Showing posts with label vRealize Operations Manager. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vRealize Operations Manager. Show all posts

Sunday, February 16, 2020

How to manually add multiple NICs to the vROps 8.x appliance

Important note: This is officially NOT supported by vROps. I've had a specific one off use case in my lab. It is just a quick workaround and is not recommended in production environment as this solution is not supported by VMware.
 
This article explains how to add multiple network interfaces to a vROps 8.0 and 8.1 appliance. Recently we had a scenario where the vROps appliance needs access to different networks that are isolated/ not routed with the primary network management interface of vROps. In my case, the vROps instance needed access to 3 different networks.

Initially while installing the vROps there will be only one interface (10-eth0.network) and its the default interface for vROps appliance. 


For configuring additional interfaces follow the steps below:

  • Add a network card and connect to the respective port group by editing VM settings
  • Login to vROps with root creds
  • cd /etc/systemd/network/
  • Create an entry for the new interface 10-eth1.network (as it will not be present!)
  • vi 10-eth1.network
  • Provide all necessary IP details and save

  • Restart network service systemctl restart systemd-networkd
  • Verify /opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_config_net

  • Similarly, follow the above steps if you require more interfaces 

Note: This solutions is NOT officially supported by vROps. It is not recommended in production environment.

Related post 

References

Friday, December 27, 2019

vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 - Part10 - Adding Remote Collector Node

In this article, I will briefly explain the configuration of a remote collector node and a sample scenario too.

Note: Before adding the remote collector nodes a vROps master node should be present.

Refer to my previous blogs for the installation and configuration of the vROps master node and enabling high availability. Here I have a single node vROps 7.5 instance which is a master and I will be expanding it with a remote collector node.

Consider the following scenario:

Datacenter A is the head office where the vROps master is installed. Datacenter B and C need to be monitored using the vROps instance configured at Datacenter A. In this case, Remote Collector nodes are installed at Datacenter B and C. As per VMware recommendation the latency between sites should be 200ms or less. 


Refer vROps 7.5 reference architecture for recommendations from VMware on different deployment profiles and other best practices. 

Deploy a vROps instance at the remote location and open its management IP address in a web browser. 

Click on Expand an existing installation.

Click Next.


Provide a name for the collector node and select node type Remote Collector.
Enter IP of vROps master node and click Validate.


Click Next.


Provide cluster admin password and click Next.


Click Finish.


This may take around 6-8 minutes to complete.



Select Finish adding new nodes.


Click OK.



The remote collector is now part of the cluster.


Now log in to the master vROps instance.
Select Administration > Management > Collector Groups.
You can see only the master node is part of the Default collector group.
Click Create collector Group (+).


Provide a name and select the remote collector node.


Now you can see the remote collector node is part of the newly created collector group.


Now, we will add a vCenter Adapter instance that will monitor the vCenter server of the remote site using the newly added remote collector node.
Click Administration > Solutions > Configuration > VMware vSphere.
Click Configure (gear icon).


Click (+) to add a new vCenter adapter and provide the necessary details.


In the advanced settings, select the collector group.


Click Test connection, Accept and save settings. 


Click OK.


Verify the collection state and status.


Hope it was useful. Cheers.

Related posts

Friday, November 1, 2019

vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 - Part9 - Dashboard sharing

The ability to share dashboards using URLs without login requirements is a very useful feature starting from vROps 7.0.

  • Select the dashboard that you want to share and click on the share icon as marked in the screenshot below.



  • Click on "COPY LINK" and provide it to whoever necessary. You can also set link expiry to 1 Day, 1 Week, 1 Month, 3 Months, or Never Expire as per your requirement.

  • To unshare a link, enter the link that you want to unshare as shown below and click "UNSHARE".

Hope it was useful. Cheers!


Related posts


Wednesday, October 9, 2019

vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 - Part8 - Super Metrics

In this article, I will briefly explain about using super metrics in vROps 7.5. For example, I will take the VM NUMA optimization super metric which was released recently. You can download the super metric JSON file from the VMware sample exchange

Once the JSON file is downloaded, login to your vROps instance. Navigate to Administration - Configuration and select Super Metrics. Click on Import Super Metric.


Browse and select the JSON super metric file that you downloaded. Click DONE.


Once it is done, you can see the two super metrics. 


To enable the super metric in a policy:
Select the super metric - Edit Selected Super Metric - Goto Enable in a Policy  - Select vSphere Solution's Default Policy and click FINISH.


Now after the default collection interval, you can see the super metric tab as shown below. 


As you can see in the above screenshot, for this virtual machine "lustre01", recommendations are: 
  • NUMA optimal CPU socket: 1 
  • NUMA optimal CPU cores per socket: 8

Hope it was useful. Cheers!

References


Related posts

Wednesday, September 18, 2019

vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 - Part7 - vSAN monitoring and troubleshooting

In this article, I will walk you through how to use vROps for vSAN monitoring and performance troubleshooting. It is always recommended to follow a systematic and established approach to troubleshoot problems. Before we start here is a link to one of my article which explains the scientific method of troubleshooting

Given below are some very useful content from VMware that talks about vSAN performance troubleshooting.

Performance Troubleshooting – Understanding the Different Levels of vSAN Performance Metrics
Performance Troubleshooting – Which vSAN Performance Metrics Should be Looked at First?
Troubleshooting vSAN performance

Performance is all relative and sometimes performance issues can be because of the wrong perception. So it is always good to validate it with actual numbers. Compare with a benchmark value or verify all relevant metrics before and after the issue has been reported. Now assume there is a storage issue in the environment. Given below is a systematic order to approach the problem, identify it correctly, isolate it and finally take necessary steps to resolve it. 

vSAN performance troubleshooting approach
  1. Infrastructure: Perform vSAN cluster health check
  2. Virtual machine level: Is there a storage issue observed at the application level?
  3. Virtual machine level: Is there a storage issue per vmdk level?
    1. Latency (vmdk)
    2. IOPS (vmdk)
  4. Cluster level: Look at operations overview at the cluster level
    1. Latency
    2. IOPS
  5. Host level: Identify the IO type that has a performance issue
    1. Read IO
    2. Write IO
  6. Host level: Collect/ analyze metrics of the storage objects
    1. Storage adapter (vmhba)
    2. Disk groups
    3. Cache disk
    4. Capacity disk 
  7. Host level: Collect/ analyze metrics of the network objects
    1. Physical adapter (vmnic)
    2. vSAN network (vmk)
At this point, you have a clearly defined workflow in identifying and resolving the issue. So let's have a look at the various vROps dashboards that provides you end to end visibility of your stack and helps you easily identify and isolate the issue. If there is a problem or abnormality or unusual performance behavior in your vSAN environment, vROps will notify that with alerts based on various metric values it monitors using its inbuilt intelligence and analytics capabilities. Alert generation is based on symptom and alert definitions and this will finally affect the health, risk or efficiency badge of the respective object. Status of the badges, symptoms, alerts, recommendations, historical performance data and time stamps will be very useful in the process of troubleshooting and quickly finding the actual problem.

Infrastructure: Perform vSAN cluster health check

As a starting point, you can make use of integrated health checks from vCenter to verify your vSAN infrastructure.


To understand in-depth about vSAN health checks refer: https://vxplanet.com/2019/01/30/vsan-health-checks-explained-part-1/

Now to get a high-level overview, let's have a look into the health, risk and efficiency badges of vSAN cluster in vROps. Please refer to this blog article from VMware to get a detailed understanding of badges.

Health badge


Risk badge


Alerts


Virtual machine level: Is there a storage issue observed at the application level?

You can make use of application aware operations feature in vROps 7.5 to get full stack visibility. Given below are the list of applications that can be currently monitored using vROps 7.5.


Reference to application aware monitoring: https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2019/05/application-aware-operations-with-vrealize-operations-7-5.html


If your application is not supported or if application aware monitoring is not configured, then you can go with native application performance counters/ methods to identify whether the application itself is observing/ affected by storage latency, low IOPS, etc.

Virtual machine level: Is there a storage issue per vmdk level?

As a first step, you can use the "Troubleshoot a VM" dashboard to understand and track resource usage of a virtual machine.

Troubleshoot a VM - a

Troubleshoot a VM - b

Select the VM object to get more details. Below screenshot shows metrics related to a virtual disk.


Cluster level: Look at operations overview at the cluster level

vSAN operations overview dashboard


Troubleshooting vSAN dashboard

Troubleshooting vSAN - a

Troubleshooting vSAN - b

Troubleshooting vSAN - c

Host level: Identify the IO type that has a performance issue

Host level storage metrics


Host level: Collect/ analyze metrics of the storage objects

Metrics related to a disk group


Read cache and write buffer metrics of a disk group


Performance metrics of a capacity disk


Host level: Collect/ analyze metrics of the network objects

Metrics related to vmnic (physical NIC) and vSAN vmk


Metrics related to network objects will help to determine whether the performance issue is due to resource contention, network misconfiguration, hardware issue, etc.  


References: