Wednesday, August 7, 2019

VMware PowerCLI 101 - Part4 - Snapshots

In this post, I will briefly explain how to make use of PowerCLI when working with virtual machine snapshots.

Take a snapshot of VM:
New-Snapshot -VM "New Virtual Machine" -Name snap1 -Description try1

Revert to a snapshot:
$snap = Get-Snapshot -VM "New Virtual Machine" -Name "snap1"
Set-VM -VM "New Virtual Machine" -Snapshot $snap -WhatIf
Set-VM -VM "New Virtual Machine" -Snapshot $snap 


Delete specific snapshot of a VM:
$snap = Get-Snapshot -VM "New Virtual Machine" -Name "snap1"
Remove-Snapshot -Snapshot $snap -WhatIf
Remove-Snapshot -Snapshot $snap 

Delete all snapshots of a VM:
Get-VM "New Virtual Machine" | Get-Snapshot | Remove-Snapshot -WhatIf
Get-VM "New Virtual Machine" | Get-Snapshot | Remove-Snapshot 

List all VMs with snapshots:
Get-VM | Get-Snapshot | Select-Object VM, Name, Description, SizeGB

List VMs with snapshots older than a week:
Get-VM | Get-Snapshot | Where {$PSItem.Created -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-7)} | Select-Object VM, Name, Description, Created, SizeGB | Format-Table

Find the parent-child relationship of VM snapshots:
$vm = Get-VM "New Virtual Machine"
get-vm $vm | Get-Snapshot | Select VM,Name,Description,Parent,Children,SizeGB,IsCurrent,Created,Id | sort Created |  Format-Table



Hope it was useful. Cheers!

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Saturday, July 20, 2019

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

In my previous post, I tried to explain briefly about the alerting aspects in vROps and overall workflow of the alerting process. In this post, I will explain how to create custom symptom definitions and alert definitions based on a scenario. 

Scenario


User is running some latency-sensitive business-critical applications on the vSAN cluster. Below are the symptoms that he would like to define and alerts should be produced for the same and these should affect the "Efficiency" badge of the vSAN cluster object. 

  1. Warning - when vSAN Cluster Read Latency is greater than 1 ms
  2. Critical - when vSAN Cluster Read Latency is greater than 2 ms
  3. Warning - when vSAN Cluster Write Latency is greater than 2 ms
  4. Critical - when vSAN Cluster Write Latency is greater than 3 ms 
Sample screenshot of vSAN environment efficiency badge 

Step1: Add symptom definitions


Go to Alerts - Symptom Definitions - Click Add (+)


Select base object type: vSAN Cluster
Select the metric "Read Latency (ms) - double click on it twice so that you can define both warning and critical symptoms.


Provide symptom definition name, criticality and numeric value as required and click Save.


Now you can see the two symptoms which you have just created.


Similarly, create symptom definitions for vSAN Cluster Write Latency.


All 4 symptom definitions are created now.


Step2: Add alert definitions


Next step is to add alert definitions.

Go to Alerts - Alert Definitions - Click Add (+)

  • Provide a name and description.
  • Click on Base Object Type and select "vSAN Cluster"

  • Click on Alert Impact and select Impact: Efficiency (this means this alert definition will affect the efficiency badge)

  • Click Add Symptom Definitions (here you have to search for the symptom definitions that were created earlier and attach to this alert definition)

  • Drag both symptom definitions to the right-hand side as shown in the screenshot (make sure to choose "Any" as highlighted below)

  • Click Add Recommendations (here I added some sample recommendations) and click save

Similarly, create an alert definition for vSAN Cluster Write Latency alerts.


Now both alert definitions are created.


Let's verify current vSAN cluster Read/ Write latency in the dashboard.


As you can see above, Cluster I/O Write Latency is 2.67 ms which is greater than the warning threshold we defined. This means a warning alert should be produced and also should affect the efficiency badge of the vSAN Cluster object. An alert has already produced for this and can be seen in the second widget. It also shows the efficiency badge color is now yellow. If you click on the alert it will provide more details on the same.


If you browse the environment tab you can also notice that the efficiency badge of vSAN Cluster has turned to yellow.


Please feel free to share if this was useful. Cheers!

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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!

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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!

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