Tuesday, July 9, 2019

vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 - Part5 - Alerting

Alerting is a very important aspect of infrastructure monitoring. vROps has very powerful alerting capabilities. It might look a bit complicated for the first time. A good understanding of symptoms, alert definitions, badges, notification rules, etc. are required to effectively utilize the maximum functionality/ capabilities of vROps. In this post, I will try to explain all these alert settings. Before getting into the configurations, first, let's have a look at objects and object types in vROps.

Objects and object types


As you can see in the screenshot above there are many objects of type "Datastore". All these objects/ object types have "Metrics" and "Properties". Click on the "Show Detail" icon as shown below to view more details of the selected object.


Metrics and Properties

"Metrics" and "Properties" of the object "vol03" is shown below.


Symptom definitions and alert definitions

Based on the value of metrics/ property you can define symptoms with criticality Info, warning, critical, etc. Using symptom definitions alert definitions can be created and this generates corresponding alerts and will directly affect the badges associated with the object. Now let's have a look at some of the symptom definitions and alert definitions that are pre-defined in vROps for the "vCenter Adapter". Here I am taking an example of object type "Datastore".


Examples: Symptom definition

Select a symptom definition and click edit.


As you can see, this symptom definition produces a warning alert when any datastore "capacity used %" is greater than 90.


Another symptom definition is given below where an info alert will be generated when space remaining on the datastore is 0.


Example: Alert definition

As shown in the screenshot below there are few pre-defined alert definitions for object type "datastore". 


Let's select one alert definition.


Now, if you would like to forward these alerts to an email address or an SNMP trap destination, you will need to configure two things.
  1. Outbound instance
  2. Alert notification rules

Add outbound instance

I will be configuring an SNMP trap destination. Go to Administration - Management - Outbound settings - click on the + icon. Provide necessary details and test to ensure the connection is successful.


Add alert notification rule

By default, no notification rules are available in vROps. User has to create new rules as per the requirement. Go to Alerts - Alert settings - Notification settings - click on the + icon and provide necessary configuration details. As an example, I will configure alert notification rule to forward all datastore related alerts to an SNMP trap destination.


The above rule will forward all the alerts that impact health, risk, and efficiency badges of datastore object to the configured SNMP trap destination.

Summary of the alerting process in vROps


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Wednesday, July 3, 2019

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:


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Monday, July 1, 2019

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:


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Friday, June 21, 2019

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!

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Saturday, June 15, 2019

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

References

vROps 7.5 reference architecture
vROps documentation


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