ?
   5. What is the impact of the issue ? What all related services/ who all are affected ?
   
   
2. Do your research
   
   1. Know your environment.
   2. Collect necessary/ related background information.
   3. Refer existing documentations.
   4. Verify change logs.
   5. Conduct discussions to gather multiple opinions.
   6. Refer knowledge base (KB) to check whether it is a known issue.
   7. Is it possible to reproduce the issue ?
   8. Are there any dependencies associated ?
   
   
3. Establish a hypothesis
   
   Design an experiment/ test strategy to validate your hypothesis based on the evidence collected in previous step.
   
   
4. Experiment
   
   1. Isolate the problem by divide and conquer method.
   2. Limit the number of variables while conducting the test.
   3. Follow a hierarchy and figure out what is most likely to cause the problem.
   
   
5. Gather data
   
   Check the current status by verifying logs, error messages etc.
   
   
6. Analyze results
   
   1. Verify whether the problem is resolved.
   2. Consolidate the learnings garnered from the troubleshooting efforts.
   
   
7. Document the problem and the solution
   
   1. Make sure you document the problem and the solution.
   2. Update necessary documentations if any.
   3. Blog it.
   

And finally, if you have resolved the issue, take a moment to embrace success. Cheers !

Reference video: 

Troubleshooting Live Migration issues on Hyper-V

1. Check whether enough resources (CPU, RAM) are available at the destination host
2. Make sure all nodes in the cluster follow same naming standard for vSwitches
3. Check NUMA spanning is enabled or not. If NUMA spanning is disabled, VM must fit entirely within a single physical NUMA node or the VM will not start or be restored or migrated
4. Constrained delegation should be configured for all servers in the cluster if you are using Kerberos authentication protocol for live migration
5. Check live migration setting is enabled on Hyper-V settings
6. Verify Hyper-V-High-Availability logs in event viewer
7. Finally check cluster debug log (Get-Clusterlog -timespan) in C:\Windows\Cluster\Reports\Cluster.log